Yeah, right, aha. Where exactly on campus do they hide looking like this?
People are losing all touch with reality.
I sit through commencement twice a year and …. no.
Eat the Consequences
We posted our minimum-wage job at the lab and got … 89 applications. We had to take the posting down, and now students are writing to ask where the posting went and can they still apply.
This is a result of the state-mandated increase in minimum wage. We have to pay each worker more but the total amount we get didn’t increase. Consequently, the number of jobs decreased dramatically. Students now have to fight it out over a fraction of the job pool we used to have.
I predicted exactly this when the announcement about the minimum wage increase first came out. We were cushioned from the consequences for a couple of years by COVID money but now we are left alone to eat the consequences.
Comrade Stalin at Plaza Frontenac
I went to a very fancy department store on business. I missed my feeding time and needed to eat something immediately but this fancy mall only had a fancy taco place. I abhor tacos and everything related to Mexican food but beggars can’t be choosers. It was either this or a hypoglycemic coma, so I accepted the tacos.
This was the right choice because those tacos had nothing Mexican about them. They were little works of art.
As we used to say, Comrade Stalin is a great chemist. He can turn any great man into a piece of shit and any piece of shit into a great man.
Other People’s History
I wrote about this concerning Spain. You can’t make your history matter to people who are not related to it and don’t perceive it as their own. I care about WW2 because my grandfather fought in it. The war between Peru and Ecuador, on the other hand, means nothing to me. I still wouldn’t deface the monuments if I visited those countries, of course, but then I’m cultured in a way that most people on the planet will never be.
The Las Vegas Problem
The problem with Las Vegas is that everybody who is not rich has been priced out. The shows, the restaurants, the shopping – everything has become extremely expensive. An older couple at church used to go every year but they stopped. They are comfortable but not rich. Now they go to Destin instead. Destin is still too expensive by my standards but it’s not completely unaffordable for normal people.
And rich people don’t go to Las Vegas because it’s too low-class for them. They don’t travel domestically that much at all unless it’s fancy places like Aspen. People who want fancy cuisine, which was unnecessarily unleashed on Las Vegas, will go to Europe. Las Vegas lost its regular middle-class clientele and picked up none of their aspirational demographic.
I’m seeing this on a small scale in my town. We had a very popular and great-quality seafood restaurant. The owners of their building decided to raise the rent to something sky-high. The restaurant couldn’t afford to pay that much and left. And the space has been standing empty for close on a year. There’s nobody in town who can afford the sky-high rent or food at a restaurant that would have to raise prices to swing it.
Denial of reality is the costliest mistake you can make.
Making the Experience
Everything keeps getting better and better. In the olden days we had to get into our car, drive to the nearest video store, look through the (usually limited) available inventory, hope to find something we liked (often impossible if you had non-mainstream tastes), wait in line to pay for it, drive home, hope that the videotape wasn’t busted or too worn out or the DVD wasn’t glitchy, and after watching the movie, drive it back to the store to return it within a set number of days or face a fine.
I have zero nostalgia for these stores.https://x.com/avidseries/status/1952814619564650812?t=T032oqbZUE6Qzxb4v2wWWw&s=19
I have great nostalgia for them. N and I were poor. We rarely could afford to go out. Trips to Blockbuster were our festive outings. I have beautiful memories from that time. It’s one of the most magical times of my life.
You bring yourself into every experience. It’s you who makes it what it is.
Full Circle
I watched Candace Owens interview Milo today and they arrived at the conclusion that Islam is a religion of peace and Americans deserve Muslim terror attacks because they’ve murdered millions of Muslims for fun.
I’ve heard all this from my Communist professor in Montreal in 2001, and I’m laughing so hard, I’m afraid I’ll wake the neighbors.
I’m not calling the professor names. He was a proud lifelong Communist who has the same opinions on everything as Candace and Milo. This will never be not entertaining.
On a serious note, can we get a political movement that doesn’t hate this country and blame it for everything? Is that a possibility at all?
Repertoire
‘Tis the season for mandatory trainings on how to hire, conduct the tenure process and award promotion. The trainings feel like mockery because nobody is getting hired, which means nobody is getting tenured or promoted.
It’s like we get together and put on plays about what academic life used to be.
Candace Owens’ Series on Harvey Weinstein
I’m really enjoying Candace Owens’ series on Harvey Weinstein. At least in the first three episodes that I’ve watched, Candace blessedly keeps her commentary to a minimum and simply reads court testimony and evidence.
The women of whose rapes Weinstein was convicted pursued him aggressively both before and for years after the alleged rapes. They sent him unsolicited, lovingly worded messages, addressed him with loving names, and kept suggesting going out for dates. One “rape victim” wanted to introduce his mother to Weinstein and reached out to come over and get moral support for a breakup. All this after the alleged rape.
Weinstein is a scumbag. I despise people like him. But he couldn’t have raped anybody much after 1991 because, as one of the “rape victims” wrote to a friend, he didn’t have much by way of a penis after a flesh-eating infection and subsequent surgery in the 1990s. While describing the encounter with Weinstein’s non-penis in a letter to a friend, this victim didn’t even hint at anything non-consensual leading to that knowledge.
One of the “victims” claimed that Weinstein raped her for 5 years. In every of these “rapes”, she sought him out. All this is documented extensively in the “victims'” emails and text messages the “victims” themselves provided.
Of course, only a total scumbag would accept sexual favors from these women, knowing that they were prostituting themselves for jobs. But putting Weinstein in jail for rape with a 20+ -year term is shocking.
Tongue Twister
My grandmother Klara could twist her tongue in a tube from both sides. I’ve never seen anybody else do that and I can’t twist my tongue like that even a bit.
The only person I know who does it exactly like my grandmother Klara is my daughter Klara. Who never met her great-grandmother.
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