This year’s research projects by my colleagues that I’m evaluating on my committee are so good that I just want to drop everything and camp out next to their offices in the hopes they’d give me progress updates.

I wonder if it’s appropriate to ask these scholars to sell me the first copy of their books in advance of publication. I’m not allowed to share what these projects are about but they are excruciatingly interesting. I feel very honored to work with people who do this kind of fascinating research.

Russians keep messing with my head. For the second time this week, I turned on Russian TV and what do you think I saw?

Yes, fucking St. Louis. Again! It’s like they are obsessed with us or something. Here is the snapshot of our famous STL Arch on Russian TV 2 minutes ago:

The reason why I turned it on was to see what’s going on with the fire in downtown Moscow. But apparently downtown St. Louis is of greater interest to the Russian viewers.

I wonder, are Michael Brown protests the only thing they’ve been showing since the last time I tried watching Russian news?

N and I are still on season 1 of The Wire (yes, we tend to come very late to the TV-watching party), and here are my impressions so far.

The show is very professionally made and extraordinarily entertaining. Of course, there are also many problematic aspects in it, which is not surprising since it’s a popular TV show.

The noble white Knight in a crowd of black people who are, without an exception, inferior to him morally, intellectually and in every other way; the insistent “lazy blacks” motifs; the sexism that is just overwhelming – it’s all there. My understanding is that the creator of the series started working on the idea for the show back in the early 1990s, which explains much of this. It’s probable that these trends will not hold until the end of the series, but season 1 is like this.

But the show is amazing. The comedic aspect is great. The scene where the people in the towers throw TV sets at police officers would make any post-Soviet person collapse with laughter. There are also less successful scenes. The most contrived and jarring was the scene where the characters say nothing but “fuck” for 15 minutes. Even the actors looked embarrassed for participating in something so obviously HBO-pleasing and childish.

The beautiful Novodevichy monastery is burning in Moscow right now:

Earlier this week, a large shopping center burned down in the city of Kazan in Russia. 17 people died. Putin did not address the victims and didn’t express condolences.

Today, a documentary was aired in Russia in which Putin calmly recognizes that he did annex the Crimea, that the “referendum” was a sham, and that he was ready to deploy nuclear weapons if anybody had tried to stop the annexation.

I remember how much time and energy I wasted on convincing people here on the blog and elsewhere of exactly this and feel very annoyed. It would be great if the next time I say something about Ukraine and Russia people whose knowledge about the region is limited to something they vaguely heard on the radio manage not to inflict their useless “opinions” on me.

Nothing is more frustrating than having to deal with folks who believe they need to have opinions about evrtything and refuse to get even minimally educated before opining.

A right to an opinion has to be deserved by a massive investment of time and effort into learning and getting informed.

Yeah, and then we can just demolish the real one because of the “budget cuts, crisis, and the MOOC version of the chapel is the trend of the future anyway.”

I don’t know what you, folks, did today but I’ve been working on my book from 8 am to 3 pm with breaks for breakfast, tweets and posts. The result is 520 words added to the book.

The way my brain works, I need to interrupt the flow every 15 minutes or so by switching to a different language or medium. Otherwise, no writing happens. 

Now I will read (writing a book requires a lot of reading) for an hour, and at 4 pm family time starts. N and I will be doing a barbecue and then taking a long walk around the neighborhood. After that, we will light the fireplace and discuss, for the bizillionth time, how cute our first date was. It’s ridiculous how people in love never tire of narrating these really trivial stories to each other for years and decades.

In other news, I just looked out of the window and saw the ondatra swimming in the clear waters of the Ondatra Creek. It is beyond cool that I can see it from the window of my home office.

The Russian news announced that Putin just met with Nicolás Maduro and showed a photo of. . . Hugo Chávez. If it’s true that Putin met Chávez today, that’s cause to celebrate.

 The Russians are as funny as ever.

“On Monday, March 16, President Putin had several important meetings,” the newscaster declared yesterday and then proceeded to give details of the meetings.

If you don’t get why that’s funny, look at your calendar.

The Russians often use what they call “canned news.” Putin is supposed to appear on the news every day, doing something massively important. Since it’s not humanly possible to do something massively important every single day, servile journalists film newscasts in advance and hold them until the days when there is nothing new about Putin to show.

Of course, such a strategy often produces mistakes and then everybody gets a chance to laugh at Putin who experiences Monday, March 16 serveral days before everybody else does.

A friend of mine was talking to her cousin who lives in Russia. The cousin soon grew frustrated and exclaimed, “Well, it’s obvious that I understand politics better than you do, so stop arguing already!”

“How come you understand politics better than I do, given that I’m a professor of Political Science and you never even took a single class in this discipline?” my friend asked, genuinely confused.

“But I’m a man!” the cousin exclaimed. “So it’s obvious I understand politics better!”

My friend asked the cousin to explain how exactly his penis was helping him understand politics but the cousin got sulky and refused to continue the conversation.

Just remember that you’ve got to be awake and make a wish at 9 hrs 26 min 53 sec this morning. 

It’s an opportunity not to be missed.