People who lived in the room next to us at the hotel had a really good time on New Year’s as evidenced by this battery of bottles. Still, they must have felt good enough to place them all in such a straight row.

I’m talking to a woman who just met her son’s girlfriend.

“She is so old!” she hisses. “She is ancient. What is somebody so elderly doing with my son who is only thirty?”

“She is my age,” I observe.

“Yes, but that’s not the same thing. She is also huge. And he looks really tiny by her side.”

My angelic patience wears thin and I say, “Well, I surely don’t know who would be small enough for your son.”

“Me!” the loving mother exclaims.

I depart, once again thanking God in heaven that my mother-in-law lives on a different continent.

I have finally discovered why I always get pawed by the TSA officers at security checkpoints. I fly often, and it can’t be a coincidence that I get signaled for a pat-down every time when I go through security. Being singled out for a groping session 16 times in a row (I counted) seems like too big of a coincidence.

Now the mystery has been solved, and it feels kind of good to know what was causing the TSA agents to pay so much attention to me. On my trip to Montreal, a male agent who was observing me step through the metal frame motioned me to step aside and requested over the radio that a female officer approach.

“What?” the female officer asked when she came by.

“The skirt,” said the male agent.

It turns out that skirts are likely to cause discomfort to TSA agents because you can hide quite a few objects underneath them. I tend to wear a lot of billowing, 1950s-style skirts that look like you could have an arsenal under them.

And if you collect horror stories about TSA scanners, here is a particularly disturbing one.

This 700-page novel published in 1861 is enormously enjoyable. East Lynne has everything to grab a reader’s attention and never let it go: a murder investigation, a love triangle, adultery, mystery, creepy but irresistible seducers and seductresses, and the kind of plot where something exciting happens on every single page. Of course, I can’t address every aspect of this great novel in a short review, so I will concentrate on the theme that interested me the most and that, I believe, is central to the novel: emotional stupidity.

Archibald Carlyle, the novel’s protagonist, is a good man. He is hard-working, sincere, loyal, honest, and kind. However, he possesses one tragic flaw that makes all of these admirable qualities completely useless. Mr. Carlyle has the emotional intelligence of a door knob. He is completely incapable of noticing that other human beings have feelings. His indifference to the emotional experiences of others rises to the level of sociopathy. As a result, Mr. Carlyle, who never willingly commits a bad or unkind act, ends up destroying people who are the closest to him. He loves his wife Isabel but it never crosses his mind to take her feelings seriously. Her husband’s utter emotional stupidity eventually drives Isabel to abandon her family. She is willing to do anything but continue living by the side of an emotionally dead man.

Whenever Mr. Carlyle is forced to confront the unexpected reality that human beings have feelings of their own and don’t move through life as smiling machines, he becomes very perplexed and dismisses this unwelcome realization. He walks through life leaving pain, suffering, and death in his wake. I think we have all met a few people who have the same flaw as Mr. Carlyle. Such folks might be very well-meaning and nice, yet their emotional stupidity makes them fatal. I don;t fear a nasty evil-doer half as much as I do somebody who is emotionally stupid.

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 610,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 11 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

 

You see what made me famous? Putin’s botox, of course! Or maybe it was this comparison of Putin before and after botox.

 

191 countries! This is a lot of countries, folks.

And the most commented post this year? This post on evolution.

No, this is not the same photo as in the previous post. If you look closely, you will see that they are different.

 

We stayed hungry all day long on December 31 to prepare ourselves for a magnificent feast at my parents’ place. See photos of how Ukrainians celebrate the biggest holiday of the year under the fold.

Continue reading “My Trip to Montreal in Pictures, Part II” →

I understand that most people resent being forced to look at other people’s photos, so I’m putting the bulk of this post under the fold. Only go there if you are ready to see many photos of Montreal, food, my mother’s religious imagery collection, and me enjoying the snow.

I have noticed that I tend to post only those photos of myself where I look weird. Here is finally a photo where I’m neither exhausted, sick, sleepy, or angry. It was taken on December 31 in my favorite Montreal cigar bar where I took N. in preparation for the New Year;s festivities.

I really like this self-portrait because at least I’m kind of smiling here. As promised, the rest of the photos are under the fold.

Continue reading “My Trip to Montreal in Pictures, Part I” →

I find the news that President Obama went to Hawaii for a vacation the moment after the fiscal bill was signed very disappointing. While the victims of Hurricane Sandy are still suffering, I don’t think he deserves a beach party. And what is the urgency to take vacations? His term will end in 4 years, and for the rest of his life he won’t have that much to do.

At least, Boehner will stop being the Speaker, so there is some good news in all of this.

What shocked me about the fiscal bill is that Hollywood got an enormous tax break. What is this, the USSR? Is Hollywood now the ideological branch of the US government?

Yes, I know all about lobbying. But I find it obscene that stupid Hollywood would get a windfall while the victims of Sandy wouldn’t even get a crooked dime.

My Canadian uncle visited Ukraine and was very impressed.

“In the US and Canada, we are totally backwards compared to Ukraine,” he said. “We are at least 50 years behind Ukraine in everything.”

When asked by his puzzled Ukrainian relatives what it was he liked so much, the Canadian uncle said that life was much more comfortable for pedestrians and he saw the latest models of extremely expensive cars everywhere, even in a mining city he visited.

Of course, what he saw as a sign of social advancement was in reality an enormous social and economic stratification the likes of which he never encountered in Canada.

North Americans often tell me, “I just visited Ukraine and it was phenomenal. I have no idea why you even left such a wonderful country.” They don’t realize that their experience there is so nice precisely because they come as tourists with their pockets full of Canadian or American dollars.

As to being backwards, my mother just put on a New Year’s concert from Russia where people ridiculed Angela Merkel for being too “manly.” I’m not a huge fan of Merkel but I can imagine no greater sign of backwardness than the need to ridicule a political leader because she doesn’t wear mini-skirts. So after the 4th stupid joke about Merkel and mini-skirts, I decided to stop watching the concert and blogged instead.

I’m going back home today. Expect many photos of snow, food, and me. I photographed every single snow mound I saw because it doesn’t seem like we will be getting any snow in Southern Illinois.