Trump statues. Hilarious!

UN peacekeepers in South Sudan ignored the rape and assault of aid workers. 
Will local authorities subsidize Uber instead of creating public transit systems?

A transcription of one of Trump’s sentences. Garcia Marquez’s dictator characters would be jealous!

A Soviet commercial for corn. Bonus points for those who know why there was this sudden obsession with corn in the USSR.

A weird name for a radio station. 

Italy aims to outlaw raising kids as vegans. Finally!

Everything is fucked: the syllabus. Hilarious!

I was very excited to start introducing Klara to solid foods. I put her in her ergonomic high chair, put a Zara Baby bib on her, and filled an organic bamboo bowl with organic quinoa puree. (I’m 40 and I don’t have any other children, ok? If I want to go nuts with organic bowls and stuff, I will.)

Feeling great about myself, I lifted an organic bamboo baby spoon to Klara’s lips and… realized that she had no idea what I wanted from her. She looked at me with scepticism as I waved the spoon around and commanded her to open her mouth. The whole procedure ended with me collapsed on the floor with laughter and Klara laughing at me from the ergonomic high chair. 

Since then, whenever I put her in that chair and take out the bowl, it’s like a command to both of us to start howling with laughter. It’s really cool because it’s like a private joke we share. I’m sure she’ll learn to eat solids sooner or later but in the meanwhile we can have fun about it. 

The pediatrician insists we don’t use a baby walker and describes scenes of horrible misfortunes that await us if we do. 

It’s a great thing, then, that I have no idea what a baby walker even is. Actually, I thought this entire time that I was a baby walker because I take our baby out for walks. But no, apparently it’s something that allows a baby to move at the speed of 3 feet a second and reach poisonous substances and sharp objects.

Finally, the NY TIMES has found the courage to report that Russians are using incendiary bombs on civilians in Syria. This has been known for a long time: it’s not like you can conceal incendiary bombs. There’s ample footage of their use on Syrians. 

But the ridiculous hope that Russians will help defeat ISIS required maintaining the pretense that nobody could see the terrifying glow of these bombs dropped on densely populated neighborhoods.

Classes begin on Monday but we still haven’t found enough people to cover our Beginner Spanish sections. Since there are no Spanish-speakers in the area, there isn’t much difference between finding a Beginner Spanish and Beginner Ukrainian teacher. (We aren’t looking for a teacher of Ukrainian but if we were, I can’t imagine the process being any less painful.)

When I traveled up North this month, I was overwhelmed by the presence of Hispanic people everywhere. I got to speak more Spanish in those few days in Montreal that I did in the entire year here. (Because I wasn’t on campus, of course.) And I’m just not as happy without Spanish-speakers around.

The nation-state mentality is not quitting without a fight. Right now on TV there started a discussion about bullying and cruelty on social media. Within seconds, though, the conversation was dead because the participants became obsessed with affirming that Americans are crueler on social media than anybody else. 

Twitter, Instagram, and Co obviously know no national borders. It’s impossible to categorize participants according to nationality. I mean, who do I count for? American, Ukrainian, Canadian? What about reader Cliff Arroyo? Or reader Stringer Bell? 

As a result of the obsession with proving that Americans are the most whatever, the discussion of online cruelty failed. 

One of the many shitty things about being Slavic is that our bodies tend to have the capacity to break down and eliminate narcotic substances very fast. Hence the insane levels of alcoholism and drug addiction. (There are, of course, psychological causes, but the physiology makes it easy to accommodate those psychological causes.)

The result of this obnoxious peculiarity for me is that I process anaesthetic with lightning speed. They give me shots at the dentist’s and wait for 30 minutes for the anaesthetic to work. But in 30 minutes it all wears out and I need new shots. And so on.
It took 3 sets of shots for me today to explain how this works. Every time it’s the same story. I try to tell people but nobody believes me until we try and fail several times in a row. 
What’s really weird is that in Canada nobody seems to get this either even though First Nations people have the same peculiarity. 

My teeth hurt like Trump will in November, and some fellow on Facebook chose this moment to annoy me with sloppy arguments. Grrrrrr.

We’ve been hearing a version of this statement about Trump’s supporters for ages:

They want respect because they haven’t just lost economically, but also socially. When they turn on the TV, they see their way of life being mocked and made fun of as nothing but uneducated white trash.

With Trump, they are finding someone who gives them respect. He talks their language, addresses their concerns.

A retired doctor in Russia spent 4 months trying to revive her dead husband  in their apartment by sprinkling him with holy water. In those 4 months, she didn’t let her children visit because she didn’t want them to see the medical / religious experiment under way.