I still miss reading Demon Copperhead. I spend time fondly remembering how I felt when I was reading it. N borrowed the book and took it to his room, and now I feel sad that it’s no longer as close as I want it to be.

This is utterly ludicrous. No child needs to spend more time stuck behind a desk. If you can’t teach them what you need in the preceding 6 hours, additional 30 minutes will simply add to the useless torture.

This is exactly what one would do if one wanted children to hate the very idea of reading.

This is the first Matt Walsh episode I have watched in my life, and I’m shocked by the nature of the children’s shows he describes:

I live in a different world, so I had no idea this existed.

As Walsh says, this kind of thing helps one lose the fear of death. But beyond Walsh’s comments and the incomprehension of people in the comments, the scenes from the actual shows – I can’t even believe this is real.

For those who don’t want to watch the show, it talks about a massively popular YouTube channel for toddlers (yes, I know) that features videos where adults behave in creepy and moronic ways. Not political, not sexual but gosh, I can imagine stuff that’s even woke that’s less soul-crushing that whatever this is.

The one in the middle is from Klara. She gathered them in a field by her school.

This observation will probably interest no one but I feel compelled to share it.

It’s a lot harder to practice Orthodox Christianity in North America than where I’m from. What makes it harder is the influence of Protestantism on how the building of the church is organized on the inside.

Protestants expect pews, so Orthodox churches in North America tend to have pews. Pews work for a short, interactive Protestant service. But for a long, very scripted and repetitive Orthodox service, pews are a very bad idea. You end up stuck in a pew, standing and sitting in a confined space, with your face turned towards the altar where not much is happening.

To entertain themselves and make the three hours of this activity bearable, the faithful stick their noses into the brochures where the script of the service is printed. It’s like a weird reading room. Everybody is glued to the booklet. To make the reading possible, the lights are on at full blast. And guess what people aren’t looking at because they are looking into the brochures instead?

The holy icons. People spend practically no time, aside from when they first come in and before leaving, with the icons. It becomes unclear why the icons are there to begin with. My parish is getting a bunch of new holy icons written but what’s the point if nobody will spend any time with them?

This isn’t how it’s supposed to be.

A traditional Orthodox service has no pews. People aren’t supposed to stand in place and stare either at the priest’s back or into a brochure. There is no brochure.

Instead, people circulate. They move among the icons and commune with them in the semi-darkness while the service goes on around them. The music, the penumbra, the sweet smoke, and the repetitive cadences of the service put them in a highly relaxed state where the experience of talking to the holy icons becomes really intense. There’s a bench around the perimeter for the elderly who get tired but that’s it. And the priest doesn’t have to do the service feeling the stare of every parishioner honed in on his back.

This is a clear example of religious syncretism, and as every example of it, it’s not good.

I’m watching the 1969 series Civilization with Kenneth Clark, and it’s starting to get on my nerves. The host so studiously avoids saying anything beyond “Britain and France” that he’s about to tie himself into a naval knot.

“Then Muslims invaded… And we are off to Ireland.” What it is that the Muslims invaded is never mentioned.

“Pilgrims went there on the way to Compostela.” Which was located where, exactly? And it mattered because… No, forget about it. If it isn’t in France, it might as well not exist.

“That formidable lady, Blanche of Castile, mother of St Louis.” And where is Castile? Did anything of interest ever happen there unconnected to bleeding France?

Clark finds more opportunities to mention Japan than Spain, which is frustrating. I’m only on two episodes in. Maybe it changes later on.

If it weren’t for these frustrating omissions, it would be a great series. Everybody should watch because Clark’s love towards medieval art is lovely to see.

I received my Chair evaluations, and at first I was happy but then I saw that one of the anonymous colleagues referred to me as “the most empathetic, kind person I’ve ever met.”

As far as I know, none of my colleagues have recently been discharged from the Wagner Group, so there’s no reason for them to see me as a paragon of empathy. I’m now starting to suspect the colleague was taking the piss.

On a positive side, I’m attending a mandatory meeting where we are told that we must stop complaining about students who hold different political beliefs. “It’s unprofessional to persecute students because you disagree with them,” we are told. “Stop telling us a student is racist or homophobic. It’s not your job to judge their beliefs.”

Obviously, this didn’t just happen. A brave student sued the university for First Amendment violations, and a federal district court recently ruled that her lawsuit has merit and can proceed.

I never thought I’d use the words “positive” and “mandatory meeting” in the same sentence.

Thank you, everybody, for the birthday wishes! I started the day by being threatened with legal action for resigning from an academic association that is now led by an intolerably woke person. It’s all utterly ludicrous because this is uncompensated volunteer work but this serves me right for being smug about how much I enjoy my life.

I’ve been thinking, yes, the neoliberal administrator sucks something nasty. But on the other hand, he’s done an enormous good to our campus. Nobody cares about microaggressions, anti-racism or pronouns anymore. I have literally not heard a woke proclamation in a year. The land acknowledgements that had been adopted a few months before he arrived have been abandoned completely.

An amazing feeling of solidarity has descended on us. Everybody agrees on how much we detest this guy. It’s become extremely easy to find common ground with anybody who works on campus. An uncomfortable silence can be turned into a moment of beautiful union and camaraderie with a simple, “so, what do you think about the new guy?”

I’m starting to think that if he cures us of pronouns and land acknowledgements, maybe the budget cuts are worth it. People mess around with that stuff because they are bored. Once you have actual problems, all that silliness goes away. Nobody worries about their gender identity in Bakhmut. We don’t need to let it go that far but a little taste of real-world hardship might be useful.