Opinions, art, debate
A lesbian couple gets beat up in Halifax for being lesbian. The perpetrators are identified in the press as “a group of men.” One wonders, of course, why would random residents of Halifax beat lesbians all of a sudden? This is truly strange behavior for the exceptionally placid Nova Scotians.
Can anybody venture a guess who these lesbian-hating men in Halifax are? It’s such a mystery, I just can’t figure it out. (It’s a joke, of course. I found the answer in the tabloids).
The very fat governor of Illinois made Ozempic and other similar drugs free for state workers. I got a gushy notification yesterday. This will cost hundreds of millions to the taxpayers of an already broke state. Nobody has the slightest idea what long-term damage these drugs do but nobody cares. It’s the current magic pill, and no cost is too large to pump people full of this garbage.
To prepare for her cousin’s visit, Klara bought a Pokemon card pack because he collects them. She thought it would give them an interest in common. Then she discovered that she has no idea how to play them. I tried looking up the rules online but I’d picked up a bad cold on my travels and my brain doesn’t process.
As a result, she invented a bunch of the girliest games in existence to play with the Pokemon cards. First, we sorted them into mommies, daddies, and babies. Then we played a game where we traded them in a way where everybody got their favorites and nobody could possibly lose. Then we told fortunes with them. We haven’t yet started creating outfits and hairstyles for them but I’m sure it’s coming.
Canada Day celebrations in Montreal today are the palest of shadows of what they used to be.
I blame much of it on COVID lockdowns that made people forget what it was like to get together to celebrate and enjoy togetherness.
There is a point in Beatriz Serrano’s novel Unhappiness when its protagonist Marisa goes to a museum and admires a painting. One gets so tired of Marisa’s incapacity to care about anything that it’s a heartening moment when she tries to enjoy a work of art. However, the reader’s hopes that there’s some substance to Marisa’s otherwise vacuous personality are dashed when she explains what she likes about it.
The painting Marisa admires is Hieronimus Bosch’s triptych “The Garden of Earthly Delights”:
She has no use for the first and the third parts of the triptych because a religious message bores her. Instead, Marisa concentrates on the central panel that represents her idea of what the world should be like. Lots of sex in the most bizarre permutations and absolutely no other activity whatsoever! What’s not to like? Interestingly, Marisa herself is not very sexual. Her sensuality is almost entirely limited to food. Plus, she’s on heavy tranquilizers that don’t lead to great libidos. This is not the case of a very sexual woman beaten down by a repressive society. Marisa’s situation is the exact opposite: she’s almost entirely unsexed in the world of extreme sexual permissiveness.
Marisa’s explanation for why she believes that the central panel of the triptych would represent the world at its best is, as always, a meaningless slogan. “Such a world would be diverse and friendly [diverso y amable]” she says, oblivious to how much of an oxymoron this is. Diverse means heavily and often irreconcilably conflicted, grating, uneasy. Marisa is too sociophobic to have a normal conversation with anybody who’s identical to her in culture, language and upbringing. In a diverse environment, she’d be even more lost.
The core of Marisa’s personality is at full view in this scene. She was told she must be in favor of sex-centered lifestyles and diversity. And even though she has absolutely no use for either and actually couldn’t tolerate them, age will cheer for them mindlessly and aggressively. The mystery of women who advocate for the destruction of women’s sports or depolicing is solved! They are all Marisa.
And that’s quite scary.
Spain won’t stop cramming its propaganda down our gullers even at the airport:
I wouldn’t have noticed if the bloody rainbow hadn’t been thrust at us in every public space for two weeks.
I’m starting to suspect that the whole “Pride month” thing is a conspiracy by a group of rabid homophobes.
Leaving Spain tomorrow.
I’ll deeply miss:
– beautiful views
– slow mornings and intense evenings
– walking 10+ km each day
– absence of terrible heat. Normal human summer weather and not the atrocious 8-month-long heatwave where I live
– carrots that taste as they should and not as if they were a relative of plastic
– sweet cherries at €2.30 a kilo. Not a pound. A kilo! It’s $5.99 a pound where I live.
– real ice-cream
– good coffee
– low prices
– sociable people
– books I want to buy
– no insects
– stylish old ladies
– architecture
– indescribably beautiful manicures for €14
– anchovies that are not only edible but actually enjoyable
– ease of buying very comfortable footwear that doesn’t make one look like an elderly duck
I will not miss:
– the perennial “our kitchen is closed and won’t open until 8 pm”
– everything reeking of smoke
– high salt intake
– scarcity of public toilets
– the suspicion that somebody vomited rainbow and Palestinian flags everywhere
– unattainability of eggs cooked overeasy. Or any eggs that aren’t scrambled into cardboard state or poured into scary “potato tortillas”
– shelf milk. I did try it and Lord have mercy
– absence of kids’ menus
– inability to straighten my hair and having to go everywhere with an out-of-control Jewfro
– laundry problems
– sadness and emptiness of malls
– ugly windmills destroying the landscape
– inability to buy a book for Klara
– terrible salads that seem utterly unconnected to the amazing produce
– old men walking around holding hands with very young black boys
– extremely emotional cab drivers
– no Uber except in Madrid
– no Ukrainian flags anywhere
– terrible little Chinese stores on every corner
– being deprived of soup
The reason why the presidential election looks geriatric and disappointing is that we are trying to convince ourselves to let go of the nation-state. We are all collectively putting on this embarrassing spectacle to make the loss not only palatable but desired.
This is why there are no younger, fresher candidates. This is why voting feels useless. Together, as a group of 320 million, we want national politics to be farcical. We really, really want it because we need an excuse to throw away the nation-state. The very first, the most successful, the most impressive nation-state in history has chosen to be the first in pulling itself apart.
Both comments are phenomenally dumb but the “81 million votes” is the absolute winner. I’ve heard actual, real people (with fancy PhDs, may I add) repeat it with happy, zombified faces for years.
Obviously, Biden’s high vote count is owed, in large part, to how many people detested Trump and voted not so much for Biden as against Trump. Many of these 81 million are not passionate Bidenites but passionate anti-Trumpists. Is it a huge surprise that passionate anti-Trumpists exist? Have we not gotten enough opportunities to hear from them that we need to be so virginally surprised at their capacity to win elections?
The exact same people who can’t go a day without mentioning Trump Derangement Syndrome can’t fathom the possibility that this condition drove voter enthusiasm for an otherwise uninteresting Biden.
This is a huge pet peeve because I have two very dear friends who keep advancing this poster’s exact talking point and I just can’t already.
A gentle reminder to Democrats: you believe that women have penises, so there’s no intellectual advantage you can claim here. Humility is always in order until you can say publicly “women never have penises and men cannot give birth.” Whatever lunacy the Trump crowd advances, it has not remotely reached yours.
I didn’t watch the debate live because of the time difference. How did it go? I don’t know when I’ll have time to watch but what are everybody’s initial impressions?
Clarissa's Blog 