Ooh, just wait until they start editing our text messages “for our own good.”

There was this joke in the USSR. We had 3 TV channels in the 1980s and so, the joke goes, a guy comes home from work, turns on the TV and a speech by Brezhnev is on. The guy sighs in frustration and switches the channel. But on the second channel, there’s the same Brezhnev speech. The poor guy switches to the third channel. The Brezhnev speech is on there, too, but suddenly Brezhnev stops and says menacingly, “who the hell do you think you are to be switching over from me?”

Given the eerie similarities between Brezhnev and Biden, the joke is particularly relevant.

See, for me – and this is a lifelong, unchanging conviction – a person who notices this kind of thing is a dipshit. Irrespective of whether he thinks “no persons of color = good” or “no persons of color = bad.” Because both positions irrevocably lead to bad, immoral actions. The ruling ideology we live under wants to turn us all into these dipshits. If seeing people as painted widgets doesn’t repel you, we live in different moral universes.

Of course, somebody who can come up with a verbal atrocity like “considered as being of color” is also an irredeemable idiot in addition to being a neoliberal dipshit, so there’s that.

As I was waiting for my sister to finish her talk from my office yesterday, I couldn’t help catching a glimpse of a stack of books by Claudia Piñeiro in a colleague’s mailbox. So of course I immediately read one of them. Yes, I’m a fast reader but it’s also very short (128 pages) and reads extremely easily. I highly recommend it for intermediate Spanish courses. You won’t find an easier, more entertaining read anywhere.

Tuya (or Yours in English) is supposed to be a crime novel but it’s not. It’s uproariously funny. I looked at Amazon reviews and, strangely, none of the readers seem to have caught on to the humor. I’m notoriously lacking in the humor department but even I caught on.

Several of Piñeiro’s novels have been translated to English but I don’t know if the rest of her books are funny. Also, much of the humor comes from the delicious Argentinean vocabulary, and I don’t know if that translates well. Tuya is a parody of the “resufrida mujer latina” or “the long-suffering Latin American woman” trope but I can just imagine some dour, humorless academic taking it completely seriously and providing a “feminist reading” of the novel. God, I hope the colleague who bought Piñeiro’s books isn’t planning to do that or isn’t reading this post.

I’m now starting another Piñeiro novel and I’ll report on whether it’s funny, as well.

This insanity was prompted by a single death of a lady in her nineties who, aside from COVID, was probably in excellent health. I have no doubt age was all ready to participate in the Olympics when COVID attacked.

This could all end today if people simply decided to stop lining up like stupid, patient cows.

P.S. If anybody is tempted to use the word “cases” in a comment to this post, I kindly ask that person to reread the sentence about patient cows.