Remember what the Internet was like back in 1995-7? You enter the url and then go get a cup of coffee, make a snack, read a few pages in a book while the website loads. The younger people have no idea how much time we all spent waiting for Web pages to load.

This is how my Charter Internet connection works this week. It’s super annoying. Maybe I should switch to the AT&T U-verse. I have AT&T on my phone and it never disappoints.

Does any one of you have U-verse? What’s the experience like? We have the most expensive Internet package that Charter offers, and it sucks royally. Should we just kick it?

The realm of politics has been so degraded that people don’t even seem to notice how bizarre the following “opinion poll” is:

A survey conducted by the Democratic-leaning firm Public Policy Polling found that 67 percent of respondents who voted for Romney in 2012 said they had a higher opinion of the family made famous by TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Just 12 percent of Romney voters said they had a higher opinion of the President than the Duggars.

By contrast, 87 percent of respondents who voted for Obama in 2012 said they had a higher opinion of the President than the Duggars. Only 5 percent of Obama voters said they had a higher opinion of the ultra-conservative Christian reality TV family.

What kind of an “opinion” can place a president and a bunch of TV personalities on the same field for comparison purposes? This is like asking if I have a higher opinion of the Beatles or sunflowers.

The word “opinion” is the most overused of all these days. I can’t tell you how many times I have to say to students, “No, it isn’t just your “opinion” that Columbus traveled to the New World in 1356. This is not an issue on which you can have opinions.” They get extremely sulky when they hear that they can’t have opinions about some things.

It’s very disturbing how easily people responded to the entirely idiotic question in the quoted poll without stopping to ask what this “opinion” was supposed to be based on.

My analyst says that I’m unusual in my 100% reliance on the logical and the rational. For me, everything needs to have a logical explanation, or it just bugs me. The intuitive part of my psyche is so beaten down that it never makes an appearance. (The way to address is that is to do things with your hands, like cooking or gardening, and pursue some creative activity, by the way.) 

So it just drives me nuts when I see inexplicable things happening. For instance, there is the mystery of the Walter Scott post. For days, this has been the most popular of my posts, even though there are no backlinks to it and the post contains nothing. This is what I see every day on the stats page these days:

 

I’m beginning to think people like the post so much because it’s as short as a tweet. And that’s a disturbing thought.

I will never become American enough to understand why everybody is so obsessed with Rachel Dolezal. To me, this is such a non-story. None of us can possibly know what’s in her DNA analysis. Anybody who’s ever seen a DNA analysis knows that drawing conclusions about people’s race or ethnicity is a waste of time. We all have a crazy amount of ancestry mixed in there.

And even if she does a DNA test and it is somehow deduced that she has no African ancestry at all, so what? What’s the big deal?

It seems like these vapid overblown scandals are growing in number. The recession must really be over if people are getting so overwrought about these trivial stories.

So have you met these creepy families with a son and a daughter where the mother is obsessed with the son, and the daughter is this mousy little creature with no personal life, and both mother and sister are total handmaidens to the boy? Obviously, the boy grows up messed up like all hell by all this, as well.

I have seen this family structure a few times, and it’s always very creepy.

The Illinois House of Representatives rejected Governor Rauner’s (a.k.a Big Government Rauner) state budget. Now Rauner is trying to pressure the state representatives by taking out TV ads where he accuses them of refusing to combat the state’s dysfunction.

Right now, Rauner is valiantly battling the state’s budget problems by hiring, on the taxpayer dime, $100,000 secretaries for his wife and an army of $150,000 – $170,000 secretaries for himself. I’m hearing that Rauner has many more relatives he needs to provide with expensive secretaries, so the state better pony up some cash for this noble purpose.

I am not aware of any country that has such a robust genre of “Country X As a Huge, Unsolvable Problem” as Spain. The “mystery of Spain” has had a scary number of huge volumes dedicated to it. And there is nothing to indicate that the genre is on the wane. 

These books are obviously part of a nation-building process, and I have been a huge fan of the genre for years. Now that I’m on sabbatical, I can indulge my bizarre passion for these books.

José Álvarez Junco is a famous historian, and his 2002 book Mater dolorosa is a 700 page volume that tries to answer the question of why the “Spain as a problem” genre is so crazy popular while actually contributing (in a very conscious way) to the genre. The book is lovely, it’s filled with insights, and though I obviously disagree with some of the things the author says, I took many pages of notes and enjoyed the volume thoroughly.

Álvarez Junco argues that Spain’s nation-building efforts in the XIXth century were deficient when compared with those of other Western European countries. There is still a lot of nation-building that needs to be done today and it has to be done fast or the antsy Catalonians are leaving. As Álvarez Junco points out, the XIXth-ventury nationalism was all about bringing territories together and creating bigger countries, while today, nationalism is about creating ever-tinier nations. There seems to be a collective failure of imagination as we are rejecting the very possibility of imagining a community that is not very small.

Author: José Álvarez Junco

Title: Mater Dolorosa. La idea de España en el siglo XIX.

Year: 2002.

My rating: 10 out of 10.

So, as you probably remember, our protagonist ‘ s casual boyfriend said he didn’t want to date her any more. Now they are seeing each other as “friends”, and the protagonist is doing the whole “let me analyze to death every breath he ever took” thing:

  I’d had my questions, obviously,

as to what we were doing and why, and I’d wondered if it was all a good idea. In the end, though, being with TA made me happy, and there’s not a lot of happiness in my life. He was fun and funny and kind and interesting and sexy – and he was into me. He started this; he pursued me; he assured me that taking it one day at a time was the perfect attitude; he told me how wonderful I was and how good we were; he described our relationship as intimate.

This is just a small excerpt. There is a lot more at the source.

I’m starting to rethink my belief that the guy is a jerk and beginning to feel some very uncharacteristic (for me) compassion towards him. Because once you are past the teenage stage, this obsessive neediness becomes scary and off-putting as all hell.

Hey, when we were young we all did this sort of thing and stayed up all night discussing with our friends what it meant if HE looked at me sideways and sighed twice. I did a lot of that when I was learning Spanish with my Colombian friends because it was the best way to practice the language. It was all a game, though, and we all knew it was just a game. Those were the times of our crazy youth. There was always a group of admirers surrounding every one of us, and we juggled and spun them around mercilessly. Oh, the stories I could tell.  .  .

I’m now starting to wonder, though, if some people in the group were dead serious about the whole thing and were doing the analyzing of words and facial expressions in earnest.

Somebody tell me this is a lie:

Professors at the University of California at Berkeley

have been officially warned against saying such things as “America is the land of opportunity.” Why? Because this is considered to be an act of “micro-aggression” against minorities and women.

Back in the 1980s – early 1990s I watched a lot of American movies. Video salons and independent movie channels suddenly became all the rage. They’d run American movies with their horrible bootleg translations, and all the kids would use any opportunity to watch them. I still can hear the voices of the men who created the voice overs.

What I found especially curious is how obsessively these movies (again, these were all from the 1980s and very early 1990s) promoted the idea that any human contact is potentially fraught with horrible danger. We were experiencing enormous social upheaval and a huge spike in street crime as the government withdrew from policing almost entirely, yet we had nothing like this terror of other human beings that I was seeing in these movies.

Now I’m living inside the culture that produced those movies, yet I’m still impressed with the strength of the “terror of others” that inspires inventions like “micro-aggressions”, etc.

We just watched an early episode of X-Files, and it feels really weird how back when I was 17, Mulder looked very old and attractive. And now he looks very young and kind of ugly.

Gillian Anderson, though, looks massively better now than she did back in 1993. Red hair is not her thing, it turns out.