A student irrupted into my office and asked in an aggressive tone, “So do you have a PhD?”

“Yes,” I said. “Are you OK?”

“So if you have a PhD, can you explain to me how a command is formed in the plural for verbs followed by object pronouns?”

I’m always happy to explain grammar even if the request is made with an unwarranted degree of antagonism. So I explained and drew a little picture to illustrate.

“Hah!” the student exclaimed. “So you are saying it would be wrong to say. . .” and she used an incorrect conjugation.

“No, that would be a mistake,” I said.

“Are you sure?” the student asked even more angrily.

“Yes, I am.”

“Professor Gomez always uses this form you say is incorrect, though!” the student was triumphant.

“That’s not possible,” I said. “You probably misheard.”

“No! I heard just right! And I filmed it and uploaded the video on Facebook because I knew Professor Gomez speaks incorrectly! And now I will quote your words next to the video. Because you have a PhD and you say Professor Gomez doesn’t speak right.”

“Wait, just wait,” I said. “I’m sure you misheard because. . .”

But the student was already running away.

I now feel like I’ve been used in some weird vendetta a student has against another professor. Professor Gomez is a native speaker who speaks beautiful Spanish and cannot possibly make any grammar mistakes. Especially such ridiculous ones. And I really don’t want to appear next to any videos.

I used to be a very leisurely person, spending a lot of time spacing out, relaxing, and drifting in contented aimlessness.

I can’t afford that any longer because I feel like I have to be running all the time. So every moment of my day from 7 am to 11 pm is scheduled.

This makes me feel like an entirely different person which is a good thing right now.

The haggard face in the photo is illustrating how hugely over scheduled I am.

Have you watched the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Sochi? I haven’t because it isn’t my thing but here is something interesting: the organizers wanted to honor during the ceremony the memory of those who died in WWII. (The whole opening ceremony was based on the history of Russia, and the victory of the USSR in WWII is the most important event of that history.)

The International Olympic Committee forbade, however, any but the most perfunctory references to the war because this subject upsets the Germans. And you know how things are these days. Nobody wants to upset the Germans because they’ve got the cash.

The activity in honor of the fallen was to be as follows. Everybody present at the opening ceremony was going to be asked to hold a photo of a person who died in the war and raise it at the same time. This would honor the memory of the dead heroes making everybody feel as if they were present among the living.

I never know what is going to impress students. In the Intro to Literature class, what caused an absolute sensation was that I can read Roman numerals and don’t need to stop and think before “deciphering” them. This came up when we started to study sonnets titled “Soneto LXXXVI” and “Soneto CLXVI.” If I’d known this would matter so much to the students, I could have started the course by reading aloud a few Roman numerals.

I never participate in the endless spats and quarrels that are so ubiquitous in the academic world. But I have a folder titled “Intrigas” in my Outlook account. All of the emails pertaining to the endless scheming among academics that come my way are assigned to that folder.

Who knows, maybe I will follow in C.P. Snow’s footsteps after I retire and create a series of masterpieces about academic life.

The UK embassy in Moscow offers a VIP service for visa seekers. If you want to receive special treatment from the embassy employees that will ensure everybody knows you are not one of common folks, all you need to do is pay the equivalent of $230. The VIP service offers the following conveniences:

1. A VIP accesses the embassy through a separate entrance lest the VIP’s tender sensibilities get hurt by encountering the nasty, smelly proles who access the embassy in a regular, not Very Important manner.

2. A VIP gets a personal assistant to help him or her fill out the paperwork. It simply won’t do to make somebody this important do any work.

3. A VIP is offered high-quality refreshments to help pass the time.

I hope I don’t need to explain to which social group in Russia people who can spend $230 on something like this belong. (If I do, see the post’s title.)

The UK makes sure visitors know from the start what kind of people the country appreciates.

A new button “Protest NSA Surveillance” appeared in my Settings. This is what it offers:

 

Does the anti-NSA ribbon at the bottom of this blog bother you? I added it but it doesn’t have to be there.

I don’t know if I mentioned this, but I love notebooks. Whenever I see a cute, unusual notebook, I buy it for my collection. Yesterday I found the following gem at the university bookstore:

This notebook features signs that prohibit or regulate dogs and allows me to combine two if my favorite pursuits: my love of notebooks and my dislike of dogs.

Here is how the back looks:

Every page of this great product features an anti-dog sign in a foreign language:

This book is out of print (which doesn’t say anything good about humanity) but here are some copies sold at Amazon.

This series also has a similar kind of notebooks for coffee lovers.

FOR AN UPDATE WITH THE MOST RECENT NUMBERS AS OF JANUARY 2016, PLEASE FOLLOW THE LINK.

I promised I would write about how WordAds are working for me, so here is the promised post. I only discovered that WordPress was offering a program of its own instead of the dreadful and malicious Google AdSense recently. You don’t need to do anything to make the program work other than going on your Settings page and enabling WordAds.

The program counts your ad impressions based on a formula of its own. Ad impressions are not equal to hits or individual IPs. WordPress takes blog visits from some countries into account but not others. So if most of your readership is not in the US, this program might not work as well for you.

Under the fold, you can see my WordAds earnings for December 2013 and January 2014. Next to the ad impressions, I wrote the number of total hits for each month. Forgive the handwriting, but if you tried writing figures in a Windows snipping tool, you’ll understand.

You will see that a significantly larger number of hits translates into a smaller number of ad impressions.

The conclusion is that WordAds rocks, and I recommend it to anybody. Any amount you get after connecting WordAds is bigger than what you had without it, so it’s all good.

Continue reading “WordAds Earnings” →

Can anybody explain to me why Google Plus refers to me as “Clarissa Glock”? Also, a gmail account that I have under my real name also started sending out emails identifying me as “Clarissa Glock.” I understand where Clarissa comes from, even though I have no idea what it is doing on an email account that is not associated with this blog. But why “Glock”? It is in no way similar to my last name or the last names of anybody related to me in any way.

When I first saw “Clarissa Glock” at the top of my screen, I thought I’d accidentally accessed somebody else’s account. But it’s my account, with my emails, etc.

Does anybody know how this works and if I need to be concerned about being nicknamed after a firearm?

What is Google trying to tell me?