The parking lot freak has taken umbrage at being told that living in a parking lot for a month is not amazing for a 5-year-old child. What is really hilarious is that he is defending himself from being accused of child abuse with the favorite line of all child abusers:

“This is my life and my child and we will parent her as we see fit.”

Sir, nobody here cares about your life. You can do whatever you want with your life. All we are discussing here is the life of a different person. A person who is not you and has a life of her own. She is not your property and not your body part. You can delete posts all you want (which is a total waste of time because everything can get screen-saved), but the CPS will be taking an interest and the child will be protected from your careless and unhinged behavior. The best thing you can do is place the child in a normal living situation ASAP. And then try to seek help for your very obvious psychological issues.

The bad news is that Joyce Carol Oates is a blethering fool. The worse news is that she is not alone.

Oates and a bunch of other pseudo – intellectuals signed a rambling, incoherent statement rubbishing the victims of Charlie Hebdo and exalting their assassins.

This is absolutely disgusting. These overfed, rich idiots are so obsessed with their need to despise Muslims that they abandon even the most basic humanity. In their desire to play the role of beneficent saviors of the supposedly weak and pathetic Muslims, they depart so far from reality that their statement sounds entirely loony.

Where are the child protection services? Why are these people just allowed to abuse a 5 – year-old in this outlandish way and then brag about it?

In case anybody was wondering. There is a musician who plays a real banjo. And great chocolate cake.

People, Ruth Rendell died. This is so sad. And she was not even old. Just 85.

If you haven’t read anything by Ruth Rendell  (or Barbara Vine), please check out her phenomenal psychological thrillers. I recommend 13 Steps Down and The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy.

Rendell was a very good writer and a kind, generous person. R.I.P.

The Putin Café in Spain stayed in business for only two months. It went broke because nobody would come. The local residents explain on Facebook that they were too disgusted by the name to feel like dropping by.

OK, another riddle now. What is happening in this photo from a Russian high school? What are the school children witnessing?

Everybody is hell – bent on making the Baltimore riots about Freddie Gray and nothing else. This is a tidy and easy way of dismissing the whole thing with a feel-good ending. Just prosecute the cops, and Baltimore will magically become a happy place.

Pathetic and disgusting.

But as long as people can inscribe the story into the familiar framework of bad cowboys vs good cowboys, nobody will want to look any further. The discussion of Ferguson dissolved in the ridiculous narrative of traffic tickets. And now the story of Baltimore riots is being taken in the same direction.

As a new contribution to our Relationships series, let’s discuss the story of a woman who is going to meet her casual lover over the summer holidays (the woman in question requested input). The lover asked the woman if she was willing to be introduced to his children:

It wasn’t exactly a surprise when TA asked me if I’d like to meet [the children] while I was there this time. I’m going to be spending lengths of time in Home State this summer, as opposed to my previous brief weekends, so it would be somewhat odd not to meet them at some point, especially if TA and I want to spend extended time together. . . TA wants me to meet them, though. He adores his kids and they’re a big part of his life; he said it would be nice to have me meet them in some capacity while I’m there.

He did ask me what I thought about the idea and I said we could talk when I’m there. Because I’m not sure what I think. . .

Is it too soon? When do you meet someone’s kids? Do you need to be in some defined state before you introduce the girl and the kids? We don’t even claim to be dating – because we’re not, given the distance between us and the understanding that we’re free to be with other people if we wish.

I’m torn. On one hand, I’d like to, because they’re a facet of TA and it seems false not to see that side of him if we’re going to keep spending time together. On the other, it seems like a step and I’m not sure about taking that one.

This will not be of interest to everybody, so I’m putting my response under the fold. If you are not very happy about your personal life, I suggest you consider what you would do in this situation before seeing my comments.

Continue reading “Relationships: Power Struggles” →

You know things get really hectic and overwhelming at work when I start to read in Russian. I almost never read anything in this language because there is simply nothing to read. Russian literature has been dead for decades and there are no signs of it coming back to life. Marinina, however, is a mystery writer I’ve been reading for exactly 20 years. She was huge back in the 1990s, and it’s kind of hard to let the characters go if you’ve followed their lives for two decades.

This book is Marinina’s most recent installment in her long-standing series about a slightly autistic, gauche yet brilliant detective Anastasia Kamenskaya. It’s extremely hard to write police procedurals in Russia where convincing the readers that there are police officers who not only take bribes but actually investigate is next to impossible. The very genre of a procedural implies the existence of a procedure that people at least try to follow. And Marinina has to work very hard to make her detectives with their sincere desire to solve crime believable.

In order to compensate for the too-honest-t0-be-true detectives, the writer sets the mystery in the world of figure skating which, as you probably know, is the most corrupt sport of all. I knew it was a very dishonest sport but after reading the book (based on very painstaking research, by the way) I will never watch another figure skating competition or performance in my life. The sport is inhuman, cruel, and involves a lot of really harsh abuse of the poor children who play it.

The mystery was fine but it’s missing the beauty of the author’s novels from the 1990s. It feels like the author was more at home back then and is not fully integrating herself into the twenty-first century. However, the omniscient narrator says “in Ukraine and Belarus” instead of “at Ukraine and Byelorussia”, which shows to me that she is a decent person and makes me enjoy the book more.

Author: Aleksandra Marinina
Title: Ангелы на льду не выживают 
Year of publication: 2014
My rating: 5 out of 10