I never used Airbnb because I detest staying in strangers’ houses, it feels too Soviet. But now I’m definitely not going to be using it. Airbnb has gone nuts and is asking all customers to sign something nauseatingly called “Community Commitment”:

You commit to treat everyone—regardless of race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age—with respect, and without judgment or bias.

If you don’t sign like an  obedient little child, you can’t use the service . Please note that no business is signing any pledges not to ddiscriminate, exploit or abuse the workers or the environment . We somehow owe a business venture the right to police our emotions or judgments but no business offers us any pledge of, say, offering parental leave or wage growth.
Fuck that shit, Airbnb. Go lecture somebody else on respect and community.

In a Friday call to Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, Dylan said he would accept the award. “The news about the Nobel Prize left me speechless,” he said. “I appreciate the honour so much.”

Speechless for two whole weeks, eh? Of all attention seeking tricks, this sounds like a particularly pathetic one. 

The vocabulary of the Russian language is quite poor. Next to the OED, its Russian equivalent looks like a Kleenex next to War and Peace . The paucity of actual words in the language is ccompensated , however, by an enormous number of suffixes and prefixes. They can be attached to words together, separately, several at once, creating new words that transmit the minutest shades of meaning . I come up with new words on a daily basis because it’s so much fun.

Now you can see why the vocabulary of swear words in Russian is so rich. If you take 30 prefixes and 30 suffixes, how many words can you create on the basis of just 10 slurs? Are there any mathematicians here who can give us an estimate ? Remember that a  word can have a prefix, a suffix, or both.

Several seasoned stylists gathered around me, trying to untangle my hair and envisioning yet another long night of struggling to emerge from the thicket. 

A quiet melancholic barber approached us and shyly extended a flimsy little brush. 

” Ha! Look at him!” the head stylist exclaimed. “All he knows is his male customers with a bald patch and two wisps of hair. He thinks we can do something with his tiny plastic brush!” 

The other stylists roared with laughter but the barber just stood there with his offering. The stylists continued cracking jokes at him and ridiculing his typically male incapacity to comprehend female hair when one of the enormous utensils that they tried to push through a particularly bad knot snapped in two.

” Drat!” the head stylist exclaimed and snatched the small plastic brush from the barber’ s hand to use instead of the one that broke. 

When she drew it through my hair, we all heard the sound of  free, unimpeded movement through the strands.  

And silence fell.

” What the hell just happened ?” the salon owner finally asked. 

” It worked!” the stylist whispered. ” The barber’ s little plastic brush untangled Clarissa’s hair.” 

” It’s a miracle!” the manicurist exclaimed.

Everybody stared at the shy barber. He smiled self – consciously and apologetically and retreated to the male side of the house . 

I’m  the only person left at the salon aside from the stylist ( because my hair needs hours of work), and the music playing is in its entirety from my youth back in Montréal  (” you are my angel, you are my darling angel”, ” banging on the bathroom floor”, ” algo en tu cara me fascina”, etc.) 

It’s a very strange feeling . 

I knew that the losing side was getting desperate but I had no idea how much before they presented a new iteration of the fake ” damn emails” scandal.

And here people were saying Trump was incapable of being funny.

There are two things that make me feel accomplished, responsible and kick-ass cool:

1. Having a mailbox with no unanswered, unread and forgotten emails.
2. Knowing that I’ve done all the grading and there is no more of it to do.

If you want to know why Illinois politics is such a freak show, look up yesterday’s debate between Tammy Duckworth and Mark Kirk. Both have been trying to outweird each other for months and the result is predictably pathetic.

The state is falling apart around them, and these two useless clowns are arguing about such a ridiculous and outdated nation-state trapping as ” Daughters of American Revolution.” These endless appeals to cheap patriotism have got to stop. And Duckworth has  got to realize that the line of ” I’ve been here longer than that more recent off – the – boat trash so I have more value” will eventually be turned against her. Rolling out ancestries is outdated and ridiculous. 

From my newsfeed, I got the impression that the protesters were a bunch of weirdos. All that the million and one sources in my feed mention about the protesters is that they are “defending sacred ancestral sites”, and it’s hard to take this concept seriously.

But then I finally saw a representative of the Standing Rock Sioux on TV and he explained that the protests are about preserving water from being contaminated by the pipeline. That is, the protest is important and reasonable and the protesters are not kooks but people who should be supported in their good fight. I Google photos of the protest, and sure enough, people are standing with placards that say “Clean water!” 

It’s almost like there is a conspiracy to shit on the protest and make it sound like a bunch of weirdos being extra special weird.

One should always go to the source and not trust retellings – that’s the lesson here. I almost condemned people who defend an issue I care the most about because I trusted retelling. 
 

Ukrainian hackers take revenge on Putin.

Kenan Malik is great, as usual. This time he’s great on reactions to Brexit.

Yale Record found a fantastic way to not endorse Hillary Clinton . 

We manufacture our own reality every day. But many people don’t want to own up to their responsibility for shaping their reality, so they project it onto the world. Here is an example. It’s curious how an author who is not a complete idiot is managing not to understand that her story is insane.

“When Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton talk about trade they each appear to envision the same target audience: a 50-year-old auto worker in Michigan or Ohio hoping his job will last until retirement.” True. And so damn boring.

Bureaucratic sex creep. 

If you are one of the few people in the country who haven’t ‘t seen the brilliant “Please reelect Gerald” ad, you totally got to. It rules. 

If you are still not tired of the screeds by wilting flower feminists who pout that men don’t manage their lives for them, here is one.

Austria”s Supreme Court frees a child rapist because the raped 10- year-old couldn’t prove he didn’t consent to sex. 

A bald hedgehog. The text is in Russian but see the touching photos  

David Duke and his buddy Assange.

And in Montana,  a whole family of circus freaks defends a father who raped his little daughter.

Facebook exploits children while parents stand vapidly by.

What if Donald Trump were gay?