This blogger has summed up my disappointment with both presidential election campaigns. Both campaigns have turned into senseless reality TV shows. As for the crucial issues, I’m still not sure where either candidate stands. This will be yet another “anybody but. . .” round of voting.

Politicians’ genitals: private or public parts?

If you are an academic, here are some great suggestions on how to have a productive summer.

“Quebec’s New Anti-Protest Law Could Shut Down Campus Student Associations for Years.”

Internal time: debunking the myth that early risers are more virtuous than late risers.

Crazed, sex-deprived Mommies assault teenagers for having fun. Talk about going mad with envy!

“I’ve been hanging out on the Twitter and just saw the most terrifying thing someone retweeted: a woman praising her husband for doing the dishes “the first time since we were married.” But before that? She said, “I caved.”” Women who tweet their coy pride in this type of husband are a mystery to me. It’s like they are proud to serve as maids to overgrown infantile idiots.

“Whenever I leave my little corner of the web and venture over to one of the big Democratic cheerleading sites, I’m told that we’re in the middle of a slow but steady economic recovery. Strange, I think to myself, because it sure doesn’t look that way from where I’m sitting. . . In the real economy, the one that matters to most people, things are not getting better. They’re still getting worse. And neither one of the two major parties is going to do a damn thing about it.”

Urban decay in Tel Aviv. Very good photos.

No vile woman-hating macho pig is capable of insulting and degrading women as much as this sort of pseudo-feminist. Some people seem to confuse hatred of women with feminism. I believe it’s some form of a psychiatric disorder where people mask their own vicious self-hatred as political activism. And if you believe it’s wrong to diagnose, take into account that the vile thing who wrote this nasty piece of trash insulted me and every woman as well, so it deserves whatever I wish to call it in return.

The government of Quebec hastily takes away the civil liberties of the Quebecois people. The people themselves continue snoozing in a contented stupor.

Romney and NATO.

Religious barbarity in Romania: “The top priority of the Orthodox Church right now is building a cathedral called Romanian People’s Salvation Cathedral — placed in Bucharest in the courtyard of Ceausescu’s enormous House of the People. Building the cathedral is estimated to cost something between 200 and 400 million Euros. It is hard to understand why this is top priority in a poor country with some 20,000 churches already but with less than 5,000 schools and less than 500 hospitals.” This is happening in many post-Soviet countries where the Church that collaborated gleefully with the secret service during the Communist era is now stinky rich. This must be some sort of a compensation for victimizing the religious people of these countries for decades.

On Christian patriarchy and body ownership.

PhD poverty.

Informed consumerism while femme. A lovely post.

And the post of the week by an academic writer who always manages to write exactly the post I need to read at each given moment.

No feminist site will ever link to my blog because I don’t see myself as a victim of anything and I don’t believe that “society conditions” me to do anything.

No academic website will ever link to my blog because I don’t consider my students to be stupid, my colleagues to be envious, and my job to be miserable.

No progressive website will link to me because I believe in individual responsibility.

Other people won’t link to me because I’m a progressive feminist academic which, for them, is the same as the devil incarnate.

But in spite of an almost complete absence of links to my blog, it’s very popular. This must mean that, deep inside, people like me and feel there is something to my contrarian opinions.

One good method of dealing with guilt-trippers and manipulators that I discovered recently is the following. Say, the manipulator starts telling you in a tragic voice how “once I’m dead, you will feel sorry that you refused to do this little thing for me.” As soon as s/he does that, start laughing as loudly as you can, saying, “You are too funny! I love it how you always make me laugh. Wow, you are such a hoot!”

The important thing is not to allow wailing, weeping, and guilt-tripping to distract you from the selected course of action. Remember that all of these sighs, tears and fake depressions are nothing but the manipulator’s tool in the service of enslaving you. The moment s/he sees that this particular mechanism produces no result, the manipulator will lay it aside.

I’ve posted many stories about funny, silly and strange things students say and do. So I think it will be only fair to start a thread where we’ll share stories about the bizarre, unexpected and unusual things our professors say and do.

College professors do an extremely important job of educating people and conducting research. However, like in any other profession, we get our share of weirdos, ignoramuses, and people who only got their jobs through nepotism. Here is a story of one such prof.

In a graduate course on Latin American literature, a passionate discussion of neo-colonialism unfolded. People were quoting theory left and right, interrupting each other, and developing complex arguments to support their positions. It is normally a professor’s dream to get students so engaged in a discussion that they would burn with the desire to contribute something on the topic.

This, however, was not Professor A’s case. She listened for a while and then interrupted the discussion with, “OK, this is boring! Let me show you photos of how I went to buy a microwave with my mother-in-law over the weekend instead!”

In the stunned silence that ensued, Professor A produced a stack of photos and started passing them around the room while explaining the virtues of each microwave model.

And this, my friends, is why I hate nepotism.

Feel free to share your stories.