Happy 4th of July, everybody!

We have massive plans for celebrating here. There will be a mini-parade in my street, followed by a neighborhood party. The only other holiday on my block that gets a parade and a party is Halloween because people leave town for other holidays. 

Then we have our own family celebration at home. I’m not sure we’ll get to see fireworks because Klara falls asleep by 8 pm, and it’s still very light at that time. 

Good times.  .  .

This had a practical purpose, too. It’s how we used to rewind the tapes. 

Facebook is scary. I just discovered a real Spanish fascist on my feed. Real like in he is posting love letters to Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of Spanish fascism and, according to this Facebooker, “an innocent victim of red hordes.” 

He asked me to friend him last week and I mistook him for a colleague with a similar name and agreed. But the question is, why did he choose me? I never publish anything in Spanish on FB. I do leave likes under the posts by writer Andres Trapiello. Does this mark me as an FB Spanish fascist? 

A few good, long pieces. 

A great article on feminism. 

A nostalgic piece on diners. 

How the left lost its mind. It’s not just the left, though. It’s everybody. 

And yes, dumb Jews do exist. Unbelievable but true. Here is one. 

I got almost no sleep tonight so I decided to make some borscht to reward myself. I went to the store, bought the ingredients, and sat there staring at them for 15 minutes because I had no idea what I was supposed to do with them.

I forgot about borscht! It’s worse than forgetting my own name (which happens every once in a while.) 

The Indian editor wrote me an email berating me for not responding to his previous message. That he sent on Saturday evening. The due date for the proofs is July 9, so it’s not like I’m behind on anything. Are there no weekends in India, or something? I don’t respond to non-urgent work emails on weekends because I don’t see the need. I have never in my life not honored a deadline or asked for an extension. Never, no matter what was going on in my life. So why the drama?

This would have been a great book. . . back in 1998. In 2012, when it was actually published, it’s quaintly outdated. The bibliography has Homi Bhabha (remember him?) but no Beck, McGuigan or Bauman. The author is convinced that the expression “welfare queen” is still constantly used on the news, Oprah’s book club still operates, and dumpster-diving as political resistance is super fresh. My guess is that it was one of those doctoral dissertations that took over a decade to be published as a book and grew old in the process. 

The introduction and the chapter on Las Vegas architecture were quite good, if not very original. But the chapters on welfare and war were so outdated and superficial that I barely got through them.

Also, this author loves to signpost. In the introduction, she says, “in chapter 3 I will discuss [copy-pasted sentence from ch. 3]”. In chapter 2, she reminds us “in chapter 3 I will discuss [the same copy-pasted sentence from ch. 3]”. When we finally get to chapter 3, she says, “in the first section of this chapter I will discuss [the same goddamn copy-pasted sentence that by now you know by heart]”.

If this is the first book you ever read in neoliberalism, it’s good enough. But if it’s not, do yourself a favor and read McGuigan instead. 

I support “Medicare for all” if it’s allowed to exist alongside the system that is currently in place. So if people – meaning, anybody at all, with no qualifications – want to use state-funded Medicare, they should. And those who want to continue in the current system (meaning me), should be free to do that. 

This is radically different from the sucky Canadian system where you are forced to use the stupid state-owned healthcare. 

I never know if people mean the system I just described or the idiotic Canadian healthcare when they say “single payer.” 

This week we will set aside 3 whole days when we won’t buy anything. This isn’t about saving money but about coming up with ingenious ways to solve problems and do things. I’ve done this before, and it’s quite invigorating to come up with alternative solutions to whipping out the cards. I will take all the cards out of my phone cover for the challenge and uninstall the Amazon app for the 3 challenge days. 

Is, of course, the Left. A section of the NYC Pride condemned the Ukrainian government (the one that defends the rights of gays and recently held Ukraine’s first Pride) and glorified the Russian government (the one that encourages the murder of gays in Chechnya, tolerates the concentration camps for gays and legalized persecution of gays on the entire territory of Russia).

In case you don’t know, the striped orange-brown bow is the symbol of Russian military effort around the world. “The resistance”, of course, refers to the Chechen soldiers who fight Ukrainians in the Donbass. The same ones that have murdered tens of thousands of gays just this year. 

More photos of these little losers can be found here.