I don’t know how widely it’s reported in the US but 38 people died, and it’s a tragedy:

Azerbaijan Airlines plane shot down by Russian missile

The crash of the Azerbaijan Airlines plane was caused by a Russian surface-to-air missile, Euronews reports, citing sources within the Azerbaijani government.

The Russians shot the civilian airplane and then refused to let it land. Heroic pilots still kept it up in the air for 500 km, begging be allowed to land but nobody cared.

In short, if you need to visit the Eastern Hemisphere, don’t fly over Russia.

YouTube is sabotaging my views on the pro-Trump channel. The count rolls back right in front of my eyes.

Bastards.

Also, for some reason a weirdly Moscovite accent infected my speech patterns in this video. So even the people who aren’t watching but are listening will have a weird experience.

Please know that I’m not normally like this.

P.S. And of course, the very first ad YouTube shows in this video is for weight loss. I look so weirdly inflated that I’m thinking I should have spoken about Bidenomics and not immigration.

Everything went wrong with yesterday’s taping. I couldn’t use the prefab backdrop, I had to sit very uncomfortably with the mic constantly slipping away. The lighting was the absolute worst. On the positive side, I now know how I’ll look at the age of 70. On the negative side, I now know I’ll look hideous. Usually, when I’m recording I get distracted by how phenomenal I look but this time I was distracted by the exact opposite.

I’m supposed to have another taping tomorrow, so let’s hope that one will be more normal.

Here’s the hideous video and please still click and leave likes to support me in this newly embraced role of Mrs Uglypants.

On the subject of hiring foreign labor, I have witnessed my sister’s 20-year-long struggle to hire Canadian secretaries and after endless drama finally giving up and hiring a Ukrainian secretary to work remotely. Now she’s in paradise (metaphorically speaking), and I’m not hearing any more secretary-related horror stories.

It’s not a money issue as much as it is about not wanting drama. It’s also definitely not about any particular sort of talent or skill.

I have an American secretary, and I’m happy but then I’m an ogre in the workplace, and everybody shapes up very fast because I’m legit scary.

While the American Twitter is engulfed in the H1-B drama, the Ukrainian Twitter is battling over which grain should be used to make the traditional Christmas dish called kutia.

As a result my feed looks like this:

Indian talent, Indian tech bros, Indian talent, kutia with rice, kutia with wheat, Indian CEOs, Indian CEOs, kutia with rice, kutia with buckwheat, kutia with wheat, Indian, Indian, Indian, kutia, kutia, kutia.

I’m going on in a few hours to talk about the ongoing debate about H1-B visas.

For those who aren’t following, Elon Musk expressed vast enthusiasm for dramatically increasing the number of tech specialists brought from overseas. He’s been receiving enormous blowback since then.

I know what I want to say but is there anything you, people, want me to mention? Insights, stories, numbers?

I think that contemplating these two sentences is actually very useful to get a feel for what makes art. Look, for example, at how the words “more vulnerable” in the original slyly undermine what comes after them. The narrator seems to be saying that his father’s advice only stuck because he was vulnerable. Would he have noticed the father’s words otherwise?

Then, let’s look at “turning over in my mind” as opposed to “still think about.” It’s kind of the same but not really. “Turning over” feels different. “More vulnerable” and “turning over” are little hooks that the sentence gets into us, and it becomes part of us, maybe for a bit or maybe forever.

My whole thing is to see these hooks and figure out why they snag me. Life would be a lot more boring if all we had were these straightforward, robotic sentences that deliver information and do nothing else.

No, this isn’t my Christmas table. This is the traditional 12-course Christmas dinner of some lucky Ukrainian who still has his health and isn’t doomed to eating nothing but grass from now and until the end of days.

Not that I’m resentful or anything.

Merry Christmas!

People keep asking how I got my kid to be so into reading.

Here’s how. Between the ages of 1 and 6, when kids are already mobile but can’t entertain themselves for long periods of time, I told her stories. All the time I told stories. My mouth still hurts from all the stories I told.

As a result, she got used to constantly absorbing stories. Reading, as we all know, is hallucinating while awake. Words come in, and your brain starts creating images on their basis. Once you get used to this form of hallucination, to your brain creating images out of words, you can’t stop. It’s addictive.

Now my daughter seeks words to trigger the creation of images by herself. Of course, TV, screens, etc create images for you, and it’s so much easier. This is why stories should come first. Kids need to learn to create images out of words. That’s the number one goal. Then they won’t be seduced by the easy, ready-made images offered by screens.