Once again, the students in my senior / graduate linguistic anthropology course, Language and Societies, have written abstracts of their research papers, which I have now posted on the course blog of the same name.    As always, I am casting a wide net, looking for comments from anyone interested in these subjects.     If you have a few spare ( Read more... )

Dang, it's been a while since I posted here.  Life is busy, as always.

As I mentioned a few months ago, I joined the NDP back in September.  All of the general points of agreement, and the occasional divergences, remain as they were - not that my politics are set in stone.   I voted today online for the federal leadership.     Honestly, having ( Read more... )

In 2006, when my dissertation supervisor Bruce Trigger passed away, I was assigned the task of supervising the distribution of his books, offprints, etc. to various individuals and institutions.  Mostly that didn't give me any real power but it did have some perks, like getting to read all his old correspondence that was tucked away inside his ( Read more... )

At long last we are returned from our two-week journey to the Far East (of Canada) and back.  I am planning on collapsing out of utter exhaustion very shortly, leaving piles of presents and garbage strewn  all about.  But I felt I should mark today as the first time Arthur got to make a D&D character, which he'd been asking us to do for months now ( Read more... )

Arthur has taken an interest in chemistry lately - well, not *actual* chemistry, but he has discovered that when you put elements together, you get molecules, and so he spends a lot of time asking me things like, "What happens when you put six titaniums with one hydrogen?" and so on.    So this evening we were at the pool, and so of course he asked ( Read more... )

I'm looking at the official description of the boundary of my provincial riding (electoral district) just now, where I learn that it is "that part of the City of Windsor lying westerly and southerly of a line described as follows: commencing at the intersection of the international boundary between Canada and the United States of America with the ( Read more... )

Arthur was in fine form today ( Read more... )

Every year for the past several years I've been tracking the number of jobs listed on the American Anthropological Association job postings as of September 26. That date is somewhat arbitrary and I chose it for historical reasons, but a slightly different date wouldn't really change much with the overall trends. As a proxy for the health of the job ( Read more... )

Last night, Arthur and I were reading a poem about Charlie the chattering chipmunk that his teacher sent home. I asked him, "Can you think of any other words that start with the 'ch' sound?" to which he replied with a twinkle in his eye, "Charisma ( Read more... )

In general, I am not now a joiner of causes.  It's not that I don't have social and political opinions - you better know that I do - but I generally find most organizations to be so ridiculously managed or so full of annoying people that I find myself expressing strong opinions about how they are run, and then taking on positions of leadership, ( Read more... )