Are you noticing anything unusual in the list of my blog visitors?

Yes. I finally have visitors from Russia and Ukraine thanks to my recent bout of Twitter activity.

I banned over 100 Putinbots on Twitter yesterday. It was fun and also very educational because it’s obvious how many of them are simply trolling for a modest salary.

When a drama-queenish, melodramatic professor encounters a group of drama-queenish, melodramatic students, the result is very embarrassing.

A short resume for those who have missed the whole sorry thing. A professor at Northwestern complained in an online article that many of her students are overwrought and behave like “trauma cases waiting to happen.”

The students proved her right by freaking out about the article in really bizarre ways and claiming they were “terrified” of the article.

The professor proved that this was not a generational issue when she responded with outlandish stories of professors being terrified of the terrified students. In professor’s words:

Someone on my campus—tenured—wrote me about literally lying awake at night worrying about causing trauma to a student, becoming a national story, losing her job, and not being able to support her kid. It seemed completely probable to her that a triggered student could take down a tenured professor with a snowball of social media.

The most surprising thing is that none of the participants in this bit of arrant idiocy are noticing how stupid they are making themselves look.

Today there was a massive rally in the Crimea, celebrating the annexation of the peninsula by Russia a year ago:

Yes, it was as massive as Putin is tall but there is no more money in Russia to pay people to pretend they are celebrating. Putin pays a little under $5 to each person who comes out on his marches and rallies but it’s getting too costly for Russia to do that.

. . . it’s summer. A hot summer with an angry, unforgiving sun. Our summers last from March to November. And that’s after only 3 instances of snowfall in all of this so-called winter.

But I shouldn’t complain. California only has enough water left for a year, so we should consider ourselves super lucky in contrast.

In other bad news, Putin has resurfaced. He looks unhealthy but these over-Botoxed creatures do looked permanently puffed up and freaky. People are saying that his disappearance was a ploy to distract everybody from the recent murder of the dissident Boris Nemtsov and from the growing concentration of Russian troops on the Ukrainian border. 

In good news, there are just 7 weeks to go until the end of the semester and then I can concentrate full-time on my research for the next 8 months. Over the spring break, I did no grading and no class prep and had a blast. When one is immersed in writing a scholarly book, everything that distracts one from it is annoying.

So 7 more teaching days, and I’m free to write.

One expects philologists to be careful with words, yet sometimes when a fellow philologist says, “Do come by our panel on online learning for a few minutes, maybe answer a question or two”, what she actually means is, “Deliver a talk at our conference. And, by the way, you are scheduled to speak this Friday.”

I don’t mind much because I have a mile-long bibliography on the evils of online learning, so I can talk away but it’s still funny how this all came about.

This year’s research projects by my colleagues that I’m evaluating on my committee are so good that I just want to drop everything and camp out next to their offices in the hopes they’d give me progress updates.

I wonder if it’s appropriate to ask these scholars to sell me the first copy of their books in advance of publication. I’m not allowed to share what these projects are about but they are excruciatingly interesting. I feel very honored to work with people who do this kind of fascinating research.

Russians keep messing with my head. For the second time this week, I turned on Russian TV and what do you think I saw?

Yes, fucking St. Louis. Again! It’s like they are obsessed with us or something. Here is the snapshot of our famous STL Arch on Russian TV 2 minutes ago:

The reason why I turned it on was to see what’s going on with the fire in downtown Moscow. But apparently downtown St. Louis is of greater interest to the Russian viewers.

I wonder, are Michael Brown protests the only thing they’ve been showing since the last time I tried watching Russian news?

N and I are still on season 1 of The Wire (yes, we tend to come very late to the TV-watching party), and here are my impressions so far.

The show is very professionally made and extraordinarily entertaining. Of course, there are also many problematic aspects in it, which is not surprising since it’s a popular TV show.

The noble white Knight in a crowd of black people who are, without an exception, inferior to him morally, intellectually and in every other way; the insistent “lazy blacks” motifs; the sexism that is just overwhelming – it’s all there. My understanding is that the creator of the series started working on the idea for the show back in the early 1990s, which explains much of this. It’s probable that these trends will not hold until the end of the series, but season 1 is like this.

But the show is amazing. The comedic aspect is great. The scene where the people in the towers throw TV sets at police officers would make any post-Soviet person collapse with laughter. There are also less successful scenes. The most contrived and jarring was the scene where the characters say nothing but “fuck” for 15 minutes. Even the actors looked embarrassed for participating in something so obviously HBO-pleasing and childish.

The beautiful Novodevichy monastery is burning in Moscow right now:

Earlier this week, a large shopping center burned down in the city of Kazan in Russia. 17 people died. Putin did not address the victims and didn’t express condolences.

Today, a documentary was aired in Russia in which Putin calmly recognizes that he did annex the Crimea, that the “referendum” was a sham, and that he was ready to deploy nuclear weapons if anybody had tried to stop the annexation.

I remember how much time and energy I wasted on convincing people here on the blog and elsewhere of exactly this and feel very annoyed. It would be great if the next time I say something about Ukraine and Russia people whose knowledge about the region is limited to something they vaguely heard on the radio manage not to inflict their useless “opinions” on me.

Nothing is more frustrating than having to deal with folks who believe they need to have opinions about evrtything and refuse to get even minimally educated before opining.

A right to an opinion has to be deserved by a massive investment of time and effort into learning and getting informed.