Do you hate audiobooks as much as I do? I detest them with a burning passion that is only equalled by my love of regular books.

I had no idea why I hated them so much but finally there is an explanation. They are too slow and linear for my brain to process them without experiencing pain.

I just looked out of the window, and you won’t believe what I saw:

Yes! A rabbit, lying voluptuously among my sunflowers. Just observe how happy the little fucker looks!

I approached the enclosure and clapped my hands. The rabbit tried to get out and got stuck in the netting:

For a while, it just flailed there, making me worry that it would hurt itself and then I’d have to tend to a wounded rabbit. And then finally it just ran away:

So guess who will now have to schlep out into the garden to reinforce the netting?

I’m seriously shocked with how hard farming is.

P.S. Click on the photos and then press Ctrl and + at the same time to see the rabbit better.

Everybody is talking about the teaching track, and I want to contribute some ideas to the discussion.

I believe that the teaching track is a great idea. At my university, for instance, we have many people who got hired and tenured when we were still a 100% teaching institution. Things have changed, and now everybody is required to do research.

Obviously, you can’t become a research scholar overnight. Being a research scholar is a way of life. You need to accumulate intellectual capital and construct a scholarly base over the course of many years. So people who are asked to start producing scholarship at the age of 50 feel completely lost. They experience shame, fear, and stress as they try to come up with something to put in the research column of their yearly evaluation.

By the way, I met people like these both at Yale and Cornell, and now their careers are ruined because you can only fake being a research scholar for a while. So this happens everywhere, and it happens a lot. 

Wouldn’t it be great to let such people off the research hook and simply give them a 4/4 or a 5/5 teaching load? And give people like me a 2/2 teaching load? That would make every sense.

However, there are three major issues that will make the introduction of a teaching track impossible:

1. There is absolutely no way of justifying the need to have people with PhDs teach Spanish 101 , Composition 101 or French 102. And people who do no research can’t teach anything else.

2. There is absolutely no way of justifying the need for tenure for people who only teach Geography 101 and Co. 

3. There is absolutely no way of introducing the teaching track without making people angry and wounding their pride. People will freak out and start plotting like their lives depend on it. 

And thus, this great idea will die an untimely death.

Unless students magically start coming to college more prepared, somebody will need to be doing all the remediation. That’s just reality. And all of the endless complaining about the horrible unfairness of the unkind universe will not change it. Some sort of an arrangement will have to be made to accommodate this reality. The discussion of the teaching track is at least an attempt to consider a solution. So it’s a step in a good direction.

The stylist’s receptionist called me 2 minutes ago to confirm an appointment and started the conversation with apologizing profusely for possibly waking me up.

“It’s 9:40 am,” I said. “I’m up.”

“Good!” he exclaimed. “Because I know that teachers like to sleep late during the holidays. They always get grumpy if I wake them before 11 am.”

The breakfast features cucumbers, tomatoes, celery sticks, lettuce, hummus, an egg, and some crumbled feta.

You’ve got to read this hilarious post by an idiot vegan and a response to it. Just keep scrolling.

I found this hilarious link at this blog that always has tons of fun and useful links.

And here is yet another article on how work – any work – is horrible, stultifying, unhealthy, and downright evil.

People mold reality, and then reality molds them right back. Soon enough, nobody will remember their own eager participation in the destruction of the concept of full-time jobs.

So we started watching The Fall, and it’s very enjoyable. Very professionally done, too.

There is one thing I find obnoxious, though. This is yet another one in a billion shows that depict a very thin woman devouring an enormous hamburger in the dead of night. The endless replay of the bizarre belief that weight is in no way linked to what people eat is simply annoying.

Yes, there are people who are very sick and who can eat tons of food while remaining emaciated. I’ve known such people, and they look nothing like Gillian Anderson. They look sick.

In The Fall, this was just a single short scene. But remember Gilmore Girls? The writers of the show seemed possessed by the need to prove that gorging on tons of junk food every day leads to remaining skinny and fresh-faced. After several seasons, it started to seem like the writers were mentally unstable. And there are millions of such shows.

I’m thinking there must be something cultural to this very Anglo refusal to see causal links. And you observe this in many different areas of life, not just food. There’s also the bizarre belief that intelligence just happens and is not a result of years of learning. And so on.