It’s OK not to like Mitt Romney, I’m not a huge fan myself. But the following article is nothing short of disgusting:

Poppy looks like Dirty Harry Callahan compared with Romney, who spent his war (Vietnam) in—ready?—Paris. Where he learned … French. Up to his eyeballs in deferments. Where Reagan saddled up a horse with the masculine name of El Alamein, Mitt saddles up something called Rafalca—except that he doesn’t even really do that, his wife does (dressage). And speaking of Ann—did you notice that she was the one driving the Jet Ski on their recent vacation, while Mitt rode on the back, hanging on, as Paul Begala put it to me last week, “like a helpless papoose”?

If you don’t vote for Romney because he doesn’t conform to a set of antediluvian stereotypes of “correct masculinity”, then maybe you shouldn’t vote at all because you are an idiot. Reducing a presidential election to a discussion of who drove a JetSki and what anybody’s horse is called is beyond disrespectful towards a country that is attempting to solve many serious issues at the moment.

It’s really funny that the author of the article accuses Romney of being “an insecure wimp.” That’s an example of projection if I ever saw one. Insecure wimps are precisely the people who see something wrong with men who speak French and ride on the back of JetSkis.

Bleh, what a vile article. I know it isn’t very recent but I missed it when I was on vacation and I can’t keep silent.

This quote just slaughtered me with how scarily correct it is:

I got it here. The linked post is quite crappy but the quote is probably the wisest thing I have heard in a while.

I know somebody who keeps saying things like, “Some people might think that I’m worthless (garbage, stupid, useless, fat, etc.), but I’m not.”

After listening to such statements for years, I finally asked, “Who are these “some people”? Who do they sound like in your head?”

“My mother,” was the immediate response.

You’d be floored if I told you how old this person is.

 

See how our discussion of algebra ennobled the list of searches that bring people to my blog:

 

Of course, people who come here in search of discontinuous functions will be disappointed, but I believe that any means is good in order to lure intelligent people to the blog.

I’m starting to believe that Bloomberg has some sort of a mental health issue that makes him want to mess with other people’s bodies:

The latest round comes courtesy of NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg and his “Latch-On” initiative. The initiative will change the current protocol surrounding formula use in NYC hospitals, requiring new mothers who want to use formula while in the hospital to sign it out like medication. Nobody will be denied formula, but if a mother requests some, they’ll receive a mandated talk from staff on why breast is best.

And while the officious losers are delivering this bunch of idiocies to women, the babies are supposed to scream their heads off because they are hungry? And all that just because Mayor Bloomberg, who, I’m sure, has breastfed a platoon of babies and knows all about it, has decided that there are no other problems to solve in New York City than monitoring what women do with their breasts?

Who elected this idiot and why? And how come he is allied with the crazed religious fanatics from LLL?

Esther Tusquets, a great Spanish writer, died on July 23 at the age of 76. I feel like a horrible person because when I heard the sad news, the first thing that crossed my mind was, “God, now she will not be able to write any more books.”

I highly recommend Tusquets’s first and most famous novel The Same Sea as Every Summer. I first read this novel for an undergrad course at the age of 24.

“What a stupid novel,” I thought. “None of this makes any sense.”

When I reread the novel this year, I finally managed to glimpse what it was all about. The novel was written when Tusquets was 42, and the mature female sexuality that imbues its every page is not something that a 24-year-old woman can even begin to comprehend. What I find really funny is that the professor who assigned the novel was male. Since male sexuality develops in a different direction (has a different vector? Would that be a correct way of putting it?) than female sexuality, it probably never occurred to him that his all-female seminar of 20-year-olds was simply not physiologically equipped to understand the novel.

Here is just a random quote from the novel to give you an idea:

The howl that can unhinge the universe, that’s powerful.

R.I.P., Esther Tusquets.

P.S. Why are so many writers dying this summer? Carlos Fuentes, Hector Tizon, Ray Bradbury, now Tusquets. This is making me very sad.