In Spanish, if there is a group of even a billion people all but one of whom is female, the group is addressed in the masculine. 

There are some bored, nasty American academics who think it’s their right to mess with a language that is not theirs  (and if you are an immigrant, the language is no longer yours to regulate) and who go into fits when they see gendered adjectives or nouns. In a gesture of extreme cultural imperialism, they substitute the vowels o and a that point to gender with meaningless x. The resulting atrocity is an unpronounceable concoction like, for instance, “Latinxs.”

I once had a group of Latin American students (not immigrants, actual Latin Americans) come to my office who had a spoiled rich brat professor correct them in class when they didn’t do the dumb x thing. They were really angry. Their complex and often harsh reality was being erased to serve the needs of a rich fool who refused to entertain the possibility that somebody on the planet had more pressing concerns than her PC-hissy fit.

Before talking to these students, I never really thought about the x thing. But once I spoke to them, I realized how ridiculous we make ourselves look to anybody who has real problems and can’t worry about crap like gendered pronouns and adjectives. 

I did get the funding for the conference in Texas. But then  I got an email from the organizers that address the participants as “Estimadxs colegxs.” The dumbness of this is hard to explain to anybody with a functioning brain. The “x” is used these days (by brainless freakazoids, of course) to avoid using either the masculine form “estimados” or the feminine form “estimadas.” The really ridiculous part, though, is that the “a” in “colegas” is immutable. It does not depend on gender. So substituting it with the terrified, PC “x” serves zero purpose, even within the diseased logic of the estimadx-ers.

Now I don’t even want to go.

After the groping video, I hope that Hillary is holding at least one more thing up her sleeve. We need something else to come out in the last two weeks of October. Or maybe she is planning to provoke him into attacking yet another individual, like he did with the Khans and Machado. That reliably plunges his ratings. 

What I really loved is how the video was released a couple of hours after Trump yet again asserted that his temperament was the best thing about him. He so set himself up for this one. 

I asked N if he ever met men who talk about women like Trump in the notorious video and he says yes, when he was an undocumented field worker in the UK, he shared living quarters with a guy from Armenia who’d been so sex-deprived back home that he boasted of having had sex with sheep and goats. He talked like that. 

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro on Friday announced the creation of peace prize in honor of late socialist leader Hugo Chavez, and said he was awarding it to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

I actually agree. If anybody deserves to be compared to that dumb fuck Chavez, it’s Putin. It would be nice to think that Maduro is trolling but I’m afraid that he’s serious about honoring the peaceful Putin who declared that bombing Syria is a wonderfully cheap practice for the Russian army.