Tom Jurich concedes: He was nervous that Louisville football coach Charlie Strong may leave for the Tennessee Volunteers.

"Are you nuts? Of course I was nervous," Jurich, UofL's athletics director, said during a news conference.

Camille Paglia is an intellectual firestarter. Her writing about art, sexuality and literature is sure to inspire eyebrow lifting and some highfalutin debate. 

Her most recent book's message, however, is pretty simple: we need to reeducate ourselves in the visual arts, and this is how. "Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars," does exactly what the title suggests. Although perhaps the most entertaining part of the book is her rollicking introduction, dicing up the state of contemporary art.

There were 370,000 first-time claims for unemployment insurance last week, down 25,000 from the week before, the Employment and Training Administration says.

The drop is another sign that after several weeks of spikes because many people were thrown out of work due to damage related to late October's Superstorm Sandy, claims have now settled back into the range where they've been for most of the past year.

Charlie Strong will remain the football coach for the University of Louisville, he said Thursday morning in a news conference.

The University of Tennessee offered him the Volunteers' head coaching position on Tuesday, he said.

In confirming that he'd return for a fourth season, Strong spoke highly of Louisville athletics director Tom Jurich -- noting that Jurich gave him his first head coaching position after 27 years as an assistant. 

This week on our audio diary series "The Big Break," Actors Theatre of Louisville apprentice Samantha Beach finishes her run of "A Christmas Story" with a fun souvenir—a recording of herself playing the teacher during a student matinee. Over at the Louisville Ballet, Claire Horrocks explains why the snowflake and the flower are the toughest roles she tackles in "The Nutcracker" and Brad Raymond spends his break from the Kentucky Opera learning music for the Kentucky Opera. (No rest for the talented.)

Visibly frail and in a wheelchair, Bob Dole reappeared on the U.S. Senate floor Tuesday to support ratification of a treaty advocates say will help disabled people worldwide. Dole served in the Senate from 1969 to 1996, many of those years as the Republican leader. He'd been the Republican's 1996 presidential nominee, the Republicans 1976 vice-presidential nominee and the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The Kentucky Department of Education is changing the way it assesses the state’s lowest performing schools and Commissioner Terry Holliday says some may be subject to more state oversight soon.

The school board’s Curriculum, Instruction and Assessment Committee heard testimony Wednesday from KDE officials who are rewriting current regulations that manage the way the state assesses its 41 priority schools, formerly known as persistently low achieving (PLA) schools.

More to say about the Ashley Judd vs. Mitch McConnell for Senate speculation, which is becoming Kentucky's political version of Pacquiao-Mayweather -- an interesting idea that may never happen.

(You decide who's who. I'm not going there.)

The Daily's blog posted a handy charticle:

Click here to see the whole thing.