Clarissa's Blog

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.

Scott Walker is extremely creepy: “Potential 2016 Republican presidential candidate and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) said in an interview on Friday that mandatory ultrasounds for women hoping to get an abortion was “just a cool thing.” 

And here is another example of Scott Walker’s insane love and support of Big Government. I’m telling you, people, this guy has very serious mental issues. I would not say this lightly. Jeb Bush, for instance? Stupid and useless but not sick. Mitt Romney? A congenital idiot but not unhealthy. Scott Walker, though? Serious issues.

Of course, Mitt Romney might be sane but  his supporters aren’t always very stable. A woman ran over her husband with an SUV because he didn’t vote for Mitt Romney.

“A recent study of overworked management consultants in the US found that 35% employed in this occupation actually “faked” an 80-hour work week.” There is an even greater number of such people in academia. The most “overworked” and “stressed out” are always those who never publish anything and teach the same course for decades.

Kerry’s humiliation only worked for a short time: “Russia’s army is massing troops and hundreds of pieces of weaponry including mobile rocket launchers, tanks and artillery at a makeshift base near the border with Ukraine, a Reuters reporter saw this week.”

Everybody is in a tizzy over mandatory T-shirts for girls at a pool party and nobody is noticing the real scandal: the mandatory use of flip-flops.

“Alas most people simply cannot think for a few seconds, and it is at these minimally-competent masses that most technology is now squarely aimed.” So true.

[Spanish]. Gender-selective abortions in Spain. Barbarity spreads and gains ground.

The new entries in Merriam-Webster‘s unabridged dictionary.

And competing for the title of the idiot of the week, “creationist suggest that if we believe in Evolution that Josh Duggar did nothing wrong.”

It is sad that completely unqualified, pedagogically illiterate people make it into higher ed.

“How hypocrite Michelle Duggar compared transgender people to ‘child predators’ 12 years AFTER her own son admitted molesting young girls as they slept.” These people are beyond disgusting.

Even though there are idiots who don’t like long books, this might be the year of the extremely long novel. Yay!

This is the best piece ever on why print journalism is dying. I was about to write this post myself but the linked author did it better than I ever could.

You will never believe which TV show this is about: “It introduced a drama of true complexity and characters of great depth, qualities absent in the television landscape at the time.  It felt less like older dramas like NYPD Blue orthirtysomething and more like European art cinema.” People are so weird.

This might make you feel sorry for Jeb Bush.

“Life is too short for a full-time job. Too short, and too precious.” We will be hearing more and more of this in the coming year. I’m trying very hard not to be judgmental and I’m almost succeeding. OK, this is a lie, I’m not succeeding.

“The vast majority of the claimed benefits of nursing simply do not hold up when we look at the best data.” Like anybody with half a brain doubted this.

Poor little rich women. “Little” is definitely the word here.

“Will the United States remain the most powerful country in the world? Many think not. Those who feel this way also tend to think that China’s ascent will lead to America’s decline.” Oh, come on. China is so not it. I thought that the decade of fretting over the ridiculous fantasy of China as the world’s next superpower was long over.

“Saint Mary-of-the-Woods College, a women’s college in Indiana, announced Tuesday that it will start to admit men.” This is amazing news. Ghettoization of education is just wrong.

Sharia law at Walmart! Horrible panic! Apocalypse! Scary, scary shit! No, not really. It’s just funny.

Can you steal an education?

So we’ve started watching Damages and I’m already disappointed. Famous lawyers are running around bars and weddings begging some two-bit dime-a-dozen job candidate to come work for them?

Unless we discover very soon that she is about to inherit an enormous fortune or something I will not be able to process this premise.

Also, a guy who proposes the day after his girlfriend gets a job with an enormous salary and doesn’t get the ring stuffed up his anal cavity?

Is this supposed to be fantasy genre?

Our current Dean (who will only remain Dean for the next few weeks, thank God) says that it will be “insensitive” to give professors cost-of-living salary increases (that we haven’t seen for 3 years now) when we are forced to fire some support staff people. We have an enormous support staff bloat and having to eliminate a tiny portion of it as a result of budget cuts is actually a godsend. 

A more idiotic argument against salary increases for professors the world has never known. Everybody seems to adore this Dean except me. He is this very saccharine sort of person who just smiles, signs and equivocates just as he keeps doing really shitty things.

He’s the one who flatly refused to offer even $10 towards my trip to Oxford, by the way. In the meanwhile, he wasted quite a bit of money on a reception for support staff where every useless paper-pusher on campus received a rose courtesy of our university. Obviously, nothing of the kind has ever been organized for people who solve all the problems the stupid paper-pushers create.

One show I like and am sorry that it was canceled was Boss, with Kelsey Grammer and the lady from Law & Order: SVU. That was a good show even though the camera person  (people?) either couldn’t hold a camera straight or was trying to be all artsy (which is something I detest).

I just finished watching Boss on Netflix, and I’m sure the reason why it was canceled is that it had no positive characters that people could identify with. Many  (and maybe even most) people can’t watch or read anything if they can’t “identify.” Which testifies to the poverty of their individuality.

I’m also binge-watching Gilmore Girls (I can’t write unless I have something playing in the background). It’s a great show but it’s too bluntly and unimaginatively Freudian even for me. Rory grows up without a Dad, so she is clingy, weepy and pathetic with guys. Lorelei has controlling parents, so she has huge commitment issues and suffers from sexual dysfunction. And yes, that’s how it works, but this could all be presented more elegantly.

So here are my television experiences of the moment. What are yours? Anything to recommend?

There is an article  in the NYTimes arguing that the Democratic Party has moved to the Left. And now every Leftie blogger is having fits trying to explain why this isn’t true. As if being to the Left of Bill Clinton were somehow shameful or a bad thing. Or as if being more radical or extreme in one’s beliefs were something negative.

I don’t get these people. A major newspaper presents as a fait accompli something they keep saying they wish for. Whether it’s true or not right now is completely irrelevant because the way to make it true is to present it as a fact everybody knows. People hear it from a source they trust, believe it, and it turns into reality.

This NYTIMES article is a gift to any Democrat who is to the Left of Bill Clinton  (and today that’s pretty much every Democrat).

Rule #11 of information wars: getting your enemy to declare that your hopes and dreams have already come true constitutes a huge win.

Alain Touraine (the famous French sociologist) says that full-time employment is disappearing in favor of mushrooming part-time / temp gigs because there is a huge demand for precisely this type of change among people coming on the job market now.

I do understand that such enormous social shifts do not happen unless there’s demand for them. But I belong to  a different generation and come from a different world. This is so counterintuitive to me that I get it but I still don’t get it.