Clarissa's Blog

Academia.edu tells me that

You’re now in the top 5% of researchers on Academia.edu by 30-day views.

Turns out I am good at self-marketing.

It’s incredible how unprofessional and lazy the NYTimes Magazine reporting is. Here is today’s example:

The explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986 has often been described as the worst nuclear disaster in history. But there are records of several larger and more destructive catastrophes. In “The Age of Radiance,” a history of the nuclear era, Craig Nelson cites a 1957 plutonium-plant accident in the Ural Mountains that irradiated an area 14 times as large as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. There are other examples, too, but these accidents weren’t publicized, because they took place in the U.S.S.R. during the secretive era before glasnost. So what makes Chernobyl history’s worst? It’s the fact that we all know about it.

Five minutes with Google would have informed the idiot who wrote this piece that the Kyshtym contamination ranks as Level 6 at the International Nuclear Event Scale while Chernobyl and Fukushima rank as Level 7 for the reason that Chernobyl and Fukushima occurred in much more densely populated areas. Chelyabinsk-40 had been purposefully built in the middle of nowhere (which in Russia means to the East of the Urals Mountains) and didn’t even have a name of its own because it’s not a real city. It’s a plant with an artificially created settlement that serviced  people who worked there. A real, living city was not wiped out of existence at Chelyabinsk-40.

Fukushima is not mentioned here at all as if it were completely non-existent. Chernobyl had, indeed, been “described as the worst nuclear disaster in history” in the past but then Fukushima happened and changed that. Gosh, it’s like, go do a simple search of nuclear catastrophes, and you will be enlightened.

And Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, who on Monday became the first senator to give birth while in office, has been pressing to change a Senate prohibition on bringing children onto the floor, which could impede a breast-feeding mother’s voting.

I think only a brain-dead idiot would bring her infant onto the Senate floor for the purposes of breastfeeding during a vote. An infant gains absolutely nothing whatsoever from being dragged into a chaotic, high-charged, noisy environment full of adults with who knows what bacteriological profiles. If it’s such an important vote, then use a pump, go vote, and come back.

The nice feelings I had towards Duckworth for giving birth at an advanced age have evaporated. Any measure involving children should proceed, first and foremost, from asking how it will benefit children. And this effort of hers is clearly not about that.

Fear of London’s ridiculously expensive real estate market and fear of human connection come together in this thriller. The result is a novel that is as tortured as its repetitively abused characters.

The worst thing about it is that it’s very fake. Is anybody really stupid enough to take on an enormous London mortgage with “a girlfriend”? Especially a girlfriend who is a completely unhinged drug addict? And then casually toss away a job on a dumb whim when one needs to be paying down the enormous London mortgage?

The characters behave like they are in a soap opera, never worrying about money even though they are supposed to be poor, spending no time at work, and concealing everything big and small from each other to create potential for screaming matches.

The only characters in the novel who are honorable, normal, not chaotic and pleasant to read about are immigrants from Iraq. The question, of course, is why people from a place that allows for such great psychological health would need to seek refuge in a culture where everybody is a totally messed-up freak who can’t function without violently assaulting everybody else every 5 minutes. Obviously, the genre rests on the use of stereotypes but here it’s too extreme.

In short: I didn’t like it.

One major difference between American and British mysteries is that in the latter the crimes are solved by studying CCTV footage. So rather than a search for a criminal, it’s a search for CCTV recordings and then for people who have time to stare at them for hours.

In American mysteries it’s rarely a factor at all.

Is that because the UK is a smaller country and much more of it is covered by cameras?

There are some cliches I like but there are also those that drive me nuts. The worst ones are “in one fell swoop” and “chock-full.” Brrr.

Which expressions give you a headache?

Putin is playing a typical S&M (aka domestic abuse) game with the US. He provokes, provokes, provokes, and then finally gets his ass whupped and is content. That is short-lived, though. The anxiety begins to build, and the cycle repeats.

The tragedy is that this is always done at the expense of completely innocent bystanders. It’s a bloody shame that the US allows itself to play this ridiculous role. This kind of game doesn’t end until one of the S&M pair dies. Or leaves the relationship. And that’s unfortunately rare.

I follow this childless couple on FB even though I don’t even know them. They are the kind of people who always travel, go out to new restaurants, bars, concerts, etc. The reason I follow them is because I use them as a gauge for my psychological health.

When I see the photos of their adult late-night outings, I always think, “Wow, that’s such a fun place! And they both look amazing. Cool!” And that is healthy.

If I thought, “I wish I could also do that but I can’t because I’m a parent of a small child. This stinks, I hate my life,” that would be a sign that I’m not in the best place psychologically.

If I thought, “yeah, they are having fun but that’s at the expense of the most meaningful thing in life, which is to be a parent,” that would mean I’m doing really poorly and need to start addressing it urgently.

Klara’s favorite phrase these days is “ugh, my whole body hurts”, complete with my exaggerated intonation.

So yeah. It’s working.