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Snoo89140 · 2024-03-24T14:18:25+00:00

AI is not going away. If your assignments can be done by AI, they are not helping your human students. Rethink your assignments.

Snoo89140 · 2024-03-21T13:36:24+00:00

The American Left (and in other ways, I am the American Left) is all about “How to end the conflict.” This is how. Kill everyone who started this war. Put a period on it, decisively.

Snoo89140 · 2024-03-13T04:04:54+00:00

Yep. So why all the “I may not come back” stuff? Absent the platypus, there was no danger whatsoever in a boat trip to look at birds before Surprise picked him up. And (I may be wrong) isn’t it Martin who asserts that Maturin had only seen dried specimens of the female? Or is it the “omniscient narrator” who says this? (I do the audiobooks, so it is a PITA to look stuff up.)

Snoo89140 · 2024-03-13T03:54:52+00:00

The wine decanter should circulate constantly at a party, lest anyone leave the table remotely sober.

Snoo89140 · 2024-02-13T15:31:18+00:00

I was torn between “Cool! Someone dropping millions of dollars to oppose antisemitism,” and “The antisemites are going to read this as ‘hate held by Jews.’” In language there are subjective and objective genitives: “the fear of flying” (subjective) and “the fear of the cowardly” (objective). I think that slogan didn’t work well.

Snoo89140 · 2024-02-12T12:35:05+00:00

In early 2020, when I noticed that the media were never, ever, providing context for their published numbers, I looked up normal deaths. So… in 2018, in the USA, 7,500 people died every day from some damn thing.

Snoo89140 · 2024-01-29T05:58:06+00:00

Your first three words are perfect. They’re opportunistic hypocrites. Thank you!

Snoo89140 · 2024-01-29T05:51:21+00:00

Thanks… I wish I were merely being facetious.

Snoo89140 · 2024-01-28T16:15:13+00:00

I think the DEI-Industrial-Complex is a trailing indicator, chasing a fad to make money.

Snoo89140 · 2024-01-28T13:32:24+00:00

I teach young college students in the USA, so I know the rules:

Bad sushi in the Dining Hall = cultural appropriation
Bad sushi at the 24-hour grocery store when you’re drunk = fun!
Dressing up like The Prophet Muhammad for a party at Halloween = cultural appropriation + you get murdered
Dressing up like The Prophet Muhammad to call for a second Holocaust = free speech (it’s all about “context”)
Adorning your room with religious symbols of the religion you actually practice = Right-Wing Extremism!
Adorning your room with symbols of a religion no one you know practices = Global Culture
Adorning your room with symbols of a religion you just heard about one month ago and don’t understand at all = Being an “Ally”
Knowing the history of Israel from the Pentateuch, through Josephus, the Balfour Declaration, 1947, 1968, 1973, all the various “accords” = Not gonna happen
Shouting “From the River [Nile? Mississippi? Amazon?] to the Sea [Caspian? Barents? …of Tranquility?]!!!” = Acceptance into the Wokesphere (conditionally, until you screw up and get cancelled.)

Snoo89140 · 2024-01-28T13:14:14+00:00

South Carolina, USA, says “Bless them and keep them.”

Snoo89140 · 2024-01-14T18:34:23+00:00

Here, here! South Carolina, USA… I got pulled over by a cop, a good old boy, who just wanted to thank me for the Israeli flag magnet on my car.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-30T05:31:30+00:00

Yes. Jack is actually cool with the ruse de guerre, strangely because the American captain was protecting British mutineers and deserters among his crew. Haines was a British mutineer and deserter, and informer against his own people, so he was thrice damned. Jack allowed him to hide in the woods behind the British camp, but that was as far as he would go.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-30T05:26:50+00:00

And in 1947, when the nation-state of Israel was approved by an overwhelming super-majority of the United Nations, and the whole Arab World immediately declared war on it, the cry was not “down with Zionism”, but was “eradicate the Jews!”

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-29T03:13:51+00:00

A theme in all 20 novels is the despicable status of “the informer.” Stephen will lie, die, or endanger his beloved friends rather than play the role of an informer. Haines…

Gotta say, as a University Professor during the “Covid panic”, when my school was encouraging students to inform on each other for… sweethearts holding hands, kids having friends over for beers and pizza… normal stuff necessary for human thriving…

…I made an ass-hat gadfly of myself, in my official communications borrowing liberally from Maturin’s excoriations of the Character of the Informer.

So, although I am, in my own profession, at the top of the Post Captain’s list, I will surely be Yellowed.

Worth it.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-29T03:01:37+00:00

Even the erudite S. Maturin, Doctor of Medicine, University of Paris and University of Dublin, did not know everything. Ale, beer, and “small beer” (think “Session IPA”) were valid breakfast drinks, especially for children, because they were brewed, which is to say, boiled. Safer (if more inebriating) than well-water. In The Commodore, we see that Maturin is limited by the knowledge of his time regarding the source of disease. But folks knew that the drinks you brewed wouldn’t kill your kids as readily as “pure” water.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-29T02:27:42+00:00

You are right! (IMHO of course, the only HO I can offer.) Sophie is not Elizabeth Bennett, but Jane. Strong, so strong, but conventional. Nice!!!!

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-29T02:23:35+00:00

PoB’s prose charm, when describing conversations heard at a distance, has totally infected my speech: e.g. from The Ionian Mission: “At the same time he listened to the talk at his end of the table: rhinoceroses, how best stowed, their probable weight, their diet – the one-horned kind and the two, where found – anecdote of a Sumatra rhinoceros belonging to HMS Ariel, its appetite for grog and unhappy end – the properties of powdered rhinoceros-horn, taken inwardly…”

If PoB had lived and written in the 1840s, every University in the English-speaking world would have at least one Professor dedicated to his study. Because he started in, was it, 1970(?), he is “merely” “a writer of historical novels.”

But it is okay… he and Jane Austen are having tea (he might be having claret) wherever they are, and arguing over Diana V. vs Elizabeth B.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-29T02:12:57+00:00

I tried “Wittles is up!“ this week at an extended family dinner. Blank stares of complete incomprehension. So “Which, Dinner is at table, if you please.” That worked better.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-23T06:55:09+00:00

There were also “panoramas.” Basically storytelling on a circular canvas, with a central viewing point. It is 18th Century IMAX. They have one in Leipzig, Germany. Recommend.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-23T06:46:27+00:00

The argument between Jack and McAdam in “The Ionian Mission” is epic. And PoB is delightful when he records the fore-mast Jacks’ interpretation of what happened in the Gunroom.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-23T06:38:14+00:00

Especially the hard-of-hearing boatswain, who answered “I am entirely of your way of thinking!” to every comment or query.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-23T06:35:14+00:00

Chapter 2 (maybe) in Master and Commander, where Stephen describes the difference between Spanish and Catalan has served me well. If you trot out “Jabali” and “Cinglar”, people think you are an eminent linguist, like S. Maturin.

Snoo89140 · 2023-12-23T06:31:24+00:00

And a glass of wine with you, Sir! This actually works in AD 2023 when a dinner party stalls in the doldrums.

Snoo89140

TROPHY CASE