In the end I had to go beyond serving as a wedding general. The person who was supposed to give closing remarks didn’t show up. I had spent the whole panel decorating my journal, answering emails, measuring my blood sugar, and texting with a friend about the Orthodox retreat where we are going on Saturday. Then all of a sudden, the organizer says, “could you please please please do the closing remarks because Gemma can’t get here?”

I had to come up with a way to connect two literary criticism talks with one on children’s picture books, and another on sociological research into experiences of foreign language teachers. And I did. On the spot. It was so good. Everything got connected to everything else and I fake praised the wokest talk in a way that demolished its woke premise. People were taking notes it was so good.

There was a tradition in tsarist Russia to invite a general to a wedding. If you had a general among the wedding guests, it conferred status on you. Retired generals picked up a nice side income by attending the weddings of complete strangers for a fee.

I’m a wedding general at this conference in Portugal. I don’t do anything. I just sit there, snoozing. My name appears on the program and the poster, and that’s the extent of my involvement. Unlike a tsarist general, I don’t charge a fee. Yet.

The reason I got involved is because the organizers, whom I don’t know from Joâo, really wanted me to participate. I have such a packed schedule that it was easier to say yes than explain why not.

“The Iranians had a fatwa against developing nukes,” Joe Kent announces as proof that Iran wasn’t on the verge of developing a nuclear arsenal.

This is comedy gold, people. I’m moderating a conference in Portugal in a few minutes, so I can’t finish the video now but even the first ten minutes are priceless.

I watched the beginning of Tucker’s interview with Joe Kent, and I bemoan Trump’s clinical incapacity to hire intelligent people.

Before Democrat readers perk up, please remember that Biden hired a crossdresser who stole luggage for the nuclear waste office, so let’s not get too smug on either side.

Kent said something along the lines of “even if Israel attacked Iran, we could have back channeled it to the Iranians that, hey, it wasn’t us.” He had time to think about it, although I’m sure that he’s not very familiar with the concept of thinking, and he came up with this kindergarten level lisping childishness? “It wasn’t me who did it, Mommy, it was Johnny.” Iran has bombed UAE and Bahrain who clearly “didn’t do it.” So what? How did it help them to not get bombed?

Two administrations, and he keeps hiring these absolute meatheads. Then he has to fire them and they pout up a storm.

The International Studies people painfully need me. Currently, their course is a mixture between Duginism and wokeism. It suggests that people must aim to be global citizens in a multipolar world and welcome climate refugees while hoping for the rise of China at the expense of the US.

I’m throwing away everything, including the textbook. Which text would you suggest as the main book for the course? It’s for next spring, so I have a lot of time.

Kudos to my children on their bedtime-delaying tactics. One of them asked, right at 8 o'clock, why the First World War started. I 100% fell for it.

— Tristin Hopper (@TristinHopper) March 17, 2026

My kid’s go-to is, “Mommy, can you tell me that story again about how you were completely normal during COVID?” The story lasts practically longer than World War I, and I can’t resist the need to share it.

Obviously, peaches are gone from my life forever because of diabetes but I am and always have been like this husband. The “save it for the kids” woman will guilt-trip everybody into infinity with her litany of sacrifices. No peach on the planet will make a child as happy as a content mom who isn’t a sacrificial victim.

Just eat the stupid peach, woman, and stop congratulating yourself for your self-denial because it’s totally fake. I’m not particularly young, to put it mildly, yet I remember women of my mother’s generation go on and on about this stupid last peach. A different continent, a different century, yet women still priss up all over the place about the damn peach.

A minor professional gripe I have is that, in the past, when one used to do book reviews, one would receive an actual copy of the book in the mail. Now all you get is a stupid .pdf. How exactly is one supposed to read and underline a .pdf? This is reviewing for academic publication. I need to do a lot of leafing back and forth and underlining. Also, one chooses books to review because one hopes to use them later in one’s scholarship. And I simply can’t use anything for research that isn’t a real book on paper. My brain refuses to process at the level necessary for this kind of work.

The physical copy of the book was a reward one got for reviewing. These book reviews don’t count as publications and are, of course, uncompensated. One does them as service to the profession. In other words, one does them out of the goodness of one’s heart and to keep things going in the field. Getting the book in the mail was a little bonus in a task that is otherwise academic charity. Academic books cost upwards of $100 each, and such things as book money for professors are long dead in most places.

I tried telling Klara the story of my school observation.

“Everybody at that school was African American,” I said.

“So what?” she immediately interrupted. “There’s nothing wrong with that. They are people, too!”

What is it, folks? Do Americans imbibe it with the air? Is it an instinct to react this way to any mention of black people? There was nothing in my demeanor or affect when I delivered that line that was negative. I had a good experience at that school as evidenced by my earlier posts. My kid grew up observing me with my friend from Africa. I organized parties at our house where everybody except us was black. She has no reason to suspect me of bad attitudes towards black people.

I witnessed this years ago when my friend from Latvia said in front of her homeschooled American son that the best basketball players are black and he reacted like she’d announced she was joining the Ku Klux Klan. “Yours will be like that, too,” she told me and I thought she was full of it.

This is the funniest headline today:

🇫🇷🗳️ INSOLITE | Charles Hittler, maire sortant, et Monsieur Zielinski s’affrontent pour les municipales à Arcis-sur-Aube. pic.twitter.com/OqIeSXFypR

— Cerfia (@CerfiaFR) March 17, 2026

You don’t need a translation. Look at the last names.