In case anybody is wondering, the Ukrainian senators are beating each other into a bloody pulp over whether the Ukrainian language will remain the country’s only official language or whether Russian should be adopted as the second official language in the Eastern and Southern parts of the country.

The adoption of Russian as the second official language would represent a huge step towards bringing Ukraine back to Russia as its colony. After 300+ years of a bloody colonial rule of Russians over the Ukrainians, we can understand why some people are reacting strongly to the current President’s suggestion that Russian be adopted as the second official language. The current President of Ukraine is a pro-Russian puppet.

This is the very first lobster bisque I have made. Pretty, isn’t it?

If you are not very smart, if you are kind of lazy, if you are not into working, if a career is not something that interests you, and if your libido is very dormant, patriarchy is quite a good little system for this kind of a woman. You agree not to do any of the things you don’t want to do anyways (working, getting an education, pursuing sexual fulfillment) in exchange for somebody else paying your way and keeping you for life. Not bad at all.

We all know that the patriarchy deprives women of their full humanity. What we forget is that a full humanity is quite a burden. All of those choices, responsibilities, problems, struggles. It’s all kind of hard. This is why there is and always will be a certain number of women who will defend their right not to be fully human and retain their patriarchal role of a kept, infantilized, stupidified object.

I hope I don’t need to explain that the patriarchy deprives men of their full humanity, too, albeit in a different way, which is why there will always be men who will support it because, for them, too, being fully human is a burden. So they willingly castrate their existences and place themselves into the rigid patriarchal mold.

Of course, those of us who have chosen to pursue the full range of human existence (whether we are male or female) annoy the patriarchally minded folks because we remind them of what they have renounced for the security of their traditional roles. This is why they get so rabid whenever they see us or are reminded of our existence.

This is another story that, for some reason, is very successful. I don’t know if you noticed, folks, but I’m good at telling stories. I can’t make them up because I have no imagination but I can tell them well if they happened to me or I heard them somewhere.

There was this old-fashioned rotisserie in Montreal that had existed for many years. It was located in an area where new restaurants were springing up every day. The rent was high, and it was getting very hard for a place that served boring rotisserie chicken to a dwindling elderly clientele who came there for old time’s sake to survive.

This was why the owners if the rotisserie signed a contract with Gordon Ramsay. The world-famous chef (whom I absolutely adore so don’t even consider saying anything bad about him) had been planning to expand his business to Montreal for a while. He gave the rotisserie his name, some of his famous recipes, and his notoriously great personnel-training practices.

Montreal’s foodies are spoiled by the abundance of great restaurants. Still, Gordon Ramsay’s name was enough to attract them in droves to the rotisserie. The profits soared. And this was when the rotisserie’s owners demonstrated that there are blockheads of the worst order even in Montreal.

“Look how great we are doing,” they thought. “Why should we give a huge chunk of our profits to this Ramsay fellow? We are popular and people love us.”

It somehow didn’t occur to them that the popularity and the profits appeared only after they put Gordon Ramsay’s name in front of the entrance and his food on the table.

So they made Ramsay leave and take away his food, service, and fame. The rotisserie went back to serving its traditional roasted chicken that is notorious for how dry it is. The droves of customers disappeared and, once again, the place is struggling to survive.

Contrary to what I expected, my online course is proving to be a lot of fun. Since students get to express themselves a lot more, they come up with all sorts of interesting stuff. This is a question one of the students came up with:

Reading about the epidemic of the Bubonic plague that killed about 1/3 of all people in Europe within just a few years in 1300s made me wonder: what would happen if our society experienced something like that? Would we also react with growing religious intolerance, fear, hatred, pogroms, etc.? We like to see ourselves as better than the Medieval people. Would we act any differently in case of this kind of tragedy?

What do you think?