It goes on in the same vein. The woman who composed the list often writes about robots but doesn’t seem to be a robot herself in spite of her poor grasp of human nature.

In my dating life, I’ve met men who made enormous efforts with candles, elaborately cooked meals, and turntables. And I fell madly in love with a dude who wouldn’t be able to decipher the phrase “buy candles” or consider the uses of hand towels. If it’s meant to be, you don’t really need to try so hard. To the contrary, trying too hard is not very appealing.

Really, the only conclusion N would draw from the suggestion to buy candles is that this is a preparation for electricity outages.

I can’t imagine experiencing the birth of attraction because a man has a throw blanket. I don’t even think I know any men who buy throw blankets for their own use.

If you have to make efforts to convince somebody to want you, that’s not the person for you, is my advice. For somebody who is really into you, your bare walls and diluted liquid soap would be majestically appealing.

I started listening to Joyce Maynard’s most recent memoir The Best of Us in a lighthearted mood. She’s one of the most clueless people ever to hold a pen but she describes her exercises in superficiality in a sincere and charming manner. It’s all good fun, I thought.

By chapter 7, however, the book took a very dark turn. Maynard’s ex-husband remarried and had another child. She wanted to have a baby, too, to equal the score but she was past the child-bearing age. To address this problem, Maynard traveled to Ethiopia and purchased two girls who were supposed to help her pretend that she was “a 35-year-old single mother” instead of a very spoilt and careless woman in her late fifties.

But wait, it gets worse.

Within a few months, Maynard tired of the children and rehomed them with people she had casually met a single time in the past. One wouldn’t gift a pet cat to a complete stranger because the cat proved to be unsatisfactory.

International adoptions are a terrible thing. Rich, clueless people purchase children as accessories, separate them from their families, and often even rename them like they are not even human. Then, once they get bored, they can just palm the kids off on somebody else. It’s very similar to how you sell a used coffee-maker on Facebook Marketplace.

There’s no likelihood that children subjected to all this will integrate well and make a positive contribution to society. Maynard herself says it was deeply irresponsible to allow a 58-year-old single woman with an uncertain income to adopt two kids. She never knew and obviously didn’t try to learn their language. She had a very vague idea of what their actual age was. And the next family to which she outsourced these girls knew as little about them. This is breeding ground for all sorts of abuse and unsavory situations.

There are many abandoned children in the US. There’s no reason not to foster an American child and instead trudge to another continent and purchase a kid whom you don’t understand linguistically or culturally.

Here’s the new video. Canadian liberals sacrifice the queen, Trump’s comments about Greenland, demographic wars in the UK, the humiliation of the West, and the first 100 days of the new presidency:

Roy Larner, the man who fought off machete-wielding terrorists on the London Bridge in 2017, was celebrated as the hero that he was by the British public.

The three terrorists killed 8 people and injured 38 more but Larner bravely rushed to stop them, getting wounded in the process.

But the British authorities didn’t appreciate Larner’s actions. They put him on a terror watchlist and forced him to attend de-radicalization classes in case his experience of being stabbed by Muslim terrorists made him have bad thoughts about them. We all know that bad thoughts about the government’s immigration policy are the true terrorism.

Later on, Larner was denounced as a racist and brought up on charges of saying something racist to protesters in his neighborhood.

As Larner rushed, barehanded, at armed terrorists, he yelled, “I’m Millwall!” This is the name of the soccer club he supports. It’s great he didn’t say “I’m Christian” or “I’m British” because then he’d be punished worse than the terrorists themselves. Supporting a sports team is still a tolerated form of community for people like Larner.

Here is a quote from Maynard’s memoir The Best of Us that describes her dating life in her late fifties:

He always paid for dinner, and it’s a sorry truth that I noticed and liked this behavior.

As a woman who dated extensively for 9 years and never, not once, in absolutely no circumstances allowed any man to pay for me anywhere, I find the behavior Maynard describes to be embarrassing. Whether you let men (or women, or relatives, or rich friends) pay for you is a matter of great indifference to me. Be whoever you are but just be honest about it. If you like men to pay, yippee for you. If you don’t, also yippee. But pretending that you don’t when in reality you do at the not-so-juvenile age of 57 is really pathetic.

First, you cudgel a guy over the head with how you are a hugely independent feminist, and then judge him for believing you and trying not to insult you with offers of paying. I understand if you are 17 but at 57 it’s way too late for these games.

I understand people wanting to close everything down when 3 millimeters of snow are anticipated. But can the closures be announced before 9:30 pm on the previous day?

The forecast has been unchanged for a week: 42 snowflakes will reach the ground on Friday. I understand that this is perceived as a great calamity. “An impending precipitation event” as people refer to it. But I’ve been on vacation and then on a weather lockdown for weeks, and I’m going on another vacation on Wednesday, so it would be nice to know that tomorrow is also vacation. So that I can prepare for all this vacationing.

Kids at Klara’s school watched the Carter funeral today for a whole class period. Is it an American tradition with which I’m unfamiliar? Should I be more respectful towards presidential funerals? I honestly had no idea it meant that much to people.

It’s not a bad thing because now my kid knows the names of all the living presidents. Except for Obama. Somehow, instead of Obama she inserted Ronald Reagan between Bush and Trump. We had a spirited discussion of American presidents at dinner today.

Anton Chekhov has a wonderful short story about a woman called Olga Semyonovna who keeps attaching herself to men and adopting their interests, way of speaking and worldview as her own. Here’s the link to an English translation. The story’s title is clumsily translated as “The Darling” but I’d translate it as “Fluff.” Olga is warm and fuzzy towards her men but also insignificant and never fully adult. She is an imprint of whichever pair of pants appears on her horizon. Such women exist, and we all know at least one. Such men exist, too, and that’s just as sad.

In any case, this brilliantly observed character helped me figure out which of Joyce Maynard’s books are worth reading. She is very much like Chekhov’s Olga, adopting the beliefs of the man to whom she happens to be attached. At the age of 60, she married “an extremely progressive” (in her own words) man and then married him. It’s kind of funny because Maynard originally became famous because she published a long article at age 18 that was quaintly conservative for somebody so young. At that time, of course, Maynard was under the influence of her father. Then, she met JD Salinger and started aping his love of homeopathy and raw eating.

After falling in love with the far-left Jim, Maynard embraced progressivism. This means one can rely on everything she wrote before 2011 (the year she met Jim) as being very good. I read her 2013 novel After Her ages ago, and I don’t remember much but my records show that I detested it with an uncommon passion. Under the Influence from 2016 is excellent but it predates the TDS stage that exacerbated Maynard’s leftism.

I’m very glad to be able to provide this service to the community. By the way, have I inspired anybody to start reading Maynard yet? She is very good. I’m loving her books. Salinger was right when he prophesied that she’d never become a real writer and he was spot on as to why. Still, even though Maynard’s books aren’t art, they are very enjoyable.

For those who will watch tomorrow’s show, I promise I didn’t dress in green because I knew I’d be asked about Greenland. It’s a coincidence.

Also, I’ll probably be invited to a different show to talk about literature on a regular basis. Need to get reading!

Zuckerberg not only recognized yesterday that there is censorship on Facebook and that this censorship has been detrimental, he has now vowed to remove it.

The responsibility for this positive development lies in equal measure with FB’s loss of popularity and the Trump election.

Facebook censorship was still there this morning. For instance, you still can’t share the NYPost article about the rapid enrichment of the BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors-Khan. Let’s see how fast Zuckerberg manages to get rid of FB’s notoriously rabid censors.