. . . is highly recommended. For the first time in this country I’m eating meal after meal that is not oversalted. The scrambled eggs we were served for breakfast today had no salt at all. None.

And we already had two soups here (potato / asparagus / crabmeat and lobster bisque) that were not oversalted. Of course, I would have wished for even less salt but I recognize that one has got to be miserable.

Most of the people on our floor at the hotel are French-speakers from Quebec. At the beach, people to the right of us are from Spain and people to the left are Italians. The young man who gives out beach umbrellas is Dutch. The waitress is from Western Ukraine.

This feels like I never even left my multi-lingual department.

Florida is a civilized state. Over a year ago, I discovered in Montreal Perrier water with pink grapefruit flavor. I scoured the stores in IL /MO but couldn’t find it. The first 7/11 in Florida, however, carried the water. That’s civilization.

If you want a completely vegetative holiday in a place where there is nothing to do but eat, sleep, and lie on the beach, I recommend Marco Island, Florida. The hotels are small, the beaches are quite deserted, the nightlife is non-existent, the noise level is low. There are fewer cars than anywhere else I’ve visited in the country, so the air is quite clear, too. This is the perfect vacation spot for the exhausted or the pregnant. And especially for those exhausted by pregnancy.

“As parents, we need to ask ourselves whether we’re posting photos for our children or for ourselves. And if you’re posting it for yourself, wait a little bit before pressing the “share” button so you can really think about if it’s in your child’s best interest.”

18% of Democrats and 44% of Republicans believe that an armed revolution might soon be necessary to protect the “liberties” in this country. I suspect that “armed revolution” is a reference to some video game or a brand of ice-cream, so I’m not worried.

A new contribution to a collection of rants from unhinged Sanctimommies. Why don’t these freaks just go get a life, seriously?

The world where dates and tamarind chutney exist is a beautiful world.

“Yes. Yes. Children should learn about sexuality the same way they learn about nutrition and hygiene and families and being kind. But they don’t, and the reason they don’t is because the grownups are mired in a dangerous combination of lack of knowledge and abject fear. How can we teach our children what we don’t understand ourselves? The answer is that we ARE teaching our children, every day we are transferring to them our ignorance and fear – and the fear keeps us ignorant, and the ignorance keeps us afraid.” Hear, hear!

A post I agree with makes fun of Obama’s outrage about rape in the army: “Obama can hardly be astonished that a couple of half-assed sensitivity training courses have failed to eradicate the military epidemic of moral turpitude; “this stuff” is necessarily endemic to the armed forces. That’s because a high moral purpose is absolutely antithetical to the systematic perpetration of deadly force, which perpetration is, after all, the whole raison d’être of the whole flippin military.”

A phenomenally stupid article from David Brooks about immigration. If he is being facetious and I’m failing to get it yet again, please, please tell me. I don’t want to believe it is possible to write something this egregiously stupid about immigration.

“If you are a cheating-enabler sort of professor — if you give take-home exams and shit like that, shit that guarantees cheating — own it. Be that thing. Get defensive when people call you on it and say it’s no one’s fucking business how you run your classes. Don’t get all schizodemento and hurl yourself from one extreme to another and hypocritically protest to the class how shocked and hurt you are.” Exactly. Let’s all stop discussing our feelings in the classroom and take them to therapy sessions instead.

I hate, hate, hate the so-called academics who do the dirty work of administrators and betray their colleagues. See an article by a vicious freak who wants the administrators to force his colleagues to be present on campus even when they don’t need to be there. People are supposed to be where they don’t want or need to be because this jerk wants an identity, a community, and compliments from his stupid wife we all are supposed to care about.

When I read posts like this one, I feel very happy that I didn’t get a job in California (I interviewed at the blogger’s college, and what a mistake that was). If their classes are of this stupid, touchy-feely sort and are dedicated to discussing the students’ “fears, desires, and uncertainties”, I don’t want to be there. And I really don’t want to be around faculty members who are so sex-deprived that they see the excruciatingly prissy society where they live as “permeated by the pornographic.” California is dead, people.

My favorite dumb parrot invents the wheel: “Feminists do not appear to welcome non-feminist male voices.” What a mystery! Feminists don’t want to hear jerkwads who don’t think women are human. How completely incomprehensible. Yes, freak, feminists don’t want to hear stupid crap coming from completely worthless insects. Why would a human being welcome the ugly and stupid voice of somebody who doesn’t deserve to be spat on, let alone listened to? If there are any questions about why African Americans do not “welcome the voices” of racists and why normal people do not “welcome the voices” of Nazis, feel free to ask.

And the post of the week is from this great blog I recently discovered and that has the beautiful slogan of “I don’t care about anything, especially your fetus.” The blogger is writing about the reasons why trying to maintain a friendship with your ex is a silly idea, and I agree completely: “Dumper or Dumpee, neither of you should try to be friends, it’s incredibly fruitless, all relationships require work but that one has run it’s contractual obligation.  The moment I tried to be friends with one of my exes I tarnished the memory of what we had. . . Being friends with your ex is like the hour after eating Taco Bell, you know it tasted good going down but. . .“

But retired widows raising their grandchildren and adults trying to learn to read and people in need of HIV tests and even, for all the lip service Republicans give the military, unemployed veterans are not high enough on the congressional priority list either to get the special treatment business travelers got or to drive it home that the sequester needs to be repealed wholesale rather than chipped away at where it’s making powerful people uncomfortable.

Yes, very tragic. But who will the retired widows, the unemployed veterans, and the grandchildren put in Congress and Senate in 2014? Yeah, exactly. So all of this outrage is like peeing against the wind.

Still, it’s somewhat of an improvement on the “She lied about Benghazi” slogan.

This country is so full of talent and creativity, yet political campaigns always get run by the most stupid idiots one can imagine. Do you have any guesses as to why that happens? Any half-assed ad agency would do a better job selling their candidates than what we have been seeing in big politics.

If your political opponents based an electoral campaign on a certain slogan and bombed, how much sense does it make to base your electoral campaign on the exact same  slogan?

The moment when Kerry’s presidential campaign became all about the “Bush lied” slogan, I knew the campaign was hopelessly lost. And I was right. The absolute majority of voters does not care about lies enough to reject a candidate on this basis. People over the age of six are not all that traumatized by lying. This might be a sad reality but it’s reality.

So can anybody tell me why the Republicans are framing their 2016 presidential campaign in terms of “She lied about Benghazi“?

We all know that Americans don’t care about foreign affairs. Yes, it’s sad, horrible, I’m as appalled as you are. But the fact remains: they don’t think other countries really exist and don’t care two straws what happens in all those places with weird names. How many people do you know who can find Benghazi on a map or even know in which direction to look? Go ask the guy at the gas station or the woman at the convenience store and observe the reaction. My students couldn’t even name the countries the US borders. Neither could my friend’s students at an East Coast college.

Besides, there has been a domestic act of terror since Benghazi. People have short attention spans. You can’t expect them to remember the terror act that happened before the most recent terror act. Especially when the most recent one took place in a city with a clear and comforting name of Boston.

Anybody who believes that a lie about anything, let alone Benghazi, will make any impression on anybody during this election cycle is out of touch with reality.

 

And the entire country just died of boredom. Rand Paul would attract more attention if he just kept yakking about fetuses.

I finally forced myself to tackle Hotmail’s new interface (bleh) and discovered that my dear friend V sent me this hilarious video that is totally about me. Enjoy!

I also sometimes respond to the question of where I did my PhD with, “New Haven. It’s in Connecticut.” I fully confess that it’s my way of being pretentious.

For those who do want to learn:

Every relationship between any human beings begins with a struggle for power. Every single one. We can dislike this fact, yet it is not going away. The balance of power that is established at the beginning is next to impossible to change later on in the relationship.

So when somebody says to you, “yeah, there were a couple of times that were perfect for you to kiss me… but you didn’t”, they are trying to set up a relational model where you are an ignorant little school-child being gently scolded and instructed by a benign, condescending authority.

Letting this happen is an enormous mistake. (Unless you really enjoy being condescended to). Things will only go downhill after you allow one such comment go unchecked. So the only appropriate response that will shift the balance of power and put you in control is: “Oh. . . you wanted me to kiss you? I’m sorry, I just don’t see you that way. You are a nice person but. . . sorry.”

After that, there is a huge probability that the interlocutor will run after you like a lovesick puppy. And you will be able to decide whether you need this person in your life, and will be able to dictate the terms.

And most importantly: even if you are totally, completely, overpoweringly in love, do not allow the person to wrestle all of the control away from you. You will not be getting it back later. At the same time, don’t allow them to give all the control to you. That is a sign they want to exploit you.

If you are looking for an extremely hilarious book to read over the summer, look no further than Max Barry’s novel Lexicon. The funniest things are the ones that are meant in earnest. The intensity of earnestness is directly related to the degree of humor.

Max Barry was trying to create a suspense thriller but ended up writing a hilarious parody of Harlequin romance with a pretense at intellectualism. Without giving up much of the plot, let me tell you the basic structure. In the novel, a pair of men called Eliot and Wil are trying to outwit a woman called Emily. The men and the woman are a collection of gender stereotypes to the extent that you will not find in even the trashiest Harlequin romance.

Emily is a completely brainless creature whose only interest consists in finding “boys” and getting them to notice her. Emily is a jumble of uncontrollable emotions that are like a force of nature. She is completely obsessed with men and subservient to them while being utterly incapable of making a connection with any woman. If you made the mistake of reading 50 Shades of Grey and wondered why the female protagonist was so pathetic, you need to read Lexicon because this novel will make you realize that, compared to Barry’s Emily, Anastasia Steele is a pillar of dignity and feminist empowerment.

Eliot and Wil are just as stereotypical and parodic. They are incapable of expressing any emotion at all and suffer as a result. There is this hilarious scene where they try to out-macho each other about a tire that needs to be changed. Eliot and Wil also compete as to which one of them has fewer human needs and desires. As a result, they both become completely robotic and object-like.

The entire plot of the novel could be resumed as, “If only he managed to squeeze out the words ‘I love you’ on time.”

What makes the novel even more hilarious is its intellectual pretentiousness. The author intersperses the story with childish little disquisitions on the nature of mass media. His insights are of such depth as to bore any intelligent 5-year-old. As an adult, one feels vicarious embarrassment when seeing a writer deliver “insights” that are so superficial.

This is a thoroughly enjoyable read and I highly recommend it. If you don’t try to take the novel seriously, it will offer a lot of fun.