So, I am now on sabbatical!  Technically I believe my sabbatical started on August 15 which was the first day of the academic year, but in terms of its impact, it started this Wednesday when classes started and I sat around most of the day, except for the part where I took Arthur to meet his Grade 1 teacher.  So that's all right.  It's actually a ( Read more... )

An astute Phrontistery reader inquires:

I was wondering if you could help me with a word issue.  I was just reading some stuff on the Internet today and came across pleonasm.  Later on in the article, they used the term "pleonastic".  A look up one m-w.com confirmed that this was a correctly derived form of the word "pleonasm".  Seconds before ( Read more... )

Well it's getting pretty busy here at Nathan Phillips Square waiting for the procession to start.  As Julia puts it, the sound of tubas and the scent of "NDP magic" are in the air. One hopes Jack would approve.

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Well, I figure I should get at least one post in this month. Dang. I promised myself that even if I couldn't stave off the obsolescence of LJ I wouldn't contribute to it. But here we are. My fieldwork is over, not only for this year but for this entire project, and I've pretty much been sleeping and playing Civilization V for the past week and ( Read more... )

So I've finally given in to the dark side and got myself a smartphone. This is partly because my old phone died a death by a thousand and finally gave in, and partly because I really do have work-related needs for it, and partly because it's only minimally more expensive than a new non-smartphone, and of course partly because I'm a giant geek who ( Read more... )

Scene: A middle-class family is watching Mythbusters, completely unaware that hilarity is about to strike ( Read more... )

So apparently Arthur has overcome his longstanding hatred of the French language. For those of you who don't know, he was in a French-only daycare for a year in 2007-08 and picked up nothing, although he did learn to count to four in Spanish from Handy Manny. So today, after finishing playing with his new Nintendo 3DS (for which many thanks go out ( Read more... )

This year, one of Arthur's big wishes for his birthday was a science kit. He got one at Christmas, and it contained a booklet telling him all the other wonderful kits they sell, and so he went through the book and diligently checked off all the other ones he wanted, making it much, much easier for me to go to Scholar's Choice and get one he wanted ( Read more... )

When I was One ( Read more... )

As Julia reported a couple of days ago, when we were discussing with Arthur whether Jello is a solid or a liquid (answer: it's both: a colloidal hydrogel) he suggested that one way to decide would be to "drop a one-inch tungsten ball" on it, to see if it sinks. Intrigued, I googled the phrase "one-inch tungsten ball" and sure enough, all of the ( Read more... )