I got all choked up when the audience cheered Bernie for 10 minutes. What a great guy. What an inspiration. 

It may be dumb but I was in tears when he spoke. 

Elizabeth Warren’s speech is fantastic in terms of the content. But she struggles with delivery. The charisma of a great public speaker isn’t there. It’s not a big deal because it’s simply a gift you either do or don’t have, like an operatic voice. 

I don’t like the institution of First Ladyism but Michelle Obama is great. She gave a very powerful speech. What a brilliant, profound person. 

I’ve liked all the speeches so far. Which is strange, I expected to be bored. There are some good public speakers at this convention. They inspire me to go work on my research. 

Heard Cory Booker speak at the DNC. He’s a fantastic speaker. Better even than Obama. Very inspiring. 

But people must have been insane to suggest Hillary should put him on the ticket. She doesn’t have his oratory skills. It would have looked horrible. A more charming, more energetic, younger veep who is a massively better speaker? What kind of a dumbass would orchestrate such a ticket? 

Horrible news from Japan:

A former employee of the Tsukui Yamayuri En (Tsukui Lily Garden) facility fatally stabbed between 15 and 19 people and injured 26 others in his former workplace early Tuesday morning. The center, which cares for people with disabilities, is in Sagamihara in Kanagawa Prefecture, which lays south of Tokyo.

According to the BBC, the man turned himself into police hours after the attack and allegedly told police he “wanted disabled people to disappear.”

What a piece of disgusting trash. I don’t even want to know what this loser thinks disabled people did to him. I hate these freaks with imagined grievances who think they are entitled to kill.

Michael Moore is saying exactly what I am: bored idiots in search of entertainment will do all they can to push Trump into the White House:

Coming back to the hotel after appearing on Bill Maher’s Republican Convention special this week on HBO, a man stopped me. “Mike,” he said, “we have to vote for Trump. We HAVE to shake things up.” That was it. That was enough for him. To “shake things up.” President Trump would indeed do just that, and a good chunk of the electorate would like to sit in the bleachers and watch that reality show.

This is why I feel like barfing whenever I hear people bleat about their lack of excitement. Politics is not a reality TV show. It isn’t supposed to make you feel. It’s supposed to make you think. If you want to get excited, go to an amusement park, visit a casino, Google some porn. But stop expecting the political process to titillate you. 

What poor Bernie never understood is that a great number of his supporters never gave a hoot about him, his ideas, or his program. They are simply very bored folks who have seen nothing but incredible opulence (which they have convinced themselves is utter misery) in their lives, who are bored and want to be entertained. They will boo him out of town if he dares to stand in the way of their entertainment. They’ve had too much bread and now demand outrageous circuses.

Klara has learned to do what, I think, the British call blowing a raspberry. It entertains her enormously. I hope we don’t meet any Brits on our upcoming trip because I know they can be sensitive to this sort of thing. 

Richard Russo is one of the best American writers of today, and I thoroughly enjoyed his collection of short stories titled The Whore’s Child until I got to the disastrous last story. This happens to be the collection’s longest story as well, and it manages to overshadow the great impression left by the preceding truly great stories.

There are plot lines that you should not touch unless you are very sure you have something new and unexpected to contribute. The world of cynical adults as seen through the eyes of an innocent child is such a story line. It’s been done to death, and it only makes sense to disinter it if you know you can do what Ian McEwan did in his masterpiece Atonement.

Not only is the innocent boy in Russo’s failure of a story so cloyingly sweet that I think I’m getting a toothache, the obnoxious little tyke also plays baseball in excruciating and incomprehensible detail. At first, he is bad at it and feels self-conscious. But at the end of the story, he delivers the winning – whatever it is that winners in baseball deliver – and his coach is very proud. Yawn McYawnski to the rescue.

And it’s such a shame that this one story is so horrible because the rest are very good and they helped me see Russo in an unexpected way. But I don’t want to talk about it because I’m still traumatized by the badness of the innocent baseball-playing boy story.

My attempt to hire a TA failed, as well. She decided that she didn’t want the job, after all. I should be kept as far away from hiring as possible.