The fame and profits of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is not letting Scandinavian authors rest, and a male duo writing under the pseudonym Erik Axl Sund produced a 3,000-page trilogy they clearly hope will get as many sales. The Crow Girl is the first ridiculously bad novel in the series.

These two male writers clearly revel in imagery of female degradation and spin out one scene of rape, torture and abuse of women and girls after another for 750 excruciating pages. I’m a huge fan of Law & Order: SVU, so I’m not squeamish. But these writers derive such obvious pleasure from describing victimization of girls and women that I can’t imagine any psychologically healthy person not being repelled by the book. 

Aside from this, the only curious thing about the novel is the depiction of Sweden. In this book, Sweden is a country with a non-existent welfare state, great poverty, extreme sexism, crowds of unaccounted for immigrants wandering all over the place, and sky-high crime rates. It looks like the authors’ two favorite hobbies are fantasizing about child rape and feeling sorry for themselves.

My sister saw people carrying the Soviet flag in Montréal today. She booed them loudly.

Our grandfather was a hero of WWII but Putinoids have appropriated the victory in WWII so loudly and obnoxiously that we don’t even feel like celebrating this year. These idiots are plastering WWII-related imagery on everything, from slippers

to cars

to unsuspecting infants:

Of course, nobody who is not an idiot wants to be part of this insanity.

Obama bashed Bernie supporters in a commencement speech:

You can be completely right, and you still are going to have to engage folks who disagree with you. If you think that the only way forward is to be as uncompromising as possible, you will feel good about yourself, you will enjoy a certain moral purity, but you’re not going to get what you want. And if you don’t get what you want long enough, you will eventually think the whole system is rigged. And that will lead to more cynicism, and less participation, and a downward spiral of more injustice and more anger and more despair. And that’s never been the source of our progress. That’s how we cheat ourselves of progress.

Wow, that’s harsh. But now we all know for certain whose side he’s on.

It’s weird that people complain simultaneously that immigrants take away their jobs and that they don’t speak English well enough. Do they realize that if immigrants follow their suggestion and become fluent English speakers they will squeeze them out not only from minimum-wage jobs in construction and hospitality but also from middle management, sales, office jobs, etc? The only logical position for somebody who is afraid of José Gutiérrez displacing him from his job is to pray that José speak as little English as possible. Or learn from José, if one is evolved enough to do something actively rather than whine.

Hispanic culture is enormously better at fostering human connections than Anglo culture. That’s why even poor Hispanics live longer than poor non-Hispanics in this country. In any job where it’s important for people to converse and relate, a Spanish-speaker is better by default. And a smart person who comes from a less communicationally gifted culture thanks God for the existence of Spanish-speakers in close proximity and learns from them. Which is precisely what I did. And now I know how to charm and get people to like me even though by nature I’m as unsocial as is humanly possible.

I wish people just stopped moaning about how the cruel universe has not made everything extremely simple for them and learned to turn things to their advantage. Instead of bellyaching about Hispanic immigrants, borrow their sociability skills and add them to your unparalleled Anglo capacity for hard-work, perseverance, and sense of responsibility, and you will be impossible to beat on the job market anywhere in the world. 

P.S. Finished the post, went to my blogroll, and the very first thing I found was this very typical post where a person struggles at an incredible length with an extremely trivial issue in the realm of interpersonal communications. And it is only one of a million such posts. The author is originally from my culture, and you can see what it means to be from a culture that is not communicationally gifted, to put it mildly.

What a pathetic, disgraceful spectacle. A bunch of angry brats are upset that mean Mommy wouldn’t let kindly, white-haired Santa bring them gifts.

https://mobile.twitter.com/ABCLiz/status/728381453067759620

The reason I hate rigid people is that I’m one of them and they remind me of my greatest flaw. Today, for instance, Klara started screaming like she never had before. Strangely, she’d stop whenever I took her outside and then would resume screaming the moment we went back inside. I put her in the bathtub, and she stayed silent. Took her out, and she screamed. She wasn’t hungry, sleepy, colicky, or cold. So I was at a loss as to what was bothering her.

Finally, N came home from the store and immediately figured it out: she was hot! Since she’d never been hot before, I didn’t even consider this possibility. Even though I was hot myself and one would think I should find it easy to notice when people are hot since hot weather is my greatest complaint against the universe.

It’s very frustrating never to be able to notice things until somebody takes the trouble of pointing them out to me.

“Why do you never go to conference X?”

Because nobody told me I should, that’s why!

“If you like these sprouts so much, why don’t you buy them?”

Because nobody told me I could!

For years, I’d make an idiot out of myself, putting a hundred used plastic bags into the tiny opening of a recycling bin one by one instead of lifting the lid and dumping them there all at once. Because nobody told me to!

In what concerns work, though, I’m a very original thinker, brimming with fresh ideas.

 

AT&T has realized that customers are finding it way too easy to haggle over the phone and made it impossible to negotiate with the company unless you are willing to subject yourself to in-person haggling at the physical store. Today I decided that time had come to stop dreading confrontation with AT&T workers, went to the local store, planted myself on one of their massively uncomfortable stools, and made it clear I wasn’t planning to leave until I got a free new phone and a reduced bill. 

When the store worker realized that her “My system must be down, I’m afraid I won’t be able to help you right now” wasn’t making me go away, she decided to try to get me out of the store through a tried and true guilt-tripping method.

“So. . . do you have children?” she asked.

“Yes, I have a 3-month-old baby at home,” I said.

“She must really miss her Momma,” the AT&T employee exclaimed triumphantly, sure that this was going to guilt me right into running back home.

But I was ready for her and parried with, “You know, it’s so nice to be out of the house for a few hours.”

When she heard the word “hours,” the employee’s face fell, and she gave me everything I wanted.

Our Klara is so chic that she has never even peed or spit up on anybody without a PhD from a prestigious university.

• I would therefore argue that the corporations promising to boycott states like North Carolina for their traditionalist politics are not so much for LGBT rights as they areagainst arbitrarily restricting lifestyle options, since such limitations are deemed inconsistent with a society comprised of consumer-based self-expression.

Well, duh. Absolutely nothing should stand in the way of a consumer choosing what to consume. The freedom to purchase anything one wants has substituted any other vision of freedom. The idea of gender being fluid would not exist if it weren’t helping to improve sales.

A professor of music is being interviewed for the top administrative position at my school. This already sounds better than his predecessor who had a degree in community building and was shocked to discover that people in China speak like a totally different language.