Klara is obsessed with books right now. Whenever she is having a meltdown, I can always switch it off by offering to read one of her favorites. (Which tells me these are not real meltdowns).

The books she prefers are the ones where she can point out objects and name them or the ones that rhyme. Yesterday, I was reading her current favorite from our Kindermusik class. When I got to the part that says, “here comes my yum-yum, a delightful treat,” I substituted yum-yum with “lentil soup” because that’s what she’d had for dinner. Klara didn’t like the substitution at all (although she’d loved the soup.) She exclaimed “yum-yum! Yum-yum!”, pointing at the page as if to say, “Read what it says! Pay attention to the text!” And she didn’t let me turn the page until I read it correctly.

She also loves numbers and geometric shapes. I had to look up words like pentagon and octagon because it’s a bit of a shame that she knows what they are while I’m kind of uncertain. I mean, I know what they are but only after I actually count each angle. 

Yes! This is fantastic news. Ishiguro is a sensational author and if you haven’t read him yet, do yourself a huge favor and get acquainted with this great writer. 

The easiest choice is, of course, his famous novel The Remains of the Day. It is a beautiful novel and I love it. I gave it to N as our first-month anniversary because I needed to know if he was going to like it. Being with somebody who wouldn’t get it wasn’t an option. (He gave me Haruki Murakami for that anniversary. We both went Japanese for the occasion with the only Japanese authors we knew.)

My favorite novel by Ishiguro, however, is The Unconsoled. I read it 20 years ago, but I still think about it often. I truly wish he stayed with that kind of writing instead of sliding into the overly moralistic sci-fi and fantasy stuff of his later novels. Never Let Me Go, for instance, is very weak and also redundant. The whole thing had already been done by Isaac Asimov and a lot more elegantly, too. Let’s see if the Nobel gives Ishiguro some freedom from the need to moralize as aggressively as he’s been doing and lets him go back to exploring the beauty of the language.

Oh, fuck, so the Las Vegas shooter was the son of Benjamin Hoskins Paddock?? Wow. Why didn’t they just say so? This explains it. 

Reporting is bizarrely bad. There were hundreds of inane piece quoting the shooter’s clueless neighbors whose only claim to fame was that he never talked to them. I only found out who his father was from a Russian FB page. 

What I hate is the expression “digital natives.” The fucker who came up with it probably never meets any actual human beings. Idiot.

The way I work is I take ideas and push them to the extreme to see how far they go. I can’t imagine a person who wouldn’t be offended by something I have written here on the blog over the years. So what? I’m at the same time extremely tolerant everywhere else. People who know me will tell you that they never feel judged around me. Students invariably say they feel very comfortable and at ease in my classrooms. 

Many academics shun engaging with the public precisely because they are afraid of saying something they’ll be hounded for. Who benefits as a result? What common good is being served? A professor tweeted something some people found objectionable and his job contract was rescinded. How is that a good thing?

I wonder what people are thinking when they try to get fired a TA who might (or might not) have posted offensive crap online. The moment you make this acceptable prepare for “You said something objectionable online so here’s the door” to be the answer whenever you ask for a raise, try to unionize, criticize the administration, etc. And even if you’ve never been online in your life, how easy is it to make it look like you are the most obnoxious person on social media?

Also, if employers have the right to evaluate the morality of workers and fire them if they disapprove, how can anybody make an argument against employers who fire people for using contraception? According to this logic, an employer should be able to fire not even just for actual use but also for writing a pro-contraception tweet. 

That’s why I always say: figure out what your principles are and proceed from there. Are you in favor of expanding employers’ rights to having control over your social media activities outside of work hours? That’s what’s at stake here. 

Turns out Klara detests fruit that has been cut into pieces and prefers to hold a whole strawberry or a whole pear, even if it’s clear she’ll never finish it. Just like me! I also only eat whole fruit and vegetables and hate it when people take a perfectly good tomato and quarter it, making it uneatable.

At least, there’s something Klara has in common with me. She looks so identical to N that people laugh when they see them together and go, “Hey, I guess you won’t need a paternity test.” And with me it’s always, “Oh, so she’s yours? Is this your mommy, little girl?” And Klara, who unlike me has a great sense of humor, responds with a sly look, “No! Monkey mama!” And demonstrates her blue plastic monkey toy for people to admire the real mama. 

I have actually wondered whether this entirely unknown to me person called Tom Petty is dead or alive after all. Group emotions are infectious.

For those who read Spanish, here are some of the falsified photos from Catalonia. The worst part is that they stole the photos from 2012 protests. Those same protests nobody cared about when they happened.