. . . in The Hunger Games trilogy supposed to be humorous? I just started reading, and already a vicious all -powerful president discusses with an adolescent the “degree of her interest ” in some boy?

I thought this book was supposed to be darker than part I.

There are just three weeks left in the academic year. This means that all I do is work. Finally, after working from 9 am to 11 pm,  I decided to take a bath and play my Kindle game. That didn’t go too well because I was so tired that I finished the sentence “Volga flows into the…” with “Bering Sea.”

Russian speakers will know that the funniest part of this has nothing to do with geography.

When working people who struggle to make ends meet identify with the imaginary sufferings of rich and pampered Hollywood starlets and rail against the mean elitist professors who also struggle to make ends meet but who dare not to appreciate the horrible problems faced by the valiant wrinkle-battling starlets, I have to acknowledge that Hollywood’s brainwashing is invincible. We can now stop wondering why the most disadvantaged keep voting for the Party of Millionaires. It happens because they saw on TV or in the movies how millionaires have problems, too.

P.S. When you feel like you have started to identify with people whose net worth exceeds yours by a few million bucks, it’s time to put down the tabloid and step away from the TV. They are messing with your head, buddy.

A student writes about a work of literature set in 1961:

This play is set in ancient times.

Well, at least, 1961 is not considered the prehistoric era just yet.

The following photo by a Canadian artist Sooraya Graham was deemed so intolerable by a group of idiot students and a staff member at Thompson River University that it was torn down from the exhibition of student artwork:

The insanity didn’t end there as an idiot from the Saudi Education Center decided to share his unenlightened opinion on how art should be presented:

“The artist didn’t approach the artwork let’s say in a very professional way that can state and can clarify the information and clarify the idea behind the picture,” said centre president Trad Bahabri.

Bahabri said he thinks text explaining the photo’s meaning is needed.

“I’m pretty sure many people misinterpret and many people misunderstand it. I can guarantee that,” he said.

The question I now have is why Kamloops, a town in British Columbia where this entire shameful incident took place, needs an “Education Center” run by idiots of this caliber. One really has to be beyond stupid to suggest that art should be accompanied with explanatory texts telling the spectators what the “correct” response to the art is. I find it sad that this ignoramus just walks around sharing his pathetic excuse for an opinion. This can only happen because nobody laughs in his face when he starts on his ignorant rants.

Notice how this fear of hurting somebody’s feelings only goes one way. Nobody thought twice about hurting the feelings of Sooraya Graham, the artist whose piece was torn down, humiliating its creator in public. Nobody cares about how much my sensibilities as a person who actually has a brain are hurt by the pronouncements of this officious fool from the Saudi Education Center as to how art should be accompanied by “correct” explanations (probably vetted by him personally.) I have absolutely no doubt that I will now start receiving emails and comments by the bucketful as to how I should respect this jerk’s religion or his sensibilities. My religion and sensibilities, in the meanwhile, can take a hike.

I, however, refuse to be one of those toothless Liberals who are terrified of their shadow and can’t articulate the obvious here: religious fanatics who want to place constraints on freedom of speech in Canada are barbaric, backwards, stupid idiots who need to learn respect for the values of the country where they are living at the moment. If your sensibilities are hurt by a work of art, it’s your job to remove yourself from its vicinity. Nobody else is to blame for your sensibilities because they are located inside you and are fully and completely your problem.

I’m bothered by the idea behind trigger warnings. Normally, I skip posts that start with one because I can’t muster any enthusiasm for the writings of a person who considers me such a delicate tender flower that I have to be warned before reading – no even seeing or hearing – but simply reading about certain issues.

My readers keep asking me if I actually invent all those stories about my students who can’t deal with a movie that has a sad ending or a fictional character who is not completely perfect. However, isn’t this precisely the sort of human being that the creators of the following trigger warning had in mind?

Got it? People need to be warned in bold type that “brief mentions of rape” will occur. Isn’t this completely insane? There is a definite suggestion here that unpleasant realities like rape should not even be mentioned in polite company because they can traumatize everybody too much. Who cares that we cannot address an issue that is never even mentioned? The important thing is that nobody’s feelings get hurt by allusions to anything that is not all happy-happy-joy-joy all the time.

Movies and books should only have happy endings, magazines and TV shows should only present extremely young and impeccably looking people, unsavory realities should not even be mentioned in articles and blog posts. Haven’t these attempts to sanitize reality gone way too far? We are getting to a place where nothing is sanitized enough for the prudish among us. These people are so terrified of life that they need to turn it into a cartoon in order to be able to live at all.

Why are we humoring them?

Renee at Womanist Musings also doesn’t believe in the sincerity of Ashley Judd’s sudden feminist awakening:

To me all of her righteous indignation reads more like self-indulgent posturing that’s an emotional response for not being considered a Sexy Young Thang anymore.

**Begins crocodile tears and a pout.

She has a mid-season replacement action thriller about a former CIA operative to promote. Since the ratings have dropped, it isn’t likely to be renewed.

I guess I’m not as kind and understanding as other people, which is why Judd’s conversion to anti-objectification militancy comes a little too late for me. Imagine Mitt Romney suddenly going bankrupt and on the next day joining the #Occupy movement and ranting about greedy millionaires. It’s easy to be against objectification when you can’t make the same huge piles of money out of it any more.

No, people, Hollywood is not a place to look for support for our feminist goals.

There are two discussions that reoccur on a regular basis on my blog:

1. Fetuses are not people and do not have rights.

2. Children are people and do have rights.

The funny thing is that I always face the same opponents on both topics.

Who could have thought I would love anything that Mitt Romney could possibly say? But I really liked the following:

Poor women who stay at home to raise their children should be given federal assistance for child care so that they can enter the job market and “have the dignity of work,” Mitt Romney said in January. . . “I wanted to increase the work requirement,” said Romney. “I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, ‘Well that’s heartless.’ And I said, ‘No, no, I’m willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It’ll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'”

In the environment where nobody wants to discuss the horrible damage a mother who is stuck at home and torn out of the normal functioning of society causes to her small children, it is very refreshing to see a politician who suggests that it’s more important to provide women with daycare than with cash to sit at home and gradually go nuts.

My sister has a 2-year-old and, through observing her, we have reached a unanimous conclusion that everybody in our family supports: the last thing a kid of that age needs is to be stuck at home with an adult all day long. Kids need to socialize and grow through being with other kids and not with a parent whose life is in a total dead end.

Romney will still lose the elections, of course, and that’s a good thing. But it’s great to see that even conservative politicians let slip useful things about housewifery. Let’s remember that Romney’s wife hasn’t worked a day in her life, so the guy is probably well aware of the burden of having a housewife about.

My students do not follow the foreign affairs, their interest in politics is very limited, and their understanding of the economy is non-existent.

However, they are very aware of the environmental issues and are capable of a very sophisticated analysis of those issues.

My Advanced Spanish students had an assignment that they were doing on their own and that involved using the vocabulary that has to do with nature and ecology. I expected boring, self-evident, uninspired responses because, at this time of the semester, nobody wants to invest a lot of energy into an assignment that is worth 0,25% of the final grade.

However, most of them handed in assignments that demonstrated a very impressive knowledge of what happens in the world in terms of the environment.

The new generation seems to understand a lot better than we ever did how crucial the environment will become to all of us. While older people keep getting boggled down in useless discussions of fetuses and zygotes, these kids are thinking about stuff that really matters.

And good for them.