My friend Ol. asks me to share the stunning story of my visits to the gym.

The really shocking part of this news is that not only do I go to the gym 3-5 times a week but that I also drive there. OK, I don’t drive there every time but only when the car is available to me (meaning, the weekends.)

Today, for instance, I drove to the restaurant where we had breakfast, to a new gift store we have in town, to the Office Depot, the grocery store, and then to Sam’s Club (all these stores are located in different areas of our town.) And then I drove back home, even though it is raining really hard.

And the weirdest thing? I don’t hate any of this. The visits to the gym are actually enjoyable.

People who don’t know me in person are now thinking that this is a very boring post.

People who do know me in person are now thinking that they don’t really know me any longer.

OK, everybody hates Adelle, I hate Adelle, too, Adelle is banished to the dog-house. I hope we have no reader called Adelle among us. If we do, I apologize.

I have now switched on our runner-up SemPress. If everybody hates that one, we can always go back to the original theme.

Elizabeth George’s most recent book has been an even greater disaster than her previous two novels. It cured my insomnia once and for all: I still fall asleep every time I remember its poor excuse for a plot and the horrible writing.

Ruth Rendell’s last good novel was published in 2009. She is a genius but her age is too advanced for her to write contemporary mystery novels.

Laura Lippman’s last novel was also a snooze.

Tess Gerritsen has made her writing as anodyne as possible to make it TV-adaptable.

Michael Connelly has taken the wrong path with his new character Mickey Haller. I mean, seriously, Mickey? It’s 2013, not 1943. You can’t expect people to read about somebody who calls himself Mickey and not get bored.

Jon Lescroart has squeezed all the juice there was in his Glitsky / Hardy series and created the most inane novel in the world this year. It was embarrassingly bad.

Richard North Patterson did a cute defense of feminism in his most recent novel but it isn’t a mystery.

So if you love the mystery genre and are finding yourself with nothing to read, I have advice for you: READ SOPHIE HANNAH. She is amazing. Her mysteries are the most intriguing, intelligent, and engrossing on the market.

Since most people have voted for the Adelle template, I switched it on. But I have to say, I don’t love it in the least.

How do you, folks, feel? Should I try switching on the runner-up?

Our local movie theaters are the worst. Here is what’s showing this weekend:

1. American Hustle – something typically Hollywoodian with FBI agents, crooks, and mafia.

2. Anchorman: The Legend Continues – this seems to be a TV show people confused with a movie.

3. Frozen – based on Andersen’s depressive Snow Queen.

4. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug – haven’t people had enough of the Hobbit already?

5. The Hunger Games: Catching Fire – another episode of yet another TV show that wouldn’t end.

6. Saving Mr. Banks – an inane glorification of Disney.

7. Tyler Perry’s A Madea Christmas – and another episode in another TV show.

8. Walking with Dinosaurs – would be fun if I were eight.

9. Out Of The Furnace – the only movie that is about the actual reality and the only one I wanted to watch. But there is only one showing, and that’s at 12 am.

Do notice how completely escapist the entire list is. Escapist and predictable, since everything is either Disney or is a sequel to something people have seen already.

I want to watch something but nothing new is getting released.

OK, so do you want to know how our friend Treglown ends his book on the memory of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain? I couldn’t have come up with anything this obnoxious if I tried.

He tells a story of a young woman who has been searching for the remains of her great-grandfather. He was killed by the fascists during the Civil War and his body was dumped in one of the many mass graves created for Franco’s victims. In the last two sentences of his book, Treglown happily informs the readers that this young woman has had a baby and now has no interest in history, war, dictatorship, and her great-grandfather.

This is precisely the attitude Franco considered the only appropriate one for women.

Talking about food, I just saw a restaurant offer a “fried chicken salad” for lunch. I can just imagine the virtuous feeling the customers get from being able to say, “Oh, I just had a salad today.”

So I just saw this documentary at the gym where somebody said that the blueberries in blueberry muffins are not really blueberries bur, rather, some chemical gunk.

Is that true? Because that’s kind of icky.

Putin has let one of the major players in the bandit wars of the 1990s out of prison a few months early, and now this is suddenly big news.

Mikhail Khodorkovsky was one of several puppets who were hired by the KGB to pretend there were capitalism and democracy in Russia. Khodorkovsky was the most stupid among these pretty dim-witted “oligarchs”. He convinced himself that the money he’d been given was actually his and started giving himself airs of a businessman. Finally, Putin put this murderer and gangster in jail.

In the 10 years he spent in jail, Khodorkovsky kept giving money to a variety of Russian artists, writers, journalists, intellectuals, and human rights activists. In return, they created an image of him as some kind of dissident and victim of the regime. The whole thing was absolutely hilarious. The human rights organizations in Russia paid no attention to the many actual abuses committed in the country and, instead, created a huge campaign defending the billionaire’s right to lead a billionaire lifestyle in jail.

I’m guessing Khodorkovsky will now join his former employees in the UK. This is a country that harbors many gangsters who are on the run from justice in Russia. Why the UK is so intent on inviting as much of this human refuse from Russia as possible to stay is a mystery.

Here is an example of what smart businesspeople who actually have a vision for taking their businesses further are doing.

My sister runs her own job recruitment agency that she built from the ground with a friend. The two business owners cultivate each of their employees like a hot-house orchid. They are paying for the employees’ health insurance (remember, this is in Canada where there is free healthcare for everybody, so my sister and her partner are paying for their workers to get a very special cherry on top of a good free cake), dental insurance, classes and seminars, and often even spa visits.

These are very bright businesswomen who are highly educated and whose philosophy of approaching the job market is based on long-term investment in each worker. They refuse the contracts for temp job searches that come their way and despise revolving-door companies that chew down temp workers only to spit them out in a couple of months.

And you know what? Within just a few years of existence they have a better reputation in the city than the agencies that have existed there for decades. They are a small business but they have been securing such lucrative and prestigious conracts that, as we say in my country, the big agencies can only nervously smoke in a corner.

Treating employees right pays off big time. A tenure-track/tenured professor will do more to attract students, raise the prestige of the school and build up the department and the school in such a way that not even a batallion of hassled, overworked, indifferent adjuncts will provide enough “savings” to counterbalance this.

How can this be not obvious?

I suggest we start seeing the increasing reliance on part-timers in academia and business as stealing. Our message to administrators / clerks who eliminate full-time jobs and hire part-timers instead should be: “You are stealing from our school. You are robbing the university. You want a business model? Here is a business model for you: you are depriving our school of cash, both short-term and long-term. This makes you a thief.”

And that’s my vision.