The bottom line after our first full two days in the new apartment in La Rochelle: Jetlag Triumphs! Especially when the two days haven’t been restful. Day 1 was dedicated to returning one rental car and getting another one. The big Peugeot 5008 that we’d gotten at the airport in Paris and driven to La Rochelle had to be returned by 11:30, and our new rental had to be picked […]
You know the saying, you can take the boy out of Iowa but you can’t take France out of the boy. Or something like that.
We got up this morning not knowing what we would be doing during the day. After some research and back and forth, we decided to drive to something called Le Sillon de Talbert, a 2-mile long, 100-yard wide spit of sand, gravel, and pebbles extending into the English Channel. Looks interesting, right? It took about 35 minutes to get there from Paimpol. We found the parking lot and walked on […]
I’m a sucker for electronic gadgets. Earlier this year I bought a handheld digital recorder for dictation. I bought it along on the trip to Brittany and had it with me yesterday at the Fete des Islandais. I was going to post these clips on Facebook, but it won’t let you post or link to audio clips. Boo hiss boo bad Meta bad. SSS Blog to the rescue! Here is […]
One of my consistently-Trumpiod friends from high school posted this on Facebook. There are two big lies here, one explicit and one implied. The explicit big lie is that this event was not reported by the “liberal mainstream media” – a favorite poor-me, oh-we’re-so-oppressed right-wing trope. A Google search that took me less than three seconds quickly reveals the lie, with three of the first four links being from the […]
My thought experiment is simpler. It doesn’t require understanding of quantum physics or the collapse of the quantum wavefunction. It requires only self-honesty and a moderate level of knowledge about our current politics.
In high school I took an advanced writing class, which required me to write a research paper of at least 10 double-spaced typewritten pages on a subject of my choosing (provided the instructor approved it). My paper was about the impact of nuclear power plants on aquatic life. The instructor required every factual statement in the paper to have a footnote identifying its source. Not only was this requirement a […]
I went off on a friend (by now, probably an ex-friend) on Facebook about her unreasonable, unbreakable support for Trump. I had made the argument that Trump’s actions and inaction increased deaths from Covid-19. In particular, I argued (see if there’s a flaw here, I don’t think so): The more widespread the Covid-19 virus becomes, the more people will catch it. The more people that catch Covid-19, the more people […]
Of all the falsehoods, half-truths, prevarications, distortions, misstatements, deceptions, … oh heck, let’s just call it what it is … of all the lies you’re going to hear during the Trump convention, this will be the biggest and most-repeated: that Trump took a poor Obama economy and turned it into a great Trump economy. Fact: On job creation, Obama beats Trump — Obama created 1.5 million more jobs in his […]
Suzie was starting to go stir crazy from being in the house in Kensington so long, as was I to a lesser extent, so we decided to go on a 4-day getaway. We were wanting to go someplace new, someplace not too far of a drive away, someplace warmer (it had been coolish in Kensington for about a week). We settled on Amador County, and found a very nice, cozy, […]