News and Updates

1. It’s St. Patrick’s Day, which is a strange holiday when a good chunk of your ancestry is Irish Protestant. It’s not really a holiday meant for me to enjoy, but I do anyway because it pleases me to do so and because it pleases me even more to annoy the sorts of people who gatekeep holidays. There is corned beef simmering on the stove and the place smells good.

2. I am getting ready to meet with the Tax Person in the coming days. On the one hand, this means gathering up all the financial paperwork that I’ve been steadfastly ignoring since the last time I did this and trying not to let the incipient sense of dread that I feel whenever financial matters come up take over my life. On the other hand, I’m looking forward to handing all of this over to the Tax Person since last year went so swimmingly well. It’s such a wonderful thing to turn this all over to a trained professional – one who is professionally insured for liability if they make a mistake – and then just let them handle it.

3. No, I don’t like paying taxes. Nobody does. But I do understand that taxes are part of the price one pays for civilization, and you can make whatever inference you’d like about the character of those who don’t understand that as far as I’m concerned.

4. Speaking of which, it looks like we’re going to get a rerun of the 2020 election now that the primaries are effectively over. Der Sturmtrumper seems to be going all in on the Psychotic Dictator routine now, and far too many Americans are happy to celebrate this, convinced that only the people they hate will suffer. Folks, this is not normal. This is a full-scale red alert for the survival of the American republic.

5. I have been trying to grade online discussion posts for three straight days now and so far have done exactly not a single one of them. It’s that time of the semester, I suppose. I will say that the first one – the post at the top of the page that I have to work my way down – made me laugh out loud, and three cheers to that particular student for having the gumption to say what they did.

6. Perhaps I will bake something tonight. That was always my solution in graduate school, way back when, and if it didn’t necessarily solve any problems at least there were good things to eat afterward.

7. I spent a good chunk of this week revamping a guest lecture for a friend’s course. It’s been four years since the last time I gave this talk – we were all logging in from home then, back when we thought the pandemic would be over by summertime – and now it’s a different friend teaching the class as the first one has retired, so there was some work to be done. It was fun work, at least, for certain values of fun that include academic nerdhood. I’m so there.

8. Is anyone else puzzled by the new GOP campaign tactic of asking “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” because that just isn’t going to help them. Four years ago people were storing dead bodies in refrigerated trucks because the pandemic that der Sturmtrumper insisted wasn’t worth taking precautions for was so horrifying that we ran out of morgue space. Four years ago the economy was so bad that unemployment hit levels not seen since the Great Depression and oil prices briefly turned negative. Four years ago der Sturmtrumper’s literally jackbooted thugs in deliberately anonymous uniforms were assaulting Americans in the streets and kidnapping peaceful protesters. And it all led to the Trump Insurrection a few months later. Am I better off? Damn, friend, who isn’t?

9. We’ve managed to catch a few Flyers games on television of late – they remain an entertaining team to watch even when they don’t win, as they demonstrated last night. I like when they win, but I don’t have any money on them. I just want to be entertained, and my but they do provide. My favorite Premier League team served up much the same “entertaining loss” experience as well yesterday – a game that went from 1-0 to 1-2 to 3-2 in the last sixteen minutes of play, with the final goal coming on the very last touch a full minute after stoppage time was supposed to have ended. Kim and I have even managed to watch an episode of Jodie Whittaker’s last season of Doctor Who, as we slowly work our way up to the new Doctor, whose name I have learned to pronounce but still can’t reliably spell. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does with the character. This all counts as a lot of television for me these days.

10. Kim spoke to one of our neighbors earlier this week – a man who does odd jobs for a living – and it turns out that he was perfectly happy to remove the giant overgrown shrubbery in front of our house, and we were perfectly happy to pay him to do so. So now the house looks rather barren, but I am sure that soon there will be new shrubbery of some kind. I’m also sure the mint will grow back. It always does.