Another weird habit that my students have is referring to artists as “descriptive.” I’m sick and tired of reading that “Goya is a very descriptive painter,” “Quevedo is a highly descriptive poet,” “Jose Enrique Rodo is a very descriptive essayist,” and “Gaudi is an exceptionally descriptive architect.”

What is it even supposed to mean? Is it something else they bring from high school?

The cashier at the grocery store rings up my donut peaches. You can see them in the photo. They are only called donut for their shape, as you can imagine.

So the cashier, a middle-aged woman of about size 8-10, looks at the peaches and sighs, “Oh, I’d love to buy some. They are incredibly delicious but I can’t let myself have even one.”

“Yes, I know, they are a little pricey,” I complain.

“Oh no, that’s not what I mean,” the woman responds. “I just don’t want to gain weight!”

I had a colleague (yes, an actual academic) who quit eating fruit to lose weight. Then he went on a “McDonald’s Diet.” This means that you eat at McDonald’s 3 times a day and will supposedly end up losing weight because you don’t mix that food with any fresh produce. This is a variation on the Atkins diet.

My colleague ended up at a hospital with a perforated ulcer, by the way.

Seriously, folks, when you hear that giving up on fresh produce will be good for you, does that not make you suspect you are being duped? Why is it so easy to get people to believe stupid things?

A brilliant post denouncing the latest anti-choice strategy adopted by woman-haters. Now they fake interest in the disabled as part of their agenda to invade women’s bodies.

Things have to be going really bad for the Republicans in this electoral campaign if they need to repeat ad nauseam that Obama’s great-grandfather had five wives. I guess there is nothing recent they managed to find on the President. These kinds of articles are always a sign of complete desperation.

An impossibly brilliant post about the annoying aspects of the self-congratulation the geek culture is engaging in.

On literary translation: can an author relinquish control?

University of Virginia is an extremely weird place. Its faculty members are contemplating a strike to protest the ousting of a fat-cat administrator. Something tells me they had nothing whatsoever to say when financial aid to student was cut and the adjuncts were exploited. One has to be quite brainless to place one’s job at risk so that some administrative quack could keep making her humongously overblown salaries. Mind you, these faculty members have not been known to protest the huge salaries bureaucrats draw.

On how the Republicans hate the female soldiers: “If an Army medic serving in Afghanistan is raped and becomes pregnant, she can’t use her military health plan to pay for an abortion. If she does decide to get an abortion, she will have to pay for it with her own money. And if she can’t prove she was raped—which is difficult before an investigation is completed—she may have to look for services off base, which can be dangerous or impossible in many parts of the world.“

Iceland is emerging in a great shape from the crisis.

Judaism is growing more extremist: “Once upon a time simply insisting on wearing a kippah in public was seen as being fanatic.  Once upon a time insisting women wear hats when married at least in shul was seen as dedication.  Now the bar has moved.  Today the Burka Babes are seen as nuts but as Prof. Marc Shapiro sadly points out, it won’t be more than a generation or two before their current idiocy is seen as normative and we are told by all the right spokesmen that, in fact, this is how all Jewish women dressed before the rise of Reform and was always approved by all the right “Gedolim”.  And if the Burka Babes aren’t extreme anymore, one must shudder to think what will occupy the far right side.”

A disappointed Republican leaves his party: “As a local GOP official after President Obama’s election, I had a front-row seat as it became infected by a dangerous and virulent form of political rabies. In the grip of this contagion, the Republican Party has come unhinged. Its fevered hallucinations involve threats from imaginary communists and socialists who, seemingly, lurk around every corner. Climate change- a reality recognized by every single significant scientific body and academy in the world- is a liberal conspiracy conjured up by Al Gore and other leftists who want to destroy America. Large numbers of Republicans- the notorious birthers- believe that the President was not born in the United States. Even worse, few figures in the GOP have the courage to confront them. Republican economic policies are also indefensible. The GOP constantly claims that its opponents are engaged in “class warfare,” but this is an exercise in projection. In Republican proposals, the wealthy win, and the rest of us lose- one only has to look at Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget to see that.”