On Saturday, I had the weirdest pregnancy symptom so far: excessive salivation. This only sounds funny in the first 2 minutes of the experience. After that, I started choking on the stuff.

The most annoying thing was that an online search suggested that I eat boiled eggs and radishes to stop the salivation. That was just bizarre, given that right before it started I had eaten 2 boiled eggs and 4 radishes.

Since then, it kind of got semi-tolerable.

So all those idiots who keep saying that “pregnancy is not a disability, it’s a perfectly normal state ” can come closer. I feel another bout of salivation coming on and I need a spittoon. Of course, it’s not a disability, but unless you give birth every year, there is nothing normal about this state. I’ve been breaking out like I never had in my life, not even in adolescence, how normal is that? And itching all over, for months, is that normal?

So the students handed in crappy essays that show they can’t follow instructions. But on the positive side, I gave them a quiz that one can only write if one has done all the readings very very carefully, and nobody made a single mistake on the quiz.

This means that I managed to interest them with the texts but failed at getting them interested in the instructions. Maybe I should find a philosophical justification for the MLA format. Something like telling them that using it is a key to the community of scholars.

Republican Governor Scott Walker (WI) — a likely GOP candidate for president in 2016 — admitted on Sunday that young conservatives support marriage equality for gays and lesbians, suggesting that the Republican party cannot sustain its opposition to same-sex marriage into the future.

We will see more and more renunciations of unsustainable, outdated causes in the years to come. My child’s generation will not even understand what was the problem of the people who opposed marriage equality. “But that’s, like, totally stupid,” they will say, suspecting that we, the older folks have gone senile.

Now let’s expect the death of the opposition to reproductive rights.

Since I still can’t make the students observe the correct format in the essays they hand in to me, I have come up with the following fill-in-the-blanks exercise:

The page number should be placed in  _____________

A title should be ___________________ and _____________________

The introduction should contain  __________________ and  _____________

The introduction should NOT contain  _________________

An example of generalization is: ______________________

Generalizations are good/ bad, useful / not useful (underline the correct answer)

The parts of the essay that should be underlined or bold-typed  ________________________

The spaces between paragraphs are ____________ and they really _________________ Professor Clarissa

The tile of the file you submit should contain  _____________________________

Reliable secondary sources can be found _______________________________ but not on _______________

Yes, it sounds idiotic, but I’m hoping that its sheer idiocy will finally have an effect.

People, let’s ask Google not to be stupid and keep Google Reader alive. Let’s let the company know that the destruction of the Reader is perceived by many as a sign of the company’s weakness and decline.

Sign the petition to keep Google Reader alive.

Even if you don’t use Google Reader but enjoy link encyclopedias on this blog, please consider supporting this cause. What lurks behind the closure of the Google Reader is the belief that blogging should die and social networks should take its place. However, if you tried Facebook and Twitter, I’m sure you know that they are not a substitute for blogging.

I just discovered that Google Reader will retire this summer:

 

When I think of moving the 872 websites I follow someplace else, I cringe. What are you going to do when Google Reader dies? What are the alternatives?

I tried Evernote but it’s clunky and not very visual.