November 24, 2023

spencergreenhalgh.com posts digest for Nov 24 2023

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Here are long-form blog posts I published this week:

• songs that should be hymns but aren't (yet?)

• Leo Tolstoy on Black Friday

Here are microblog posts that I published this week:

• Watched The Great Mouse Detective with kiddo earlier today and am now reading Neil Gaiman’s A Study in Emerald. These are… two very different takes on Holmes.

• Spouse typically has a strict after-Thanksgiving rule for Christmas decorations, so the fact that we’re breaking them out today should tell you something about the week we had.

• Spouse and I have been using French to talk about Christmas presents in front of kiddo. Tonight, I got to hear spouse refer to “monsters of the pocket” so that kiddo wouldn’t recognize “Pokémon” in the middle of an otherwise incomprehensible-to-her sentence.

• Comme mon épouse se débrouille en français, on s’en sert pour parler des cadeaux devant notre fille exclusivement anglophone. Mais comme « Pokémon » serait quand-même reconnaissable, mon épouse a dû trouver une circonlocution : « le jeu vidéo de… pochette…. monstre ? »

• I respect web forms that don’t let me paste content into the “confirm email” field, but I still resent them.

• Helping a student distinguish between backticks and single quotes and remembering the 8th grade keyboarding students from a decade ago who complained that I made them do code in a class they thought should be about learning to type properly. Gotta do the latter to do the former.

• Anyone who doesn’t accept that gender is socially constructed needs to explain to me why one of the cartoon turkeys on my Thanksgiving 5k shirt is wearing lipstick and a pearl necklace just so we know the race is open to women.

• Kiddo has no cousins on my side of the family, so during our Thanksgiving Zoom call, we successfully lobbied to add her to the siblings and partners gift exchange we do every Christmas.

Here are news articles and podcasts I commented on this week:

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'X Races to Contain Damage After Elon Musk Endorses Antisemitic Post - The New York Times'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'IBM pulls X ads as Elon Musk endorses white pride - The Verge'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'As Elon Musk Endorses Bigoted Nonsense, Advertisers Find Their Ads On Nazi Content | Techdirt'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'Wallace & Gromit Creator Aardman is Almost Out of Clay'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'A longer Advent helps some Christians prepare for more than Christmas : NPR'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on '‘Free Speech Absolutist’ Elon Musk Promises To Sue Media Matters To Silence Their Speech | Techdirt'

• 🔗 linkblog: my thoughts on 'X Sues Media Matters Over Research on Ads Next to Antisemitic Posts - The New York Times'

Here are my reviews of books and other media I consumed this week:

• 📚 bookblog: ❤️❤️❤️❤️🖤 for The Lost Cause, by Cory Doctorow

If you have thoughts about anything I've posted, feel free to comment directly on my website through Hypothesis or to reply to this email with what you have to say.

Thanks for reading!

Spencer