People, I implore you, resist bar code menus. You are paying money to get served. Don’t put up with this crap. In my town, the barcode menu experiment lasted a couple of weeks but customers simply refused to use them and restaurants had to give in. We don’t have to agree to this crap. There’s no reason for it, it’s inconvenient, ugly, and stupid. Nobody is obligated to possess a smartphone. Let’s stand in solidarity with the people who don’t use them.

Give it a couple more years, and the US will ban laughing to commemorate the death of George Floyd.

Does anybody have recommendations for Audible books for a 5-year-old with a 9-year-old’s vocabulary? We are looking for longer books (250 pages or so). Ideally, they should be narrated in a standard US accent. A milder British accent is OK but nothing too hardcore.

If you are not into books on tapes, think about regular books. What did you enjoy reading at 8 or 9? We prefer girl protagonists.

We’ve done all of the Disney princess books already. Many, many times. She liked JK Rowling’s The Christmas Pig, even if I didn’t. Done some Kipling and the myths of Ancient Greece. Now she plays Zeus and Hephaestus with her Dad all the time.

I heard there’s a book called “Green Gables.” Is that any good? Or is it too early? She has a 9-year-old vocabulary but a 5-year-old mind. So no unseemly realities of life for now. For instance, I think she might just be able to do some Dickens vocabulary-wise but she won’t enjoy the stories.

I reconnected with a long-lost acquaintance and mentioned I’d had COVID.

“Before or after getting vaccinated?” the acquaintance asked.

“Instead of,” I answered.

In 1988 – already perestroika but still USSR – I’d go to the underpass and buy a packet of bubble gum for a rouble. Just so you understand what a rouble was, my father made 110 roubles a month before taxes. It wasn’t easy for a kid to come across a whole rouble to spend on illegal underpass purchases.

I don’t like gum, so that isn’t why I bought it. The gum packets had inserts with pictures of Disney characters. But I didn’t know them, so this wasn’t the reason either.

I bought the gum because of the colors. The inserts were very bright, and I’d never seen such colors before. Looking at them was an escape from the drab Soviet reality to a world of color. I stored the inserts in a matchbox and spent hours contemplating them.

A couple of years later we were finally allowed to have “private cooperatives” (tiny proto-businesses), and they flooded the city with neon green and orange blouses and skirts. We all looked like road repair crews but we we were desperate not to look grey any more.

Women were also finally allowed to feel like women and not industrial cogs, and it all resulted in everybody dressing like neon-bright streetwalkers for a few years because we didn’t know how else to manifest our newfound womanness.

The private cooperatives started making shoelaces which had been impossible to find in the USSR. They colored the shoelaces in the same neon orange and green, and we wore them as hair ties, necklaces, and bracelets. It was as if suddenly the whole world had exploded in color.

The reason why I signed up to teach a winter course is because normally the money it makes goes directly to your department. Last year, we made enough in winter to buy everybody a printer and all the books and movies they could wish for. It was so nice! Membership fees, journal subscriptions, research materials, gadgets – I could pay for everything. We don’t get any money for any of it otherwise. And there’s always stuff you need. I have photocopy costs from the National Library of Spain. A colleague is in Film Studies and needs boatloads of movies. And so on.

But now we aren’t getting any of this money. Bupkes, zero dollars zero cents. These winter courses are hard to prepare and teach. We teach 7 days a week from December 20 to January 8. And of course we were only told that the money was being taken away after we signed our contracts and students registered, so it’s too late to get out of it.

I only have 10 students in the winter course but a colleague has 65. Imagine the grading and everything. He only took it on to help the department.

This is “free college.” Thank you, Governor Pritzker.

It’s quite an experience when you talk on the phone to your 70-year-old dad and you hear your 68-year-old mom yelling in the background, “The test is showing only one line! We are fine, it was a false alarm!”

Sad thoughts about Alzheimer’s started visiting me until I realized that retirees now have their own alternative to a pregnancy test, and home COVID tests operate in a similar way.

Instead of real books, our library now has this fake fireplace:

I understand the idea of reading in front of a fireplace. It’s one of my favorite pursuits. But in order to read in front of a fireplace, you need books. And books were destroyed to make place for the fake fireplace. Not surprisingly, there are no people congregating in front of it even though its finals week and the library is very populated.

What kind of a bleating idiot thinks that our students need more screens in their lives?