In Duolingo you can now have conversations with the emo Lily, one of the cartoon characters in the language-learning app.

While I unleash long, confusing German sentences riddled with clumsy errors at Lily, N answers all of her questions with a heavy pause, followed by “sí” or “no”. He can say long Spanish sentences very well but the idea that a conversation with anybody outside of the immediate family might be more than monosyllabic does not appeal.

With me he’s actually very chatty which nobody on the planet believes because nobody heard him say much in years.

Klara also does Duolingo but she despises languages. She’s doing the math one instead. Like my father taught me what a thesaurus was at 4, Klara’s father has been talking to her about heteroscedasticity and beta binomial distribution since she was a toddler.

I had to Google how to spell heteroscedasticity.

Is it true that there are people who are cheering the murder of the medical CEO? Today is the last day of class, so I’ve been outside the news cycle. But we had a department meeting today where everybody was very eager to discuss this murder and the general mood was that the murderer needs to be caught and locked up ASAP.

Is it an exaggeration that people are celebrating? I’ve seen some mentions of this phenomenon but it’s too out there for me to believe it.

When I was 12, my father signed me up for a distance learning program in French. It was very successful in imparting to me a detailed and sophisticated knowledge of the French grammar but you can’t learn to speak if all you do is write and read.

When I moved to the French-speaking Quebec a decade later, I was hoping to buff up my conversational French but I met with reluctance and mockery of the native population. Today, I’m a different person but back then I was a painfully shy little wallflower and didn’t react well to people laughing at me. It’s strange because in Ukraine, which is also a country battling to preserve its language from a larger, more dominant culture, if a foreigner says even just a couple of words in Ukrainian, he’ll be feted and love-bombed but in Quebec it’s nothing of the kind.

I tried enrolling in French courses at the university but ran into the problem of the proficiency test. Once she saw my answers on the test, the French professor said, “You are a native speaker. You don’t need language courses because your French is perfect.” I tried to explain that I’m the opposite of a speaker. I can conjugate flawlessly but I can’t say sentences. I tried to demonstrate my speaking impotence by speaking in my very faulty French but the professor was convinced I’m faking it to get easy credit and I was banished. This is how I ended up in a situation where I can read and enjoy Maupassant in the original and understand people speaking about Maupassant but can’t say, “Excuse me, where are the toilets?”

My gerdan has arrived! Just in time for the meeting where I’ll announce budget cuts.

You can’t figure out the scope of the thing before seeing it on a person, so here it is:

Don’t tell me it isn’t absolutely stunning.

The “g” in gerdan is pronounced closer to a “h” in “hurray.” It’s definitely not pronounced like a g in “gesture.”

I’m not sure if everybody can see the cracked planet over the woman with a cross. This symbolizes the rejection of paganism and embrace of Christianity. Also note that the woman depicted on the gerdan is wearing a gerdan of her own. This particular necklace is from the Catholic part of Ukraine, which is why the cross and the colors are not Orthodox.

The Orthodox part of Ukraine suffered more from the Soviets (and now the Russians), and the traditional arts weren’t preserved in the same way. We do have these necklaces in Eastern Ukraine but I’ve never seen a y religious themes in them. Usually, it’s flowers or even vegetables, very pretty but not menacing like this one.

Our woke top administrator thinks that a secretary (office manager, whatever the term) is an unnecessary job. He wants to get rid of all the departmental secretaries and have professors do their jobs for free. This strategy has already been implemented at the departments of Geography, Mathematics, and Physics, bringing their Chairs to the brink of a nervous collapse.

The administrator who came up with this is keeping his own secretary, though. Some people are always more equal than others.

The color of the year 2025 is excrement?

Thank you so much, Pantone.

Make sure you have a private life. Every so often, do something no one knows about.

Go see a movie alone and don’t tell anyone. Press a flower in a book and tell no one. Drive to the neighboring town, walk around, and come back, and don’t tell anyone where you were all day.

It will feed you.

https://x.com/JustineBateman/status/1864518347892691142?t=k1XFhodAhRmFsJHDt3HhQg&s=19

I do a lot of this kind of thing. A LOT. It does untold amounts of good to my inner peace and enjoyment of life.

Excellent, excellent advice. It’s little things like this that can save people from all sorts of mental ailments.

I’m astonished at the profound ignorance on display at the SCOTUS today. Sotomajor and Jackson- you think giving T to a boy is the same as giving it to a girl? You believe a girl can go through “typical male puberty”? I am dumbfounded.

https://x.com/Miriam_Grossman/status/1864389446453346489?t=puXh0dWd4mTSaFWDdRAQuA&s=19

Do you think Jackson and Sotomayor are posturing for political reasons or is this because they are old and sincerely don’t get it?

Here’s more:

“You’re depriving young adults the choice of which sex to adopt,” says Sotomayor to counsel.

Is she a moron? Old? An old moron? Or simply cynical in the extreme?

I could live with cynicism but what if she really thinks that “the choice of which sex to adopt” is a normal thing to say?

This is exactly the same thing as Tucker’s approach to Russia:

Without sounding dumb, I’m not really clear what the Taliban’s endgame is.

More women dying, especially in childbirth, means fewer women to make the babies the men want to later subjugate as baby-makers.

What am I missing?

https://x.com/FondOfBeetles/status/1864297335649440108?t=Bm4yllNf5ZJEZpVNkMyZfQ&s=19

She’s trying to understand religious fundamentalists through her own, very Western, very arithmetical logic. What she’s missing is that Talibs aren’t us but with beards and head-wrappings. They exist in a completely different conceptual universe. We look as bizarre to them as they do to us.

For everybody who keeps asking why I post no videos in English, yes, yes, you are right. Here is one just for you on the subject of the olfactory kerfuffle that erupted on Twitter/X in these past couple of days:

I hope nobody complains about the sound because this one was done with a microphone and it should have come out like a blasted loudspeaker.