I respect web forms that don’t let me paste content into the “confirm email” field, but I still resent them.

Comme mon épouse se débrouille en français, on s’en sert pour parler des cadeaux devant notre fille exclusivement anglophone. Mais comme « Pokémon » serait quand-même reconnaissable, mon épouse a dû trouver une circonlocution : « le jeu vidéo de… pochette…. monstre ? »

Spouse and I have been using French to talk about Christmas presents in front of kiddo. Tonight, I got to hear spouse refer to “monsters of the pocket” so that kiddo wouldn’t recognize “Pokémon” in the middle of an otherwise incomprehensible-to-her sentence.

Spouse typically has a strict after-Thanksgiving rule for Christmas decorations, so the fact that we’re breaking them out today should tell you something about the week we had.

Watched The Great Mouse Detective with kiddo earlier today and am now reading Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald. These are… two very different takes on Holmes.

“Just as I suspected, Daddy… You’ve been listening to We Will Rock You!”

For orthodontic reasoms, kiddo has to brush teeth after eating basically anything, and we usually double check after each brushing. This just happened while I was making myself some chai, so she complained my fingers tasted like tea when I was poking them in her mouth.

I know I should probably exercise the MST3K Mantra here, but I don’t understand how you can carry a weapon as inherently dangerous as a lightsaber and describe yourself as a “guardian of peace and justice.”

Kiddo gets scared by even the mildest of spooky things, but she also loves the “jibblies” monster from Homestar Runner and does imitations of it where she says legitimately creepy things, and I don’t know how to reconcile those.

J’ai souvent l’impression que Johnny Hallyday savait plus sur Tennessee Williams que moi, un Américain, et même si j’apprécie cette chanson-là, je ressens donc toujours un peu de culpabilité en l’écoutant.

I wanted this coconut tea to taste like coconut cream pie, but it’s going in the direction of piña colada instead, and I’m always disappointed when I make myself a cup.

Did early voting on Saturday, so I guess my civic contribution for today is giving kiddo extra screen time while her school is being used as a polling place.

I always assumed “Dem Bones” was one of those vaguely educational children’s songs (meant to teach anatomy?) and was always confused by the line “hear the word of the Lord.” I was yesterday years old when I finally realized the song is a reference to that story in Ezekiel.

Je suis un Américain qui travaille pour une université américaine, mais je viens de recevoir un courriel (à mon compte professionnel) prétendant venir de l’EDF et annonçant que j’ai une facture à payer. Même si c’est évidemment du spam, je suis flatté qu’on essaie de m’arnaquer en français.

Got to do early voting at the library today, which neatly combines a lot of my favorite things into a single experience.

It weirds me out that linking to a file in an email is starting to become the new attaching a file to an email. It isn’t that I’ve never done this, but it seems like it’s the default for my students—even for file types that I don’t think of as cloud-specific.

This morning, my very tired brain noticed that the title of the John Le Carré novel “(The) Tailor of Panama” follows the same syllable pattern as “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and started singing it accordingly.

I know it’s not Advent yet, but I’m feeling impatient for Advent, and if I start checking out Advent books from Libby/the library now, I won’t have to compete with people for them in a month when Advent really starts.

The sheer hassle of ordering an instructor copy of this McGraw-Hill textbook is only strengthening my commitment to eventually replacing it with an open textbook.

I have thought for years about the way that Twitter research (in the aggregate) serves as a largely unintentional history of Twitter, but I’ve never thought to wonder what that specifically looks like right now.

Je fais du vélotaf depuis des années, mais avec chaque petit changement de température, j’oublie complètement comment bien m’habiller.

Kiddo has reached the “I want to read while you buy a few groceries, please steer me so I don’t walk into anyone” stage of bookwormdom.

One of my favorite things about Hugo is how much work I can do on a website from my phone (so long as I have a git client installed). Editing text files from a small screen isn’t a big deal.

Thinking a lot today about Leo Tolstoy’s argument that because we cannot agree on when violence is justified, we must agree that violence is never justified. It still seems to me like a bold claim to make, but I’m feeling more and more convinced by it.

Hear me out: What if the moral of Dr. Strangelove for the 2020s is that automation and efficiency aren’t always good things?