There is one house listing that the agent sent us that was a little puzzling at first. The house was advertised as “Perfect for handy cap!” I didn’t know what that meant until I saw that the house was also advertised as wheelchair accessible.

Does anybody have any interesting insights into Venezuela?

For now, what I’m planning to tell the students on Tuesday is that Venezuela was kept together by Chávez’s charisma. His uncharismatic successor can be saying and doing the same things, and people will find them annoying because he isn’t Chávez.

It seems from everything I’ve read that Venezuela has been experiencing a free fall in every respect since Chávez’s death: the inflation is ridiculous, the crime rates are soaring, the popular discontent is mounting.

So what is the conclusion we can draw? The whole thing was kept together only by Chávez’s personality?

I welcome any contributions because I’m not extremely knowledgeable here.

In the conversations with real estate agents, mortgage brokers, and the likes, I have to struggle to eradicate the instinctive reactions of a Ukrainian peasant from my behavior. The need to curve my spine in a servile half-bow, nod and apologize all the time, and have an ingratiating smile plastered onto my face is profound.

I just learned a new word, “glassholes.” It refers to people who wear the Google glass in public.

A woman in San Francisco entered a bar on Haight and started recording everybody with her Google Glass. The bar patrons threatened her with bodily harm if she continued.

But this is a losing battle. We need to resign ourselves to the idea that everybody will be recorded every second if their lives in the near future.

I just met somebody who teaches public speaking online. And being a smart person, she laughs and says, “Yeah, I know. But if people want to pay for this load of BS, then who am I to argue?”

 

A group of armed men have stormed and occupied the building of the Crimean parliament and put up the flag of the Russian Federation.

Putin has ordered military maneuvers he is calling “regular practice” at the border between Russia and Ukraine. The war ships of the Baltic fleet are moving in the direction of the Crimea.

The ousted President Yanukovich has come out of hiding and declared that he’s the legitimate president and his administration needs to be defended.

I just heard something curious from a colleague in social sciences. She says that in the US the percentage of children in the foster system is heavily skewed towards Muslim children. I don’t understand ow this can be.

Christianity denies the value of the extended family and exalts the nuclear family. The positive result of this is that the patriarchal family structure is undermined. The negative result is that orphans don’t have anywhere to go and end up abandoned by their relatives.

Islam and Judaism, however, don’t have this absolute denial of the extended family. Hence, the patriarchal model is extremely strong and orphaned children are always cared for by the extended family.

But this scholar’s data seems to contradict this. Does anybody have any insight? What am I missing?