Opinions, art, debate
Cakes continue causing major drama. This teddy bear that was featured on a cake, for instance, has found itself in the midst of great controversy:
The woman who bought the cake was very upset:
“It is completely inappropriate. The cake is supposed to be for a three-year-old girl.
“It is not just me who thought this, it was a talking point at the christening — everyone was commenting on it.”
Can you guess why the cake angered people so much? See if you guessed right under the fold!
I found a very long dark hair on N’s pillow. It’s a good thing I have a delayed reaction to things. This gave me time to remember that I’m dark-haired these days before I had the chance to get all Calderónian.
So guess where I’m staying in London? Right next to the Freud museum, of course! It’s also very close to the Hampstead Heath.
It’s quite far from the center but I’m not that into the center anyway. I just want to walk around and see something authentically London-like (meaning, something that doesn’t remind me of New York.)
I just got an email urging me to sign a petition asking Amazon and eBay to remove merchandise that features the Confederate flag. I’m not signing the petition. Neither would I sign a petition urging to remove merchandise with a swastika or with the symbols of the Russian terrorists in Ukraine.
Of course, it makes me feel like I’m being punched in the gut every time I enter “Ukraine” in the search box at eBay and have “Novorossia” symbols thrust into my face. But there are things that are more important than my feelings, and freedom of expression is one such thing.
And because I know somebody will ask: if a student came into my classroom in a T-shirt featuring a swastika or a Confederate flag, I’d ask them to leave. But I wouldn’t do that if a student came in wearing the Russian terrorist symbols. My job in my classroom is not to protect myself from the discomfort that only I am likely to experience.
People are so weird:
The UK government [has] promised to put psychologists into job centres “to provide integrated employment and mental health support to claimants with common mental health conditions” but with the potential threat of having assistance removed if people do not attend treatment.
It has been criticised as ‘treating unemployment as a mental problem’ or an attempt to ‘psychologically reprogramme the unemployed’ and has triggered an upcoming march on a London job centre.
What kind of a freak marches against assistance to the unemployed? Long-term unemployed desperately need a psychologist. After 7-8 months of unemployment, workers need psychological assistance to re-inscribe themselves into the workplace. Long-term unemployment is both an effect and a cause of psychological issues. And if the UK government wants to rehabilitate the unemployed, this is a great thing that is to be applauded.
Reader Steve says a propos of national symbols:
[In South Africa] people seem to fixate on historic statues rather than flags, but the same principle applies. Removing a statue of a long-dead politician does nothing to transform education, but much student rhetoric suggests that students think it does.
This reminds me of a funny true story. In 1958, the statue of the founder of the Soviet secret police was erected in front of the secret police building in Moscow.
In 1991, the statue was pulled down and everything associated with the Soviet secret police was repudiated on a state and popular levels.
And now the statue is being taken out of storage and dragged back to its old place because now the Soviet legacy is considered prestigious in Russia again. It will cost an enormous sum to restore the statue but nobody seems to mind.
It’s just really funny to imagine the Russians running there and back, there and back with the stupid statue.
By the way, a great measure of whether a school (or a department) is worth attending is what happens after graduation. If professors just forget about their students’ existence two minutes after the graduation ceremony, make no effort to place them in jobs, don’t forward information on employment opportunities, don’t speak to local employers about the graduates, etc. – that’s not a good school.
Our graduation ceremony took place in early May, and since then, I’ve been doing a lot of this kind of work. Everybody should try to locate a recent graduate of their department (this is super easy to do through LinkedIn) before choosing a college to attend and ask how often the school has been in touch for anything other than requests for money.
Quebec has passed regulations that forbid 6 of its 8 psychoanalysts to practice in the province. God forbid pharmaceutical companies lose a couple dozen patients. The government of Quebec has to protect the interests of these companies at all costs.
Say what you will but Germans do the sore loser thing better than anybody else:
Following his divorce, this German man appears to have decided to split all of his belongings with his wife—literally.
The disgruntled ex-husband
, who goes by the name Der Juli online, posted a video to YouTube showcasing him cutting chairs, beds and phones in half for his ex-wife. The video’s translated description reads “Thank you for 12 ‘beautiful years,’ Laura! You’ve really earned half. Greetings also to my successor.”
It’s a total mystery why this guy has trouble staying in a relationship.
Brownback. . . refused to acknowledge that he had signed a tax increase. “Look at the totality of the picture,” he said. “When you look at that, it is a tax cut.” Nobody else saw it that way. “Not only is this a tax increase, it is the largest tax increase in state history.”
Well, if this is what people voted for, this is what they very richly deserve. And I don’t mean the sales tax discussed here. I mean a governor who is so pathetic, so inept that all he can offer to the voters is this impotent equivocation about a tax raise meaning a tax cut. As if fiddling with taxes was the extent of gubernatorial duties.
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