OMG, I had no idea people still did that:

On Sunday, after church, Julie and I had a Full And Frank Discussion with our boys over inattention at the liturgy. We tried to impress on them that there are places in this world where Christians are risking their lives simply to do what we can easily do on Sunday morning. I told them about Father George Calciu, and what he and the other Romanian Christians endured in Ceaucescu’s prisons — and how they celebrated that same liturgy inside prison walls.

In my childhood, the starving children of Africa were the preferred trick to try to make me eat. The result was, of course, a life-long eating disorder. 

Do people still think that this heavy-handed and dumb manipulation provokes anything but eventual contempt for them?

Author: Ulrich Beck

Title: German Europe

Country: Germany

My rating: 5 out of 10

In Europe, “sociologist” is not a swear word like it is in North America. Some of the most important thinkers of today are European sociologists, and Ulrich Beck is one of them.

Ulrich Beck’s German Europe (2012) is a slim volume that discusses the current crisis that the European Union still can’t overcome. The main problem of the EU, according to Ulrich, is that it can’t let go of the outdated attachment to the nation-state model. As a result, for instance, Angela Merkel makes decisions that affect the entire union on the basis of nothing but her concern with winning votes at home. 

After two costly efforts to achieve hegemony within Europe that cost the world two devastating wars in the XXth century, Germany is finally seeing its dream come true:

The fact is that Europe has become German. Nobody intended this to happen, but, in the light of the possible collapse of the euro, Germany has slipped into the role of the decisive political power in Europe.

I’d disagree with the “nobody intended” part, yet the rest is unassailable. Beck believes that this state of affairs is deeply problematic because the very existence of democracy in several other countries of the union now hinges on the domestic political strategies of German politicians. 

I wasn’t that interested in the part of Beck’s argument dedicated to Merkel whom the sociologist calls “Merkiavelli.” It bores me to see politics reduced to personalities because I don’t see anything useful coming out of this sort of analysis. What I did find interesting is the suggestion that the root of Germany’s power today does not lie in anything that Germany does. Rather, it resides in its dithering, its constant vacillation that keeps other players on the European arena constantly on edge.

The book was written back in 2012, so there is obviously nothing in it about Russia. We can see, however, that the strategy of “yes, but no, but maybe yes” is precisely the one Merkel has been using with Putin. Feel free to judge the results for yourself.

Germans are tired, Beck says, of doing endless penance for the Holocaust and the two world wars so they are welcoming a chance to adopt a posture of being pedagogues to Europe who are teaching wayward Europeans how to do things right. Still, even the boring didacticism of the Germans is not too huge a price to pay for the ultimately very positive and successful project of the EU.

I’m watching an interview with a real-life pedophile teacher whose story imitates,  in great detail, the plot of Alissa Nutting ‘ s novel Tampa.

The pedophile would come to the kid’s house and flirt with him in the presence of his idiot father. Later, she’d have sex with the kid in the father’s house. She followed the boy when he went on vacation. They had sex in a parking lot. The first time she raped him was in the classroom, in the very first year she worked as a teacher. The pedophile is the same age as the one in the novel. The victim is the same age.

Plus, the real-life pedophile is speaking in the same dispassionate, monotonous, cold  voice as the novel’s narrator.

I’ve got to take back everything I said about the novel in my review. It’s scarily true to life, as it turns out.

A colleague asked us to a party in honor of her daughter’s college graduation. I was at this young woman’s high school graduation, and still remember her as a gawky teenager who had no idea what to do with her life. And now she’s a very cool, sophisticated adult who will be leaving for her prestigious job in Austria after the party.

It’s really funny how I only came here for a year and stayed for many more. I’m very glad I’m not into the “write your way out” mentality. So many people don’t even notice their lives passing them by while they fantasize about a magical future that never really comes. It makes much more sense to love the present instead.

So I go outside this morning, and what is it that I see? The rabbit is hanging out around my sunflower garden. I might have to start covering the garden with netting overnight.

I have a newfound appreciation for farmers’ work.

But for the last word, you’d never guess what show this blogger was talking about:

In any case, I regard

the genre of television as completed now. The most critically acclaimed, culturally prestigious, artistically ambitious television show of all time — and judging by current trends, I include the future here too — has culminated in a tacky commercial.

Mad Men is not a bad show in the tradition of Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, and dozens of similar “creepy workplace” shows. I enjoyed it quite a bit for a while even though it fizzled out a season and a half ago and now I can’t even remember what happened in the penultimate season.

But “culturally prestigious and artistically ambitious”? I had no idea there were still people who took television so seriously and could get so pompous about it.

Two Russian special ops officers were wounded in a battle near Lugansk (that’s the city where I was born, by the way.) They were captured by Ukrainians who tried to tend to their wounds. The Russians started freaking out and begging the doctors not to steal their organs. When asked what the hell they were going on about, the soldiers replied that they’d been warned by their commanders that Ukrainians would cut organs out of their POWs to sell them on the black market. 

Now the soldiers have finally been treated and are lying in nice, comfortable beds, giving massive evidence about their warfare in Ukraine. They will be put on trial for terrorist activities. 

Putin, of course, denied their existence.

I swear to God, all I wanted to do was plant a few peaceful sunflowers and get on with my life. Little did I know, however, that in what concerns gardening, everything turns into a bother and a half.

Rabbits have taken to visiting my sunflowers and chewing on them. There is plenty of good, juicy grass, yet they fixate on the sunflowers. I even left some carrots for the rabbits but do they care? No, they just want to eat the sunflower stalks.

So I’ve had to put up a fence. And tomorrow I will be adding a layer of topsoil because the clay – like soil looks ugly. Plus, I will reseed the bald line you can see on the photo. We laid some tubing there, and now the grass isn’t growing over it.

I know everybody hates videos but you’ve just got to see this hilarious video of  a city manager of Lauderdale Lakes, Florida give a class on how to handle the traumatic reality of having to work with women.

For those who really really hate videos, here are some highlights:

• Women ask lots of questions. He learned a valuable lesson on communicating with women from his 11-year-old daughter, who peppered him with questions while they were on the way to volleyball. “In a matter of 15 seconds, I got 10 questions that I had to patiently respond to,” Allen said. Allen says female City Council members are less likely to read agenda information and instead ask questions. He says it’s tempting to just tell them to read the packet, but “my daughter taught me the importance of being patient” even when they may already know the answer to the question.
• Women don’t want to deal with numbers. Allen said in his city they used to have background information and financial analysis on the front pages of agenda forms. Allen says he normally would have presented the financial argument, but that his female commissioners would balk and say “Mr. Manager, I don’t want to hear about the financial argument, I want to hear about how this impacts the whole community.” He said that it may make good financial sense, but if he wants to get the votes, he has to present his arguments “in a totally different way.”

And there is a lot more right here.

 

NYC is becoming unlivable for absolutely everybody:

FAO Schwarz, the oldest toy store in the United States and a retailer once considered accessible only to the rich, is closing its much-loved Fifth Avenue flagship store in Manhattan, citing rising rent prices.

The city is going completely nuts. Just yesterday I read a long and weepy post about the horrible hardship of living in NYC on a salary of $70,000. This would be insane anywhere but in New York it’s a little less insane.

I never understood why anybody wanted to live there anyway.