I had such a day that when I saw a book titled “Living in a Spirit Filled Life” I read it as “Living in a Spirit of a Failed Life.”

Wow, Patrushev, the secretary of the Security Council of Russia, yesterday repeated the Q conspiracy theory that the United States is not a country but a corporation that murdered 4 US presidents.

Crazy has truly gone global.

Protestantism is a culture of individuality, willpower and loneliness.

Catholicism is a culture of dialogue.

Orthodox Christianity is a culture of joy.

As a result, Protestants try to understand and improve themselves to change the world for the better.

Catholics try to understand the Other and establish a conversation.

And the Orthodox love life and try to express this love. Hence the notorious resistance to change. Why change if everything is gooooood?

Canada? The country with the population of 30 million and one of the most unreliable air travel systems in the developed world?

We recently tried to send my aunt from Montreal to Halifax. It took 5 days. She had a ticket, and everything. It was 5 days after the date of her initial ticket.

Analogies are stupid. Canada is a very different country. Its population is tiny compared to ours. It makes zero sense to imitate it.

Curiously, the genre of “let’s be like the US” is nowhere as popular in Canada, as its equivalent is in the US. And it’s really funny that both pro-privatizers and pro-socializers use Canada to justify their plans.

Poland is giving Leopard tanks to Ukraine. This is what I mean when I talk about leadership. Sure, Poland could roll out a million weaselly, nitpicky objections against Ukraine that of course exist between two neighboring nations.

Take a position and defend it consistently, is what I say. If your position is pro-Russian, then go ahead, say it.

Poland will play a leadership role in the new world order while Israel, India, and Spain, just to name a few, will keep pouting about being marginalized in world politics.

People ask what I think about the riot of Bolsonaro supporters in Brazil. I don’t think anything because both Bolsonaro and Lula stink to high heaven. I do think, though, that there were 18 people who died yesterday because of left-wing riots in Peru and one police officer was burned to death. There are 46 confirmed deaths as of now. This is a death toll incomparable with what happened in Brazil but there’s no hullabaloo over it here in the US because it’s a leftist mob rioting and causing these deaths in Peru.

6:30 am. On every one of the three floors of the house, somebody is listening to a newscast in Ukrainian.

In the novel, a fanatical Baptist preacher punishes his daughters by making them copy a hundred verses from the Bible until they get to the one containing a lesson he wants to teach them.

This is a metaphor for The Poisonwood Bible. Five hundred pages of characters and scenes that already appeared in a million other books culminate in the towering idea to which all these evil colonialists, stupid Southern belles, abused Georgian housewives, precocious cripples, saintly Communists, and wise natives were leading us.

That idea is…

Drumroll…

More drumroll…

Please prepare yourselves…

… “whiteness needs to be erased” so that people can “walk on a compassionate earth unmarked by whiteness” and live in perfect innocence.

Don’t say I forgot to warn you.

The Baptist preacher character is supposed to be the bad guy in the novel. He’s not as bad as President Eisenhower who’s devil incarnate but still really horrid. All he does is try to indoctrinate people into a meaningless, confusing dogma that he doesn’t even practice himself. He only preaches it to feel superior. The author seems to be unaware of how similar her attitude to her readers is to the way the dastardly preacher treats his flock.

In the first half of the novel, at least there is a plot. In the second half, the plot disappears, and there are 250 pages of straight-on preaching. Bad whites, good Communists, bad whites, good Communists – with absolutely no acknowledgement, of course, that Marx, Lenin and the sainted Khrushchev were very, very white. All this unavoidably reaches the point of suggesting that white people deserve to be murdered solely for being white. I said this about fifteen times already but I have to say it again, Demon Copperhead is the exact opposite. Really, I promise. No murders of white people are advocated in that novel.

OK, just one more thing and then I’ll leave everybody in peace with this book. Do you know who causes wars in Africa? Well, white people, obviously, that’s easy. But do you know how? By bringing vaccines and medications that improve life expectancy. More African babies survive, which is a bad thing. Because each additional black baby disrupts the delicate ecological balance of the continent. And that forces Africans to slaughter each other to restore the balance. I heard Kingsolver wrote a whole novel on the impending climate catastrophe, and you can just imagine how delightful that is.

This is beyond bizarre. Not only are gas stoves massively better for cooking (and I say it as somebody who is an amazing cook, false modesty be damned), having two different kinds of energy is crucial for times when one of them is compromised. It’s only smart to diversify sources of household energy.

Who came up with this insane plan and why? It’s going to be mega expensive, it will punish lower-income households the most, and it is plain moronic.

A colleague from Iran visited her country over the winter break and says that for the first time in her life she didn’t need to wear a head covering. The authorities are too scared to take any measures.

She brought me a little receptacle of saffron that has the most amazing aroma even taped up in several layers of bubble wrap.