A working-class man drove the car with his 3 children into a river. The kids died but the father survived. He had recently been left by the mother of the kids who’d found a better husband. He was demolished, unable to process a sudden loss of his family.

Did he murder the kids to spite the unfaithful wife? Was it a terrible accident?

Helen Garner attended the two murder trials the accused father underwent and wrote a book about it. This is a very shocking case, and Garner’s writing is as good as ever. Yet I didn’t enjoy this book as much as Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The first of the two trials it describes was very boring due to a large volume of technical information. Garner made sure that her readers got a full fill of the tedium she experienced in that courtroom, retelling every expert witness statement in unnecessary detail. As a result, the book is mostly a slog until the last 80 pages when it suddenly starts to shine like the sun bursting through heavy clouds. Those last 80 pages are so good, though, that the slog is totally worth it.

We’ve been talking about beautiful writing here on the blog recently. If you want beautiful writing, read Garner. I’ve only been able to find her true crime books so far but my library should deliver a novel of hers soon, and then we’ll see if she was good at fiction, as well.

Yes, this fits in with my observations perfectly. About 14% of people have a sense of humor and an IQ necessary to realize that this question deserves only mockery.

The rest are sweet, earnest individuals who do not deserve this cruel, cruel world.

I just heard DeSantis dropped out.

And once again neither party can cough up a candidate who is not an elderly man in steep mental decline.

OK, let’s give it another 4 years.

It’s actually cold outside. For 15 years, I waited for a normal winter in this region, and finally it came. I walk around in my furs. Women who drive by roll down the windows and yell, “Beautiful coat! I love fur!”

It’s the Midwest. People live to give compliments.

Many people are upset that Harvard professor Derek Penslar has been appointed as co-chair of the university’s antisemitism task force. Penslar is the author of the famous statement “Veins of hatred run through Jewish civilization” and has made a career out of explaining how violent and nasty Jews have been throughout history.

In short, he has intimate knowledge of anti-semitism as a careful practitioner of it. Penslar was appointed by Claudine Gay’s substitute in the role of university president.

In the meantime, in Ukraine there now exists pizza with 4 different types of salo:

When I left the country, the restaurant culture was just being born. There was a little restaurant that opened next to my university. It was called Burger King but had nothing whatsoever to do with the well-known chain. The owner must have seen the name on TV and liked it. The place served home-made Soviet-style salads that were actually pretty good. We were just coming out of the USSR era, and going out to eat was a practice that people couldn’t even imagine, let alone embrace.

I was making large sums of money in translation back then and going to school full-time (which in Ukraine really meant full-time, and not 3 hours a day like it does in North America). I had no time to shop for food and cook, which still was a very Soviet process in 1995-98. If you wanted chicken, you had to burn off and pluck the remaining bits of feathers, remove the head and the feet, clean the scaly feet, cut off the nails, and so on.

It’s funny that today in America cooking everything from scratch 95% of the time makes you admirable and, in higher income brackets, cool and countercultural. But in 1996 I was countercultural by going to the Burger King that wasn’t to eat beet salad with walnuts and mayonnaise.

And today, look, they have fancy humorous pizzas and everything in Ukraine. That’s really wonderful.

Yesterday I told students that because of the weather and poor road conditions, they could stay at home and send in the class activity by email. The weather was quite nasty, and unusual for this area. I thought they’d all stay home.

But they all showed up. The wind chill, the sleet, Friday morning. Yet everybody came. And you know what? I don’t think they came for me, great as I am.

It’s because this is a translation course. Translation kicks you into the deep focus zone like nothing else. And being in the zone feels good. These are young people, and only one is an athlete. They don’t have much experience in the zone. It’s like I’m feeding them drugs in those translation activities. It’s almost unfair.

I have no idea why translation triggers the zone. Maybe these are two areas in the brain that are close together.

Another thing I noticed, working with tables, even the simplest ones that you can draw in MS Word, can kick you into the zone. I draw a lot of tables that I don’t really need because it works. Every test I design for my language courses opens with a table.

For that to happen, you need to undergo a major change in personality, though. Otherwise, I don’t think it’s sustainable. Can you imagine a “slacks and flannel shirt” man going “business suit and tie” permanently? That would require shoes, accessories. Probably, different friends. No, I can’t imagine.

And it’s OK, I’m still quite wordy myself.

I’ve been writing about this phenomenon for years. Trump could have issued an executive order to ban this practice but he didn’t. Of course, it would have ended up in SCOTUS but that’s great. A discussion of the so-called “birthright citizenship” at the Supreme Court level is long overdue.

Of course, Trump didn’t do that.

Is he promising any action on immigration this time around? I haven’t been following but I’m curious.

A job candidate for my department informed the hiring committee that she is dedicated to “decolonizing the classroom.” When the stunned faculty members asked what on Earth she meant by it, the candidate said that she asks students to turn off their phones while in class and concentrate on “the whole self and body well-being.”

I hate hiring.