Posts
This page is the home to both long(er)-form blog posts (which are collected separately here and have their own RSS feed) and to microposts (~280 characters) that get forwarded to my Twitter and Micro.blog accounts (and can also be read here or followed here). You can read more about the reasoning behind my web presence on my About page.
- January 20, 2021 Thinking about how D&D has druids, bards, and magic potions and wondering if anyone has ever done an Astérix-themed campaign (or, preferably, actual play podcast).
- January 20, 2021 First time I’ve read this much into Inauguration Day happening around the same time as my birthday.
- January 19, 2021 I hear Italian PM Giuseppe Conte’s name fairly often on Francophone radio, but I nearly always hear it first as José Piquanté and then fix it in post.
- January 19, 2021 This passage about the anti-Semitic Dreyfus Affair (from a book I’m reading on the French Third Republic) is coming to mind today: “Long before the end of the Affaire, as the French called it, the question of the guilt of Dreyfus became almost lost i...
- January 15, 2021 Thinking today about all the faculty performance I could do with the time it takes to do data entry for my faculty performance review.
- January 13, 2021 I do not have any data to back this up, but it sure seems like Francophone news outlets have transitioned over the past two years from translating “impeachment” to just using it as a loanword.
- January 7, 2021 Remembering Governor Andy Beshear’s comments from last May: “You cannot fan the flames and then condemn the fire.” I can think of lots of people who need to hear that this morning.
- January 6, 2021 I had a friend in Michigan with whom I disagreed on a great deal but who was still an important and supportive mentor for me. On November 9, 2016, we had a very tense conversation where he told me that I would see: The candidate’s bluster might be wo...
- January 6, 2021 Pour le 6 janvier, Urban Federer, l’abbé d’Ensiedeln (Suisse), écrit au sujet de « la peur d’être perdant » de Hérode et Saül, qui a inspiré « une jalousie, laquelle les a poussés a la haine meurtrière ». C’est un message pour l’Épiphanie pour tous l...
- January 5, 2021 One of the biggest perks of teaching in an ICT program is the ease with which scenes from the fantastic 1992 hacker/heist movie Sneakers can be worked into one’s lectures.
- January 5, 2021 A Star Wars recap/remix from my house this morning: “The piggy galactic emperor wants to rule space so he can stop astronauts from going into space! But we NEED astronauts so that we can study space!”
- January 4, 2021 Missing teaching French today for a few reasons. First, my first time teaching FREN 102 began ten years ago this month 😱. Second, my kid insisted this morning on pronouncing “sept, huit” as “sept, tweet,” and even though that’s not really liaison, it...
- January 4, 2021 First line of this morning’s France Inter news broadcast: “A phone call worthy of an American crime novel.”
- January 3, 2021 The Georgia transcript reads like a student calling after I’ve submitted grades but before the registrar’s deadline has passed, arguing that he’s earned a perfect score but is willing to settle for my bumping him up a couple points to get an A.
- December 14, 2020 TIL that Star Trek’s “warp speed” is translated as the vastly inferior “distortion” in French and that at least one French news outlet has therefore adopted the translation “Operation Lightning Speed” for the U.S. vaccine effort.
- December 9, 2020 Just minutes after complaining that Harry Turtledove works so many recaps into each book of the series I’m reading, I discovered that I’d actually skipped a much earlier book. I hadn’t noticed because the recaps were so helpful in catching me up.
- December 9, 2020 I recently ordered a book directly from a French publisher, and thanks to COVID, watching the FedEx tracking updates is the closest thing I’ve had (or will have) to vacation travel for a long time.
- December 8, 2020 Reading about the Dreyfus Affair is spookier in December 2020 than it was back as an undergrad in French Civ II.
- December 7, 2020 The stress I feel when assigning final grades is compelling evidence that I would never make it as a judge.
- November 26, 2020 Also conscious this year how much “being thankful” isn’t quite enough. It helps me better appreciate what I have but doesn’t change what others lack. I could stand to do better with the former, but I have much more work to do for the latter.