It was extremely naive of me to believe there was a single rabbit visiting my sunflower patch. The other day, I glanced outside and discovered six of them.

The rabbits assumed the position of Goya’s naked maja, turning their fat white bellies to the sun and stretching themselves luxuriously. My appearance outside did not arouse much of their interest.

I have now covered my sunflowers with a net because the rabbits have taken to surrounding the patch and eyeing it greedily.

It is absolutely hilarious that there are still people who are naive enough to believe that Republicans support small government. Here is just one example:

A string of media reports has revealed that, even as he has touted the need for cost-cutting and has excoriated state workers as being overpaid and coddled, Rauner has been paying his hand-picked gubernatorial staff about one-third higher salaries than their predecessors earned. He also hired a $100,000-a-year chief of staff for Diana Rauner, the state’s first lady, who has no official duties.

Got it? The state is going broke, and its Republican governor proposes to take sick kids off ventilators to pay an enormous sum for a chief of staff for. . . his wife.

People, wake up and drop the unendearing childishness.

Botany is dying as a field of learning. Nobody is studying and teaching it any longer:

Fewer students are taking botany classes and herbaria are shuttering their doors. What this means is that fewer and fewer people have the skill and experience to identify plants.

This problem has existed for a while and the results are not good:

Botany has always been a ill-treated

stepchild in the field of biology in the USA, always in the minority, and never having the financial support of bio-medicine.

People who know plants might find an alternative to pills. This is the same thing that happened with psychoanalysis. Anything that might conceivably compete with pill – popping is stomped out.

Putin made a speech saying that Assange never sexually assaulted anybody and is unfairly persecuted, Snowden is also unfairly persecuted, and all this means the FIFA officials accused of corruption are unfairly persecuted as well.

He will squeeze every ounce of value out of the courageous anti-authoritarian Snowden.

229 Spanish poets got together and created this collection of poetry to express how they feel about the crisis. I only need a couple of poems out of this collection for my research but you know me, when did I ever stop at just a few?

Of course, I read all the poems (which took several months because you can’t just gulp down poetry in one sitting) and I researched every single one of these 229 poets. I now know something about every one of them. Yes, I thought I was going to go nuts for a while because this is a lot of information to process but it was still quite enjoyable.

Even in the age of the Internet, it takes quite a bit of effort to find information about poets. You’d think a poet, especially a young and a yet unknown one, would understand how crucial it is to make oneself easy to find online. But you know poets and their otherworldliness. If their poetry is good, they tend to suck at self-promotion. So you can just imagine what it’s like to try to find a poet with a name like “Pedro López” among the bizillion and one other Pedro Lópeces who might or might not also have written some poems.

The oldest poet who contributed to the collection was born in 1925. The youngest was born in 1992. There is a poet from Bulgaria who now lives in Spain, several immigrants from Argentina, one from Peru. There is a young poet who left Spain for Quebec. There is a poet who killed himself in the year since the collection was published.

Some of the poems in the collection are quite bad. Several are amazing. Many are good. I’m finding it extremely hard to select the few I need for my research because there are too many poems I like in this collection.

Title: En legítima defensa: Poetas en tiempos de crisis
Year: 2014
My rating: 8.9

We have a beautiful campus.

Everybody is making fun of Potemkin companies in Europe but they are a great idea. Long-term unemployed need serious rehabilitation if they are to be integrated into the workplace. The need for rehabilitation begins after 6 months of unemployment and increases if the jobless stretch is extended.

So have you folks heard the story of Patrick Bronte, the father of the Bronte sisters?

He was one of 10 children in a poor Irish family. Nobody in this family – or in any of the families of poor Irish people for miles and miles around – wanted anything better than working on a farm or, if one was very lucky, owning an ale house.

Patrick, however, did want a different life. He managed to get into Cambridge – and just imagine how much time and effort it took an Irish country boy to prepare for Cambridge – and graduated as one of the best students in his class.

He didn’t do anything special with his own life because these kinds of things need to accumulate for at least a generation in most cases. But Patrick’s brilliant daughters will be remembered for centuries. And their work was only possible because Patrick had decided to leave the farm and go study Ancient Greek and Euclid’s geometry all of a sudden.

This is the great mystery of life. Some people make a choice to smash life into pieces and then rearrange it according to their own liking. And others just keep talking about themselves in the passive voice while life smashes and rearranges them. Why and how these choices are made nobody knows. The great mystery of life.

The organizers of the Oxford conference stuck me in the same session as the talk on Croatia. Croatia – a country I know nothing about – follows me everywhere I go. For some reason, people seem to think that Ukraine and Croatia are extremely similar. Even when a person from Ukraine is delivering a talk on Spain, she is still to be grouped with Croatia. I would think it might make more sense to schedule me to present with Latin America and put Croatia next to Romania but that’s not what happened.

But since presenters on South Africa are squished in with Northern Ireland (and not, say, with Central Africa), I can hardly complain.

“Whenever I look at Richard, I’m filled with hatred,” my friend Jenna told me.

“But why?” I asked. “He’s a great guy, everybody loves him.”

“I can’t look at him without remembering that he sullied my beautiful daughter’s body! With sex! He had sex with her!”

“Jenna, your daughter is 36,” I said.

“Yeah, so what?”

“She is married to Richard.”

“And? What are you getting at?”

“They have a daughter.”

“OK, I’m seriously not getting your point here,” Jenna retorted irritably. “Whose side are you on?”

P.S. This is a family of highly educated cosmopolitan atheists from LA, in case anybody is getting ready to make comments about the Bible Belt.