Today has been a little weird.

I am blogging this into a text file because for the moment, my website is down. A routine scan by my webhost found some files that it thought were kind of hinky and so it flagged them as “malicious” and I was supposed to delete them the first (or second) time they emailed me about it, but I am so used to getting spammed by them with ads trying to get me to buy more services from them that I ignored them out of habit.

Bad move, it turns out, because the third email was to tell me that they had suspended my account for 24 hours in order to protect the integrity of their systems and their reputation blah blah whatever.

I don’t know why they couldn’t just delete the files themselves. I would have been cool with that. But the whole thing smells like a scam to get me to pay for some security upgrade anyhow.

I mean, all the files flagged were from an archive of the site I made in 2015. That means that these were not active files and had not been accessed in five years. One of them was a test file I had created myself back when I was trying to learn a few things about webhosting.

It’s possible that some malicious code infected those files, but if so, it originated from someone else’s account, not mine. Why should I get the third degree? Unless, of course, they are trying to scare me out of my money.

Anyhow, the ebil bad files are all deleted now, and I asked the support staff very nicely if they could activate my account now. So hopefully, the security people will scan my account, find it clean,and reactivate it in time for this post to go up before midnight.

Otherwise today has been decent so far. I went to Ideology and Politics. It was so freaking slow and boring. It consisted mostly of us reading out our cutesy little “interviews” we had done the previous Wednesday. So we had to go to the front of the class and tell everyone our partner’s answers.

Lather, rinse, repeat twleve times. These kids are so young that they don’t exactly have sophisticated and well developed political ideologies, and we’re all still pretty shy and nervous around each other, so for me at least, it just dragged on and on with no actual education going on. Suck city.

I did notice one interesting trend, though. One of the questions was “Do you think democracy is alive and well in Canada?” and the answers fell into two distinctive categories based on two distinctive interpretations of the question.

Some people interpreted the question as “is Canada currently a democracy?” and the answers was, of course, “yes”. They said “We have votes, our rights are protected. Of course we have democracy here in Canada!”

And more often than not, these were the kids with the thick accents who looked a little out of place. It’s a subtle difference, granted, because in this area, lots of born and raised Canadian citizens have brown skin and an accent. But my theory is still that these are people who grew up somewhere where there was no democracy, and so to them, it must have seemed like a trick question.

The other camp I will call the cynics, and they are the ones like myself who think Canadian democracy is under attack from Stephen Harper and his billionaire cronies. We interpreted the question as, in a sense, “How democratic is Canada right now?”

It was a real eye-opener in terms of different perspectives. From the point of view of someone from (like one student) Saudi Arabia, quibbling about degress of freedom and democracy must seem insane, like we are arguing over how juicy the fruits of Paradise are compared to last year’s crop.

But for those of us thoroughly in sync with this culture and its politics, these are very important issues. I truly believe democracy is under attack by people who, until now, have believed that democracy was a way to fool the sheep into being sheared, something to keep the masses diverted while the billionaire class – the private jet set – the “real people” – did whatever the fuck they wanted.

Then their golden boy, the One of Them that was supposed to deliver the White House to them so they could finally skip all that bribing of of individual politicians, lost to Obama, and people started talking about things like how the rich people won’t stop until they have literally all the money and the entire economic system collapses, bringing them to the ground like the king in Yertle the Turtle.

And now they are scared, and they have suddenly remembered why they never liked democracy in the first place because it gives the peasants some vague notion that they matter, and they want to strangle democracy to death ASAP.

Did not expect to go on that long about my political opinions. But it’s hardly a surprise, is it?

The rest of today has been comfortably banal. Finally got around to seeing if I could turn a can of baked beans into something vaguely like bean dip via blenderization. The results were not great. I should have followed my first instinct and emptied the bean juice out before blendering.

Also, in retrospect, should probably have used a lower setting than “frappe”. What can I say, I have not blendered much in my life.I have to learn this sort of thing the hard way.

All is not lost, however. The main problem with the result is that it is far too soupy. But I have cleverly put the leftovers in the fridge in hopes of not merely keeping them fresh but drying them out some as well.

Who knows, maybe it will develop an actual texture.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.