OK, folks, I’m very sorry but I had to go back to the previous blog template. I hate to be one of those people who keep fussing with blog templates but the most recent one was constantly causing me trouble and I don’t have time right now to keep straightening it out. I’ll see if I decide to do something about the template later on. It isn’t like people come here for an inventive template, right?

By way of compensation, I wanted to acquaint you with a new trend in nail-painting. See how every nail has its own polish? If you have many almost empty nail polish bottles, this fashion trend that I picked up from my students will allow you to utilize them.

I don’t know why everybody says that blogging is dying. My readership grows every year even though I stopped promoting my blog anywhere and almost never comment on other people’s blogs. (There is simply no time for that any longer). Really amazing new readers have joined the blog in 2013.

The greatest change that has taken place on my blog is that the readership has consolidated, retaining only the people of exceptional intellectual caliber whose every comment is valuable. It took a few years (and some banning) but we now don’t have anybody here who is not on our shared wavelength. We disagree but in a way that enriches us all and creates priceless discussion threads.

Quite a few people visit this blog not so much to read my posts as to follow the comments of their favorite commenters. I don’t mind that in the least even if it takes the form of “OMG, that scarily smart woman from Zimbabwe / the funny American guy in Poland / the brilliant English prof / the talented Canadian physicist / the hilarious British lady / that cool dude from South Africa, etc. is THE BEST THING ABOUT YOUR BLOG!”

I honestly have never come across a blog with such uniformly great readers. When I first started blogging, I was sure nobody would want to read this blog, so I’m obviously happy about how things developed. Altogether, there have been about 2,000,000 hits on the blog since it was founded on April 1, 2009.

Here is a report WordPress prepared for us (disregard the number of comments by individual readers. WordPress always attributes anonymous comments to random people it happens to like):

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 650,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 28 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

If there are things you believe we need to discuss on the blog, do leave your suggestions in the comment thread. I’m taking questions and requests.

Have you heard about the scandal with the phantom African & Afro-American Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill? The linked article starts with an extremely offensive suggestion that “child-rape” shouldn’t merit much attention from anybody and we should investigate academic fraud instead. I have no idea what the brainless journalist was thinking when making this enormously insulting claim at the beginning of what could be a very important article. I barely managed to get through the piece because I was so insulted by the article’s dismissal of pedophilia as a serious problem.

Here is what happened at Chapel Hill:

Last month a grand jury in Orange County, N.C., indicted Julius Nyang’oro for defrauding UNC by accepting payment for teaching a no-show course on “blacks in North Carolina.” The 19 students in AFAM 280 were current or former members of the Tar Heels football team, allegedly steered to the phantom class by academic advisers who sought to help elite athletes maintain high enough grades to remain eligible for competition. AFAM 280 was one of dozens of courses offered by North Carolina’s African & Afro-American Studies Department, formerly chaired by Nyang’oro, that never actually met.

Of course, now Nyang’oro will be stuck bearing full responsibility for what is obviously a huge fail on the part of the school’s entire administration. It’s scary to imagine a future where most universities will become phantom entities whose only goal will be to make football teams look legitimate.

I always forget books I classify as “not real literature, just entertainment” completely two minutes after I finish them. As a result, I have a ready supply of what to me are entirely unfamiliar books I read several years ago. It works especially well with mystery novels: I can re-read them five, six times, discovering anew who the killer is and feeling fresh shock every time.

This saves quite a bit of money.

Books that I classify as “real literature”, however, stay with me forever and I can reproduce quotes from them many years after reading them.