Ahead of a talk from conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at UC Berkeley, a letter has been sent by the university to students, faculty and staff, stating that counseling services will be made available to those who feel “threatened or harrassed” by certain speakers. “We are deeply concerned about the impact some speakers may have on individuals’ sense of safety and belonging,” the letter states.

And you are going to tell me this place hasn’t turned into a total joke? They haven’t been able to teach or produce any research in the past decade, so they hypercompensate with these childish tantrums. It’s their recruitment strategy. They no longer can attract good scholars, so they try to recruit students who aren’t looking to learn. They cater to the rich brats with an exaggerated sense of grievance against the world that fails to celebrate their magnificence as much as they want. 

The farmer I tried to buy 2lbs of garlic from reacted as if I asked him to engage in unnatural sexual practiced with his tractor. Have people never heard of pickled garlic? This is rural Midwest, I thought people pickled garlic for fun. 

I did finally wrench my 2lbs of garlic from the farmer, by the way.

In 1932, Stalin was obsessed with getting money to fund the big war he was planning. As part of his money-making activities that year, he was not only starving 8,000,000 Ukrainians to death but also trying to attract Western tourists with posters like this one:

It looks like cars were allowed onto the Red Square back then but I don’t know if it’s true or part of poetic licence. Today they aren’t, of course. Neither are pedestrians unless there is a special dispensation. 

One of the very few good things about Facebook is this group called “Soviet Art.” They never say anything, just share art from the Soviet era.

This is a painting by artist Ivan Vladimirov titled “Tsar’s Box at the Theater” (1918).

I’d love to know what they were watching. 

Did Irma get to Fort Myers? What’s its strength right now?

I’m very worried. It’s a lot harder to accept when it’s a place you know well.

My favorite nursery song is “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, once I caught a fish alive” because it’s the only one I can sing without going horribly off-key. I’m a singer from hell but I have great hearing and suffer whenever anybody sings off-key. The reason why I can sing this particular song is that I saw the score. Maybe I should buy a book of scores for these nursery rhymes and peruse it. 

There must be something wrong with an introduction to a new edition of a novel if I read it and think, “God, what a bad novel. I so don’t want to read it” only to start reading the novel and discover that it’s incredibly good.

I’m reviewing yet another book, and God, the writing is just killing me. It’s an important subject, I’m glad the book exists, but it’s so badly written that I can’t read more than a paragraph before needing a break. It’s full of sentences like “This poet’s work is very important work and he worked on it tirelessly, leaving a vast stock of important work.” 

I don’t know how to allude to this issue without sounding harsh but seriously, folks, how can one remain so completely unaware that this is not the way to write literary criticism?

As I mentioned before, our Chancellor is trying to give himself a raise while denying a puny little cost of living increase to everybody who is not an administrator or with the School of Pharmacy.

It’s during times like these that one realizes how good it is to be part of a union. I don’t feel in the least stressed because I know I’m not alone. There are many people who are working together to defeat the Trump-like little tyrant who is our top administrator. I do my small part and rely on others to do the rest. We are all in the same boat, nobody is isolated or left struggling in misery while everybody else pretends it’s not happening (like when people started to be kicked out by their doctors one by one and there was no union yet to stand in solidarity.)

Look at what’s happening in Florida. People need people. The neoliberal mentality of isolation and competitiveness as the highest forms of existence is defective. It’s downright dangerous at times. 

The only thing I like about Facebook is that it warns you that you are overusing it. It just told me, “You’ve posted for 2 days in a row, and everybody is noticing!” So OK, point taken, I’m going away. 

If only Amazon did that. Like in, “you already bought a book yesterday. Are you sure you need a new one? Have you read the previous one already? Really? Everybody is noticing that you haven’t.”