In St. Charles, I saw a beautiful little girl of about 3 years of age who had a Romney-Ryan sticker placed right on her pubic area. I don’t want to be too Freudian here, but the reason why her parents will vote for Romney is quite clear.

I would have preferred to see the sticker placed in the vicinity of her father’s wallet. That’s a more legitimate reason to vote for Romney-Ryan in the election.

I exhorted students to identify themselves as precisely as they could in their emails to me. This is what one inventive student came up with:

Dear Prof. Clarissa, I’m in your 12 pm FLXXX-001 class. I’m the guy who usually pulls down your projector screen.

Of course, I remembered him immediately.

As for the screen, some enemy of humanity hung it right under the ceiling, forcing all 5’6 professors either to make idiots of themselves by jumping up or to recruit taller students to pull the screen down.

Eric Hobsbawm, my favorite historian, died at the age of 95. 😦

Here are some quotes from this brilliant scholar:

Historians are to nationalism what poppy-growers in Pakistan are to heroin-addicts: we supply the essential raw material for the market.

I find his insights into the nature of nationalism to be absolutely priceless:

Nations without a past are contradictions in terms. What makes a nation is the past, what justifies one nation against others is the past, and historians are the people who produce it.

And one of my favorite quotes ever:

Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently not so.

Hobsbawm had a profound understanding of WWII:

The victory over Hitler’s Germany was essentially won, and could only have been won, by the Red Army.

And here is Hobsbawm on the economy:

Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another.

And these words about his bookshelves constitute the best tribute to this great historian:

Most of them, however, are filled with the foreign editions of my books. Their numbers amaze and please me and they still keep coming as new titles are translated and some fresh vernacular markets – Hindi, Vietnamese – open up. As I can’t read most of them, they serve no purpose other than as a bibliographic record and, in moments of discouragement, as a reminder that an old cosmopolitan has not entirely failed in 50 years of trying to communicate history to the world’s readers.

I highly recommend Hobsbawm’s Nations and Nationalism.