Opinions, art, debate
And this is the most recent weird ad I found:
As strange as this ad is, I have to confess that in terms of shoes, I’m definitely number 3 from the top. I have very sensitive feet and prefer ballet flats to any other kind of shoe. And the guy that corresponds to those shoes on this graph is really my kind of guy. My eyes immediately go to him out of all these men. Hmmm. . .
Are you noticing any similarities between your preferences in shoes and in men?
Have you ever seen anything like this? Baby pineapples! I think it’s the cutest fruit I’ve ever seen.
They are much pricklier than regular pineapples, though. I kept trying to place them into a plastic bag but they’d slice right through it. And you can’t hold them in your hands for long because it’s like holding a cactus.
I thought you don’t get many surprises at my age but I still can’t get over these baby pineapples.
A new trend I’ve noticed is that you write a recommendation for a PhD student, and then the school calls you with a list of questions to answer. They go down the list of questions mechanically and you just answer them out loud. Presumably the nice faculty member on the other side of the phone takes notes on what you say, probably including the most significant phrases.
I also have a weird hiring experience to share. When I was interviewing for academic positions, prospective employers would phone people from my department and ask questions as to what my personality is like and whether I’m a nice person.
That was a big department and they called a couple of people I’d had no interactions with. Those kind colleagues did all they could to sell me to the prospective employers pretty much sight unseen.
It was very weird to be approached by strangers who’d say, “I’m sorry, are you Clarissa? I was interviewed about you today. I said you had a great personality. I don’t know you, but I’m guessing your personality is good.”
Then, I’d start trying to prove to the kind stranger that I did, in fact, have a great personality.
So the lesson of the story is: make sure that everybody at your current department is aware of you and can say something positive about your personality.
We were discussing Spain’s Indignados movement today and, of course, I simply couldn’t resist asking my students what they thought about the #Occupy protests.
Here are their responses:
“What’s #Occupy Wall Street?”
“Never heard of it.”
“I’m opposed because they are all corrupt.”
“I’m in favor because they want to stop the corruption in the government.”
“I’m in favor because they want to stick it to the big corporations.”
“I’m opposed because they keep whining how they are in debt. And if they took out all those credit cards to buy stuff, that’s their own fault.”
“They are OK, I guess.”
“Oh, that’s all just silly. I have no patience for those people.”
“I don’t care. I have more important things to think about.”
“Boooorrrrring!!”
The other 55 students valiantly resisted my efforts to elicit their opinions on the subject. Many smiled enigmatically. I believe they didn’t want to share what they think because I made it impossible for them to guess what I thought of the #OWS.
And that’s a shame because I don’t grade on political opinions.
Can anybody guess which percentage of the population participated in the elections to the Russian Parliament (the Duma) in Rostov area?
A little over 146%! (The link is in Russian, but you can still see the numbers and add them up for yourself.) This is true civic consciousness for you. Here we barely get 60% of the population to vote while in Russia more voters come to the polls than actually live in the area.
This is either a case ofDead Souls immortalized by the great Russian writer Gogol, or the ruling party of Russia has become even more shameless than it used to be.
It’s grading time, so I will now regale everybody with funny grading stories.
A student was answering the question of “What were the only acceptable choices for women in Franco’s Spain?”
The answer I expected was “a wife, a mother, and a nun.” In the student’s interpretation, this response sounded as “a domestic slave, a breeder, and a nun.”
This week, I spent a lot of time meeting with students in my office, so I managed to read quite a lot of interesting posts from my blogroll between appointments. This is why this week’s list is so long. These are great articles, though. Enjoy!
Communists are the same everywhere. The second they come to power, they organize the sort of lavish lifestyles for the party leaders that few millionaires in capitalist countries enjoy. This is how this hypocrisy manifests itself in China.
An absolutely brilliant analysis of a marketing campaign for an expensive luxury product. OK, I need to say it again to get it out of my system. The post is brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
“The growing number of Muslim students are boycotting lectures on evolution saying they cannot take courses in the subject because it is opposed to their religious beliefs.” Did anybody explain to these so-called students that they made a choice to get educated at a secular institution, which makes their religious beliefs of no interest to anybody? The hypocrisy of these religious fanatics (of all religions) who want to enjoy all the benefits of a secular society while working hard to undermine it is appalling.
The teenagers are losing interest in cars. If this is true, then it’s the best news I’ve heard all week. Yes, it’s been a harsh week.
Planning to vote for Mitt Romney? Here is a great humorous post on the subject from one of my favorite conservative authors.
Jürgen Habermas on a mission to save the European Union.
Download Jonathan Mayhew’s book The Twilight of the Avant-Garde for free. Don’t worry, the author doesn’t mind. I find that reading Jonathan’s prose helps to improve my own writing style, so I’m happy to be reading this book on my Kindle.
Why the #Occupy Toronto protest failed.
Politicians try to please the lobbyists by destroying the Internet. Let’s do all we can to prevent that from happening!
Debunking the tired old cliche of “American exceptionalism.” How can people who use this concept in all earnestness fail to know that every single nation in the world always believes itself exceptional?
“UC San Diego is adding diversity fat even as it snuffs out substantive academic programs. In March, the Academic Senate decided that the school would no longer offer a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering; it also eliminated a master’s program in comparative literature and courses in French, German, Spanish, and English literature. At the same time, the body mandated a new campus-wide diversity requirement for graduation. The cultivation of “a student’s understanding of her or his identity,” as the diversity requirement proposal put it, would focus on “African Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Hispanics, Chicanos, Latinos, Native Americans, or other groups” through the “framework” of “race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexuality, language, ability/disability, class or age.”” I had to quote this entire passage because what UC San Diego is doing is simply egregious.
I find it especially entertaining when people blame their miserable personal lives not on their own pathetic excuse for a personality but on the bugbear of feminism. Here, for example, is a guy who warns the world that “nagging wife is always inside them” (women.) For obvious reasons, nobody reads this loser’s blog, so let’s make his day and give him some hits, even if only to ridicule him.
The President of the Modern Languages Association makes a statement aimed at destroying the PhD in Literature. Right you are, Dr. Berman! Who needs a stupid dissertation for a PhD when you can demonstrate kick-ass computer skills, instead? Who on Earth elected this individual to the presidency of the MLA and why did they do that?
“The idea of having one’s own personal library of physical books, so useful in earlier times, is no longer worth passing on to our students . . . Eliminating physical books from college campuses would be a positive step for our 21st-century students, and, I believe, for 21st-century scholarship as well.” That’s Chronicle of Higher Ed for you, people. I vote we rename it into Chronicle of Destroying Higher Ed. Who’s with me on this?
Help a great blogger make an important mustache-related decision.
Check out this great new blog by a blogger from Dubai. He posts really cool ads and photos with some very insightful analysis. I already added him to my blogroll and suggest you do the same. The blog really rocks.
As a feminist, I find this completely insulting: “On Monday, after a number of women complained of “overly aggressive” men dominating events, OWS has, for the first time, instigated a series of female-led meetings where only women can speak.” I don’t need a group of people to be silenced for their physiology in order to have a voice. Bleh, how disgusting.
A very insightful post on the differences between Christianity and Buddhism.
Israeli propaganda machine has really gone off the deep end. It’s very sad to see how unbridled nationalistic hysteria drives a country to self-destruct.
Since people seem to have liked the last riddle I posted, here is a new one. It’s based on completely real events surrounding the approaching elections in Russia.
Independent observers and progressive bloggers in Russia are exhorting the voters to bring their own pens to the voting booths. “Please, don’t use the pens that will be provided to you for marking the ballots at the voting polls!” they keep reminding the voters. “During the previous elections, many people forgot to bring their own pens and used the ones that were given to them at the polling stations, and we all know what happened.”
Why do you think it’s so important for Russia’s voters to bring their own pens?
Reader Nancy P. says:
The American Dream is inherently easier to achieve for the immigrant with an education subsidized by the former country of residence.
It is profoundly painful to me to see how strong anti-immigrant sentiments are even in highly educated, good, progressive people. Easier, eh? Let me tell about how easy my subsidized life has been. My high school education was non-existent. I went to school with children of party apparatchiks. Grades were bought and sold, there was no teaching to speak of. I’m grievously ignorant about the most basic things and am still filling the lacunae in my knowledge.
My university education in Ukraine is irrelevant because I never used it. I started my BA in Canada in an entirely new field from scratch. Besides, the quality of that education was abysmally poor. I blogged about this at length and don’t want to repeat myself.
N. and I both got into debt, of course. He paid his down by wearing the same clothes for 10 years and never going out to a restaurant or a bar (never, not a single time, not once) during his undergrad studies and the first 4 years of his grad studies. I got into debt because I was taking care of my underage sister. I still haven’t paid it down. I don’t know who it is that subsidized us but they didn’t do a very good job, it seems.
Neither of us gets to speak our own language anywhere except at home. That, of course, makes our lives so much easier. We also have noticeable Russian accents; his is more noticeable than mine. We had to learn everything anew after we emigrated, everything. How to take a bus, how and where to buy food, how, when and where to pay rent, what a checkbook is and how it is used. God, I even had to learn how to use a library. I spent several months freezing to death in my apartment in New Haven because I had no flapping idea that the switch on the wall needed to be turned to turn on the heating. I’d never seen anything like that before, so how was I supposed to know? Roads are different, kitchen sinks are different, bath-tubs, beds, windows, everything is different. And you get to learn all of that as an adult. Oh, that is so easy, let me tell you.
Our last names are Slavic, which guarantees that our job applications end up in the trash can 90% of the time. My sister is a professional job recruiter, so I know this for a fact. What do people think when they see a Slavic name on a resume? A whore and a mail order bride. An alcoholic and a gangster. That’s how it works and that makes the lives of immigrants so much easier.
And, of course, as immigrants, we can’t just go and find a job. We have to wait for years and pay through the nose to get residence permits and work permits. Even a stupid job at MacDonald’s to tide you over is closed for an immigrant without a work permit. And that also simplifies things incredibly for immigrants.
I feel the pain of American people who suffered in the current economic crisis. But anybody who wants to have an opinion about the easy lives of immigrants will be well-served to acquire some basic information about the complete economic collapse that we experienced in Russia and Ukraine in the 1990ies. We had the kind of inflation where my mother would bring home her salary for 3 months, and on the next day, the very next day, you could buy 2 loaves of bread and nothing more with that money because of the inflation.
Yes, there is unemployment in the US today, and that sucks. However, in the FSU countries, everybody became unemployed when the state fell apart. The very country that used to give people those low-paying Soviet jobs was not in existence any more. And everybody had to look for employment and compete in the job market for the very first time in their lives. Scholars with decades of experience, teachers, doctors, engineers had to start traveling to Poland and Turkey to buy cheap rubbish and then sell it at the market-place. And this wasn’t something that happened to 9% of people or 16% of people. It happened to everybody. At once. Do I need to mention that there were no unemployment benefits, food stamps, credit cards, food banks, churches to offer assistance, or anything of the kind?
Yes, my students don’t have an easy time finding jobs while they go to school. When I was an undergrad in Ukraine in 1994-8, however, there was a law in place that forbade students to work. Police officers would drag students out of classrooms for the horrible crime of working. This is the environment in which I had to support myself and an unemployed husband when I was 19, 20, 21, 22.
Nancy P’s father benefited from the GI bill, and that’s great. My grandfather, though, was a veteran of World War II and he died in penury. He couldn’t feed his children, and my mother didn’t get a chance to finish high school because there was simply no money to support a non-working 15-year-old girl.
It’s great that people in the US are organizing, protesting, getting politically active. But why, on God’s green Earth, can’t it be done without making these egregiously hurtful statements about the supposedly easy lives of immigrants?
I wouldn’t say it if I weren’t provoked beyond all patience by this insanely offensive statement I quoted above, but now I will say it: if you were born and raised in the US, you have no place talking about hardship, poverty, and economic instability to a person from an FSU country.
I’m so insulted that, for the first time in 11 months, my blood pressure has gone up.
This is from an ad campaign by Durex:
I think it’s brilliant. N. and I have been laughing all day long. I have no use for the product any more but if I did, I’d switch to this brand immediately, just to support the marketing people who have such a great sense of humor.
I found the ad here and there are two more equally great ones on that site from the same campaign. The entire blog is well worth checking out.
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