Turns out 11 Russians have been charged with organizing the recent act of terror in Istanbul. 

It’s not surprising that Erdogan rushed to beg Putin for forgiveness, seeing as Europeans are too busy taking the union apart and putting it back together to stay engaged in the world. 

I got an email from a 27-year-old man in New Jersey who wants to be our live-in nanny. His CV shows that he spent the last ten years going from one state to another and working as a live-in nanny. I wish there were a cover letter that explained his story. 

The title of this post will be clear to my fellow post-Soviet people. 

A fellow fusses in the NY TIMES:

I sometimes get calls and emails from friends seeking help in landing internships for their children. I understand what they’re doing; this is part of being a parent. Still, it’s a reminder that America’s current internship system, in which contacts and money matter more than talent, contributes to an economy in which access and opportunity go to the people who already have the most of both.

Don’t worry, Mr. Fussball. Your friends have already crippled their children to the point where their chance of succeeding at anything other than developing a host of addictions is tending towards zero. Their solicitous parents are handing them a handicap, not a privilege. And no, turning your child into a useless layabout is not “part of being a parent.” It’s part of being an insecure jerk who needs to have a loser child in order to feel more accomplished against such a background. 

I’m not in the least an anti-gendered baby clothes maniac but people are truly taking it too far with pink vs blue.

Klara has many pink outfits. But she also has clothes in other colors because we’d both go nuts if it were only pink all the time. So today I put powder-blue pants and a grey onesie on her for her walk.

Outside, we met a woman with a 6-month-old granddaughter. I told her I also had a girl and that my daughter’s name was Klara. Still, throughout the conversation, the woman kept referring to Klara as “your boy” and “son.” I’d gently correct her, and she’d look at Klara’s blue pants. Every time. (She didn’t see anything but the pants because Klara’s upper body was shielded from the sun by a muslin sheet.)

Her granddaughter’s name is Emerson, like in Ralph Waldo. Yet I managed to retain the information that she’s a girl on a first try. It’s weird that people would be so enthralled by the color blue that they would disregard clear verbal clues as to a child’s sex in favor of what they think the color of the clothes tells them.

The FBI director just said that no reasonable prosecutor would bring any charges against Hillary in the email brouhaha. The soporific scandal is dying down in spite of the pathetic efforts to keep it alive. 

“Opinions are irrelevant. Only facts matter,” he said. 

Hillary is in the clear as we all knew she’d be. 

The article this quote comes from is all kinds of stupid but it contained an expression I never heard:

Kim Mitchell of Mantua, N.J., dropped out of college twice because it was impossible to balance schoolwork with a demanding software-trainer job and her role as lead parent to two children.

What’s “a lead parent”? Does anybody know? I never encountered this before. 

It is prestigious among young men in Russia to be a wrestler. Not a professional athlete but somebody who belongs to an amateur wrestling club. If people know you are a wrestler, they will think twice before trying to bully or insult you. 

Being an actual wrestler is hard, though. So these young men found a way to look like wrestlers without doing any wrestling.

They break their ears.

An ear is frozen and broken, making people think it was broken during a fight. For this purpose, pretend wrestlers invariably choose their left ear.

Riddle: Why do they break the left ear and not the right?

I submitted an article for publication a couple of weeks ago but when an older acquaintance asked what country I sent it to, I couldn’t answer. The journal is located in a country, for sure, but I have no idea which. Because I don’t think in terms of countries when I publish.

Another example. “Would you consider moving back to Canada?” I asked N.

“Which city?” was his response. 

“I don’t know which city. I’m asking as a matter of principle if you’d consider moving to Canada.”

“What’s the difference?” N shrugged.

I started explaining the difference between the US and Canada but in the midst of the peroration discovered that N had fallen asleep. Yes, he’s been getting up for the baby for the past 3 days but still, a discussion of countries makes even my sparkling oratory soporific. 

The dichotomy of nationalists versus cosmopolitans is entirely spurious. The lives of “nationalists” are as cosmopolitized as anybody else’s because they can do nothing to exclude themselves from being affected by global risks. They enjoy every benefit of the global world that they manage to reach and only remember to dust off their nationalist rhetoric when the risks become too daunting and somebody else gets better rewards. The actual, red-blooded nationalism of “ask not what your country” is as alien to them as to any jet-hopping, passport-swapping cosmopolitan.

Confirmation bias is never as strong as when we are trying to confirm the basic worldview we receive from our parents. I was never taught that there could be anything to prevent me from getting everything I wanted, and as a result, all I ever found was proof that everything was within my reach.

Of course, there are also people who believe that children need to be informed as often as possible and in great detail about all kinds of injustices, sexism, racism, anti-semitism, etc that await them once they grow up. They remind me of this fellow back in the USSR who beat his small children to a bloody pulp on regular occasions, telling them that this was his way of preparing them for the world where violence was awaiting them around every corner. This man was justifying his sadism with a self-serving speech about looking out for his kids. And the folks who use words instead of fists to turn children into scared and insecure creatures are not that different.