It’s only when one gets to Europe that one realizes how horribly over salted everything is in the States. A waiter serves you dinner, you taste it and think, “Where is the salt?”

And then you realize that salt is back home with its children, hypertension and heart disease.

So it turns out that it’s not a very brilliant idea to stop a cabbie in Oxford and ask him to take you to the university.

“This is the university,” the cabbie says, looking at one with the compassion usually reserved for the severely intellectually limited. “The entire town is the university.”

I was expecting something more American-like where the town and the university are two distinct entities.

The town (=university) is very crowded  (compared to my town / university). I entered a dinky little hole in the wall and found myself inside a humongous bookstore. It was so huge there were even some books in Spanish, all of which I immediately bought.

Just arrived at Heathrow, exchanged some cash at the currency stand, and left with a puzzled feeling. This is so not what I remember the exchange rate to be from back in 2012. Has the pound sterling dropped or USD soar?

Russians are trying to smear senator Dick Durbin. Note what political party Durbin belongs to.

This comes on the heels of Russians trying to smear Hillary Clinton. Note what political party she belongs to.

If any of this puzzles you, pick up the program of any local Republican politician and compare it point by point with Putin’s. They will coincide verbatim.

And in the really bizarre news of the day, Putin’s party created and is now promoting a “straight pride flag.”

The divorced Putin with his harem of mistresses makes for a very funny defender of “traditional family.”

It seems like purveyors of airport food have conspired to ensure that travelers suffer from acidity or indigestion on their flights. It’s next to impossible to find anything semi-decent to eat while waiting for yet another delayed flight.

If you find yourself in Dulles Airport, however, there is a solution: Chef Geoff ‘ s. Of course, this is not the real Chef Geoff ‘ s but a very diluted version. Still, one can actually feel fine after eating there, and that’s already a big thing.

I just had a very decent tomato bisque and a good arugula salad at this place, and after the horrible food at the St Louis Lambert Airport, this is heaven. Only order the arugula salad if you are really crazy for arugula, though. It’s really fresh and delicious and there’s a mountain of it. And it’s nothing like those horrible soggy wilted things that airports usually call “a salad.”

Putin seems to have finally gotten through to the UK:

The chancellor has pledged in his summer budget to meet Nato’s target of spending 2% of national income on defence every year, up to 2020. . .
George Osborne said he and David Cameron were not prepared to see threats to the country go unchallenged.

This was quite unexpected since everybody thought the UK will continue failing to meet the NATO target.

I’m not a fan of Cameron, obviously, but he’s right in starting to pay attention to the angry neighbor to the East.

Russia vetoed the UN Security Council’s attempt to declare the Srebrenica massacre a genocide. Russians have an enormous resistance to declaring any genocide a genocide but they are especially reluctant to recognize genocide against Muslims for obvious reasons.

So it turns out that there is another huge controversy on feminist websites. This time it has to do with a video by Rihanna. The video is either good because of its intersectionality or bad because of its fake intersectionality.

As you can imagine, there is no likelihood of me watching the video (7 minutes of Rihanna is what I will be subjected for in hell for my numerous sins). There is also no chance I will be able to untangle who intersectionalied whom and for what purpose in the video or in any discussions thereof. But here is an article that makes fun of the whole thing.

Russian oligarch Yakunin will be helping Tsipras privatize the Greek railway carrier Trainose, the transportation company Rosco, and the Saloniki seaport.

This is the same oligarch who has a separate enormous building to house his fur coats on his sprawling estate near Moscow which dwarfs that of any Hollywood star. And now Tsipras is setting him loose on Greece’s last remaining state-owned enterprises because Yakunin is dearly beloved by Putin.