Fidel in the Fridge

Some days, said Molly Ivins, it’s like finding Fidel Castro in the refrigerator smoking a cigar. Hard to know what to think.

It’s been quite a week around here.

At the macro level, the level of insanity and dysfunction in the world – already far higher than it needs to be – reached wholly unreasonable proportions this past week.

The Great Email Debacle of 2026 meant that my students couldn’t contact me nor I them, which ordinarily is not a huge issue but during registration week when classes are filling up rapidly it’s a problem. A whole lot of commonly used programs went down all at once, actually, and a conspiratorially-minded person might see that as more than a coincidence. Fortunately, I am a firm believer in human incompetence so I tend to view conspiracy theories as elaborate fantasies set in a world where events are controlled by leaders who have identifiable goals and the skills to achieve them along with a dedicated core of similarly focused followers who can be trusted to do the work and have the discipline not blab about it to the first person who shows even the slightest interest in hearing their story (or even if not, if that person is a member of the follower’s desired gender), and as a historian I am well aware of how thin on the ground such people have been over time.

A ship rammed and sank a riverboat docked at a New Orleans pier in one of the weirder slow-motion train wrecks ever caught on video. Fortunately nobody died. Another ship rammed a bridge in Philadelphia. Bridges don’t move, so they’re generally easy to dodge. Not sure what happened there.

Philadelphia also got hit with enough hail that people had to shovel it, and Wilmington Delaware actually had a tornado – like a real one, not just a duster in the corner of a parking garage.

The CEO of a tech company turned out to be having affairs with the majority of China's female spies and has now been forced to resign, which I have been told will tank the US stock market and with it most of the economy because reasons.

The GOP managed to torpedo Secretary of WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRR Pete Kegstand’s impeachment by holding an unannounced snap vote after the close of business, when many Democrats had left for the day and this has caused untold wailing and recriminations among Democrats because psy-ops designed to cause division always seem to work on people who think justice matters. Relax, folks. You should have seen this coming. Even if it had passed, it wasn’t going to happen in the GOP-controlled Senate. It was a statement of intent for the future, no more.

The US suddenly grounded every flight in its airspace for the second time since 9/11. This happened two days after the FAA – an organization decimated by Unelected Co-President Elon Musk and His Band of Feral Teenagers last year and systematically starved of funds by the GOP for over a decade now – pushed through a brand-new AI system for flights because replacing skilled workers with cheap nonsense code is just so on brand for them. Meanwhile Amtrak’s ticketing system also collapsed, so I hope you’re happy wherever you are.

They found a bomb in Peoria yesterday. Who bombs Peoria?

It’s been a time.

Having the least competent set of grifters, know-nothings, Dunning-Kruger poster children, and walking tumors in charge of the country when all of this is happening is not particularly comforting, it has to be noted. They’ll probably use the opportunity to bomb some other non-white country and steal whatever is left in the Treasury that they haven’t stolen already. They are nothing if not predictable.

At the micro level, it is registration season down at Home Campus, as noted, and my calendar is entirely booked from last Monday through this coming Thursday, and by Monday afternoon I suspect the remaining handful of openings next week will be likewise occupied. One of my colleagues doesn’t have an opening until December and hasn’t for a while. This is the downside of growing enrollment without being able to grow staff in the current fiscal climate. We’ll get there. It will just take a while.

I’ve spent most of the last two weeks flagging AI-generated essays for a class where the assignments are all 1-page personal reflections graded on a done/not-done basis. The current trick seems to be submitting jpgs of the essays rather than Word or pdf files. They’re easy to spot – black background, oversized white sans-serif font, vapid empty prose that almost but not quite addresses the question asked – and easy to check with two minutes of work. Why anyone would bother to cheat on an assignment this low-stakes is a mystery, but I refuse to grade them until the students speak to me about what happened and sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.

AI will be the death of us all.

I have multiple things I want to accomplish at home and zero energy to accomplish them even if most of them actually look like they’d be fun. Such is life.

I think I need to close the refrigerator door and let Fidel have it for a while. Maybe next week things will go back down to their usual level of crisis and psychosis – I’m used to that, so it will feel like normality.

One can dream.