During the bandit wars of the 1990s, the first bars, restaurants, and coffee-shops started appearing in FSU countries. Obviously, only the bandits and their entourage could afford to visit them. Regular people lacked money for such visits and also had no tradition of eating out.

All of these public eateries used to turn up the volume of the music they played intolerably high. There was a powerful reason why their owners never lowered the volume.

Question: why was it so crucial to have the music play very loud in the first public eateries in FSU countries?

Practicing a religion is like being in love. If it requires you to make any sort of payments or purchase anything, then this isn’t really about religion or love. It’s about you trying to buy what can’t be bought.

My adventures with Yale Alumni Magazine are continuing. The way they work is that I read an article, get upset, and leave the magazine until I feel ready to continue reading. (Did you know, for instance, that Au Bon Pain at the corner of York and Broadway has gone out of business? The only place with tolerable breakfast and lunch food on campus and the place where so many good memories were generated is no more. The place where I discovered that the word croissant means something completely different in the US than what it does in Quebec. The place where I had coffee before my very first class at Yale. ABP’s demise is very sad.)

In any case, the article I read at 4 am today when my heartburn was not letting me sleep informed me that 62% of all grades awarded by Yale College are As and A-minuses. Fifty years ago, the number of A and A- grades was about 10%.

As anybody who has taken teaching methodology classes knows, awarding 10% of As is about right while giving out 60% of As is a sign you need to revise your curriculum and adjust your expectations in the courses you teach. If 62% of people do exceptionally well in your course, then you are misunderstanding the meaning of the word “exceptional.”

The reason why grade inflation is taking over at Yale is, of course, that the majority of courses is taught by people who have no autonomy or authority. Tenured professors are a small minority, and tenure-track does not exist. (If anybody tells you it does, I will be happy to explain to you why that is factually untrue.) Tenured professors don’t like teaching Yale College courses and prefer small graduate seminars (where grades are not on the A, B, C scale).

The graduate students and the instructors who teach most of the undergrad courses don’t  feel like facing the irate “I paid you all this money so that you would teach my kid well enough for him to get an A” parents and the whiny “I was always the best student at my private school and here you are giving me a B” students. So its easier to award an A and avoid the hassle.

The moral of the story is: the best, most responsible and most engaged teaching comes from people who see their school as their own, who feel allegiance to it and are deeply personally invested into the success of the students and the school. Yale’s President Levin failed completely at creating this sort of an environment at Yale. Maybe President Salovey will start realizing that when a university becomes more interested in flattering the vanity of its paying customers than in academic rigor, it loses a lot of its prestige.

The birth preparation class was very good and useful but it also had its problematic moments. For instance, we spend over 50% of the class talking about the no-epidural no-medication-of-any-kind “natural” birth. We were shown several videos where very young and very athletic women easily delivered babies in this manner. Nobody in the audience was in the same decade of life or had the same degree of athleticism as the women in the videos.

The videos and the lecturers kept using the word “powerful” in connection to the unmedicated deliveries. This method of giving birth is supposed to make one feel powerful (which is the weirdest notion I have encountered in a while), while succumbing to an epidural makes you feel like a failure.

Out of the 10 women in the audience, only 3 had college degrees: yours truly and 2 women who graduated from the local community college. The rest of the women work in menial low-paid jobs.

So imagine this type of crowd hearing figures of authority in an official setting repeat “no epidural = powerful”, “epidural = failure.”

Eventually, the lecturer did mention in a very low-key way that at our hospital over 90% of women ended up requesting an epidural. Now consider how it makes one feel to end up needing an epidural after hearing how one is deficient in wanting one. Wouldn’t it be a lot more productive and honest to begin the birth preparation class by explaining to the audience that the absolute majority of those present will need an epidural and that’s just how things are for most of women these days?

I don’t think the lecturers were so eager to promote the anti-epidural mythology because they are evil-doers or anything of the kind. I believe they want to give a positive, encouraging message to the heavily pregnant audience. The result, however, is that unrealistic expectations are created. Women begin to see delivery as some sort of an exam they have to pass in a way that will demonstrate their worthiness.

30% of all women who give birth suffer from a significant and noticeable post-partum depression. I have a feeling that the conviction that one has failed at giving birth “correctly” might not be conducive to making this number lower.

“Oh, who cares how she comes into this world?” the only woman in the “over 45” category at the class exclaimed. “This is my first child, and I just want to giver birth to a healthy baby, that’s all.”

I think this is an approach that should be adopted by all of the “powerless failures” who cannot accomplish the useless feat of giving birth in the field and continuing picking crops two minutes later.

So this guy

shot this child

dead and that’s ruled self-defense because he said so?

Good luck to the people who let the freakazoid roam the streets of their city free. I hope they don’t look too scary to his diseased brain.

Maybe the smart people of Florida should give Zimmerman a bazooka to make it easier for this unhinged hysteric to protect himself from the terrifying world that surrounds him. Who knows, he might need to mow down a menacing little old lady or an evil toddler.

What is really scary, though, is how many of these untreated hysterics roam the streets and how many similarly sick hysterics are eager to celebrate them.

I’m a philologist and I’ve been one since the age of four when my father taught me how to analyze a sentence in terms of the parts of speech it contains and the function each word performs in them. Words have meaning, and if we are careless with that meaning, we run the risk that somebody who who is less lazy and more attentive to the power of words might use them against us.

Yesterday at the birth class, we were told by both lecturers and read in the hand-out they gave us that “a woman’s body was made to carry a pregnancy to term and give birth.” The question I had when I heard this was which worldview this idea represented.

It is obviously not a scientific worldview (which one would really prefer to encounter at a hospital) because modern science does not accept the idea of a purposeful Maker who creates people and determines what their goals should be.

This is not part of the Judeo-Christian worldview either because, according to the Old Testament, painful birth is punishment God imposed on humanity for the original sin. When Eve was first created, there was no talk of pregnancies or delivery of babies.

I have no idea how other religions approach this issue but I highly doubt that they could have had a huge impact on our tiny town in the midst of the Bible Belt.

The only explanation I’m left with for this pearl of dubious wisdom is that it originated in what I call the “Dr. Phil entertains intellectually limited housewives” philosophy. The philosophy’s central tenet is that you can say any number of stupid things and get idiots to nod happily in agreement if you preface your unintelligent idea with “we are hard-wired to. . .” The passive voice construction and the quasi-scientific terminology sound extremely convincing to those who are both pretentious and silly.

Dr. Phil might not be a real doctor but he can make hospital workers parrot his ideas, and that’s quite an achievement.

P.S. If you want to inform me that this verbal atrocity is “just a way of speaking,” please concentrate and re-read the first paragraph of this post.

A loser du jour came to this blog yesterday to announce to me that a fetus is not part of a pregnant woman’s body because something something. . . placenta seperates. . . something something. . . placenta is a body part but a fetus inside it somehow isn’t.

It is really funny that this preachy idiot who – I am absolutely sure – has no capacity to be pregnant at all would try to educate me about “seperating placentas” at this particular moment in time. As I as reading the idiot’s comment, I was suffering from an affliction called “pruritic urticarial papules and plaques of pregnancy.”

PUPPP is a very nasty rash that 1 in 200 pregnant women get in the last weeks of pregnancy. Usually, it afflicts women who are carrying boys. The rash is so bad that many women ask to be induced weeks earlier than their due date, and many doctors actually agree because women suffer so badly. Believe me, this is horrible suffering. I have no idea what can carry one through it other than the knowledge that one has freely chosen pregnancy for oneself.

The rash happens when fetal cells invade the skin cells of the woman. Tests have shown that male DNA is present in the skin eruptions of women with PUPPP who are pregnant with boys. Does this sound close enough to a body part for everybody?

This is what the fight for the reproductive rights is like: women, doctors, and scientists try to explain what a pregnancy is to a world filled with officious losers who know nothing about the functioning of the human body but believe themselves to be entitled to decide what happens in the bodies of others.

One of my greatest fears was always that if I give birth to a baby I wouldn’t love it. And don’t say this isn’t possible. There are people I know very well who told me that they had no positive feelings for their children from day one (and into adulthood), and this became the greatest tragedy of their lives. Imagine what the experience of those children was. So, of course, I was worried.

Today, however, my fears were allayed. During the birth preparation class, we were taken to the neonatal unit to look at babies. We live in a small town, so there was only one baby, a tiny preemie named Lucas. We stared at him through the glass partition while he screamed his little head off.

I only saw him through the glass, but I already love this baby. If I could, I would totally take him home. Everybody in the group seemed to feel this way, too.

I should have just visited a neonatal unit a long time ago to figure all this out.

I’m playing my favorite word game against my favorite opponent Mariah. First, Mariah defeated me with the word “abortion.” In the next game, I defeated Mariah with the word “zygotes.” But in the following game she came at me with the word “embryonal,” and I lost again.

I’m beginning to wonder if Maria was one of the women sitting next to me at the prepared birth class today.

There has been a protracted and extremely obnoxious spam attack on this blog. The spammers sign themselves in with Facebook accounts which is why WordPress doesn’t send them directly into the Spam folder.

This is yet another way in which Facebook sucks.