Archive for the ‘These terrible times’ Category

It’s a jungle out there

November 12, 2025

Yesterday’s most puzzling item that turned up on my e-mail Junk site for my moderation (a small but significant amount of stuff is incorrectly labeled as Junk and has to be rescued; the rest I hand-delete):

headers (items with embedded links are underlined):

Outreach Team
Are you accepting paid guest post on arnoldzwicky.org
To: arnoldzwicky.org
Reply-to: Outreach Team

body of text (in its entirety, verbatim):

Hello,

I hope you are doing well.
I’m reaching out to explore the possibility of contributing a guest post to your website, along with a permanent do-follow link.
Could you let me know the available opportunities and relevant details?
I look forward to your response.

Best regards,

Thank you!

My first response was astonishment. I get an enormous number of requests to do guest postings on my blog, but most of them have some bit of credibility, and some are very cleverly framed. But this one is essentially a detail-free message. Does anyone ever reply to such messages?

Ah, but then I looked at the links and investigated further.

(more…)

Posted in These terrible times, This blogging life | Leave a Comment »

A reminder

June 9, 2025

From 1970, 55 years ago. Their offense was failing to obey a lawful order to disperse. For this the National Guard, totally untrained for the situation, fired on them, from a considerable distance.

Killed 4 and wounded 9 at Kent State in Ohio. Killed 2 and wounded 12 at Jackson State in Mississippi. All hell broke loose.

In the ensuing chaos at Ohio State, I managed not to get shot or bayoneted when I ended up at the end of a Guardsman’s rifle, by accident in charge of a group of students; we were just passing between classes. There is a saving grace in being right in the scared kid’s face, able to tell him levelly that if he backs off we will too. And then we went on to our classes. And I did not shit my pants. Though I did reek of anxiety sweat. (My teaching assistant got tear-gassed coming in from a different part of the campus, so he was weeping unhappily at the beginning of class.)

After that class, the university closed for a while — there were tanks on the street and helicopters with searchlights overhead — and I taught classes in my living room. I still have panic attacks from those days. But we survived.

People are dealing with much worse. Right now.

 

Posted in My life, These terrible times | 4 Comments »