Lust and the Professor
2013-05-28 - by
Lust has undone more men than most any other sin and, about a year ago, over in Chapel Hill, it turned an aging professor into a drug runner.
Professor Paul Frampton was born in a working class family in a working class neighborhood in England, earned three degrees from Oxford, earned a Ph.D. in nuclear particle physics, moved to Chapel Hill and settled happily into a quiet life without a glimmer of controversy for thirty years.
The genial professor was also a confirmed bachelor until he was fifty – when he married a Frenchwoman. The marriage didn’t work out and at sixty-four, divorced and lonely, he started searching for a new wife on online dating websites and fell to ‘chatting’ with a Czech model, Denise Milani, who’d won the Miss Bikini World contest and had, well, a figure to shame Dolly Parton.
One thing led to another and soon Miss Milani was confiding to the lonely professor how she was unhappy and how much she wanted a new life – then she cooed, Could you ever be proud of someone like me?
The professor’s response was, Hell, yes – then a strange thing happened. When he asked Miss Milani for her telephone number, she said no.
Later, when a puzzled New York Times reporter asked the professor why on earth he’d thought a Czech beauty who wouldn’t give him her phone number wanted to marry him – the aging professor replied, Well, he was in the top 1% of the men in the world when it came to intelligence and she was in the top 1% of women in the world when it came to looks – why wouldn’t she want to marry him?
The professor kept on asking for Miss Milani’s telephone number and she kept saying no until one day, out of a clear blue sky, she sent him an air plane ticket to La Paz and asked him to fly to Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot, to meet her. Fast as a jackrabbit the professor boarded a plane and headed south but when he got to La Paz Miss Milani was nowhere to be seen – instead she’d left a message that she’d had to leave for another photo shoot and would he fly on to Argentina to meet her and, by the way, would he bring her a suitcase she’d left in La Paz.
A ticket arrived to Argentina, a stranger met the professor on a side street near his hotel and handed him Miss Milani’s suitcase, and the professor flew on to Argentina – but instead of meeting his love eye-to-eye, strolling through the Buenos Aires airport toting a suitcase full of cocaine landed the Professor in an Argentinean prison; worse, a month later, sitting in a prison cell with eighty drug smugglers and a leaky roof, the professor came face to face with a cruel truth: Not only did Miss Milani not love him – she’d never heard of him. He’d been exchanging endearments in an Internet chat room with a Bolivian drug smuggler.
A thousand miles away in Chapel Hill, the Chancellor, shaking his head at the errant ways of aging professors, had the kindness not to fire Frampton outright but had no choice but to suspend his salary – an act of kindness that promptly backfired when Frampton sued not just the Chancellor but the University and the Chancellor, demanding one check for his back pay, another check for all the pain and suffering the University had caused him, and demanding that the University go on paying him while he was in prison in Argentina because he could teach his classes on the Internet.
Perhaps there’s a kinder way to bring the errant professor home – before he does anymore harm. Perhaps the new Chancellor should offer Argentina a deal: If it will send the wayward professor home, in return he’ll promise his shadow will never fall on Argentinean soil again and that he’ll spend the rest of his prison term in a warm, safe place where there are no Internet connections, contemplating the wisdom of Solomon’s old Proverb about lust: Can a man walk across hot coals without his feet being scorched?
Lust and the Professor
2013-05-28/
Lust has undone more men than most any other sin and, about a year ago, over in Chapel Hill, it turned an aging professor into a drug runner.
Professor Paul Frampton was born in a working class family in a working class neighborhood in England, earned three degrees from Oxford, earned a Ph.D. in nuclear particle physics, moved to Chapel Hill and settled happily into a quiet life without a glimmer of controversy for thirty years.
The genial professor was also a confirmed bachelor until he was fifty – when he married a Frenchwoman. The marriage didn’t work out and at sixty-four, divorced and lonely, he started searching for a new wife on online dating websites and fell to ‘chatting’ with a Czech model, Denise Milani, who’d won the Miss Bikini World contest and had, well, a figure to shame Dolly Parton.
One thing led to another and soon Miss Milani was confiding to the lonely professor how she was unhappy and how much she wanted a new life – then she cooed, Could you ever be proud of someone like me?
The professor’s response was, Hell, yes – then a strange thing happened. When he asked Miss Milani for her telephone number, she said no.
Later, when a puzzled New York Times reporter asked the professor why on earth he’d thought a Czech beauty who wouldn’t give him her phone number wanted to marry him – the aging professor replied, Well, he was in the top 1% of the men in the world when it came to intelligence and she was in the top 1% of women in the world when it came to looks – why wouldn’t she want to marry him?
The professor kept on asking for Miss Milani’s telephone number and she kept saying no until one day, out of a clear blue sky, she sent him an air plane ticket to La Paz and asked him to fly to Bolivia, where she was doing a photo shoot, to meet her. Fast as a jackrabbit the professor boarded a plane and headed south but when he got to La Paz Miss Milani was nowhere to be seen – instead she’d left a message that she’d had to leave for another photo shoot and would he fly on to Argentina to meet her and, by the way, would he bring her a suitcase she’d left in La Paz.
A ticket arrived to Argentina, a stranger met the professor on a side street near his hotel and handed him Miss Milani’s suitcase, and the professor flew on to Argentina – but instead of meeting his love eye-to-eye, strolling through the Buenos Aires airport toting a suitcase full of cocaine landed the Professor in an Argentinean prison; worse, a month later, sitting in a prison cell with eighty drug smugglers and a leaky roof, the professor came face to face with a cruel truth: Not only did Miss Milani not love him – she’d never heard of him. He’d been exchanging endearments in an Internet chat room with a Bolivian drug smuggler.
A thousand miles away in Chapel Hill, the Chancellor, shaking his head at the errant ways of aging professors, had the kindness not to fire Frampton outright but had no choice but to suspend his salary – an act of kindness that promptly backfired when Frampton sued not just the Chancellor but the University and the Chancellor, demanding one check for his back pay, another check for all the pain and suffering the University had caused him, and demanding that the University go on paying him while he was in prison in Argentina because he could teach his classes on the Internet.
Perhaps there’s a kinder way to bring the errant professor home – before he does anymore harm. Perhaps the new Chancellor should offer Argentina a deal: If it will send the wayward professor home, in return he’ll promise his shadow will never fall on Argentinean soil again and that he’ll spend the rest of his prison term in a warm, safe place where there are no Internet connections, contemplating the wisdom of Solomon’s old Proverb about lust: Can a man walk across hot coals without his feet being scorched?