Apparently, he looks like a drunk balding white man drinking a Bud Lime-A-Rita and yelling racial epithets on a train. You learn something new every day.

…and he decided to enlighten (endarken?) the masses with two great endeavors.

One was to write a comic book about superheroes who fight SJWs. OK, silly, but go ahead, make your story about people with superpowers bopping evil immigrants and antifa.

The other was to…start a university? An online university? A…Voxiversity?

All right, he’s got to be fucking with us. You have got to watch this thing: It’s an animated pop-up book. It opens to “Religion and Philosophy”, which features Vox Day in ridiculous fantasy spiky armor and a spiky throne and a skull. Because of course it does. That’s exactly how we advertise the philosophy department at my university. It’s also precisely how I picture John Wilkins.

Page two is “Male-Female Relations” which features another fantasy warrior-man and a playboy bunny standing atop a pile of nubile women who are dead or something. I guess it’s his alternative to a women’s studies department. I take it he’s going to be teaching gender caricatures.

Page three is “History, Immigration, and War”, with a gigantic suit of golden armor wielding a huge flaming sword. Popping up out of the top of the suit of armor is a tiny Trump-head wearing a baseball cap, like a tiny pimple atop an engorged, inflamed, veiny testicle. In the background, a horde of Pepe the Frog cartoons are driving tanks.

Cut to a dead-eyed, middle-aged man who introduces himself as Vox Day, and assures us that tens of millions of people will want to watch the series of videos he’s calling “Voxiversity”, which the social media giants are trying to silence, so you should send him money.

You are reading my description and refusing to believe this could possibly be true — it’s got to be some kind of over-the-top joke. But no. Watch the video. I was underplaying the cheesiness.

Nobody takes this bozo seriously, do they?

Probably, darn it. I had uncles who were in it, and sailed the same routes in the video below, and they had a few stories. There are positives: like the isolation and repetitive mundane tasks and long stretches where nothing happens. There are negatives, like the isolation and repetitive mundane tasks and long stretches where nothing happens. But man, the peacefulness and beauty of the sea sure are tempting.

The adjunct run-around. We ought to be ashamed. The Guardian explains how bad the adjunct game has become: professors living in poverty, homelessness, and even turning to sex work to make ends meet. This is simply not right, and yet universities are openly exploiting the people who should be the most important workers in their institutions. Why do they allow it to continue? Money.

Adjuncting has grown as funding for public universities has fallen by more than a quarter between 1990 and 2009. Private institutions also recognize the allure of part-time professors: generally they are cheaper than full-time staff, don’t receive benefits or support for their personal research, and their hours can be carefully limited so they do not teach enough to qualify for health insurance.

This is why adjuncts have been called “the fast-food workers of the academic world”: among labor experts adjuncting is defined as “precarious employment”, a growing category that includes temping and sharing-economy gigs such as driving for Uber. An American Sociological Association taskforce focusing on precarious academic jobs, meanwhile, has suggested that “faculty employment is no longer a stable middle-class career”.

This behavior is blatant capitalistic criminality, and it has to end. I have a few suggestions.

The accreditation agencies are playing a role in allowing the exploitation to continue. They are supposed to be assessing the quality of the educational experience at a university; when half the faculty are part-time, paid on a shoestring, and are receiving no benefits for their work, that says that the teachers at that university are disrespected and are not provided the resources to do their work, and they should not be accredited. When a big name ivy league university is told their degrees will count for nothing unless they increase the percentage of full-time faculty, they will change.

Make it illegal to hire faculty for less than some high percentage of full time (with exceptions; some part-time medical leave, for instance). It is absurd that anyone has to take on 3 or 4 piddling little teaching appointments to make ends meet; that says right there that there is enough work for a full time person, but they’re artificially breaking it up to avoid paying benefits. Sometimes you do have to hire faculty purely for teaching, with no research option, and that’s OK — but do it with an integral number of teaching lines, instead of breaking it up into dribs and drabs that are not fair to the people you hire. When my wife was working as an adjunct, it meant driving all over eastern Pennsylvania to piece together enough work. She would have been thrilled with a job at one place, with an office and some acknowledgment of her existence, even if it involved just as much teaching.

My tenured and tenure track colleagues have a part to play, too. Are the contingent faculty in your department treated in the same way as everyone else? Are they asked to attend faculty meetings? Do they have a say in the curriculum and course offerings? Or are they told to come in, teach their one course, and then get out of the way and disappear? Are you telling your administration to create teaching lines, or are you simply lobbying for individual courses to be staffed? Are there part-timers in your department that you are used to seeing show up briefly and disappear? Do you talk to them?

Parents of prospective students: do you ask about how classes are staffed? How likely is it your first-year student is going to meet or be taught by tenured faculty? If their classes are all taught by a temporary faculty who is also teaching part time at a local community college, you might as well start your kid in that community college. They’re getting the same education, from the same person.

We treat too many people in this manner of prolonged cruelty. It really needs to stop.

Why don’t we have elevenses anymore?

You’ve had an excruciating work day. Your boss moved your deadline up, an irate customer yelled at you over an expired coupon, or maybe your desk mate smacked through an egg salad sandwich with his mouth open. Happy hour couldn’t come soon enough.

In the 19th century, you wouldn’t have had to wait. Start drinking before lunch, why don’t you? The tradition of “elevenses” meant it was customary for workers to take a break at, you guessed it, 11 a.m. In most cases, the respite was synonymous with a tug from the ol’ bottle.

This semester, most of my lecture classes are scheduled for mid-day, and I’ve got labs in the morning from 9-11. Eleven o’clock is the perfect time for a break, I’m realizing. I know how a hobbit would celebrate elevenses, but the American tradition is different.

Boozing wasn’t very taboo at first. In our new “alcoholic republic,” people (mostly men) passed the bottle at all waking hours. Employers were actually expected to provide hooch throughout the workday. It made sense that the mid-morning break now common in modern work environments naturally paired with whiskey. Thus, the American definition of elevenses was born.

Hmm. I should float this suggestion by the division chair, or even the chancellor. Except…this is a very bad idea in a commuter culture. Daily alcohol consumption before the drive home sounds like a catastrophe in the making, and it’s a good thing this custom faded away.

But wait! I don’t have a commute! I live across the street from my workplace. Surely nothing could interfere with a daily tipple for me, so maybe we can make an exception for people who live within walking distance of work.

Except then I’d become that “fun” professor who is oddly discursive and talks funny and occasionally falls down in class. So maybe that’s a bad idea.

I guess I’ll stick to 11:00 tea.

What did we do to our kids? Dahl was a favorite author around our house, and only now am I learning what an unpleasant person he was.

His early writing in the short story form was impacted by the political situation on the world stage. He believed in a world government and he was extremely sympathetic to Hitler, Mussolini, and the entire Nazi cause. His stories were filled with caricatures of greedy Jews. One suggests ” a little pawnbroker in Housditch called Meatbein who, when the wailing started, would rush downstairs to the large safe in which he kept his money, open it and wriggle inside on to the lowest shelf where he lay like a hibernating hedgehog until the all-clear had gone.” In 1951 he visited Germany with Charles Marsh and luxured in Hitler’s former retreat at Berchtesgaden. His dislike of Jews and especially of Zionists was egged on by Marsh’s Israel hatred, later encapsulated in a revolting letter to Marsh where he mocked the head of East London’s B’Nai B’rith Club.

Suddenly, the Oompa Loompas have context, and it’s not good. When you read how he regarded women, you’ll read The Witches with different eyes, too.

I rolled my eyes at this story: Forget Cheat ‘Sheet’ — Student Outwits Professor With Enormous ‘Cheat Poster’. The gist of it is that a professor told their students they could bring a 3×5 card with notes to an exam — but he didn’t specify the units (there’s a lesson right there), so one student created a crib sheet that was 3 feet by 5 feet. The professor was good natured about it, as I would be in such a situation, but the article completely misses the point.

The purpose of the exam is to evaluate learning, not the ability to read stuff off a card. I’ve occasionally given open-note exams, and told the students they can even bring their textbook if they want. It doesn’t matter all that much. Those kinds of exams are asking, do you understand the concepts? Can you apply them correctly? Can you think creatively and synthesize multiple ideas? I think students are all aware of this: if the professor lets you bring in notes of any kind, the test is not going to be about literal transcription of facts from one piece of paper to another.

The professor was not outwitted at all. If anything, they might feel a little chagrined at a loophole that tricks a student into wandering around campus with an awkwardly huge notecard. And they probably figure creating that ‘cheat sheet’ was a useful study exercise for the student, so no problem — if they mastered the material, good for them.

Good news! The world isn’t ending today. The absence of an onrushing Niburu has compelled the original false prophet to retract his claim. Go ahead and throw a party tonight, for good or ill. (For some strange reason, my wife has decided to go on a Christmas movie binge. I’m sitting here praying for Niburu to show up after all.)

Then, remember, tomorrow was supposed to be the start of Freedom Week, that nonsensical few days that Milo Yiannopoulos was supposed to bring all of his asshole friends to Berkeley to test the limits of free speech with advocacy of Nazi policies. There were portents and omens of raging incompetence ahead of time, and now they have been fulfilled — the event has been formally cancelled.

In a Saturday letter to the school, an attorney for Berkeley Patriot, Marguerite Melo, wrote, “On their behalf, you are hereby notified the Berkeley Patriot is canceling all Free Speech Week activities it sponsored.” The letter accused administrators of putting up roadblocks and said the group was “contemplating initiating litigation against the responsible parties and the administration for violation of our clients’ civil rights.”

Yeah. It’s the administration’s fault because the students (and Milo) failed to get speakers signed up and to pay for the auditoriums they wanted to reserve. Except that also it was clear that this was just the alt-light wackaloons trolling the university.

But in a separate email chain obtained by this news organization, Lucian Wintrich, one of the supposed speakers, told Mogulof the event had been a set-up from the start. “It was known that they didn’t intend to actually go through with it last week, and completely decided on Wednesday,” Wintrich wrote in an email around 10 a.m. Saturday morning.

“Wait, whoah, hold on a second,” wrote a clearly surprised Mogulof. “What, exactly, are you saying? What were you told by MILO Inc? Was it a set-up from the get-go?” “Yes,” came Wintrich’s one-word response. Wintrich did not immediately respond to a voicemail seeking comment.

So it was officially cancelled, but everyone behind it had known it couldn’t possibly happen, and…some of them are still claiming it will happen, without any institutional backing or security or venue.

But representatives for Yiannopoulos insisted the event would move forward without the student group. “The Berkeley Patriot may have pulled out of the event, but Milo and his other speakers have not. More details will be released at a FaceBook Live press conference that will be streamed shortly,” spokeswoman Mona Salama wrote in an email around 11:15 am Saturday.

I think that means that aimless disorganized thugs will show up anyway, wander around haplessly, try to cause a little trouble, and get rounded up by campus police. Fun! Chaos! Confusion! And afterwards,
the recriminations and finger-pointing!

Except here. I’ll be home grading papers.

Niburu, where are you?