While Biden snoozes at boring, meaningless meetings in Africa, Trump is in Europe, meeting with world leaders who matter at an event celebrating the greatness of the Western civilization.

It’s almost like this is staged because it’s hard to believe that the Biden administration consciously pursued the policy of making America irrelevant.

Irrelevant decrepitude versus active engagement. It’s not surprising that the American people chose not to be irrelevant.

I was looking for a good, wholesome Christmas movie to kick off the seasonal activities. The first thing I found was this:

Spoiler review for the new movie Conclave (2024): 

(This may sound like a parody, but it’s not) 

It’s about cardinals that are to elect a new pope. There is an evil cardinal who is conservative and against Islam. There is another cardinal who is good and humble. Then near the end, the good and humble cardinal gives a speech about how we should not be prejudiced against Muslims. Everyone claps and vote for him as pope. Ralph Fiennes character then finds out that the newly elected pope in fact has a uterus, and is an intersex genetic woman. He decides that the right thing to do is to let the intersex person be pope nonetheless.

https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1865179629314548170?t=KspEUUMvYgdOBkB8nvRI2w&s=19

Well, at least I laughed while reading the synopsis. The festivities have been thus kicked off through a bout of laughter.

Very heartening developments:

In Duolingo you can now have conversations with the emo Lily, one of the cartoon characters in the language-learning app.

While I unleash long, confusing German sentences riddled with clumsy errors at Lily, N answers all of her questions with a heavy pause, followed by “sí” or “no”. He can say long Spanish sentences very well but the idea that a conversation with anybody outside of the immediate family might be more than monosyllabic does not appeal.

With me he’s actually very chatty which nobody on the planet believes because nobody heard him say much in years.

Klara also does Duolingo but she despises languages. She’s doing the math one instead. Like my father taught me what a thesaurus was at 4, Klara’s father has been talking to her about heteroscedasticity and beta binomial distribution since she was a toddler.

I had to Google how to spell heteroscedasticity.

Is it true that there are people who are cheering the murder of the medical CEO? Today is the last day of class, so I’ve been outside the news cycle. But we had a department meeting today where everybody was very eager to discuss this murder and the general mood was that the murderer needs to be caught and locked up ASAP.

Is it an exaggeration that people are celebrating? I’ve seen some mentions of this phenomenon but it’s too out there for me to believe it.

When I was 12, my father signed me up for a distance learning program in French. It was very successful in imparting to me a detailed and sophisticated knowledge of the French grammar but you can’t learn to speak if all you do is write and read.

When I moved to the French-speaking Quebec a decade later, I was hoping to buff up my conversational French but I met with reluctance and mockery of the native population. Today, I’m a different person but back then I was a painfully shy little wallflower and didn’t react well to people laughing at me. It’s strange because in Ukraine, which is also a country battling to preserve its language from a larger, more dominant culture, if a foreigner says even just a couple of words in Ukrainian, he’ll be feted and love-bombed but in Quebec it’s nothing of the kind.

I tried enrolling in French courses at the university but ran into the problem of the proficiency test. Once she saw my answers on the test, the French professor said, “You are a native speaker. You don’t need language courses because your French is perfect.” I tried to explain that I’m the opposite of a speaker. I can conjugate flawlessly but I can’t say sentences. I tried to demonstrate my speaking impotence by speaking in my very faulty French but the professor was convinced I’m faking it to get easy credit and I was banished. This is how I ended up in a situation where I can read and enjoy Maupassant in the original and understand people speaking about Maupassant but can’t say, “Excuse me, where are the toilets?”

My gerdan has arrived! Just in time for the meeting where I’ll announce budget cuts.

You can’t figure out the scope of the thing before seeing it on a person, so here it is:

Don’t tell me it isn’t absolutely stunning.

The “g” in gerdan is pronounced closer to a “h” in “hurray.” It’s definitely not pronounced like a g in “gesture.”

I’m not sure if everybody can see the cracked planet over the woman with a cross. This symbolizes the rejection of paganism and embrace of Christianity. Also note that the woman depicted on the gerdan is wearing a gerdan of her own. This particular necklace is from the Catholic part of Ukraine, which is why the cross and the colors are not Orthodox.

The Orthodox part of Ukraine suffered more from the Soviets (and now the Russians), and the traditional arts weren’t preserved in the same way. We do have these necklaces in Eastern Ukraine but I’ve never seen a y religious themes in them. Usually, it’s flowers or even vegetables, very pretty but not menacing like this one.

Our woke top administrator thinks that a secretary (office manager, whatever the term) is an unnecessary job. He wants to get rid of all the departmental secretaries and have professors do their jobs for free. This strategy has already been implemented at the departments of Geography, Mathematics, and Physics, bringing their Chairs to the brink of a nervous collapse.

The administrator who came up with this is keeping his own secretary, though. Some people are always more equal than others.

The color of the year 2025 is excrement?

Thank you so much, Pantone.

Make sure you have a private life. Every so often, do something no one knows about.

Go see a movie alone and don’t tell anyone. Press a flower in a book and tell no one. Drive to the neighboring town, walk around, and come back, and don’t tell anyone where you were all day.

It will feed you.

https://x.com/JustineBateman/status/1864518347892691142?t=k1XFhodAhRmFsJHDt3HhQg&s=19

I do a lot of this kind of thing. A LOT. It does untold amounts of good to my inner peace and enjoyment of life.

Excellent, excellent advice. It’s little things like this that can save people from all sorts of mental ailments.