I love Miami Airport. At the airport newsstand, there are several magazines and books in Spanish. I immediately bought a book. Of course, it’s by a Cuban dissident, but it’s the principle of the thing. They also had a book by Ray Loriga, which is strange because he’s a Spanish GenX writer, and that’s not a compliment. I will be condemned to reading unreformed Spanish GenXers in hell. So I had to settle on the Cuban dissident because the rest of the books were motivational volumes for Hispanic women, and that’s worse than zoophiliac porn. 

Sheesh, I’m so hyper that I don’t want to imagine what the crash will be like. I hope it comes after I get to the hotel. Which by the way is located in a building that was built over 500 years ago. So yeah! Go get ’em!

I always loved saying “y griega”. It was my favorite part of the Spanish alphabet. I don’t want to let it go for some stupid “ye.”

It was probably a Silicone Valley mind that came up with a name for a sweetener that rhymes with “fecal.” 

Sorry, folks, I woke up at 2:30 am and that makes me very hyper even before I had any coffee. 

On the flight I read the story in The Atlantic about this funny kid in the Silicone Valley who sells vegan mayonnaise and markets his company as some sort of a hugely important tech thing that will save the world. The reporter pokes merciless fun at the fellow who represents the Valley culture of crazy startups where kids like him roll out grandiose ideas to get enormous amounts of funding from venture capitalists. For the most part, all they end up producing is rhetoric and vapid dreams. 

I think what the kid is doing is cute and the Valley culture he embodies is not a bad thing. Where I come from the mega rich waste money on nothing but solid gold diamond-encrusted bidets and million-dollar cars they race down city streets mowing down pedestrians and folks in cheap vehicles. It’s great that there’s a place where the very rich are sated enough that they feel like donating part of their crazy riches to fund the dreams of kids from Southwestern Podunkburg. Once these kids get fed and have “a room of their own”, they might actually come up with something useful. Even if it’s just a jar of mayo. 

Also, for as long as these rich bastards are distracted by fantasies of ultra special super duper techy mayonnaise, they’ll stay out of messing with public education even more than they already do, fuck their idiotic minds. So yeah, let them all congregate in their very funny little reservation and try to outcrazy each other into a stupor. I find it all to be very cute. 

In Charlottesville, the scene of white supremacist violence in August that resulted in the death of Heather Heyer, “raw votes cast were up 31 percent,” reports FiveThirtyEight.

What stinks is that it had to go this far for people to wake the fuck up. I’m glad about the Virginia results but now is not the time for complacency and self-congratulation. This is the very first step on what can only be a very long road. 

Back in June, I was at the busy LaGuardia airport and I saw TSA pre check, so I told N how convenient it must be. I just mentioned it in passing, as a general observation, no big deal. But he immediately researched it, got together all the paperwork, filed it, and set up an appointment for me. All I had to do was show up at the appointment and get fingerprinted. And now I have TSA pre check. I don’t have to wait in line or take off my shoes any more.

N is always like that. Anything I mention, he goes and gets it for me or does it. It’s the way my great-grandfather was when I was a kid. I’d make an effort not to ask for anything because I knew that he’d go crazy to fulfill every whim of his little darling.

All of my boyfriends were like this. Don’t get me wrong, they had numerous faults, the main of which was that they weren’t N. But they helped me to avoid becoming a nagging person because I never needed to. 

Thanks, great-grandpa.

I knew I needed an urgent rest when I was reading the reviews of the hotel I’ll be staying at in Santo Domingo and instead of “if you can’t stay at this beautiful hotel, at least go and dine there” I read “go and die there.” 

I love the AILFCH conference because it always comes at the time in the semester when I’m completely wiped out and need a rest. 

I’m leaving at 3 am tonight. 

I’m constantly worried that I’m teaching consumerism to Klara by taking her to stores for fun. But on the positive side, the only store she recognizes by sight and can name is the bookstore. So I feel less guilty.

So. The 100th anniversary of the October Revolution. We are all children of that revolution because so much of what we do was defined by it. 

It’s more than probable that the Western capitalism would not have embraced the welfare state and would not have accommodated the wishes of organized labor like it did if it remained completely uncontested by any existing state ideology. This possibility is supported by the retreat of the welfare state and the weakening of labor after the collapse of the Soviet system.

On the other hand, the uncontestable failure of the Soviet alternative makes it very hard for the Left to try to articulate any way forward that lies outside seeking cosmetic changes to the dominant capitalist ideology.

The most enthusiastically pro-capitalist and rabidly Ayn-Randian folks don’t come from Wall Street. They come from the ranks of those who stood in 3-hour lines for toilet paper in the USSR. And this is the greatest testimony to the utter failure of the Soviet system to compete with seductive capitalism. Whether the Left will be able to restore itself from the crushing blow of the Soviet failure remains to be seen. But the number one prerequisite for that is knowing and understanding the legacy of the October Revolution.

Talking about intellectualism, many people on FB have stopped communicating verbally altogether. Their response to anything is a cutesy, flashing picture. In some threads, there are barely any words at all, just flashing tweety birds, smiling bunnies, and pulsating red hearts. After staring at 20 of them in a row you begin to think you are in a crazy circus 

Some folks started banning pictures in their threads, and I don’t blame them.