WordPress has introduced this completely bizarre system of blog security where you have to:

• install a barcode-reading app on your cell phone,
• scan a barcode that appears on the screen of your computer with this app,
• write down a list of 10 long sequences of numbers that appear on your screen,
• carry the sheet of paper with the number sequences with you wherever you go to avoid losing access to your blog.

I can imagine few things more ridiculous than requiring people to carry notes with sequences of numbers.

WordPress can’t stop messing with the best and most popular blogging platform in existence. They keep trying to “improve” it in increasingly bizarre way. First, they wanted to shut down people’s Dashboards but had to cancel that plan in view of users’ rebellion. Now, there is this bizarre “security” feature.

A reader left a comment telling me that IKEA sells vegetarian caviar. I love IKEA for making furniture accessible to students and low-income people but what they sell in lieu of food is scary. I remember once trying one of their $1 breakfasts and a week of heartburn I experienced after that. And the way IKEA perverts the noble dish of Swedish meatballs?

If they are now doing to caviar what they did to meatballs, that’s simply criminal.

I have the best courses next semester:

• Spanish Drama of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries;
• Introduction to Reading Literature in Spanish;
• Hispanic World in the New Millennium.

All three are completely new preparations. I can’t even say which one I’m the most excited about. There will be tons of readings (in Spanish, of course) in all three of them.

And I only have to be at work two days per week from 11 to 3:15 pm.

My father looked at this picture of me with Rebecca Schuman and said, “I’m sorry, which one is you?” He says I look completely different in real life.

Before I had my nervous breakdown yesterday, I had a really great time with a fellow blogger. There is this inventive way of meeting new people that I came up with a while ago: I bark at them aggressively online, after which we meet and become good friends.

Here is a post about the encounter. It includes photographic evidence of the fun that was had.

So after everything that happened yesterday, I decided to have a restful day today, sleep in, relax, and try  to recover.

But at 8:35 in the morning, my cell phone rang.

“What?” I croaked into the phone.

“I missed the final yesterday,” a chirpy voice rattled out. “Ha ha, I just forgot about it completely, which is, like, totally silly of me. I wrote you an email to ask if I could take it this morning but since you never wrote back, I decided to call.”

“Who are you?” I cackled, trying to awaken. I’m an old person and tend to expect that people start a conversation by greeting me and telling me their name.

“Oh. I’m Janet. From your course?”

When I looked at my emails, I saw that Janet had, indeed, sent me an email. At 11:47 pm. Since there was no response from me between 11:47 pm and 8:35 am, she found my cell number (which, as you might imagine, I do not share with my students) and  called me.

The funny thing is that I would have certainly let her retake the exam. I’m the most laid back professor in the world and always accommodate students’ needs. The student, however, could not have found a more antagonizing and obnoxious way of going about the whole thing.

I understand that students are young but do they have to be this inconsiderate and rude?

I swear, if another . . . well-meaning person sends me another . . . well-meaning email with a link to the  . . . well-meaning speech by David Simon about his  . . . well-meaning comments on Marx, I will beat my head against the wall.

It’s good that Simon is reading Marx. Reading is always better than not reading. I’m just wondering if he has had the time to get to Marx’s writings about Jews and what he has to say about them. I’m thinking specifically of:

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is the worldly god? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.

I would be really interested in what David Simon and his father, the same father who spent his life working for B’nai B’rith, would have to say in defense of their worship of huckstering and deification of money.