Totally:

I answered the question “so how many languages do you speak?” six times just this week. I love counting and measuring but if there were were a completely meaningless number, it’s this one. 

I wish people asked me, instead, how many books and articles I’ve published. I’d answer that question six times an hour without getting tired. 

What I liked about Bernie Sanders was that he never claimed the victim status. He was the only one among the leading candidates who resisted the temptation. We didn’t hear how he was a victim of antisemitism, ageism, foreign powers, powerless foreigners, or prejudice against balding men. 

In the meantime, Trump pouted like he was competing for the position of the campus leader of “We Are Oppressed by Life” student organization. And Hillary made herself look ridiculous claiming she was a victim of sexism when sexism was the reason she had become the establishment candidate. I still supported her over Bernie, as everybody here knows, but she reminds me of union-busting factory owners who claim to be Marxist.

In the end, we had to choose between two very wealthy people who competed for victim status. 

Of course, in the imaginary universe where a billionaire can empathize with and defend the interests of working classes, it totally makes sense to have rich kids who think they can empathize with and defend the interests of the oppressed. It’s all part of a mentality that rejects class solidarity to reinforce a classist structure where workers are considered to be so irredeemably dumb that they can’t even articulate their own interests and need the rich to do it for them. 

Klara’s got a cold and she was even running a bit of a fever yesterday so I kept her home today. To cheer her up, I took her to Petco or whatever it’s called. What a great place, folks! We all know how I feel about nature but even I liked it. 

There were mice who all live together in their own house! Plus, there was a very expensive animal called “assorted male chinchilla.” And a very cute ferret that made me feel bad for wearing a ferret hat back in high school. (It was back in Ukraine and you can’t get by without a fur hat. It gets really cold, and nobody had cars.) 

There were also fish tanks and a large tank with beautiful live corals. They were amazing, I’d never seen such a variety. Some were quite expensive.

We also saw snakes, turtles and frogs but the best thing so far were geckos. I love geckos with an uncommon passion, and here there were some very interesting varieties.

I have no idea why people told me there’d be nothing of interest there. The store is fantastic and a great place for kids. 

Events like students screaming down the ACLU speaker are not about freedom of speech. They are about the narcissistic woundedness if the rich who can’t take anything not being about them. They want to consume everything, consume the world. They feel truly oppressed when attention shifts away from them even for a moment. These protesting kids at W&M are Trumps in miniature. Their protests are the equivalent of his tweets. 
It would be great if people stopped addressing patient and reasoned discussions about the value of free speech to them and started giving sharp rebukes about entitlement and condescension of the rich. 

Some teachers in Catalonia have been bullying and publicly shaming students whose parents work for the police. I don’t care whether they are pro or against independence. I don’t care what their politics are at all. You don’t bully students no matter what you think about their parents, you dumb freaks. 

Trump supporters both in RL and on FB are telling me that thanks to Trump you can no longer purchase automatic weapons. And that makes them very happy because Trump solved a serious problem. Where are they getting this? It’s got to be based on something, right? These are completely unrelated people. 

I need something to tell them but this is one argument I didn’t anticipate.

​But tucked into the tail end of the presentation, Google quietly revealed that it had changed the world with a pair of wireless headphones. Not to be outdone by Apple’s Air Pods and their wirelessly-charging TicTac storage case, Google packed its headphones with the power to translate between 40 languages, literally in real-time. The company has finally done what science fiction and countless Kickstarters have been promising us, but failing to deliver on, for years. This technology could fundamentally change how we communicate across the global community.

Oh, I hope it works. At least, some day. 

Yes, I’m really tired of teaching language.

A Russian activist is militating against imported goods:

“For thousands of years Russian people ate nothing but potatoes! We don’t need American things to survive!”

Nature lovers, can you help me identify this snake that is sitting in front of my door and tell me if it’s dangerous. I’m freaking out here because I have a toddler who loves playing in the grass outside.