From my favorite Philip Bobbitt:

Much of contemporary crime is kind of a protowar against the State, waged against civilians.

The guy wrote this in 2002. And now apply this quote to the riots and looting in Ferguson, MO. Here’s the explanation of all that’s happening in one short sentence.

I have officially handed in my tenure dossier and now I can go back to my favorite hobby of perusing my Bobbitt books. They tend to go on for thousands of pages and every sentence is a gem.

For reader el: when I get to the chapter when Bobbitt talks about Israel, I promise to post many quotes.

After heavy rains, the water in the Ondatra Creek has acquired this strange color:

The aquamarine color is even brighter than the camera allows for. Does anybody know what this means? I’ve also seen this happen to ponds in the area that are located quite far from our creek. Is this something to worry about? In my country, when the water gets this color, that’s a very bad sign, so I’m worried.

I don’t know if it’s considered courteous to snip out bits of other people’s Facebook pages, so I will just reproduce the hilarious dialogue I had with a friend yesterday here.

The friend posted photos of herself on the beautiful beach resort. Under the photos, we had the following short dialogue:

Clarissa: Bitch. I spent the whole day at work, in meetings.

Friend: Beach. . .

Clarissa: Yes, keep having fun while some of us sit here, green with envy.

The moral of the story: the best friends are the ones to whom you can easily say, “I’m totally envious of you.”

Here is an interesting question. I don’t get British humour at all. Once I read an entire book by a British author and felt completely befuddled. Then I read the back flap and found out that the book was supposed to be humourous.

“Ah!” I said. “In that case, ha ha.”

Making me watch Monty Python is one of the best ways to torture me. It’s just not my sense of humour at all.

There is an exception, however. I find my British readers to be hilarious. When readers Jones and Benoni make jokes on this blog, I always get them and envy their robust sense of humour which is a quality I lack.

Is there a reason for this? My guess is that since these are my readers and I like them, I make an effort to get them.

I know everybody is worried but I’m better now.

I even have a funny story to share about that horrible meeting of the Spanish section. As you can imagine, everybody speaks Spanish at these meetings.

“This happens because I’m a procrastinator,” a colleague from Spain said. “What is the Spanish for procrastinator? Is there a Spanish equivalent?”

“No,” a colleague from Venezuela responded. “We don’t need a word for it because that’s how we all are.”

And it just kept getting worse and worse after that. I went to the meeting of the Spanish section of the department, and that was a bad idea and a half given how the entire day was evolving. As one could have predicted knowing my degree of general luck, the conversation at the meeting concentrated on maternity leaves.

I was sitting there quietly, waiting for the discussion to end when a colleague decided it was imperative to involve me in the conversation.

“Wasn’t your maternity leave like that, Clarissa?” the colleague asked.

I ignored the question, hoping the colleague would let it go but when were things ever that easy?

“What about your maternity leave, Clarissa?” the colleague kept insisting. “Your maternity leave? Clarissa??? Maternity leave?!?!?”

I stared into my cup, at the wall, at the ceiling, but the colleague persisted like it was part of her job duties to badger me with maternity leaves. At this point, everybody was staring at me, expecting a story of a maternity leave from me.

So I got up and went to the bathroom, hoping people would get their maternity leave discussion out of their systems. But it was not meant to be that I should achieve peace even in the bathroom. The colleague followed me there. And then another colleague followed to see how I was doing, and the whole thing was unrelenting.

I know nobody means any harm but I don’t really care what anybody means at this point. For me the only way of dealing with this situation is by narrating it. So I narrated it here and now I will go and narrate it to people in person and over the phone.

I don’t really need any comments, I’m doing this for me and the act of writing is helping.

I spent half the night crying because going back to work is very difficult. Everything reminds me of last year. And the one-year anniversary is approaching. It took everything I’ve got (and I haven’t got a lot) to bring myself to work today without looking completely swollen and without breaking down every 5 minutes.

But then the general faculty meeting just had to be graced with some kid singing an interminable “This was the best year of my life” song.

God has it in for me with a vengeance.

Said the university’s senior administrator in a back-to-school speech.

I’m cancelling my long-standing subscription to The Nation because it has become a shameless mouthpiece for Putinoid propaganda. Every week the magazine publishes some idiotic piece on Ukraine but this week things have turned even worse. An article by Stephen F. Cohen, an idiot I have already ridiculed on this blog in the past, has decided to excrete some more lunacy and The Nation chose to accommodate him.

Cohen is still sad that the USSR fell apart and is now enthusiastically supporting Putin’s plan to bring it into existence. Of course, he is entitled to his lunacy, just like everybody else is, but I’m shocked that The Nation will publish a piece that makes outlandish claims and doesn’t offer a shred of proof. 

In his article, Cohen parrots every one of the favorite propaganda point of his beloved Putinoids. Ukraine is not a real country, the Maidan was an uprising of neo-Nazi street thugs, Putin is a kind, avuncular victim of the West’s tragedy. In short, everything that Putin’s propaganda machine has been hoping the more brain-damaged among the Westerners will swallow. It’s sad that the brain-damaged have taken over what used to be a good magazine.

Two Ukrainians are talking.

“My friend why do you keep reading these Russian blogs?”

“Well, when I read Ukrainian blogs it’s all about how the Ukrainian army is full of traitors, Maidan has been betrayed, the Ukrainian president is a loser, and Russia won’t stop invading. But when I read Russian blogs, it’s all about how the NATO troops are fighting on Ukraine’s side, the CIA is giving tons of money to Ukraine, Ukrainian troops are about to take Moscow, and Russia is on the brink of extinction. What’s not to like?”