We have a beautiful campus.

Everybody is making fun of Potemkin companies in Europe but they are a great idea. Long-term unemployed need serious rehabilitation if they are to be integrated into the workplace. The need for rehabilitation begins after 6 months of unemployment and increases if the jobless stretch is extended.

So have you folks heard the story of Patrick Bronte, the father of the Bronte sisters?

He was one of 10 children in a poor Irish family. Nobody in this family – or in any of the families of poor Irish people for miles and miles around – wanted anything better than working on a farm or, if one was very lucky, owning an ale house.

Patrick, however, did want a different life. He managed to get into Cambridge – and just imagine how much time and effort it took an Irish country boy to prepare for Cambridge – and graduated as one of the best students in his class.

He didn’t do anything special with his own life because these kinds of things need to accumulate for at least a generation in most cases. But Patrick’s brilliant daughters will be remembered for centuries. And their work was only possible because Patrick had decided to leave the farm and go study Ancient Greek and Euclid’s geometry all of a sudden.

This is the great mystery of life. Some people make a choice to smash life into pieces and then rearrange it according to their own liking. And others just keep talking about themselves in the passive voice while life smashes and rearranges them. Why and how these choices are made nobody knows. The great mystery of life.

The organizers of the Oxford conference stuck me in the same session as the talk on Croatia. Croatia – a country I know nothing about – follows me everywhere I go. For some reason, people seem to think that Ukraine and Croatia are extremely similar. Even when a person from Ukraine is delivering a talk on Spain, she is still to be grouped with Croatia. I would think it might make more sense to schedule me to present with Latin America and put Croatia next to Romania but that’s not what happened.

But since presenters on South Africa are squished in with Northern Ireland (and not, say, with Central Africa), I can hardly complain.

“Whenever I look at Richard, I’m filled with hatred,” my friend Jenna told me.

“But why?” I asked. “He’s a great guy, everybody loves him.”

“I can’t look at him without remembering that he sullied my beautiful daughter’s body! With sex! He had sex with her!”

“Jenna, your daughter is 36,” I said.

“Yeah, so what?”

“She is married to Richard.”

“And? What are you getting at?”

“They have a daughter.”

“OK, I’m seriously not getting your point here,” Jenna retorted irritably. “Whose side are you on?”

P.S. This is a family of highly educated cosmopolitan atheists from LA, in case anybody is getting ready to make comments about the Bible Belt.

One thing that bugs me about Damages is Glenn Close’s wardrobe. Why do they dress her so ugly? These clothes might look great on a different woman but on Glenn Close they look hideous. If you get the only talented actress in Hollywood to star in your show, could you at least find a good stylist?

The clothes in the show are used to send a message but in a very inelegant, “let me pound you over your head and then pound some more” way. Glenn Close is dressed to look like a man, Rose Byrne is dressed like a nun, the Katie character looks all hippy-dippy in the extreme. A little bit of subtlety would go a long way to make the show more watchable.

Did you hear that Amazon will be offering free one-day delivery to the Prime members?

Impulse shoppers everywhere are tingling in happy anticipation.

Russians are in fits over the FIFA arrests. Putin is issuing official statements, condemning Americans for persecuting the poor innocent FIFA on political grounds, everybody is experiencing extreme outrage over the arrests.

What’s funny is that nobody has accused Russia of anything in connection with FIFA just yet. But this intense emotional involvement is giving away the secret of how Russia was chosen to host the 2018 World Cup.

So. Several of the nasty stinky FIFA officials have been arrested. Finally.

I’m boycotting the next World Cup thanks to these corrupt vicious creatures, so I say, let them rot.

Author: John Lescroart

Title: The Fall

Year: 2015

My rating: 4,1 out of 10

I haven’t managed to locate any fans of Lescroart’s Hardy/Glitsky series on this blog, so I’ll make the review brief. The Fall is the new addition to the series and the good news is that it is a huge improvement on the horribly bad Ophelia Cut (#14 in the series and brrr, what a bad, bad novel) and the utterly forgettable The Keeper (I bought it less than a year ago but for the life of me can’t say what it was about.)

In The Fall, Lescroart uses the same technique that forms the basis of his really great novel Guilt, which is my very favorite one in the series. But it’s just not as good as the original, and the ending is kind of crumpled. Still, Lescroart is to be commended for coming out of the slump that prompted him to write the utterly boring Ophelia Cut. It’s a good series and the readers are not ready to let it go. Or at least I’m not ready. The author should just get his shit together and work harder.