So I go outside this morning, and what is it that I see? The rabbit is hanging out around my sunflower garden. I might have to start covering the garden with netting overnight.

I have a newfound appreciation for farmers’ work.

But for the last word, you’d never guess what show this blogger was talking about:

In any case, I regard

the genre of television as completed now. The most critically acclaimed, culturally prestigious, artistically ambitious television show of all time — and judging by current trends, I include the future here too — has culminated in a tacky commercial.

Mad Men is not a bad show in the tradition of Ally McBeal, Boston Legal, and dozens of similar “creepy workplace” shows. I enjoyed it quite a bit for a while even though it fizzled out a season and a half ago and now I can’t even remember what happened in the penultimate season.

But “culturally prestigious and artistically ambitious”? I had no idea there were still people who took television so seriously and could get so pompous about it.

Two Russian special ops officers were wounded in a battle near Lugansk (that’s the city where I was born, by the way.) They were captured by Ukrainians who tried to tend to their wounds. The Russians started freaking out and begging the doctors not to steal their organs. When asked what the hell they were going on about, the soldiers replied that they’d been warned by their commanders that Ukrainians would cut organs out of their POWs to sell them on the black market. 

Now the soldiers have finally been treated and are lying in nice, comfortable beds, giving massive evidence about their warfare in Ukraine. They will be put on trial for terrorist activities. 

Putin, of course, denied their existence.

I swear to God, all I wanted to do was plant a few peaceful sunflowers and get on with my life. Little did I know, however, that in what concerns gardening, everything turns into a bother and a half.

Rabbits have taken to visiting my sunflowers and chewing on them. There is plenty of good, juicy grass, yet they fixate on the sunflowers. I even left some carrots for the rabbits but do they care? No, they just want to eat the sunflower stalks.

So I’ve had to put up a fence. And tomorrow I will be adding a layer of topsoil because the clay – like soil looks ugly. Plus, I will reseed the bald line you can see on the photo. We laid some tubing there, and now the grass isn’t growing over it.

I know everybody hates videos but you’ve just got to see this hilarious video of  a city manager of Lauderdale Lakes, Florida give a class on how to handle the traumatic reality of having to work with women.

For those who really really hate videos, here are some highlights:

• Women ask lots of questions. He learned a valuable lesson on communicating with women from his 11-year-old daughter, who peppered him with questions while they were on the way to volleyball. “In a matter of 15 seconds, I got 10 questions that I had to patiently respond to,” Allen said. Allen says female City Council members are less likely to read agenda information and instead ask questions. He says it’s tempting to just tell them to read the packet, but “my daughter taught me the importance of being patient” even when they may already know the answer to the question.
• Women don’t want to deal with numbers. Allen said in his city they used to have background information and financial analysis on the front pages of agenda forms. Allen says he normally would have presented the financial argument, but that his female commissioners would balk and say “Mr. Manager, I don’t want to hear about the financial argument, I want to hear about how this impacts the whole community.” He said that it may make good financial sense, but if he wants to get the votes, he has to present his arguments “in a totally different way.”

And there is a lot more right here.

NYC is becoming unlivable for absolutely everybody:

FAO Schwarz, the oldest toy store in the United States and a retailer once considered accessible only to the rich, is closing its much-loved Fifth Avenue flagship store in Manhattan, citing rising rent prices.

The city is going completely nuts. Just yesterday I read a long and weepy post about the horrible hardship of living in NYC on a salary of $70,000. This would be insane anywhere but in New York it’s a little less insane.

I never understood why anybody wanted to live there anyway. 

So do you remember the freak who lived in a Walmart parking lot with his daughter? The daughter is now at the hospital after being hit by a tractor.

Will Child Protective Services finally wake up and do something for the poor kid?

I have no idea who this Louis fellow is but the set that is causing so much inexplicable turmoil is mildly funny and very little else. I have no idea why people are freaking about it so much.

Here is the set:

Sometimes, the world just disappoints. First, some blethering fool writes the following bit of smug idiocy:

Middle- and upper-class women who work don’t have time to tidy (housekeeping), rear their children (child care) or cook (food industry), and they have to look professional (beauty care and garment industry). These services are provided by an underclass of largely people of color often living in precarious financial situations with little opportunity for upward mobility.

And then I see one facile loser after another happily reblogging said idiocy, highlighting especially stupid bits with the self-satisfied drool of happy idiots.

Why are people stupid? Why are they not trying to become less stupid? Why do they chirp so much and read or learn so little, if at all?

Yesterday we finished watching The Wire. I believe it was a great idea to turn the last season into a parody of the entire show. Taking the comedic route allowed the creators of the show to lower the tensions of the previous seasons and close the show in a beautiful way.

The greatest problem with the show was that it had almost no women. And the only two or three women among the enormous cast of characters were not really women. The makers of the show were obviously aware of this problem and took it as far as possible in the character of the assassin who is supposed to be a girl but is supremely unconvincing as one.

But nobody can be perfect at everything. The show is brilliant even in spite of the absence of women.