The really sad thing isn’t even that somebody is wasting the Senate’s time by quoting Dr. Seuss and offering uninspired imitations of Darth Vader while the entire country has to worry about a government shutdown. What is really sad is that people keep voting for politicians who are completely useless at what they do and will keep voting for them.

Will the happy day finally come when I will open a news app and see no stories about circus-like antics in the Senate? Is there a chance we will once read about our elected representatives coming to work and actually achieving something other than endless posturing and bickering?

A colleague from the PoliSci department came to visit me yesterday and told me how hard it is to get the students to notice a difference between Marx and Mussolini, so I guess the answer to my questions is “Not a chance.”

This person must have also encountered Windows 8 and swapped “Jesus” inside the fish for “Linux.”

I just discovered Window 8 and now I need to know the name of the enemy of humanity who came up with this torture device. This is the most obnoxious operational system I have ever encountered. Can anybody explain what the point of making PC function like a tablet device is? People who want tablets can just get tablets.

At the same time, I have to recognize that Windows 8’s idiocy did serve a purpose. I was having a bad day until I had to work on a Windows 8 computer. Trying to get it to function was so engrossing (and mostly futile) that I got really distracted from everything else.

Maybe Windows 8 should be used for grief therapy. It’s quite useless for everything else.

I really REALLY hope that no perky administrator decides to install it on all our campus computers.

One useful tradition that has been lost is wearing mourning. I would gladly wear mourning if there were a chance people would know what it meant. This is a small town and everybody has seen me with a huge belly. Now I dread the prospect of answering questions and preventing people from offering congratulations.

A fascinating post on why so many people insist they are bad at math.

“Of the 254 counties where the number of food stamp recipients doubled between 2007 and 2011, Republican candidate Mitt Romney won 213 in last year’s presidential election. . . Kentucky’s Owsley County — which backed Romney with 81 percent of its vote — had the largest proportion of food stamp recipients of all the communities where Romney won.”

“Opposition to the burqa has been massive over several European countries. Defenders of this full-body shroud specifically designed for little girls and women are in the embarrassing position of having to declare huge swathes of the population of Europe bigots.”

It is very sad to see people who were so zombified by their manipulative and abusive parents that even in adulthood they keep trying to explain why their parents were completely justified in not loving them. Pay attention to the linked post’s title. The naked masochism is terrifying.

“I saw a job ad on Craigslist recently that asked for five years of Exchange 2013 experience. Five years. For a product that’s been out for a few months. Yeah, good luck filling that one.” I don’t doubt for a moment that this is true because I happen to know quite well who is often in charge of creating job ads and just how clueless they can be.

Colleges keep building enormous stadiums that can’t be filled. There must be a psychoanalytical explanation for this weird obsession.

If these shoes don’t make you smile, I don’t know what will.

A Montrealer asks, “If such a thing as psycho-geography exists, then surely there should be a market for psycho-geographical counselling?” The answer is, yes, of course. One can definitely remove the traumatic associations with certain places through therapy. I have used it to turn “No Heaven” back to “New Haven.”

The same journals that used to send me nastily worded rejections are now accepting my articles. I just got an acceptance from a place that really hurt my feelings with a mean rejection back in 2009. And all I had to do to change things around was learn to work on research every day and reread / edit the piece I’m working on from the beginning every time I came back to it.

I will now be able to present a book and 8 articles for tenure. My initial goal was to present a book and 10 articles. I still have time to do that before I submit the tenure portfolio. Nobody is requiring this, of course, but I want to make tenure significant to myself and not to some external agency.

I also want to do better than Jonathan’s promotion guidelines. There is no particular reason to do this other than my own enjoyment. Yes, I have a very weird understanding of enjoyment.

This most recent acceptance makes me happy because the article is controversial and quite harsh. I’m very glad that the ideas I express there will become known.

Those who conduct the discussion about food stamps in terms of “lobster-eating surfers” are as irresponsible as those who frame it in terms of “19 million starving children.” Both groups turn our politics into a circus where the win goes to those who scream the loudest and make the most outrageous, drama-queenish claims.

In the meanwhile, the very real problems that lie equally far from lottery-winning surfers and starving children do not even get mentioned, let alone resolved.

There are many more people graduating with PhDs than there are academic positions to absorb them. The reason for this is the same as for the growing number of adjuncts in academia: the rapid deterioration of secondary education in this country.

Professors want to teach interesting, complex courses. It’s normal to want to come to class and discuss your research with people who are at least somewhat equipped to understand what you are talking about. The absolute majority of students, however, is in need of intense remedial learning. One can barely get anybody to enroll in advanced courses while enrollments in the classes that teach the basics are exploding. The Bachelor’s degree has become what a high school diploma should be.

The few students who are interested in exploring their major beyond the few very basic courses that these days constitute most programs of study go into graduate school. Professors who want to teach serious courses resign themselves to the idea that this can only be done in the format of a graduate seminar. When there are 40 students in a classroom whose knowledge of the Hispanic Civilization is limited to “Latin America is a fascinating country” it is impossible to accommodate those three who are reading Octavio Paz for enjoyment and have passionate opinions on the origins of Spanish Romanticism. For such students, graduate school becomes the only place where they can finally study things that interest them.

It is useless to repeat “there are too many PhDs; let’s produce less” or “there are too many adjuncts; let’s hire fewer.” The college system we have in place arose in response to the breakdown of the system of secondary education. The number of schools that manage to prepare students for college is tiny and it seems to be shrinking. The rest of the graduates come to college lacking  the most basic knowledge and have to dedicate the first two or three years of their Bachelor’s studies to catching up.

We keep pretending that college and high school are two completely different worlds. This pretense will end up destroying higher education in this country unless we wake up already and take a peek beyond the walls of the ivory tower.

We had the funeral today. It was a very private event, to the extent that it is possible to make it private in this culture. All N and I could deal with at this point was going to the cemetery alone and spending some time there together.

In this country, cemeteries are a lot more integrated into daily life than in my culture. I’m used to cemeteries being secluded, hidden behind trees, obscured from view. Our local cemetery, on the other hand, is located right in front of an entertainment complex. There is also a residential area consisting of very expensive mansions facing it. I have no idea how people manage to spend their lives staring at graves and funeral processions.

The cemetery markets itself as a place where people should come to take walks “in a peaceful, beautiful setting filled with exotic geese and ducks.” And people do come for that purpose even though we have beautiful hiking trails and flower-filled university gardens where there are no graves or grieving folks.

I’m used to graves being separated from each other with fences and gates. Here, however, all graves sit together (and sometimes even on top of each other, as we were told today), so there is no way to signal that company is not welcome.

It took us forever to get rid of people who wanted to offer us rides back to the funeral home (across 200 feet of space), pray with us, tell us about their church, stare at us, or engage in a conversation.

When we were finally left on peace, we talked and cried together. We felt completely exhausted after that because grief is strangely tiring. But we also felt better. On our way from the cemetery I felt like the burden of grief had become lighter because we left some of it back there.

I wouldn’t believe this story if something similar hadn’t happened to me at about the same age:

A New York librarian was fired from her job after standing up for a child who liked to read. Lita Casey, who worked as an aide at the Hudson Falls Free Library for 28 years, said she was “stunned” after a library board member called her with the bad news on Monday night. . .

Casey spoke up on behalf of Tyler Weaver, a 9-year-old who has won the library’s summer reading contest for five straight years. He’s won a T-shirt, an atlas, a water bottle and several certificates of achievement. This year, he read 63 books in just six weeks. But library director Marie Gandron, wanted to change the rules to end the child’s winning streak. Gandron reportedly said the boy “hogs” the contest and should “step aside.”

Instead of making it a competition, the director shared plans to pull the winner out of a hat.

At my school, I was the star in all English classes for obvious reasons. I’d been speaking English my entire life and had learned to read and write in English before I did in Russian and Ukrainian. As a result, my English was better than that of all of the teachers combined and multiplied by one hundred eleven. We had regular English competitions, and I won all of them very easily.

One of the teachers decided that it was unfair that I should win every year. She convinced the other judges that other kids were getting discouraged from learning because they knew they couldn’t surpass me. I was awarded the third prize, and the first two prizes were given to two other students. Kids are not stupid, so the “winners” knew that theirs were pity prizes. They did not look in the least encouraged by this kind of win. All everybody felt was intense discomfort. This was the last English competition we had because nobody felt like organizing them or participating any longer.