Horacio Castellanos Moya is El Salvador’s Balzac. He is writing a multi-novel saga where he traces the lives of the Aragón family members from 1940s to our times. If you thought that nobody wrote any longer like Trollope or Balzac, you are wrong. Castellanos Moya has created a rich and complicated literary world where each new novel adds a new piece to the puzzle of the familiar characters.

The preceding two novels in the Aragón saga, Moronga and A Tamed Man, were absolute masterpieces. They were set in 2010s, and show what mass migration and neoliberalism have done to Salvadorans. They are hilarious but also extremely dark. Outstanding and devastating literary feats.

With the new book in the series titled Cornamenta, Castellanos Moya steps back in time but also in intensity. The novel describes the closing days in the life of Clemen Aragón, the father of the Tamed Man Erasmo. It is set in 1972, and the historical backdrop is quaint and not extremely interesting for anybody but the most hardcore fans of the series. Clemen is as comically horny as his son, the protagonist of several of the Aragón novels. You get some useful background and meet a few of the familiar characters (Vikingo is one of them). But I found it hard to connect with the novel because after the heights of artistic mastery Castellanos Moya had reached in Moronga and A Tamed Man, this novel was a letdown.

Please don’t get me wrong. Castellanos Moya is one level extra beyond any of the most talented authors you can think of. His not-so-great book is still a masterpiece that other writers could only dream of writing. But I was hoping for something at the level of Moronga and A Tamed Man, and I definitely didn’t get that in Cornamenta.

One change that I find disturbing here in SW Florida is the proliferation of offensive language in store names, menu offerings, brand labeling, and product advertisement in local establishment. I never had to worry about that kind of stuff here in America, and now I suddenly face the need to steer my child from a litany of fucks, asses, jerks, and worse.

As somewhat of an aside, if you decide to read Sarma’s memoir, please be forewarned that she overuses the f-word to an extraordinary degree. I’m a literary critic and no vocabulary in literature bothers me. But when it’s used randomly and repetitively for no purpose, that is simply bad writing.

Wait, what?

Is he suffering from heatstroke or did something happen that I missed?

Truly, one can’t get distracted for a day in this timeline.

Going through the bureaucratic red tape and the environmental regulations to dispose of these in the US will be costly and onerous:

🇺🇸🇺🇦 Zaluzhnyi: "By the end of 2023, the US had produced over 170,000 Hellfire missiles. Their service life is coming to an end, after which the weapons need to be decommissioned or disposed of. Ukraine can take advantage of this chance." pic.twitter.com/AUFfg0Riuc

— MAKS 25 🇺🇦👀 (@Maks_NAFO_FELLA) July 12, 2025

Instead of getting itself into this quagmire, the Trump administration could simply sell them to Ukraine, pocket the money, and avoid the headache. There’s absolutely no reason not to do it.

Let’s see if this smart, fiscally responsible solution with zero downsides will be adopted.

I finished Sarma Melngailis’s memoir The Girl with the Duck Tattoo, and it’s so sad. I feel terrible for this poor woman. She got married to a gambler who conned millions of dollars out of her. She robbed her own business to give this loser money so he could gamble it away. She defrauded friends. Lost everything, ended up in jail, and will be saddled with millions of dollars in debt forever.

And even after writing a 700-page memoir about all this, she has zero insight into why it all happened. The narrative is completely flat. It never goes deeper than an enumeration of money withdrawals she made in response to the conman’s badgering. Sarma is utterly mystified by her own actions. It is as if the possibility that effects might be connected to causes never crossed her mind. She has no family and no longer owns a business. One wonders what it is that she does all day that the possibility of analyzing her own motivations never occurs to her.

This is a sad, sad story. At times, the details of Sarma’s degradation are painful to read. But she learned absolutely nothing whatsoever and doesn’t seem to know there might be anything to learn.

Are these people trying to be funny? I can’t guess.

How many fired State department employees are going to get paid overtures from foreign intelligence? And how many will be angry and financially unstable enough to take them?

We're gutting a century of American excellence in real time. https://t.co/968t2qFBhc

— Mike Rothschild (@rothschildmd on blu sky) (@rothschildmd) July 11, 2025

American excellence consists of traitors who’d sell out their country for a few bucks? Is that some sort of a joke? The poster is on Bluesky, which means he’s probably not big on humor.

Ethnic clashes have started in the town of Torre Pacheco, population 35,000, in Southeastern Spain. A group of Moroccan migrants brutalized a peaceful grandpa who was walking to the cemetery. The video of the grandpa being beaten and taunted by a group of young louts is painful to watch.

Locals, who have had thousands of migrants brought into their town in the past couple of years, went out to protest. More Moroccans arrived, and now there are large disturbances.

The Spanish media are describing what is happening as “the far right is persecuting migrants.”

I do not advise looking at the videos or photos of the brutalized grandpa. They are not pretty.

Republicans are extremely scared of the New York subway but every time I ride it, its like mostly women riding and at 11 PM tonight and it was like 5 : 1 young women on board.

The secretary of transportation is scared of something hoards of 20 year old girls ride at midnight.

— Darrell Owens (idothethinking on bluesky) (@IDoTheThinking) July 12, 2025

I’m very uninterested in a discussion of the New York subway but I’ve got to ask:

Where are all these 20-year-old women going at midnight and why are there no young men going to that destination? It’s a completely sincere question. What are these “hoards of girls” pursuing alone on the subway at night?

I also wonder if the spelling mistakes are aimed at bolstering the self-infantilization that this guy pursues.

The leader of the Conservatives, Kemi Badenoch, has said she does not believe one in four people are disabled and the term is in danger of losing its meaning, as she used a speech to criticise the size of the welfare state.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/jul/10/term-disabled-in-danger-of-losing-all-meaning-says-badenoch

And she’s right. If everybody is disabled, then nobody is.

My Twitter feed is bursting at the seams with people feeling self-righteous about Badenoch’s eminently reasonable statements. They are drowning in self-pity and clearly experiencing great pleasure at doing it. Being sick, incapable, and wounded is like a badge of honor that they won’t relinquish.

I’m not sure whose side I’m on in this conflict:

These people all truly deserve each other.