Okay, go ahead and judge me, but I howled with shocked laughter when I read this little tale:
For months my boyfriend led me to believe he was busy caring for his elderly mother – but she’s been dead all along and his lies were a front for him having sex with another woman, and living with her.
Sometimes, you just have to tip your hat to a master.
For some reason, I’ve recently been reading French History, because why not? I don’t know how it got started, but it did: and once started, I couldn’t stop. Here’s the bibliography, so far.
The Collapse of the Third Republic — William Shirer
The Franco-Prussian War — Michael Howard
Dawn of the Belle Epoque — Mary McAuliffe
The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 — Philipp Blom (re-read, because it’s brilliant)
The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World — Holger H. Herwig (told from the German side)
The French Army and the First World War — Elizabeth Greenhalgh
France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924 — Benjamin F. Martin
La Belle France: A Short History — Alistair Horne (I’m still busy with this one; I’m only up to the succession of Henry II in 1547, so still a way to go.)
On deck: France On The Brink — Jonathan Fenby
Yeah, that’s what’s been keeping me busy over the past three weeks. All are well recommended except the last one (because I haven’t read it yet).
One last note: I cannot recommend The Vertigo Years highly enough. When people talk about the social- and psychological dislocation of the Information Age, you have to know that we’ve experienced it before: when the Age of Speed dawned, in around 1900. If you read no other book from the above list, this is the one.
This past Thanksgiving saw a change for us. Instead of doing the massive overindulgence of a Thanksgiving dinner, we opted instead for a simple snack tray.
Of course, the kids didn’t starve to death, oh no. Son&Heir went to his mother’s family (guest count: “over 20 FFS!”) and Daughter went to her newly-acquired in-laws (guest count: “about 10 or so”) so they arrived at our place early last Thursday evening groaning with gluttony.
So for New Wife and I to have gone Full Thanksgiving with a turkey and the whole catastrophe could have been classified as child abuse. Well okay, the “children” are all in their mid-30s so maybe not, but you get my drift.
The chances are that the kids would barely have touched our meal anyway — and with the cost of food nowadays…
Then just yesterday I saw this little snippet:
Nearly six in ten Brits would rather have a takeaway than a traditional Christmas dinner, according to a survey.
A staggering 59 per cent of the nation say they would prefer to order a takeaway than cook up a roast dinner with all the trimmings on Christmas Day.
…and I can see where they’re coming from, just based on my own experience.
Of course, I plan on doing a proper Christmas feast for our lot:
… but as usual, this will take place on Boxing Day rather than on Christmas Day proper, so the kids can do Christmas with the other family branches just as they did on Thanksgiving.
The reason I’m hosting Boxing Day dinner at all is partly tradition — we’ve always celebrated Christmas that way — and partly because I can eat roast beef leftovers for days afterwards. (I can’t do that with Thanksgiving turkey because it can cause a gout flare-up. Beef, however, is a safe bet.)
The only slight bummer is that I’ll be on my own over Christmas, as New Wife is off to Seffrica for most of December and early January to bless the New Grandson — cost thereof will be most generously met by her #2 Son — so I’ll be doing the dinner myself. (No big deal: I’m debating whether to do roast beef or leg of lamb — the kids are agnostic on the subject, they love both.)
Hell, I might just get the butcher to slice the raw beef/lamb really thinly (a.k.a. “shabu shabu”), and do a “table roast” on a hot steel plate, Mediterranean style, with Greek salad, hot pita bread and hummus, and dessert of baklava or cheesecake. They love that idea as well.
Tradition? I don’ need no steenkin’ tradition. But I draw the line at takeout, tempted as I am by the thought of a no-hassle huge dish of fish ‘n chips supplied by the tavern across the road.
I need to get something to eat, now. Excuse me.
Your suggestions in Comments.
Sweet Baby James and that smiling face.
Best bass line in any country/rock song.
As I’ve mentioned several times before on this here back porch of mine, there are few topics that can compare with multi-language societies. This one guarantees a rant of epic proportions, every single time.
You see, nothing divides a society more quickly than being unable to communicate with each other. It’s cute when you’re a tourist; it’s hell when you’re at home and are forced to deal with someone who can’t (or won’t) speak your language.
Trust me: I know whereof I speak, having grown up in a nominally-bilingual country where speakers of either language hated or despised the others, all set in a multilingual society of no fewer than six other languages (English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Sotho, Ndebele, Xhosa, Venda, Tsonga, Tswana, Swazi). And then let’s add Portuguese, Greek and Italian, with a few others such as Hindi and related Indian languages.
And everyone hated everyone else, most often because they simply couldn’t communicate with each other. The Black tribes were remarkably multilingual, in that each tribe had at least a passing / conversational knowledge of about four other African languages, and of necessity most spoke English. (Understandably enough, they refused to speak Afrikaans because they — rightly — regarded the Dutch derivative as the language of the Oppressor.) As for the Whites… well, they were mostly hopeless. (My father, born an Afrikaner, was way out of the norm because he spoke English, German, Zulu and Sotho fluently. Most Afrikaners spoke English begrudgingly and badly, and hardly any other than farmers spoke an African language. This was also true of most English-speaking South Africans, who likewise spoke Afrikaans begrudgingly and badly, and no Black languages.)
I won’t even go near the topic of Yiddish and the Jews.
So you can imagine my response when I came across this priceless little piece of fuckery:
The Denver school district is among the first in the country to adopt a “language justice” policy as a “long term goal.”
The district would encourage non-English speaking students to be able to use their native language to learn as opposed to being educated in English, which advocates say is oppressive and rooted in racism.
Denver schools had about 90,250 students in 2022 with 35,000 multilingual learners with home languages other than English. The district has 200 languages spoken across the district, with Spanish as the home language for the majority of those.
The district included a draft of an equity document that includes a policy statement on “language justice.” It was included in the Nov. 16 school board agenda. The document includes this definition for “language justice”: “The notion of respecting every individual’s fundamental language rights – to be able to communicate, understand, and be understood in the language in which they prefer and feel most articulate and powerful.”
This is not going to end well. As with all idiotic nonsense of this type, it starts off with the noblest of intentions (albeit wrong-headed), but the end result is going to be a population of alienated people refusing to speak to each other in anything but their home language. And hating each other in consequence.
You heard it here first.