I should stop watching these Russian TV shows because they traumatize me. I just watched one where mothers of 35-year-old men discovered their children had been swapped at the hospital where they were born and they had raised other people’s children. Imagine how these poor families must feel. Poor parents. And the men themselves who have been deprived of their real families for so many years!

This is too horrible.

The only piece of good news is that nowadays there are DNA tests that allow people to establish true paternity. What a great invention of humanity!

. . . was left by Andrea:

Something just occurred to me: the act of putting kids at a smaller, separate “children’s table” and feeding them subpar food instead of what all the grownups are eating is just what we do to pets. People more and more are treating their kids the way they treat their dogs — as something to be fed the minimum nutritional requirements, to be relegated to being fobbed off to a corner away from the activity, to be produced when there’s a need to brag that you have something cute to pet, to be paraded about like an object, and to be talked down to in a simplistic tone. In other words, a child is just a primitive, barely living being that is an ornament to an adult’s life, not a person in their own right.

I think this is a brilliant insight. I haven’t looked at the issue this way but this makes total sense. Chicken nuggets even look like oversized dog food.

Thank you for the great comment, Andrea!

My blogroll is populated with Scrooges who are publishing endless (and endlessly boring) posts about why Valentine’s Day is bad and should not be celebrated.

I think this is simply stupid. I love this holiday. I love all holidays and even remotely festive occasions. I celebrated Valentine’s Day when I was single just as well as I celebrate it when I’m not. Who cares what other people make it about, what the marketing companies want it to be about, what it was like 100 years ago, or anything of the kind? A holiday is what one makes of it.

I especially detest those passive-aggressive losers who are too chicken to tell their partner, “I don’t like you and don’t find you valuable” and who instead say, “I don’t celebrate Valentine’s Day on ideological grounds, so don’t expect a gift.”

And the idiots who say crap like, “We love each other every day, so what’s the need to have a special day to celebrate it?” should first apply this line of reasoning to their own Birthdays. I mean, if you are alive every day, then what’s the point of celebrating your life once a year? If we follow this inane logic, there is no reason to celebrate anything ever.

Graduation? Well, shouldn’t the process of acquiring knowledge be more important than the day you get an empty diploma cover?

New Year’s? Why should an arbitrary number be celebrated as if it meant anything special?

Wedding anniversary? Marriage is hard work, so why celebrate the day when you accepted yet another job that will not even be remunerated?

Christmas? That’s all commercial anyways, and besides, Jesus wasn’t even born on that day. He was never born at all, and that is a great reason to deny oneself a chance to have a good time. Let’s punish Jesus for never getting born and have a crappy time instead of enjoying ourselves!

Happy Valentine’s Day, folks! Let’s celebrate the people and the things we love today. If there is nothing else to celebrate, I suggest we celebrate our love for this blog. 🙂

P.S. We will be celebrating Valentine’s Day by going to the theater to see Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and then to a Peruvian restaurant. That will happen on Saturday because N. has an important presentation tomorrow, so he’s preparing. I will tell you all about the play and the food, of course.

 

Only very weird kids brought up by lazy irresponsible people would prefer the garbage in the bottom picture to the beautiful food in the picture on top. When I was a kid, only extreme hunger would have forced me to eat the goat droppings in the bottom photo. And then I would have thrown up anyway. But I would give a lot to be offered the beautiful plate of food on top.

The reason why kids choose the garbage on the bottom is because their parents are too lazy to make anything good for them and get them accustomed to ingesting crap. And then everybody sits there super-puzzled why 60% of children in this country are obese.

These kids are like orphans who are rescued from horrible orphanages in Romania and Serbia and cannot fall asleep in good, comfortable beds. Instead, they crawl into small, dirty spaces. Because that is all they know.

So please stop repeating like broken records that kids like to eat this shit. Sick kids like to eat this shit. Healthy kids wouldn’t touch it. Nobody knows what foods are good, healthy and nutritional better than small kids. You need to work long and hard to break these natural mechanisms of food selection.

I found the images here.