After a year and a half of trying, I finally got the permission to hire a full-time faculty member in French. With one condition.

Prepare yourselves.

No, I mean, really prepare yourselves.

I can proceed to hire a full-time faculty member in French immediately on the condition that I put in the paperwork to close down the French program. Also immediately.

This means I can hire a full-time, unionized person to teach a program that we are eliminating.

Yes, the permission and the condition are coming from the same people, in the same email, and the same sentence.

No, I can’t ask what this means. It’s like those automated banking call centers. There’s nobody to answer questions. Whenever I email or call, I get one of those “your email is very important to me. I’ll answer it as soon as I can” template responses.

I mean, what do I care anymore? I’ll hire and eliminate simultaneously, and then let the absolute doofuses who came up with this genius plan sort out the consequences.

In the meantime, parents who actually care about their kids took them to the park, read to them, laughed together, played, had a picnic, made pancakes, and exchanged goofy jokes.

It’s extremely annoying when people use children to excuse their absolute piggishness. And I mean everybody in this video. They all suck.

Russians are having another totally normal one.

I was making a Twitter report about some bastard harassing a rabbi when I found out that Twitter considers “misgendering and deadnaming” hate speech.

And then people will keep telling me that there’s nothing fishy in the relationship between Elon Musk and the trans lobby.

Ukrainians are installing animal feeders in the flooded out areas:

Tragically, much of the flooded territory is under Russian occupation, and nobody there tries to save people, let alone animals.

Instead of asking Trump why he didn’t build the wall, fire Fauci, put an end to the BLM riots, end the war in Ukraine, crack down on crime, battle homelessness, and stand up to COVID lockdowns, his “opponents” help him avoid having to answer these questions by turning him into a martyr of confused, silly indictments.

The Trump indictments are so idiotic, it almost looks like they are made that way on purpose. Almost being the operative word. I don’t expect complex, multistage planning from anyone involved.

Textbook publishers painted themselves into a corner by adopting ridiculous, aggressive and price-gouging sales strategies in a world where it’s getting easier every day for customers to dump them.

They constantly release “new editions” to get universities to pay again and again for the same bloody textbook.

My university is paying professors to ditch textbooks and use stuff that’s openly available online. I’m participating not even for the money but for the joy of being able to tell the salespeople that we don’t want to hear from them again. I can’t tell you, folks, how supercilious and nasty their sales pitch has become. One salesperson asked me “Do you even care about the needs of your students?” I asked her not to contact me again but she keeps writing me.

Textbook publishing is a dying industry and instead of looking for ways to exist in the new reality, publishers are wiping themselves out of existence by indulging in greed and hysteria.

So who caused the tragedy, the people risking their lives to save the victims or those who are trying to murder the evacuees?

Klara receives every suggestion to get photographed with a character or join every other kid in the room onstage with a truly Victorian outrage.

The laws of heredity are fascinating.