We watched the animated movie Scrooge (2022) as our New Year’s activity, and while the songs are nice and actors have beautiful singing voices, the visual effects are so overwhelming that they are almost epilepsy-inducing. Whoever belongs to the intended audience of over-stimulated screen victims, I feel bad for them. As it is, I had to look away for at least 70% of the movie.

Half of the population of Dickensian London in this movie is black and at least a third is severely obese.

A timeless, beautiful story was drowned in opulent, overstuffed, insistent self-obsession.

The Patient’s Secret by the bestselling Canadian author is the best mystery I have read in years, and that’s saying a lot because I read a crapton of them. The novel has twists even I didn’t anticipate, and at this point I usually anticipate all of them.

Reading a huge number of suburban murder dramas like this one helps one notice that they are imbued with the anxiety over who deserves to belong to the shrinking middle class and who doesn’t. It’s very easy to fall out of it but increasingly hard to claw your way back in. And it isn’t about justice or fairness. If you can wear a daily corset of self-control and self-monitoring, you have a chance. If you want to indulge yourself and avoid boundaries, you will be forever excluded. These popular bestsellers are rulebooks for living in fluidity.

Even in Squid Game 2, there’s a trans character who is, of course, absolutely saintly. One can’t hide from this crap anywhere.

In 1979, Rhodesia elected its first black Prime Minister, Bishop Muzorewa. The Carter administration branded him a “neo fascist” because he was politically centrist. Instead, Carter wanted the bloodthirsty Mugabe to be installed. Unlike most other things, Carter was successful at this goal, and Mugabe took control of the country.

What I find instructive in this story is that leftists don’t learn new tricks. Decades go by, and their only argument is that everybody who disagrees with them is a racist and a fascist. That they managed to get such cultural ascendance on nothing but name-calling and claims of deep sensitivity is shocking.

See? I told you. They want to play the squid game, poor bastards. And the saddest thing is that this dude is like the flabby 60-year-old in season 2. With these intellectual limitations, poor verbal skills, and looking 20 years older than his actual age, he’s not all that competitive. But he’s very sure he is precisely because the country he scoffs at provided him with opportunities. And in return, he wants to throw it onto a garbage heap.

Is anybody on here watching Squid Game 2? I really identify with the main character who’s standing in front of a crowd, yelling “People, don’t play with neoliberalism. I’ll win but you won’t. Stop and go home!’ And people roar, “No, we want to play! This is winnable!”

Ian Smith’s memoir of the handover of Rhodesia to Soviet-backed Mugabe is a depressing account. It also strikes a little too close to home to read about a naively pro-Western country being handed over by Kissinger and Co to Russians and their North Korean toadies. Maybe I should have waited to read the book to avoid being haunted by the similarities.

After reading Bitter Harvest, I’m not sure to what extent there actually was a Cold War. The British and the Americans seemed hell-bent on handing large swatches of the world into Soviet control. But at least I now have an answer to a question that puzzled me for years. The USSR I grew up in was mismanaged, bumbling and inept. Having physically eliminated most people with well-functioning brains and terrorized the rest into submission, it was led by geriatric morons who couldn’t tell their ass from their elbow even in their better years. How, then, could a country of glorified mediocrity end up controlling half of the world?

Well, now I know. Everything was done by the supposed opponents of the Soviets to strengthen the Soviet cause.

Ian Smith’s book is very long and extremely detailed. Often, it’s a little too detailed, making it hard to follow all the intricacies of the Rhodesian political scene. It’s a commonplace that history is written by the winners. Yet, even though Smith lost every single battle, from huge to minuscule, in his efforts to keep his country livable, his opponents have no defensible position. There’s no narrative of why Mugabe was a better leader than Smith and why the entire free world needed to work so hard to install Mugabe as Zimbabwe’s dictator.

I regularly try to read something about Africa. This, of course, lies on the very periphery of my interests, and time is scarce. Still, I believe one could do worse than acquire at least some basic knowledge about the continent. What I find paradoxical, however, is that our reigning system of morality finds me, a person who only wants to read about Africa out of sporadic curiosity and have nothing else to do with it, to be superior to Smith who loved it, understood it, belonged to it and wanted to make it better. We have accepted that the apartheid of “us here and Africans way over there” is superior to Smith’s belief that apartheid was wrong. He’s the bugbear, the evil racist, and we are good and virtuous.

Talking about poetry, which of the two translations of a snippet from The Odyssey do you prefer?

I’m in the Wilson camp because “a complicated man” is bolder, clearer and more exciting than the clunky “man of twists and turns.” I like that Wilson isn’t trying to fake an ancient Greek mood and makes it clear she’s doing a modern translation.

As a translator, I like making the text my own, going as far out there as possible. Translation is not for the meek or those lacking in perspective.

Today Klara treated me to an animated half-hour disquisition on baseball, replete with terms like outfielder and second base, and I’ll never get over having a completely American child.

I understood not a word of the talk but I did experience paroxysms of cuteness attacks.