I’m sorry, alumni survey, but this is silly. Why do you care whether I’m within Canada only if I’m more than 400 km away? You can be outside Canada and within 80 km of U of T! And you could live halfway between the St. George and Scarborough campuses and be about 11 km away from each of them.

When we ask questions like this, it is not cynicism. On the contrary, we are clinging to the hope that the monsters in power are at least rational in some narrow economic sense of the word, because greed would be more comprehensible than pure mindless cruelty for its own sake.

Technologically advance a band: Titanium-Alloy Monkey Third Eye Corrected-to-Normal Trefjaplast

I just never know what kind of wildlife I’m going to encounter out on the water.

Q. Pheevr knows how to bust out lyrics to all classic Doors songs, even the ones that have never been featured in commercials.

An Albertan who was 39 years old in 2010* would have had no memory of anyone other than the PCs governing their province. *e.g., Danielle Smith

Tu me prends pour un pilote ?

Share favourite covers for a timeline cleanse: Gillian Welch, covering Radiohead youtu.be/_8VXBMjOZXI

Ruin a song by adding “literally” to the title: The Literally Sick Bed of Cuchulainn

Make a band singular: The Kingston Solo

Some impressive forbearance in the naming. I would have been tempted to call it “computer-assisted lying”.

I’ve now encountered the same pleonastic construction in two consecutive papers, by authors with (I’m pretty sure) two different first languages: “shed light on our understanding of X” where what is really meant is “shed light on X” or “enhance our understanding of X”. #AmEditing

What a completely thoughtless and irresponsible way of framing a question, @nytimes.com. I sympathize with people who want to live in peace and let others do the same. I sympathize with the bombed, the starving, the kidnapped, the displaced, the bereaved, the uprooted.

Looking forward to having an actual trombone emoji. (So far I’ve been using 📎 and hoping people know French.)

Catch of the day (so far): INDICT for INDIC (abbr. for ‘indicative’; should really be IND if we’re using the Leipzig glossing rules). #AmEditing

The Joliet Manual of Style #SlightlyDiminishABook

Accidentally left my ad blocker turned off and saw a bunch of ads that said “We took the drama out of car shopping.” At least I know they haven’t gathered a detailed profile of my interests and proclivities, because clearly they have no idea what I think about either cars or drama.

Why can’t I get just one knish? Why can’t I get just one knish? עטלעכע זאכן דאַרף איך טאַקע נישט But I look at your pants and I need a knish

Are people having trouble using their bulk-mailing templates? Today I’ve received one message whose subject line begins “You’re almost finished! Draft Name your email” and another that greets me as “Dear [FNAME]”.

Can’t believe this still needs to be said in 5785.

Far too many of my compatriots would rather try to acquit Canada of all its sins on a technicality than face an honest reckoning with our history.

🐦🐦 Some interesting choices in the pronunciation notes here (including which names get them and which don’t). Hyphens clearly don’t always mean syllable boundaries—probably the one in “Tie-g” is to keep the ⟨ie⟩ for [aɪ] safely away from the ⟨g⟩. But what are the ones in “Ch-an-dra” for?

It’s hard to pick, but in the interest of choosing something that hasn’t already been said a zillion times, I’ll go with track 11 of Green.

GBH in the PG this afternoon

SEPTEMBER CARTOON: ivacheung.com/2025/09/witc...

Honestly, it’s the smartest thing he could do. Redouble the affections of his base, blunt the attacks of his opponents, boost the value of his merch. The civility police would refuse to hear a word against him. It would eliminate any chance of a third impeachment. What’s he waiting for?

When you’ve feel enchanted on a deep personal level by a famous witch but she doesn’t even know you exist—call that a parasorcell relationship

Of all the mailing lists I’ve ended up on by accident, the only one I’m actually kind of pleased about is that of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution. No idea why I started getting their e-mails—I’ve never even been to Somerset—but their talks always look interesting.

I’m right-handed for most things, but I mouse with my left hand. I’ve always held it at an angle so that my index finger is over the primary (left) button. To right-click, I extend my index finger over to the right. It’s never occurred to me to use *two different fingers*. 🤯🖱️

Technically it’s no longer Thursday in my time zone, but here’s something for #ThreeBirdThursday anyway:

A site just for expressing contempt and disdain? Oh, you mean Twitter.

This is an interesting example of the challenge of writing alt text. The general rule, as I understand it, is that alt text should describe what you would want someone to be able to see in an image. But what if there are things you want to be visible, but not too obvious?

Update: I’ve now managed to complete the survey as an instructor (by signing up for another of [redacted]’s mailing lists). Questions included: Q: What barriers do you experience to using gen AI? A: I don’t want to. Q: If all gen AI tools vanished, what would you miss most? A: I would celebrate.

Wishing for a cursed sword is basically extending an invitation to a beheading.

This is the AI policy I'm going with this semester

Just e-mailed an author to say “Please ignore the publisher’s query on the proofs asking you to provide the names of the editors for a bibliographic entry that already has them listed.” 🤦🏼 #AmEditing #OrDoingSomethingEditingAdjacentAnyway

If you say “I want you to write me a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge”, ChatGPT will spew out fourteen lines of the most banal pentameter praising Victorian civil engineering. ELIZA will say “Why do you want me to write you a sonnet on the subject of the Forth Bridge?”

AHCAS¹ ¹all holographic cops are smegheads www.vice.com/en/article/s...

The heartbreaking thing about this is that there’s already a proven way to invest lots of money in a knowledge machine that produces unforeseeable results that include fantastically profitable ideas (and some life-saving ones) and generally benefit society and this machine is called a university

If you see this, post a tower or some other similar kind of structure.

Jonathan Swift predicts "AI" writing in _Gulliver's Travels_ (1726), including the hype, techbro self-aggrandisement, devaluation of knowledge, funding grifts, labour sink, and arguments about IP

k.d. lang, but more of her, with the fanciest dijon ketchups

Yeah, it’s like finding out Terry Pratchett wasn’t actually a Flat Earther.

I worry that the summit of the autocrats will end with the two of them agreeing that Putin gets Crimea, Donbas, and Alaska, in exchange for which Trump gets Greenland and Alberta, and Zelenskyy gets murdered.

Heard the evacuation alert for West Dalhousie on the radio just now. The text-to-speech synthesis they use is not great. If it’s not practical to have a human read the alert, they should at least repeat the message so that people get a second chance to hear anything they miss. novascotia.ca/alerts/

If you want to read the book, read the book. If you don’t want to read the book, don’t read the book. If you don’t enjoy reading the book but you want to know enough about it to keep up with your friends who’ve read it and love it… get a friend to tell you about the book.

Dévastation Splendide #IncreaseABand

Gash Cavern and the Horrible Sprouts

Peristyle Inferno