A brilliant takedown of the moron who claimed college profs are lazy and overpaid.

And here are suggestions on how to combat such morons.

A recipe for orange-liqueur pancakes. Yum!

“You will not be less busy in the future than you are right now.”

“It doesn’t matter what a child chooses to spend his or her time doing, parents have no right to bully their children into partaking in hobbies they deem ‘worthy’.” A fantastic post!

“The world [is] in a post feminist reactionary period where Republican primary candidates are talking about making the American government small enough to fit in a vagina while their June Cleaver wives stood by theirman and baked cookies for the cause.”

It always drives me around the bend to hear my students drawl, “Oh, I’m not interested in politics!” I wish they could get acquainted with this post by a brilliant young person who is politically active and engaged: “The first thing that I learned was that politics affects everyone. It touches everything in our lives. This was the same fact that I told every person who skeptically, condescendingly, asked why I was studying English. Politics was why the roof of my urban high school leaked when it rained. Politics was why gas prices were soaring. Politics was why tuition was so dang expensive. Politics was why. Politics was. I had to learn as much as I could about this thing, this entity, this institution that touched every corner of my life. I had to know.” By the way, this was written by a young journalist. I have got to ask: how come we see articles from complete and utter morons in leading newspapers and never great stuff by promising writers like this one?

How to engage with a recruitment agency in a way that maximizes your chances to be introduced to a potential employer.

“The American education system has never been better, several important measures show. But you’d never know that from reading overheated media reports about “failing” schools and enthusiastic pieces on unproven “reform” efforts.” The scare-mongering about the completely fictitious horrors of the American public education are spread on purpose by people who are terrified of intelligent voters.

“In the kind of world the forced birthers want to exist. . . the minute a woman is pregnant the man who impregnated her would have extra rights over her body because of her pregnancy. She is now the aquarium for his future child, after all. That the aquarium is also a person is where the complications enter.”

“Political coverage is nothing but empty prognostication, with no indication about why we should even care about the outcome. Meanwhile, political debate is conducted via empty abstractions that are supposed to be vaguely “good.” All of it is utterly meaningless and useless.”

This is the most brilliant thing I have read for ages on the US foreign policy: “We try to analyze what happens and is likely to happen in North Korea as though we knew as much as there is to know about it. We seem to look upon it as a small state in a mid western part of the United States.  It is not. Korea has a far longer history than does the United States and is extraordinarily different culturally, historically and in just about every other important respect. . . Until we learn that people around the world are not necessarily the same as we are, don’t necessarily think in the same way and don’t necessarily appreciate the same things, we will continue to muck up foreign policy terribly. Our troops and those of our allies and enemies will continue to die unnecessarily, we will continue to spend money that we don’t have and continue to be impoverished in the process.  Are we stupid, naive, or just mistakenly well-meaning?”

It always shocks me to see how people use horrible crimes like the one committed against Trayvon Martin to write bizarre pieces on how things would have been a lot worse if Martin had been a woman. Because he’d be more dead, or something: “The president has promised a proper investigation. The case will go to a grand jury next month, and the Department of Justice plans to review it. The governor has appointed a special prosecutor, and the police chief has stepped down temporarily. Martin’s parents have spoken before a Congressional panel. I can only dream of a female president speaking out when a man kills a woman. Take Back the Night marches draw little or no media. Slutwalks do better, probably because they include young women in sexy clothing. Offhand, I can’t think of any time in recent history when hundreds of women and men took to the streets across the country because a man stalked and killed a woman.” Constructing an argument that presents Trayvon Martin as hugely fortunate could have only occurred to a very diseased human being. His parents have spoken before a panel, yippee, problem solved. This is simply outrageous.

I had to spoil my own blog’s birthday by going and reading a stupid post by a stupid ignoramus who blabs like a stupid idiot because she has nothing better to do with her stupid time. I used to like this stupid creature’s stupid blog but now I know better.

The stupid jerkwad said stupid and nasty things about my university. One of them is that we are losing faculty members because they are supposedly leaving for I don’t know where. I have discussed my university’s fantastic and absolutely exceptional hiring practices at length here, so I won’t repeat myself. I’d worked for three super-duper fancy schools before I came to this modest public school and I can give you my word that they were nasty, corrupt cesspools where exploitation of employees was rampant. My current university is, indeed, Utopia.edu compared to those fancy places where you could only hope to survive by outmaneuvering and out-intriguing everybody else.

And then this stupid, stupid, stupid blabberer goes and runs her nasty big mouth and offends a place where good people do good work. We apparently don’t have enough people bashing public education in this country. Now, faculty members (because this is who this useless fool claims to be) have to dump on universities they know nothing about just because they have nothing else to blog about on a Saturday.

Of course, I will not offer a link to this idiot’s offensive post. I don’t promote brainless fools who besmirch the reputation of a public university that provides cheap, high-quality education to people who wouldn’t be able to get educated otherwise and that treats its employees very fairly.

I feel very patriotic about this university, people. And any ignoramus who ventures to say anything critical about it does that at his or her own peril.

Today Clarissa’s Blog turns three!

If we assume that a blog follows the same stages of psychological development as a person, then we can say that at this point, the framework of this blog’s personality has been established. So what do people have to say about Clarissa’s Blog? I have been gathering some of the compliments people have been making to the blog. Here they are:

Brittany-Ann: “My day is not complete without having made the rounds to my favorite blogs. Some of them are well known and popular, like Shakesville and Clarissa’s Blog. Others have their own niches on the net.”

Evelina Anville: “Clarissa’s Blog falls under the category of “necessary” online time.”

Elizabeth: “The best part of my day is getting online and seeing that you’ve made a bunch of new posts.”

Keith: ” I hold tremendous respect for you your integrity is seldom baited. I value your honesty and respect the liberty of your thoughts and ideas. I like the geometry of your thoughts and the thoughts of many of the commenters.”

Liz: “This blog profoundly changed how I view many things, particularly feminism. Now I argue with friends telling them how misogyny unfairly places everyone in boxes, whereas before I bought into evolutionary psychology and had no idea that gender stereotypes might not be based on anything important, and I thought feminism equated hatred of men – which in all honesty after a long look in the mirror (largely thanks to this blog) I realized I regularly engaged in.”

Another Liz: “I enjoy your blog immensely, though I don’t believe I’ve ever commented. I would like to add here that your trolls’ comments are ridiculous, and not only do I think you’re intelligent and humorous, but your hair is awesome.”

Arzee: “I often agree with you – as I do for this blog – but even when I don’t, you discuss the most interesting things and spur good dialogue. ”

Titfortat: “You make me and wifee smile. Great sense of humour that is much appreciated!”

And my blog was referred to as “the awesome Clarissa’s blog” here.

This blogger also agrees that my blog “is awesome.”

And this is from a blogger I barked at angrily: “This girl is very intense, like a microwave that got stuck on high and is emitting brainwaves more intense than a microwave stuck on high.  She writes an incredible amount of blogs a month, knows a bunch of languages and is a professor.  She was arrested for stealing a microwave that emits brainwaves and presently cooks for the inmates on Death Row*.” I really dig being an intense girl-professor.

Thank you, everybody, for reading and commenting! I can safely say that my blog attracts the most intelligent, enlightened, passionate people ever.

Happy 3rd Birthday to all of us!