Jonathan Mayhew has a fascinating series of posts on his blog about his intellectual formation.

Here is Post 1. Post 2. Post 3. Post 4.

I’m now totally inspired to write my own intellectual history in a series of posts. This will be fun! I’m wordy, so I will have many posts in my series.

Read Jonathan’s posts in the meanwhile.

OK, folks, I have come up with a beautiful game for us to play. The name of the game is “How Americanized am I?”

The rules are as follows: you are to come up with questions  to test my understanding of American history, idioms, geography, culture, literature, daily life, food, fashion, TV – anything. And I absolutely promise not to Google or do any searches and just answer off the top of my head. I don’t mind feeling ridiculous or ignorant for a change, so I won’t cheat.

Questions can be serious or humorous but they have to be of the kind that anybody who you consider part of this culture to be able to answer.

If I answer more than 60% of the questions (which is the passing grade at my university), I win. If not, you win, and you can come up with a collective decision of what I should do to expiate my lack of Americanization.

Russia’s official representative at the UN made a statement explaining that the goal of Russia’s actions in Ukraine is to help out the EU.

The US, he said, wants to saddle the EU with Ukraine so that it would deter the EU from developing economically. This way, the US will get rid of a major economic competitor.

No, he doesn’t really mean it. Yes, he is laughing in all of our faces.

People complain that I haven’t posted any recipes for a while, so here is a dish I made today. The recipe is completely my own, and this is easily the best dish I ever cooked, which is saying a lot.

Here is what I used:

– 4 quail;
– 2 cloves of garlic;
– a bunch of purple asparagus;
– 7 big mushrooms;
– 1 huge meaty tomato, seeded;
– half a bunch of kale;
– 1/4 of a bunch of curly parsley;
– a cup of peas;
– turmeric, allspice, nutmeg, salt;
– half a cup of sake.

Quail are expensive and tiny, so unless you buy two packages they have to be part of a casserole. I crushed some garlic and fried it briefly in a small amount of olive oil and a bit of butter. Then I added some sake (since I had no wine) and reduced it.

I cut the quail in 4 parts each with kitchen shears and seared them on both sides. Then added some water, just to cover the quail.

The vegetables are all added at the same time and so are the herbs. It’s important to take the seeds out of the tomato because we want the liquid to reduce to almost nothing in the process of cooking.

Then I added the seasoning, closed the casserole and put it into the oven for an hour. And the result is beyond delicious. It’s also very easy to prep and takes next to no time.

Here it is on a plate:

A question on the quiz is, “Who won the Spanish Civil War?”

As the students write, I walk around the classroom and spot that one of them answers, “The United States.”

“Think about it,” I say quietly. “It’s a CIVIL war. What does that tell us? Who fights in civil wars?”

“Oh gosh, of course!” the student exclaims. “Silly me!”

She crosses out her answer and writes, “Cuba.”

As you know, the Civil War is my topic. Can you imagine how many times I spoke about it? How passionately? In how much depth? I’d interrupt my discussions of medieval poetry to talk about the Civil War because I’m so obsessed. (And if anybody can figure out how I connected the two gets extra points on this blog).

And in case you think the student didn’t understand my lectures in Spanish, she is a native speaker. And this is a high-level course for Spanish majors.

If you like cats, you will love this invention. Or so I think but I don’t have cats, so what do I know?

It’s kind of embarrassing to see people so in the grip of the Electra complex: “As filmmaker, Jen Senko, tries to understand the transformation of her father from a mild mannered life-long Democrat to an angry, Right-Wing fanatic, she uncovers the forces behind the media that changed him completely.”

Russian authorities are considering a bill that mandates fingerprinting of all HIV-positive people, including tourists. Words fail me to describe this egregious policy.

I usually read posts on Shakesville for their humorous potential but sometimes they are so offensive that my blood boils. This is an example of a post that turns the expression “rape culture” into a joke, and that’s very hateful.

And this is why, as much as I love stand-up comedy, I avoid listening to female comedians.

“Publishing has been historically and still is one of the most hidebound, exploitative, decrepit businesses in the world, right behind the clowns at (and members of) the RIAA and MPAA.” Hear, hear! And the worst are academic textbook publishers.

How can I not admire somebody who came up with the phrase “I really feel like beating a pillow into stuffinglessness”?

An interesting approach to to-do lists.

Why I would never want to teach high school.

I would totally use this phenomenal service on my trips.

A blogger ridicules the privilege check-list we discussed on the blog last week. Read the post, it’s very funny: “Not just anyone can use prescription drugs recreationally. Many there are who have to settle for such indignities as sniffing glue. This seems like an as-yet-unexplored vista of privilege, whereby those to whom the greatest advantages of self-destruction have accrued must ask themselves searching questions about how they attained their current misery and how they can redistribute it to others.”

In Spanish: An intelligent discussion of why García Márquez sucks.

NPR is bent on being stupid and “reporting” on things its stupid journalists know nothing about: “Most Ukrainians are primarily Orthodox Christians, and Easter is the most important religious holiday of the year.” And there is more idiocy from the same article: “I’m Rachel Martin. Ukraine celebrates Easter today as a divided country.” Ukraine is an invaded country, you fool. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why no such division was in evidence even two days before the invasion by Russia?

A great idea: memorial library books. Absolutely brilliant. But only if there are still libraries with actual books in the future.

This kind of thing was super fashionable among us, poor industrial ghetto kids, back in the 1990s in Ukraine. It’s kind of shocking to see it touted as high fashion in today’s US.

“What say you, blogosphere? Is it hopelessly shallow to want to move for the weather and because you just don’t feel love for your place of employment?” No, it’s absolutely not shallow. The climate where I live is killing me, and I’m not being overly dramatic. So I’m extremely sympathetic to what this blogger experiences.

What kind of a hopeless Grinch could possibly hate Mrs. Doubtfire? Well, this one! It must be a painful burden to be so patently lacking in humor.

The new SATs substitute vocabulary with linear equations. And gives even few choice on the multiple choice. I say, why not just give one correct choice and assign high marks for those who manage to underline it without falling off their chairs?

There is A LOT of social mobility in this country: “It turns out that 12 percent of the population will find themselves in the top 1 percent of the income distribution for at least one year. What’s more, 39 percent of Americans will spend a year in the top 5 percent of the income distribution, 56 percent will find themselves in the top 10 percent, and a whopping 73 percent will spend a year in the top 20 percent of the income distribution.“

I know how much everybody likes my riddles, especially the ones that have to do with me. I like them, too, so here is one:

No matter how much we like our professions and our lives, many of us have a secret childish fantasy about a dream career we haven’t pursued for many objective reasons but still fantasize about. I know a very brilliant academic in her fifties who secretly thinks it would have been amazing to be a pilot or a flight attendant. Another academic still has fantasies of having his own ice-cream cart. Somebody imagines herself as a model or a movie star. Somebody else fantasizes of being an astronaut.

I also have such a secret fantasy for a profession for which I’m not qualified at any level. I avidly watch the reality TV shows where representatives of this profession appear and imagine myself as one of them. I think there is nothing more glamorous and fun than working in this field.

So here is Question 1: what is my fantasy profession?

And Question 2: do you have one?

Putin made a statement today that the Internet is a product of the CIA created to control the world. This is why, he explained, Russia needs its own Internet and if American companies (Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, etc) want to be accessible to Russian users, they need to move their servers to Russia.

At this point, the Internet is the only communication medium where the people of Russia can express themselves freely.

I’m watching a lot of Ukrainian and Russian TV these days and what strikes me as very curious is how calm and respectful Ukrainian TV programs are in comparison with the utter hysteria of Russian TV channels. Pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian Ukrainians speak in calm, reasonable voices, nobody yells, interrupts, or insults anybody else. Everybody switches from Ukrainian to Russian and back easily, nobody gets shutdown for unpopular opinions. You’d think, based on this contrast, that Russia is the country invaded by Ukraine because the degree of how completely unhinged everybody is on Russian TV. s

So here is Putin’s official plan. On May 9, he will celebrate the victory in WWII, which is a holiday I always celebrated but now won’t because recent events have made me disgusted with all the ideological baggage that is being attached to it.

On May 11, there will be a “referendum” in the Donetsk region (where my aunts and cousins live). Putin will invade the day after and annex that region, too.

If anybody asks, “But what about the Geneva agreements?”, I’ll have to wonder whether you are intelligent enough to be on this blog.