I almost forgot that today this blog turned 5. Happy anniversary to me and my great blog!

2,150,000+ hits. 85,000 comments. Recipes, book reviews, discussions, photos, political commentary, link encyclopedias, funny stories, anger, and rage!

And, of course, the smartest readers of all blogs ever. I was feeling very lonely when I started this blog at the most unfriendly department in the universe. And now I have a huge group of people willing to debate, discuss, argue, disagree and analyze right in my pocket (meaning, on my iPod) wherever I go.

I don’t have a single reader here who agrees with me 100% on everything, and that must mean I’m doing something right. I suspect that even this celebratory post will cause somebody to disagree about something. Which is the whole point. There are too many blogs that promote complacency and uniformity. I want to foster disagreement. Cranky malcontents and principled dissidents are always welcome here.

So here is what I suggest: let’s spend five more years arguing and disagreeing about everything we can think of.

Happy anniversary to us!

A student writes, “I prefer works of art (literature and film) where a man and a woman get married at the end. I don’t really enjoy any other kind of artwork.”

From the Russian news: the government of Russia announced that the Crimea is going to be Russian Mecca which is why tourism has to be developed.

What this all means is a mystery.

People keep asking why I put such a scary photo of myself on the blog’s homepage.

I have managed to prevent my blog from going the way of many other blogs and becoming a feeding ground for crazies who use the blog author’s honesty and kindness to behave in incredibly rude, aggressive, and condescending ways. Here, I have created an environment where only normal people find it comfortable to stay for any length of time.

Anybody who behaves inappropriately towards me is first yelled at and then banned. If I’m not careful, I might find myself in a situation where some unhinged weirdos would start asking me to “examine my privilege.”

Nate Silver (who is my new favorite blogger now that he has a blog of his own one can add to a blogroll) points out that the gaffes made by politicians can have zero influence on the voters even if the press explodes over them:

The first is Barack Obama’s remark at a San Francisco fundraiser about voters who “cling to guns and religion,” which was first reported by the journalist Mayhill Fowler on Apr. 11, 2008. Then-candidate Obama’s comment generated more than 2,500 news articles by the end of that month, according to a search of records at NewsLibrary.com. But it had no effect on the polls, either nationally or in Pennsylvania, which was the next state to vote in the Obama vs. Clinton Democratic primary. Instead, Hillary Clinton’s win in Pennsylvania was in line with demographic trends from earlier primaries.

What about Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comments during the general election campaign in 2012? They barely moved the polls; there was a swing of perhaps one percentage point toward President Obama.

I don’t consider Obama’s 2008 comment to be a gaffe but one of rare instances when  a politician said something valuable and true. What’s curious, though, is that there is such an enormous gulf between what the press thinks is relevant in politics and what the voters believe is.

Might this disconnect be one of the reasons why the political process is so broken right now? Are the journalists simply failing to report things that actually matter to voters because they have no idea what those things are? Back in 2012, it was obvious to me that wasting time on Romney’s “47 percent” was a mistake. How come people who have no other job but to follow politics don’t see such obvious things?

Last week also offered an unusually large crop of really bad posts that, I believe, deserve a thread of their own. These are just bizarrely poor, people. Maybe we should take a vote on which one is the worst.

I had no interest in watching Noah until I read the linked review. Now I think I really need to see it.

I didn’t know people still wrote such viciously anti-Semitic posts. And I don’t care what made the self-hating Jew of the author become so vile. This is unacceptable irrespective of reasons.

Atheists who claim they are morally superior to religious people are idiots. Just like the religious people who claim that they are morally superior to atheists.

A completely ridiculous and disgusting reaction to an even more ridiculous and disgusting reaction to the death of Fred Phelps. Just look at the picture. It almost made me barf.

It is sad that nobody is telling this obviously disturbed person to take his or her obsessive and very unhealthy posts on the TV show Friends to a therapist.

I shouldn’t go for the really low-hanging fruit but here is something recent from Juan Cole: “So Obama denied the premises of Romney’s perspective. Russia, he said, is a narrow Eastern European issue, not a globe-straddling one. In this regard Obama is certainly correct. Romney and other hawks appear to want to resurrect the Cold War.” Oh, Lordy. Or if “Romney” is Putin’s nickname, then I apologize.

“One way of escaping the current American nightmare and of redefining the American Dream is to get rid of the bosses—such that workers can become their own bosses.” The quoted person is a college professor, in case you are wondering.

A completely ridiculous and offensive attempt to excuse the murder of a young woman. I literally couldn’t fall asleep for hours after I made the mistake of reading this garbage article.

From Shakesville: “Every person in this video is thin. There isn’t a fat person to be seen. This is because images of thin people are supposed to be aspirational for fat people, and because the weight loss industry is explicitly eliminationist: The stated objective is to get rid of fat people.” I’m starting to think she is writing all this to make fun of the idiots who giver her money.

And from the same blog, a really shocking post that seems, at first, to be about a horrifying case where a child rapist receives no punishment for his crime because he’s rich but that, at the end, is revealed to be all about using this tragic story to excuse another child abuser.

What’s worse, another blogger decided that this was a cute trend to join and also used the same raped child to excuse a child abuser. What’s wrong with people?

Feel free to share things that appalled and shocked you recently.

These are people in my city of Kharkov:

I have to say, if my people memorized such long texts in English, this must mean they really want to be heard.

By the way, are you aware that remaning as part of Ukraine was not even an option at the so-called Crimean referendum? I’m not sure if I mentioned that before.

Musa Djamilev, the former leader of the Crimean Mejlis and one of the leaders of the Crimean Tatars, confirmed today that only 32,4% of people in the Crimea took part in Putin’s referendum on the annexation of the region.

In the meanwhile, the integrists in Spain are using what happened in the Crimea to defeat Catalonia’s hopes for independence. The leader of the ruling party Mariano Rajoy says that the refusal of the international community to recognize the Crimean referendum is a foretaste of what awaits Catalonia if it were to vote to separate from Spain.

Of course, this is a forced parallel, if there ever was one, but I still hope the strategy works and Catalonians forget all this independentist talk.

People are asking me to write about weight loss. I feel reluctant because I don’t know how to make such a post not boring but if readers want it, then here it is.

After gestational diabetes, people often develop Type II diabetes. My doctor was very sure that I was going to develop it and kept insisting that there was no way for me not to have it (which is why she isn’t my doctor any longer.) After my hormones came back to normal and I went off the medication, my fasting blood sugar (which is the measurement you take first thing in the morning) was 110. This isn’t horribly bad, but it isn’t good either. The normal range is under 100. And the only way to bring it down significantly is by losing weight.

I’m passionately opposed to developing diabetes, so I lost weight. And here is what I discovered in the process:

Physical activity has zero connection to weight loss. Going from an inveterate couch potato to intense physical activity 5-6 times a week (swimming, spinning, fitness, cardio, weights) didn’t lead me to lose as much as an ounce. I’m not pathetic enough to convince myself that it just seems like there is no change in weight because I’m gaining muscle. That big thing that follows me around wherever I go is definitely not muscle.

The only thing that helps lose weight is to:

NOT EAT.

And I mean not eat in a way where you feel serious and constant hunger pangs.

Unfortunately, I have what in psychology is called “food trauma”, and I don’t do well with hunger. So this has been a complicated process for me. But I lost 25 lbs compared to the pre-pregnancy weight. It took me exactly 5 months. And the blood sugar started creeping down slowly. Today it was 102. I will feel content when I get it to 89, which means that there is still a long way to go.

And now the most boring post known to humanity is finally over.

P.S. If somebody is planning to recommend that I use WeightWatchers, please don’t.