I’m annoyed by this article in The Atlantic that accuses talk show radio, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, etc for promoting the kind of rhetoric that made Trump’s rise possible. Anybody can get access to any information they want these days, and if people gravitate towards this kind of stuff, that’s because this is what speaks to them.

I don’t see any poor innocent victims duped by evil talk show radio here. I see people who are getting exactly what they want and have wanted for a long time.

The Norwegian TV show Occupied is not realistic in the specifics but it’s eerily realistic in the underlying idea: Europeans will accept anything, swallow anything, turn a blind eye to anything in order to avoid conflict. They are so comfortable in their status quo and so used to the idea that all the risks attendant on preserving it are shouldered by somebody else that they’ll pretend nothing is happening to the bitter end.

It snowed so hard today that classes were canceled. This is especially weird given that it was +70°F on Saturday and will be +68°F on Sunday.

A colleague wrote a passionate email exhorting the professors to stop working and go outside.

“We will have to wait for 9-10 dreary months to see snow again,” he wrote. “Let’s not waste this beautiful, rare moment by staying inside and writing work emails!”

And here I thought I was all alone on this campus in my belief that a day without snow is a day wasted.

Nearly 20 percent of Mr. Trump’s voters disagreed with the freeing of slaves in Southern states after the Civil War.

I had no idea these. . . erm, people existed, especially in such numbers.

I’m really floored.

One literally can’t turn away for two seconds without weird things happening. While I’m on maternity leave, my colleagues decided to request a new position in Spanish. It sounds like a great thing until you find out that the position is in. . . completely dead and irrelevant Chicano Studies. Maybe one could somehow justify a specialist in Chicano Studies somewhere at a huge school in California that has every other specialist possible and is trying to sound hip in a very 1980s kind of way. But in Southern Illinois, it’s pretty much the most irrelevant thing on the planet. If there are still people who are not academics and who identify as Chicanos, they are not located in this region, that’s for sure. 

It’s always a bad sign when schools abandon the meaningful traditional model of Medieval / Golden Age / Enlightenment / Colonial / XIXth century / XXth century / poetry / drama, etc model and engage in manufacturing weird fields that will fall out of fashion 15 minutes from now. The most bizarre example of this was a professorial position in Disability Studies offered by a Department of Spanish of a certain huge university. The professor in question concentrated on studying depictions of disability in literature. The department has been going to the dogs ever since.

I’m afraid that by the time I emerge from my maternity leave, we will have not only Chicano Studies but also the expired Comparative Literature track at my department. It’s like we are in the business of picking up everything the world has joyfully discarded. Or we could go completely Californian and offer a course on how Spanglish is a real language and it’s perfectly OK to say “diecitres” instead of “trece” because requiring that anybody speak Spanish correctly is imperialist and oppressive.

Bernie is losing hope. The indifference of the African-American community is hitting him hard. He is slipping away from his graceful early – election persona of “enough with your damn emails” into “let me manufacture an email scandal of my own.” Now Bernie screeches – screeches “Speeches-speeches!” All that’s left for him to do is to say “Benghazi” or any equivalent thereof, and we’ll know he’s done.

____________

Rubio is so hapless. He appeared on TV standing under a sign that said, in large letters, “SALIDA” and in small letters “exit.” The poor fellow will always end up in the worst place for him to stand.

_____________

It is not in the least surprising that Trump won the Hispanic vote in Nevada. Republican – voting Hispanics are a lot more likely to come out for Trump than for Rubio. Documented immigrants dislike undocumented immigrants and tend to wish for the border to slam shut right behind their backs. As for Rubio, non-Cuban Hispanics feel about Cuban Hispanics the way I feel about Russians.

As you’re reading this blog post silently to yourself, do you hear an inner voice speaking the words in your head? A new paper published in Psychosis suggests that most people do hear an internal voice when they’re reading.

I don’t hear the words I read in my mind, which is probably why I read so fast. Instead, I see images. It doesn’t happen immediately; I need to get into the reading for the picture to appear. But once it comes, the images are so vivid, colorful and strong that I often have the impression that I saw a movie based on the reading.

And it’s not only fiction that gives me vivid imagery. History and sociology provide very clear pictures of their own. Today, I was reading the new history of Ukraine by a Harvard scholar and could clearly see the faces of the medieval Slavs the author talks about.

What is it for you? Do you hear words or see images when you read? 

I’m back at the hospital for a checkup and the nurse is giving me the guidelines on post-op care.

“No vacuuming, no mopping, you can wash dishes at the sink if you want but don’t bend over to the dishwasher. If you really need to do laundry, do it in small, light loads.”

Given that I wouldn’t do any of this stuff with or without the operation, the conversation reminded me of the joke where a patient asks, “Doctor, will I be able to play the violin after the operation?”

“Well, I don’t see why not,” the doctor says. “This is a simple appendectomy.”

“Oh, that’s a miracle!” the patient exclaims. “I never played the violin before!”

Hormones are the craziest thing, people. During the pregnancy, my hair became extremely tangled. Forget Jewfros, this was one huge, thick, matted mess that remained uncombed for months.

“Please don’t make me deal with it!” the hairdresser begged when she saw it. I reassured her that I wasn’t going to because the only solution for that hair was to pour massive amounts of chemical solutions into it and I obviously wasn’t doing that during the pregnancy. I was lucky to be on sabbatical because I was simply not presentable in human society with this hair.

And then, in the last two weeks of pregnancy, the hair magically untangled itself and straightened out. (I mean, it was my definition of straight and untangled. To everyone else it probably looks very curly.) It just happened, completely on its own. So weird.

What bothers me about our shared political space is how eagerly people react to the superficial, trivial stuff and how readily they dismiss anything of substance.

Take, for instance, the current drama over Kasich’s “women left their kitchens” comment. There is plenty to dislike about Kasich but his actual record as governor never even gets discussed. Instead, everybody descends into a ridiculous paroxysm over an entirely reasonable, casual comment. I’m not even interested in finding out which specific orthodoxy this particular comment happened to slight because these regular bouts of outrage are growing too indistinguishable and too frequent.