I never thought I’d be one of those “keeping up with the Joneses” types but in what concerns Christmas decorations, I really am. When everybody decorated over the Thanksgiving weekend, I was incensed. We should give every holiday its own opportunity to shine and not hurry to the next festive occasion before this one is experienced in full!

I’m not going to cover the entire house with Christmas lights, turn it into a Coca-Cola bottle, or buy a huge Darth Vader that lights up like my neighbors did. But I found a better way to upstage them and make my house stand out with its decorations.

At the local Home Depot, there are these small, cheap projectors that are like strobe lights of a kind. I bought two, red and green, and they make my porch look like a giant aquarium. Here is a photo but it looks much better in real life because the lights actually move:

Sorry for the note of levity but it’s good to explore something warm and fuzzy on a difficult day.

This is turning to be quite an atypical situation.

P.S. So there wasn’t a third shooter?

P.P.S. Journalists are too funny. How can the police know the shooters’ “ethnicity”? “Ethnicities” can’t be determined on sight.

And at the clinic for the mentally didabled, too? God, enough already.

Has anybody heard which organization it was that was renting the facility from the clinic? That might be important.

Let’s share whatever we hear in this thread.

The person I hate with the blinding passion of a thousand exploding suns is the creator of the Chicago Manual of Style. 

This is the most ridiculous, counter-intuitive system of citation ever that creates nothing but dumb busywork. There is no logic behind entering the exact same information into two different places of a paper in a slightly different format.  

MLA forever!

The news of yesterday’s Muslim Challenge has prompted my colleagues with the last names like “Smith” and “Jones” to share touching stories of horrible victimization their British grandmas endured when locals didn’t immediately recognize their pronunciation.

The participants of the discussion are feeling suitably and joyfully victimized. Nobody who is an actual immigrant is participating in the pity fest.

(And please don’t ask why a mention of Muslims in a region with a significant African American population immediately leads everybody to think of hijabs and immigrants.)

NATO has invited Montenegro to join the alliance. In case you never heard of Montenegro – and who has? – it’s a tiny little country in the Balkans with only about 650,000 people.

Normally, nobody would notice because the country is way too minuscule for anybody to care. But Russians, in accordance with the tradition started by their dearly beloved Stalin, consider Europe their property and are now freaking out.

Russia’s Foreign Affairs Minister Lavrov has been raising a huge stink, calling the invitation “irresponsible” and “a provocation.” Russia is promising all kinds of sanctions against Montenegro if it exercises its sovereign right to accept the invitation.

Why these people can’t just mind their own business for once is a mystery. In the meanwhile, in the Russian – occupied Crimea, people are exhorted only to use public toilets in groups of at least 3 and flush once, after the last of the group is done. As we say in Ukraine, these are the people who want to lecture us on how to pick our noses.

Is there anybody more pathetic than Liberal journalists? Trump managed to get them off the PP massacre and onto the last week’s story of celebrating Muslims with just one interview.

Turn on MSNBC if you don’t believe me. It’s so easy to manipulate these losers that even Trump can do it.

All Dem female senators (except Warren, right?) endorsed Hillary for president. No big surprise there. They know very well that women – friendly policies only ever get promoted and adopted by female politicians. Which is obviously not the same as saying that all female politicians promote women – friendly policies.

Plus, Bernie is notoriously weak on women’s rights. Like any honest Marxist, he believes that gender equality will follow from economic equality. And as feminists, we know that’s bunk.

I’m watching America’s Next Top Model reruns, and it’s curious how insistently the contestants are exhorted to “show your personality” and “be yourself.” These expressions obviously ask the women to do the exact opposite: to hide their own self and personality behind the mask of a fake persona. People don’t need to make efforts to manifest their real personalities because they already do that by default.

There is a lot more variation in the body types of the models than in the personality they are told to adopt. For some mysterious reason, “personality” has come to mean being exuberant, gregarious, effervescent, and over the top (i.e. like the way I am.) Everything else is dismissed not as a bad or inadequate personality but as no personality at all.

Here is the paradox, though. These women compete to be runway / photo models. And this is a profession where having an impassive, blank face is obviously more valuable than being super talkative and funny. So the contestants are pushed towards a behavior that will handicap them professionally. Everybody knows this but the socially acceptable definition of “personality” is stronger than any practical consideration.

P.S. By the way, here is a small exercise to determine if you have a healthy body image. Watch a couple of episodes of the show, look at the models’ bodies (female models if you are a woman; male models if you are a man). If as a result of the experience you think, “These models are beautiful. I’m beautiful”, and you feel no tension between these ideas, you have a healthy body image.

Today is December 1, and that means I have exactly one month left to wind down my crazy research extravaganza that has lasted for a little over a year. The house is filled with library books that cover every available surface, my brain boils and gives me the weirdest dreams known to humanity, and the neighbors probably know me as the lady with the crazy hair who walks around in a daze, mumbling and bumping into trees and mail boxes.

One article has been handed it with final revisions completed. Now I have to finish revisions on two more articles, do one last rereading and editing of the book, and submit a book proposal to some publishing houses. 

After that, I’m ready to vegetate for 55 days.