What the parade should really feature is row upon row of teachers, daycare workers, college professors, janitors and cafeteria workers brandishing automatic weapons and bazookas, riding in tanks and launching little nuclear missiles. That would be really fun.

The sudden interest in HBO owes to the fact that the cutesy doorstopper about terrorists I talked about the other day has inspired the very first TV series made by the HBO Spain. And that makes total sense. Cutesy mafiosos, cutesy ditzes, cutesy drug dealers. The only thing that was missing was cutesy victims of terrorism.

I’m sure it will be a very enjoyable series. I have no idea why people find it so hard to imagine that one can massively enjoy a product and still retain a critical distance from it. We do it every day with stuff like mass market sweets or fast food. We know it’s shit but we also know it tastes phenomenal.

Students in Louisiana thought a math symbol looked like a gun. Police were called.

No, it’s not from The Onion.

A great example of “cool capitalism” is HBO. It sells seemingly edgy content that allows viewers to feel rebellious while consuming the most conformist of ideas. And it’s especially telling that one has to pay extra for this fake edginess. Because being part of the financially comfortable class that can afford to access the “cool capitalist” version of capitalism is a large part of the enjoyment.

And in the meantime, really great, hard-working people experience real and completely undeserved hardship.

Fie has been denied tenure. You, folks, have no idea how dedicated, talented, and hard-working this woman is.

And it’s done under some completely bogus excuse about enrollments. The truth is that the decision is probably completely political but the school is too shy to say it honestly. Bastards.

I actually went to the bank in yoga pants. Hee hee. I put a very fancy spring coat on top, but still.

I’m feeling very local.

“Everybody only writes about success!” N protested. “If there is a discussion of failure, it’s only in the context of how it was overcome. Nobody writes about how they failed and failed and never overcame anything.”

So I introduced him to the genre of quit lit. Currently, the field of history is experiencing a boom in it. It’s exactly like every contribution to the genre: verbose, overwrought, self-pitying and superficial.

Needless to say, N was stunned because the phenomenon is unbelievable the first time you come across it.