Q. Pheevr

The Icelanders are on the slippery slope that leads to surnames. (Many more delightful examples in the replies.)

(balcony buffalo not pictured)

I tried to go back and pick “instructor” so that maybe [redacted] would be interested in my responses. The form said sorry, you’ve already completed this survey.

🤷🏼

What a complete waste of not very much time.

[Redacted] sent me a link to participate in a survey about ‘AI’ tools in academic work. Figured I’d give them a piece of my mind.

Question 1 asked me to identify my main role: instructor, researcher, student, or other. I said other: instructor and researcher equally.

There were no more questions.

38D: Parental term that is phonetically more difficult to say than "dada"

I don’t know how the #NYTXW (or today’s setter, Rebecca Goldstein) measures articulatory effort, but I’m skeptical. And Roman Jakobson would like a word.

Well, if anyone’s going to be goose-stepping along Louis van de Maesenstraat, it should be actual geese.

ביג בערד [אַ געלער פויגל אַזוי גרויס ווי אַ דערוואַקסענער מענטש] זינגט אויף סעסאַמי סטריט.

Queer eyes on the street

I’m choosing to assume this means a motley assortment of Highsmith adaptations and instalments in the Alien franchise.

I submit that one person with two scooters on the bus would be even sillier!

(There are, alas, some PhDs who exhibit the same glib know-it-allness as LLMs. They are spectacularly annoying. But a good PhD program should be able to channel such people’s enthusiasm for displaying knowledge into teaching them how to *create* knowledge.)

As James Thurber once wrote, “It is better to ask some of the questions than to know all the answers.”

LLMs are programmed to extrude answer-like prose with what comes across as blithe self-assurance (though of course they don’t really have selves). PhDs are trained to ask interesting questions.

Oh, I subscribe to the Star—here’s a gift link, which I hope will let you read the whole thing:

www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

Within Canada (lifetime):

🅽: Hazelton, BC
🆆: Prince Rupert, BC 🅴: Cape Spear, NL
🆂: Windsor, ON

bsky.app/profile/cage...

I got used to green-on-black, and when I started using a system with a colour monitor I thought it was very silly that the word-processing program was trying to emulate paper. It’s a different medium! Black is the default state of a screen! But eventually I came around to it.

Congratulations!

Take that, ELIZA.

Screenshot of the skeet I’m replying to, showing it in light mode (dark text on a white background): James Harbeck @sesquiotic.bsky.social I’m… just curious. There aren't polls here, so I can't do [one] as such, but how many of you use night mode (light text on black background)? Reply "night" or "day" [timestamp: August 8, 2025 at 12:58 AM] [🌏 Everybody can reply]

day:

“If you strike me down, I will become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” —Jesus, probably

Well, subtitles often don’t get the attention they deserve. But titles…!

frosted mini-beeves

so not goat, then

You might think the production team behind a big-budget sci-fi TV show could, among them, manage to come up with the correct spelling of the word “lens”.

“the sound of a million Shakespeares would produce the very same furious din and hubbub as the sound of a herd of prairie buffalo or sea billows”
—Stanisław Lem (as translated by Marc E. Heine)

I don’t know why, but I read it as the infinitive of a (Mexican) Spanish verb with a diminutive suffix incongruously stuck on the end.

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/checar#...

Notes:

1. When I say “OpenAI’s description”, I mean the company, not the technology; the quote is from openai.com/brand/. I don’t know whether OpenAI used OpenAI to generate it.

2. There are arcs in the logo, which maybe counts as a “use of circles”. Still no right angles, though.

Fittingly enough, OpenAI’s description of the logo says:

“The design embodies the fluidity and warmth of human-centered thinking through the use of circles, while right angles introduce the precision and structure that technology demands.”

There are no circles or right angles in it.

My lifetime answers haven’t changed since the last time I did this, so here’s my YTD. (Landmarks may not be *quite* the farthest in each direction, but they’re close enough.)

🆆 George C. Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary
🅽 Консульство України в Единбурзі
🆂 5 Drive-In
🅴 Augarten

The prose style of this article can best be summed up as “pretentious, without at the same time being grammatical”.

#AmNotEditingThisTime
#AmJustReading
#ThankFuck