A silly Spanish word: "universidadamente".

I saw that in an article, it's about how the Jesuits think about changing the world, "university-ly".

Honestly, I could shit Spanish.

And I do!

Parking lot wordgames.

The other week when I was biking through the empty parking lot of the city's major league sports team arena near me, I noticed that I was going through "B LOT", and I suddenly recognized that it was almost as if the sign was spelling the word "blot".

Then, I suddently realized that "A LOT" would look like the phrase "a lot", and "C LOT" would look like the word "clot", though "D LOT", "E LOT", etc., don't much look like anything.

Last major holiday...

i.e. Thanksgiving, turns out that my art school curriculum on cults had a unit on Satanism planned for the Monday afterward.

So, my students had to read about Satanism over Thanksgiving weekend!

I thought that was funny, and I wondered what their parents thought.

I asked them, and one said that the woman on the plane asked her what she was reading.

One more thing about these kids nowadays...

...at the main university where I'm getting my current degree:

A good amount (like 15%) have logoware for the school.

It's like they've arrived.

When did kids get to love the system so much, and how long will it last?

I do wonder if their attitude changes the longer they're in school, and the longer they're out and they see how student loan debt affects their lives.

My father in retirement: Perspective.

When that really disturbing Rolling Stone article on the alleged UVA gangrape came out, I was talking with my dad about my having just read it, and I said I'd send him a copy if he wanted, though I found it really disturbing.

"Please do," he was like.

"Are you sure?", I was like.   "It's not that pleasant to think about, and I really don't want to force this on you."

"Oh no," he was like, "I'm retired, I bitch about whatever the hell I want."

Stories of Brits (2 of 2): Fomenting revolution, vocab.

The other week I went out for drinks with the (half British) (half Sudanese) sister of my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend, who is now also my friend.

We hadn't seen each other since the one night we went barhopping and I was trying to convince her to take other people's food since they bought it with *her* money, and she brought that up, and was like, "You know, I was totally with you, until you said all that about Christmas."

I had forgot -

After that one bar, we went to see if a restaurant bar was open (it wasn't), and on our stroll back, she saw a Christmas tree in the window of a store, and was like, "Oh look, Christmas, how lovely!".

"Christmas?", I was like.  "Christmas is a bourgeois luxury."

Then, I started going off on how many children the world over suffer making the toys that the children of the rich unwrap, look at once, and throw in a corner, and how it's a reactionary holiday, etc.

On a completely different note, she mentioned that for her new job she has to field filable cases and so feels like an "agony aunt", since people just go off and complain and complain to her, even when there's nothing filable.

I was confused by that phrase, and she said it's British for a major newspaper columnist who listens to your problems (like a Dear Abby, I took it).

Stories of Brits (1 of 2): Email banter.

So my one (half British) (half Sudanese) friend is a vegan, so when the ISIS pancake recipe came out, I immediately emailed him the link with this message -

Non-vegan!  How barbaric!

- to which he replied (after a smiley emoticon):

thank goodness they are not vegan, they would give us vegans a bad name!

. . .