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?

Five years ago, a few of us who had (had) the same PhD advisor started a group chat on Keybase and added that advisor. It’s been a source of music recommendations, professional advice, sympathy during rough personal moments, and much more. It’s wholesome, helpful, and all around great.

Un jour pendant mon séjour en France, un ami (aussi américain) m’envoie acheter des flocons d’avoine. Mais lui, il ne se souvient pas de la phrase complète, et moi, j’entends mal ce qu’il dit. C’est donc comme ça que j’arrive chez Casino demander tout bêtement « des flacons de quelque chose »

I would never visit a casino or place a bet, but I’m putting off the last mow of the season until tomorrow morning, when it might rain and get all the leaves wet, so clearly I’m still a gambler.

La webradio joue un rôle important dans mes efforts de garder un lien avec le monde francophone depuis le Kentucky. Je suis donc content d’avoir appris ce matin comment trouver un flux caché d’une webradio—comme ça, je peux l’ajouter à une appli au lieu de visiter le site web.

Kiddo picked up a new library card over the weekend (lots of Kentucky counties do reciprocity agreements, so we collect them), and she’s incensed that there’s a 25-book limit at this system (we regularly check out 50 books each from two different counties).

I generally like my local paper, but I’m annoyed by all of the feel-good “someone won big at the lottery!” stories they publish. Lotteries are regressive taxes, and celebrating winners helps conceal that fact.

Maybe not clicking with Utah is because so many of my interactions with Utah and Utahns involved being defensive about or emphasizing my being from somewhere else. Even in my Mormonism, I was a Kentucky Mormon, and I filtered a lot through that perspective.

Visiting Utah for work this weekend has me thinking about how I’ve never really felt like I understand this state—and that despite attending college here and all four of my grandparents being born here. I feel like it should be more familiar to me than it is.

I was dreaming that some STEM-type was criticizing Bachelor of Arts degrees as “BS” and dream-me flew into a rage ready to defend the humanities until I woke up and realized that his joke didn’t even work.

Used some Conet Project numbers stations recordings as white noise to help me fall asleep last night, so can’t wait to see what kind of paranoia my subconscious injects into the day.

I am enjoying Dimension 20 now that I’m finally trying it out, but it’s also reminding me how much Dungeons and Dragons straight up expects you to solve problems with violence, and that’s been bothering me a lot more than it used to.

Is it too much to ask to put virtual conference attendees on a different listserv? One that doesn’t include the pleas to join the in-person social events taking place while I’m trying to clean my kitchen and put kiddo to bed?

Thanks to a combination of personal hubris and inconvenient coincidences, this week involves 4 presentations at 2 conferences, catching up on 3 weeks of grading, and writing P&T letters for 4 colleagues. Hooray for free wifi on my flights.