Stan Beeler 🇨🇦

Not fair! Just try to explain your area of research to one of your non-academic relatives and you will see that they care intensely, vigorously, and with great abandon.

Latest computer recycling exploit: I have a bunch of 2.5 inch sata 500 gb hdds that were sitting on a shelf (years) after I upgraded some computers to faster ssds. I found some very cheap usb ssd caddys on Temu for about $5 each so I now have some storage / backup drives that I can give to students.

No, he is the skilled operator...

Yes, I believe that is true, to some extent. German is my 2nd (3rd? if you count poor highschool French). However, I don't think that I have the nasalized vowels and missing terminal g sounds from Nova Scotian English in my German.

I liked it, but I have not eaten meat for over 30 years so my perspective may be somewhat skewed.

No, it is an online competition and the footage that is submitted can't be released to the general public until the judging is complete.

My Nova Scotian accent disappeared under years of Canadian RP English education. According to my mother-in-law standard Canadian is also quite noticeable in my German. <grin>

A letter in spring and autumn, but they always mention academic excellence, new programs in science and the humanities, etc. They only time they asked that I actually visit campus was when I was awarded a visiting scholar position for a year. Nobody mentions the sports teams in my letters.

My Uni hired a president from the US system & he tried to develop a revenue stream based on sports fetishism. Canadian Unis do not have a tradition of universal ritual attendance at games and alumni team loyalty resulting in donations to the institution. He quit after 1/2 his term.

I went to an academic conference in Florida just after the 2nd Bush was elected and discovered that no one at the conference had voted for him. It was then I realized that education level and political affiliation in the US is a more significant factor than in other countries.

I filmed Merlin and Karin for an online dog competition yesterday and today. Here is the empty arena & my camera. I am not allowed to show the actual routines until the submitted footage has been judged.

Latest Temu-in-Canada purchase is a set of dog sport hoops (like agility but actually a sport called hoopers according to Karin). About 1/2 the price of the same item at Home Depot so I guess we did not get charged the US China tariff.

While working on my crispy baked tofu recipe today I noticed that I have created a vegetarian visual analogue of the McNugget. Sigh.

We started watching Call my Agent: Berlin last night. It's still funny in German although some humour from the French original looks a bit odd in a German cultural context. The humour in Ten Percent (UK version) was not as noticeably different. I like adaptations of TV in various languages.

Anybody else think of the poisoned tylenol capsules murder that happened in the early 1980s? There was a lot of speculation at the time that it was an attack on their market share. That company can't seem to catch a break.

Indeed, I have noticed this, but one can hope. <grin>

In German or English? Not noticeable for a cow, perhaps, but if it were chicken?

Or, you could just read something that the prof has published before you sign up for the class...

In highschool my chem lab partner was a refugee from Uganda. Idi Amin expelled all of the Asian "immigrants" and some made it to Canada. She was much better at chemistry than I was & probably went on to a career in the sciences. It's not good for a country to have a "mad dictator" in power.

Q.E.D.

If you mark enough undergraduate essays you lose any confidence in your ability to spell. In any case, orthography is a modern illusion, look to your ancestors for the freedom to adjust the words according to mood or available lead type. <grin>

Today's run was in a light rain and despite rain gear I got wet feet and soaked to the skin. 10.7 k, not particularly fast, but it was warm so I came home happy and relatively comfy. I am not looking forward to the snow as it makes running hard, even with spikes. Life as an aging road runner.

Could have been the Pope... (from a 1960s stoner variant of that old saying.) <grin>

Forest primeval, northern British Columbia, we have bear & moose warnings on the Uni campus regularly.

This morning on the way to my car I noticed "dog" poop on the lawn...looked closer and saw it was the size of cow crap and realized that a bear had been by in the night. I am happy that I did not meet the perpetrator at his business...Life in a Northern Town

I have a number of recipes that consist of printouts from the web that I have heavily annotated to adjust for available ingredients, dietary restrictions, and portion size. If I lose that pile of paper I will be helpless.

Our retirement activity: Karin is taking a Japanese course and spends a lot of time mumbling and quietly writing characters on a sheet of paper. Me setting my synth keyboard to pipe organ mode and running over the same 4 bars of a fugue until even the dogs flee in horror. Performative Masculinity?

Old German joke: Herring, Herring, so fett wie Göring. (Herring as fat as Göring) got a fish seller jailed so when he got out it was changed to Herring, Herring, so fett wie gestern (yesterday) when the SS were around.

I doubt that I will ever master it, but I can aspire to get the first part, if not the second. I started teaching myself piano when I retired and I mostly learn Bach's easy works for children or slow-learning aristocrats. My dogs seem to enjoy watching me practice...

Muscle memory & autocorrect. Sometimes ignorance, but also, our fingers follow the most common sequence or the cursed machine "fixes" your (you're?) spelling. As a beleaguered English professor I had a series of macros that typed in an encouraging correction for most of these common errors.