True, it’s a little late to be talking about Christmas shopping, but throughout the year we need to give gifts from time to time, often to young people, so I don’t think it’s a waste of time to discuss presents a little even at this late date.
Is anyone else exhausted after the rush of the holiday season? I feel as drained as my parents’ stock of batteries was when I got a Sega Game Gear one year for Christmas.
A year ago last week, having taken steps to preserve my privacy, I started an account on the ubiquitous website that at the time was called Twitter. Much has happened since then, as you may have heard.
Christmas Day was this week and, I hope, at least some of our OFB readers are continuing the celebration with the Twelve Days of Christmas. As we do and as a New Year beckons, what do we carry from this holiday time into life?
It is as familiar a phrase as any in American English, usually remembered in the smooth baritone of Nat “King” Cole: “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .” The song was written by Robert Wells and Mel Tormé in 1945. (The first line made more sense then.) It is secular, as Christmas songs go — both Wells and Tormé were Jewish — but it acknowledged that yes, this is a religious holiday.
Zippy is back and with this episode, the boys not only recording live and in-person, but live-streamed the podcast. Check it out as we talk Christmas, random bits about Taylor Swift, off season baseball speculation and more.
It took a few months of daily communication requiring translation software for me to notice the similarity. The software — Google Translate, a product called DeepL, and Apple\’s translator (which does to languages what its maps did a few years ago to geography) — seems to be close to accurate much of the time. Sometimes that is good enough. Often it isn\’t. The mistranslations are so serious so often that one learns to ask the correspondent to rephrase the sentence. With luck the realization comes before much damage is done, and war is averted.
Looking for something more unusual than a gift card to give this Christmas? Here at OFB we have a sampler of options that are (mostly) inexpensive and useful for those with a wide variety of interests.
You probably have never heard of Nick Shabazz. We seldom hear of people who make sense. Our attention is drawn instead to noisy malevolent clowns.
When you write about an ongoing project it’s always risky that it’ll go south afterward. My attempt to link my home and office together with Netmaker last week had such a southerly flow.