Opinions, art, debate
A message my daughter wrote for me:
Of course, as soon as I gave my interview, the war with Iran was won, making my interview outdated before it had a chance to come out.
It’s great news otherwise. Let’s celebrate. Yay to us.
I told my mother about the Iran interview for Azerbaijan. Her reaction was, “Why did they interview you? Is it because you are blonde? And they are into blonde women?”
If my father were alive, his reaction would be, “of course, they wanted to interview you. You are the most brilliant person ever. I’d be shocked if they didn’t want to interview you.”
I rarely saw my mother during my formative years from birth to age five, and here’s the result.
I was interviewed for a radio station in Baku, Azerbaijan. About the war in Iran. How I suddenly became an expert on Iran is a mystery but it clearly pays off to be banned as a foreign agent in Russia.
It turns out that in Azerbaijan they really love Israel. Really, really love Israel. I had no idea.
So I sent the book to a British publisher (Liverpool UP) back in October. They’ve been dragging their feet ever since, taking months to answer emails and exhibiting every sign of being understaffed. I didn’t mind because I wanted to do heavy editing on the first draft anyway and needed time. I have now done that but they are still moving at a glacial pace.
I sent the manuscript to a Canadian press to see what else is out there (McGill-Queens UP). It’s meaningful to me because McGill is my true alma mater. Plus, it’s slightly more prestigious than Liverpool UP according to the three AI tools I asked. McGill-Queens is very well-organized. They respond immediately. They are “extremely enthusiastic” and think the book is “fantastic.” They want some serious changes to the intro chapter but these are not ideological changes (which I wouldn’t accept). These are changes to the structure and how the material is organized which I don’t particularly mind.
The main criteria I’m looking at are how prestigious the press is and how fast they can put it out.
So I don’t know. I might go with the Canadians because I don’t want to hit retirement age before the book sees the light of day.
On the most recent Tucker Carlson show, the guest advanced the idea that the main problem of religion in America is that churches don’t have enough government oversight of their finances. Tucker eagerly embraced this idea.
Can the people who keep insisting that Tucker is not liberal explain which branch of conservatism supports more government interference in religion? Not only would we need to throw away the US Constitution to introduce this government oversight over the affairs of churches, we’d open an era of future liberal governments punishing the faithful over the aspects of their religious teachings that contradict progressivist dogma. If you think this is in any way conservative, you must be on drugs.
The reason why government should control church finances, this guest claims, is that churches are corrupt. So our famously non-corrupt government should take over. We’ve truly arrived at the heights of conservative thinking with this kind of reasoning.
I understand black. But I most certainly can’t comprehend what brown has to do with it. Why are African Americans, who absolutely do have a legitimate historical grievance, lumped together with recent arrivals who showed up willingly? They weren’t dragged anywhere in chains. To the contrary, they insisted on coming. Probably went to great lengths to come. Why is anything’s owed to them?
It turns out that Klara’s 65-year-old Christian school teacher is telling the kids utterly ahistorical things about women’s oppression. I knew something was off when I said, “I don’t lift heavy things. Daddy will do it” and Klara responded with a fiery speech about how wrong it is to be lazy. Then she told me that “in olden times women weren’t allowed to work or to vote.” To which I responded pedantically that for most of human history nobody voted and that there’s zero chance there was a single woman in our bloodline who avoided having to work.
Then I heard a story that a classmate of Klara’s responded to this indoctrination by doubting the wisdom of the female suffrage and was sent to the principal.
I will never understand why any of this is necessary in a 4th-grade classroom and why it’s so impossible to find a teacher who simply teaches instead of cultivating resentments.
I was asked in the Q&A what I think about “the last Lily Allen album.”
My friend, I don’t do albums. I very rarely listen to music of my own free will. Auditory or visual are not my thing. I’m only good with words. I listen to novels when I exercise. If I turn on music, I immediately get massively distracted and don’t hear anything.
I understand from the question that this is an important album, so everybody should feel free to discuss.
Eighties, schmeighties. We go all the time. It’s so much fun. They are really quaint little stores in there. We walk around, explore, laugh. We have our mall jokes and our mall routines. There are tons of people there, all clearly in the middle of their own mall rituals. There are teenage girls choosing squishies with the grim determination of fighter pilots. Very young couples on their first dates. Tween girls flocking to Claire’s (that curse of every mother of girls) for their BFF bracelets. Young dudes poring over dusty DVD collections. A father of four little kids sells his 3D-printed apple toys at ridiculously low prices. A single mother bustles in her pop-up wrapping kiosk. A black lady does brisk business of selling dessert pickles.
People sit around pouting instead of just going and doing things like tasting the mall lady’s dessert pickles. Yes, they taste something horrid but you make memories to last a lifetime.
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