My doctor is absolutely hilarious. I went in for my regular checkup last week, and he told me to lose weight. This morning, I got a phone call from a gentleman saying, “Hi, I’m Dave from Dr. Rabinowitz ‘ s office. He asked me to call and remind you that you need to lose weight. I will call next week to remind you,  as well.”

So now I’m weeping with laughter and I don’t know how I will manage to collect myself for the final exam I’m administering in 9 minutes.

Russia ‘ s most venerated rock musician said that the war with Ukraine will end when Russians turn off their TVs.

Of course, there is no evidence that Russians are about to ease up on their favorite drug.

If Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are what our choices will be reduced to in 2016, that will be a crying shame. Can’t we at least come up with a couple new names, or are we doomed to be trapped forever in these pathetic efforts to replay the 1990s?

Yes, everybody had a grand old time in the 1990s but they aren’t coming back. It’s time to let this fantasy go.

I was given Gary Brecher’s The War Nerd book as a gift, and it’s great fun. Here, for instance, is an excerpt on Colombia:

The historians I’ve been reading – typical bleeding -heart college professors – all try to say Colombians aren’t really violent. Oh no!  It’s America’s fault, or it’s the United Fruit Company’s fault, or whatever… So how about a little truth for once? As in: Colombians kill. They’ve done it nonstop for 400 years. They’ll do it for another 400. That’s part of the reason it’s hard to explain the current wars in Colombia, because they’re just a little episode in one long war that will never end.

Finally, somebody with something refreshingly reasonable to say about Colombia. And in Mexico,  instead of one long war, you have a periodic flare-up of insane violence. A new century hits, Mexicans start killing each other. By the fourth decade of the century, they get whatever it is out of their systems, it all settles down, and there is stagnation under a benevolent dictatorial power until a new century arrives. And then the cycle repeats. The drug wars and the Americans are just an excuse. And since Americans enjoy being an excuse for the shitty behavior of others, then everybody is happy.

Apparently, the Rolling Stone apologized for publishing porn under the guise of political activism. Of course, the apology is formulated as “sorry we didn’t fact-check.”

The whole thing is beyond bizarre. People read this sort of article to self-titillate but are so terrified of their urges that they invent all kinds of weird excuses for these compulsions.

I find it really disgusting that people would use a horrible crime like rape to play this sort of a sick game. Rolling Stone should be eternally ashamed.

Last night we went to watch the first part of the last part in the Hunger Games series. Before the movie, we finally paid a visit to the new local gastropub.

“We have become so Americanized!” I told N. “We eat an enormous meal and then go watch Hunger Games.”

The gastropub served us some really disappointing pea soup because the chef believes that it’s OK to use canned peas to make pea soup. Today I will be making a real Canadian split pea soup to erase the bad taste of those canned peas from my mouth. The fish tacos, however, were sensational. And the scallops were not bad at all. There were some fans of mine among the patrons and they kept telling the waiter to say hi and send messages in Spanish. This made me feel glad that I’m no longer a drinking person.

The movie proved to be very good, so thank you, everybody who recommended. It is quite an achievement to make such a good, solid movie out of the weakest book in the trilogy. Of course, the movie would have benefited from reducing it by at least 30 minutes. There are several superfluous scenes like, for instance, the scene on the staircase. It introduces no new insights into the characters: yes, the mother is useless, the sister is a damsel in permanent distress, and the protagonist is a teenage drama queen, but we’ve known all this since the first scene of the first movie in the series. There are also way too many scenes where the camera zooms on the protagonist’s face, making the viewers privy to the actress’s hopeless struggle to convey emotion. As a result, she just looks severely constipated, and the viewers get bored.

Judging from the nearly empty theater – and that’s on a Saturday night! – the movie is doing much worse at the box office than the previous two parts of the series. This is not surprising, given that there are no Hunger Games in this part of the trilogy, and the Hunger Games were what made the series original and attracted viewers and readers. Another reason for the series’ downward trajectory is that the economic well-being of the viewers grows, the recession is receding into memory, and the viewers don’t identify with what they are seeing on the screen any longer. (Not that they ever had reason to identify, coming to the movies after enormous, delicious meals, but it isn’t like these things are ever reasonable.)

But here is something you probably didn’t know: in Russia, the ticket sales of Mockingjay, Part 1 are 15% higher than the ticket sales of Catching Fire (the second and the strongest film in the series so far.) Russia is at war, and its people need inspiration to keep up the military effort. I find it very interesting to trace how the audiences’ response to entertainment differs and why. 

In Germany, ticket sales are up as well. That was to be expected since most of the action in Mockingjay, Part 1 is set underground, and Germans could never resist subterranean imagery. They will watch anything as long as it happens in a tunnel or a shaft. 

In terms of acting skills, the generational chasm between the older, more seasoned actors and the younger, really vapid ones is very distracting. When Julianne Moore, Woody Harrelson or Stanley Tucci appear in the scenes next to the actors who play Katniss, Peeta or that other guy (Gale, or what is his name?), the younger actors disappear completely. The scene where Julianne Moore is talking to Jennifer Lawrence is extremely unfortunate since Lawrence is completely washed out by the striking and even somewhat artistically gifted Moore.

What’s great about the movie is the abundance of very expensive, very impressive special effects. They make the movie very entertaining and just a good way to spend a relaxing, escapist couple of hours.

I’m now considering going to see Interstellar in 4D because that has got to be even more escapist.

We are entering the Christmas season, so I promise not to freak people out until the second week of January with the heavy stuff and only post cute funny stories.

Here is one.

A very young cashier at Michael’s asks me, “Are you from Germany?”

“No,” I say. “Ukraine.”

“Oh,” she says. “Ukraine! I would have loved to be born in Ukraine. That is such a fun place to be born. I don’t know much about it but it sounds fun. Not like this town.”

The proverbial kindness of Midwesterners sometimes takes bizarre forms.

My colleagues exchanged hundreds of comments through the university’s mailing list on the subject of whether there should be clocks in the classrooms. They exchanged even more comments on the subject of the campus geese. On the topic of the IBHE director’s talk yesterday, however, they have not exchanged a single comment. Nobody cares.

On this blog, the interest to the IBHE post is not a whole lot greater than the interest to the (admittedly funny) story of how I fed my husband soap. The post hasn’t had a single refback. It has not gone on Facebook. The likelihood of it going viral is nil. Aside from the blog’s regular readers who are exceptionally intelligent and well-informed, nobody cares. 

Academics are online more than any other professional group I know. They produce miles upon miles of posts about students who looked sideways at them or colleagues who stepped on their big toe scarring them emotionally and physically for life. They are exceptionally well-equipped to participate in a discussion about the future of higher ed but the don’t. I guess, they just don’t care.

We had a deputy director of Illinois Board of Higher Education speak on campus today. He said the following:

In the nearest future, only rich people will get to go to real universities. Everybody else will get educated online. This is why mid-tier universities, such as ours, need to go online, period. This is what students want. This is what the state can afford.

Online education is as good as the real education because that’s what somebody said on some survey somewhere in the boondocks.  

If a state can keep at least one or two state universities in existence, that already will be a great achievement. Such universities will do no research because research prevents students from having access to professors [sic].

If academic programs don’t attract enough students to justify their existence, they should be eliminated.

We are losing our competitive edge on the world arena.

College degrees are no longer meaningful because people can get the same stuff for free online. Instead of a college degree, it makes more sense for students to present employers with a list of their marketable skills and a list of specific facts the student learned online.

What students know will become less important than what they can do.

Students need to access classes from their cell phones and in their cars because they come from diverse backgrounds. Classroom discussions, office hours with a professor, lectures, study groups, and papers will all be online.

Startup ventures can educate students better than colleges.

The bestest ever model of public university is Western Governors University. And besides, why should a credential from Microsoft University or the British Open University be less prestigious than one from a regional state college?

And if you don’t like this, you are an irrelevant outdated academic who will be forced out of the system.

The curtain.

P.S. No, I’m not punking you. I copy-pasted these statements from the PP delivered at the meeting, making cosmetic changes only, to save space.

P.P.S. I have only one question: why do you, Americans, hate yourselves so much? 

A colleague came to yell at me in my office today. She delivered a long and passionate rant that went something like the following:

What are you doing here? Are you crazy? You are wasting your life on this place. Your parents need to be telling you this but since they are not, I will speak as your mother: you need to leave. This university does not deserve you. We don’t deserve you. This stupid state doesn’t deserve you. You can have much broader horizons, you could be making a much greater impact, you could be making so much more money, you could be spending your life with really interesting, brilliant people, and not these idiots you meet around here.

Look, I’m going to be 70 soon. And as I look back on my life, I feel enormous regret. I have frittered my life away, I have wasted it on this place. As I’m getting older, I’m thinking about end-of-life issues, I’m thinking about death. Don’t make the same mistakes as I did. You are an intellectual of the first order, you are a high-powered research scholar, what are you doing here? What? You need to leave. I love having you here but you need to go. Go on the job market, leave this place that is in a permanent crisis mode. I’ve been here for a quarter of a century, and there has barely been a year when we were not on the brink of extinction. This shit is not getting better. It’s getting worse. 

If I had anything like your talent and potential, I would never make this enormous mistake of staying here. Leave!

I’m now quite shaken up by the whole thing.