I just heard on TV that 50% of Jews in the US married someone non-Jewish.

It’s obvious that time has come for people to start adopting cultural rituals and customs at will, without chaining them to the ridiculously outdated concept of “blood.”

For instance, the Russian N is the biggest Jew I know: he loves his Star of David, doesn’t celebrate Christmas, is bookish and uxorious to a scary degree, drives me nuts with his capacity always to answer a question with a question, and is great with money in a very non-Russian way.

Let’s be consumerist about cultures! This month I can be Peruvian, the next looks good for a spot of Ukrainianness, March is cool for being English, etc. This will make learning more prestigious as people will explore new cultures to adopt temporarily.

Did you hear that Michelle Obama didn’t put a submissive pillow case on her head to signal her enslavement to the barbarians in Saudi Arabia? And they swallowed it and said, “Thank you, ma’am”?

I totally dig this. Michelle rules.

For the very first time ever, my academia.edu profile has had a visitor from Ukraine:

Freaky! I wish this mysterious person got in touch.

I’m getting heavily into academia.edu these days. It’s turning into quite a useful website for academic articles and books one can use for research. Academia.edu is like an intellectual’s version of Facebook. I hated it at first (because my psychological rigidity often gets the better of me) but now I’m beginning to see its uses.

The Chair of the Russian Parliament charged a committee with creating a statement that will condemn the annexation of East Germany by West Germany.

If there is a more ridiculous organization in the world than the Russian Duma, I have no idea what it is.

Everybody is discussing Jonathan Chait’s essay. I read it and have only the following to say: the guy is intellectually impotent to a disturbing degree.

He has a really great collection of interesting anecdotes, yet he can’t even construct a semi-convincing narrative on their basis. His extreme laziness pushes him to string the anecdotes together with the help of the tired old “virtuous Republicans” versus “evil Democrats” binary. That’s been done a bizillion times already and it doesn’t get more exciting with every new repetition.
There is a definite problem with brainless idiots who feel perpetually sulky and aggrieved. This problem is not in any way linked to the aggrieved idiots’ pathetic excuses for political opinions. The world is more complex than the conservative / liberal division. And if Chait stopped sulking for two minutes, he might have figured that out.

A link in a link in a link in a link (seriously) let me to this brilliant column by a very talented student at the University of Michigan:

As I walked, I slipped on a patch of wet leaves lining the steps of the Hatcher, and I fell forward headfirst onto the steps of the library. If it hadn’t been for the left hand that I thrust out right before my fall, I would have ended up just another statistic in the war on colored people. As it were, a white cis-gendered hetero upper-class man came down the steps just as I was falling. He looked at me with that white man’s burden face that I see too often on this racialized campus.

The guy is seriously gifted. I laughed until I almost hurt myself. OK, I’ve got to go reread the piece because it’s too good only to be read once.

A group of pleasantly plump ladies at the gym is eyeing N with voracious interest.

Hey, pleasantly plump ladies! You’re pleasantly plump, you’ll have no trouble finding somebody in time for St. Valentine’s. But this gentleman has already been found by a pleasantly plump lady who’s not going anywhere.

First, New Yorkers were filling my blogroll with endless melodrama because there was going to be snow.

Now, New Yorkers are filling my blogroll with endless melodrama because there was no snow.

Everybody makes fun of the Brits for supposedly obsessing about weather but it doesn’t look like Brits are half as drama – queenish about it as New Yorkers.

When I was in Montréal 3 weeks ago, we a had an ice-storm that knocked out electricity in half the city. It was -38C (38 degrees below freezing) and there was a huge snowstorm. Montréalers, however, comported themselves with supreme indifference to the weather.

You’d say that’s because Montréalers are used to snow. But that’s not true. That’s just how things are: some people encounter tragedy and battle their way through. And other people experience the tiniest of setbacks and choose to fall apart.

So how does everybody feel about the Putinoid freak show Syriza winning in Greece?

As Russians would say, Greeks have degenerated to the point of enjoying sexual intercourse with mice.

Have you heard of Sonia Singh from Tasmania and her project Tree Change Dolls?

She takes the butt-ugly and scary Bratz dolls and makes them beautiful:

Check it out, it’s a great project and the artist is very talented.