In the meantime, in Ukraine there now exists pizza with 4 different types of salo:

When I left the country, the restaurant culture was just being born. There was a little restaurant that opened next to my university. It was called Burger King but had nothing whatsoever to do with the well-known chain. The owner must have seen the name on TV and liked it. The place served home-made Soviet-style salads that were actually pretty good. We were just coming out of the USSR era, and going out to eat was a practice that people couldn’t even imagine, let alone embrace.

I was making large sums of money in translation back then and going to school full-time (which in Ukraine really meant full-time, and not 3 hours a day like it does in North America). I had no time to shop for food and cook, which still was a very Soviet process in 1995-98. If you wanted chicken, you had to burn off and pluck the remaining bits of feathers, remove the head and the feet, clean the scaly feet, cut off the nails, and so on.

It’s funny that today in America cooking everything from scratch 95% of the time makes you admirable and, in higher income brackets, cool and countercultural. But in 1996 I was countercultural by going to the Burger King that wasn’t to eat beet salad with walnuts and mayonnaise.

And today, look, they have fancy humorous pizzas and everything in Ukraine. That’s really wonderful.

Yesterday I told students that because of the weather and poor road conditions, they could stay at home and send in the class activity by email. The weather was quite nasty, and unusual for this area. I thought they’d all stay home.

But they all showed up. The wind chill, the sleet, Friday morning. Yet everybody came. And you know what? I don’t think they came for me, great as I am.

It’s because this is a translation course. Translation kicks you into the deep focus zone like nothing else. And being in the zone feels good. These are young people, and only one is an athlete. They don’t have much experience in the zone. It’s like I’m feeding them drugs in those translation activities. It’s almost unfair.

I have no idea why translation triggers the zone. Maybe these are two areas in the brain that are close together.

Another thing I noticed, working with tables, even the simplest ones that you can draw in MS Word, can kick you into the zone. I draw a lot of tables that I don’t really need because it works. Every test I design for my language courses opens with a table.

For that to happen, you need to undergo a major change in personality, though. Otherwise, I don’t think it’s sustainable. Can you imagine a “slacks and flannel shirt” man going “business suit and tie” permanently? That would require shoes, accessories. Probably, different friends. No, I can’t imagine.

And it’s OK, I’m still quite wordy myself.

I’ve been writing about this phenomenon for years. Trump could have issued an executive order to ban this practice but he didn’t. Of course, it would have ended up in SCOTUS but that’s great. A discussion of the so-called “birthright citizenship” at the Supreme Court level is long overdue.

Of course, Trump didn’t do that.

Is he promising any action on immigration this time around? I haven’t been following but I’m curious.

A job candidate for my department informed the hiring committee that she is dedicated to “decolonizing the classroom.” When the stunned faculty members asked what on Earth she meant by it, the candidate said that she asks students to turn off their phones while in class and concentrate on “the whole self and body well-being.”

I hate hiring.

Elena (Greta Grinevičiūtė) is teaching a contemporary dance class to a group of deaf students, which is how she meets Dovydas (Kęstutis Cicėnas), their translator. They hit it off immediately, upon which Dovydas tells Elena that he is asexual. Despite her amazement (and not a little skepticism), Elena falls into a complicated romance with Dovydas in which they both shift and grow in their understanding of what love really is. Slow, from Lithuanian director Marija Kavtaradze, is a lush and sensual drama that evokes the rush of affection and excitement and delves into what embodied love means.

https://www.vox.com/culture/23578435/sundance-2023-best-polite-eileen-passages-past-lives

What was even the point of seeking freedom from the USSR only to find a new USSR to obey? The only difference between this movie and the Soviet films about Komsomol members working hard to improve their productivity at a steel plant is that the Soviet films had popular appeal.

I found a website that collects each year’s most scathing book reviews, and it’s very helpful. Any book that departs from the left-wing dogma of the past two seconds gets torn to shreds. I found a list of books that are potential good reads there.

Holy sites, holy schmites. The activist in question spoke against the use of migrant labor to push natives out of jobs. For that, he’s going to jail for 4 years. The actual charges are that he used the equivalent of the n-word to refer to migrants.

It’s tiresome that people project their own obsessions (holy sites! environmentalism! colonialism!) onto very clear-cut issues that are about something else entirely.

A wife crushed by childlessness and washed out by NHS’s mishandling of COVID.

A husband demolished by a vicious and unfair #MeToo attack.

They come to rural Cornwall, and a murder mystery ensues. It’s a good mystery but what I found much more impressive is that there’s a clear and unvarnished depiction of #MeToo as destructive and horrid. George, the #MeTooted husband, was a sincerely lefty journalist but that didn’t help when the time came for him to suffer a media mobbing over a misinterpreted joke.

Let Me In contrasts the general indifference towards an actual pedophile with the evisceration George experiences after making a clumsy joke about pedophiles around an easily scandalized teenager. Crimes of word and crimes of deed have swapped places.

It’s encouraging to see that popular literature is turning against #MeToo in a straightforward, unapologetic way. Let Me In also states it clearly that a man like George, who has no claims to being “diverse,” has no hope of clawing his way back into a career once he’s tarnished by the overheated word police.

To be clear, the novel is not about #MeToo. George’s loss of his job and reputation is provided as background to the murder mystery. But still, it’s good to hear this message no matter how tangential it is to the story.

A solid murder mystery about pedophiles but offers no graphic descriptions of anything unsavory.

People will despise me for it but I’ll just come out and say it. What saved my writing from being a pompous Germanic mess was the good old Strunk and White. It’s fashionable to hate on Strunk and White but I read that tiny volume twice and now I’m the author of the very moderately Germanic posts you all enjoy.

Strunk and White give examples of sentences, and for every single one I’d exclaim, “Yes! That sounds beautiful!” And then Strunk and White would explain why it’s a horrid, ugly sentence.

Just to give an example (which Strunk and White would tell me to reduce to “Example:” but then nobody is perfect):

I was totally the “he is a man who” (or even worse, “I’m a person who”) type of writer. But I’m mostly cured. OK, partially cured.

Strunk and White have become less popular because their rules hurt the feelings of the wordy. Or the grammatically challenged. But they are great.

To practice, I recommend writing a 500-word piece on any subject. The last movie you watched, your favorite podcast. And then try to edit it down for maximum clarity.

Another great exercise is to summarize in one sentence an episode of a TV series or a book you read. Write the sentence in Word and see what the grammar check flags as possible problems. Do that at least once daily.

In short, clarity, brevity, and a lot of practice.