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Any Anglophone learners of French who would like to share errors?

Interested in your mistakes

For an exercise I'm planing, I'm looking for learners of French who could produce a text about different subjects that I could give to my learners. They will have to find mistakes in the text, correct them and justify them.

I'm not looking for an expertly crafted text, I'm interested in the mistakes that you could make. The point is for the text to be natural and representative of your proficiency in French

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With TikTok teetering in the US this weekend I was going to write about it. But since the drama is not exactly over, I decided to hold off.

While I was looking for something appropriate to post, I found this song by the VERY early U2. "11 O'Clock Tick Tock" may be spelled differently and totally unrelated but it's a good song.

This is a live recording in Sweden and the audience was amazingly polite �� closer to what you'd experience at a classical concert.

So enjoy something totally off topic from what I had planned to write.

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Chicago is Chicago because it is a natural transportation hub.

The area got the attention of French explorers Marquette & Joliet and La Salle because the Chicago area provided a short portage from the Great Lakes to a tributary of the Mississippi River system. Canals later connected the two.

The western expansion of the US and the growth of the railroads made Chicago a natural focal point for the rail system. To this day, the Chicago area is crisscrossed with tracks and has an unusual number of ground level rail crossings and railroad yards.

If you like trains, a long stay in the area is something to consider.

All Aboard: Chicago’s Train Stations

One of my favorite jobs was working for Amtrak—I really got to see the breadth of the United States and the impossibly rich diversity of people from Portland, Maine to Garden City, Kansas.

When I began working on this series for the Chicago Public Library, I knew we had to talk about the vitality of Chicago’s historic train stations.

Not so very long ago, they were tremendously busy community spaces, offering fine dining, lounges, barber shops, and a vast array of trains arriving and departing seemingly almost every single minute.

That’s really why I wanted to highlight these tremendous hubs of activity—to let people know how tremendously vital these places were—and might be again.

Bonus: I read a poem from Langston Hughes.

Enjoy.

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Honestly can't say I've ever seen one in the city. Though I have seen peregrine falcons and hawks. In Elmhurst near Salt Creek I heard an owl once.

This would be our yard, with the brazen squirrel(s) thinking it/they can win a stare down with a bald eagle:

Excerpt from this story from the Chicago Tribune:

Many dream of waking up on Christmas to a mound of presents stacked around a tree. Others simply wish to glimpse a few snowflakes when looking out the window.

And then there’s Alexandra Greenberg, who walked onto her back balcony on the holiday and saw two adult bald eagles.

“They were fishing,” said Greenberg, 34, who lives with her husband along the North Branch of the Chicago River in the Lathrop Homes area. “We saw one first and then we saw the second. It was just magnificent.”

The bald eagle, a symbol of the power and the strength of the United States for more than 240 years officially became the country’s national bird on Christmas Eve. It once avoided Chicago like the plague.

But a light at the end of the tunnel appeared in the 1970s.

DDT was banned. After the Endangered Species Act of 1973, the eagles were listed as endangered or threatened throughout the lower 48 states. The eagles were bred in captivity and reintroduced to the wild. Nesting sites were protected.

By 2007, there were nearly 10,000 nesting pairs of bald eagles in the contiguous U.S., and they were removed from the list of threatened and endangered species.

Bald eagles seek out larger rivers and lakes because they eat primarily fish, so there’s much for the birds to love about Chicago: the Chicago River, Calumet River, Lake Calumet and maybe even the lakefront.

In the winter, there tends to be an uptick in bald eagle sightings when smaller bodies of water freeze over and the birds congregate around larger ones that stay unfrozen, Igleski said.

The birds are also nicer to each other in the winter. Once, Igleski saw 17 bald eagles perched together around Lake Calumet.

“You’ll see sometimes a dozen or so all together flying around or perched in trees fairly close to each other,” he said. “If it was the nesting season, they probably wouldn’t be that tolerant. They’d probably be chasing each other away.”

The clamor of the nation’s third largest city doesn’t seem to bother the eagles all that much, Igleski said. It’s possible that birds who come to the area from the north have to adjust to the noise, he said.

Just across the state line, there’s an eagle nest Igleski often sees right next to the Indiana Toll Road.

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Nobody would be in more trouble than Donald Trump if Biblical rules were strictly enforced.

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Libraries are cool. Look at how the Bayonne Public Library nurtured George R.R. Martin's writing career.

When making contributions to nonprofits in the final days of 2024, keep your library in mind. Libraries are institutions of knowledge. They preserve the learning of the past while encouraging forays of enlightenment seeking in the present.

More than ever, we need reality based institutions.

@newberrylibrary

George R.R. Martin honored by his hometown library in New Jersey.

George R.R. Martin grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey. Bayonne is located across a relatively narrow waterway from Staten Island – one of the five boroughs of New York City.

While Bayonne is in the shadow of NYC, its peculiar geography and GRRM's meager family income meant that he seldom ventured outside Bayonne. Growing up, young George did spend a lot of time at the Free Public Library & Cultural Center of Bayonne. He has often spoken with fondness about the institution which sparked his imagination.

A few months ago GRRM returned to Bayonne. October 15th was declared George R.R. Martin Day. And a new room at his old library was given the name the George R.R. Martin Room for Popular Fiction.

He wrote about the occasion at his non-blog...

A Day to Remember

For me, home was Bayonne, New Jersey, just south of Jersey City, on a peninsula sandwiched between New York and Newark. I was born in Bayonne in 1948, and spent my childhood there, most of it in the federal housing projects on First Street, with the lights of Staten Island across the waters of the Kill Von Kull. Bayonne was my world until 1966, when I went off to college at Northwestern, the first time I ever went beyond the borders of Jersey and NYC (except in books and comics, of course, where I could oft be found wandering Middle Earth, on Barsoom, Trantor, or Venusport, or slinking down the mean streets of Gotham City). [ ... ] I remember the library.  I always will. And it would seem that the library remembers me.    They have just completed some renovations, and did me the honor of naming one of the new rooms after me: the George R.R. Martin Room for Popular Fiction.  To mark the occasion, they declared October 15 to be George R.R. Martin Day. That is… so cool, so, so, so…  well, words fail me.   I have won a lot of awards over the course of my career: Emmys and Golden Globes, Hugo Awards and Nebulas, Lovecrafts and Stokers and Dragons. (I have lost a lot more, to be sure, but then that’s only fitting for a guy who helped found the Hugo Losers Club)… but I have never had a day before.   Few have.   After all, there are only 365 of them. James (Jimmy) Davis, Bayonne’s mayor, presided over the ribbon-cutting ceremony.   Old friends and new attended.

He talked about growing up in Bayonne, his early reading including comic books, and his early writing career. Watch his somewhat rambling speech on this vid. It's not exactly HD but don't let that deter you.

GRRM posed next to some epic art which he probably helped to inspire.

If you're passing through or near Bayonne, you can visit the library and see the George R.R. Martin Room for Popular Fiction and the mosaic art at 697 Avenue C.

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Happy Solstice!

Some people will claim that today is the "first day of winter". They would probably get an argument from people in the Southern Hemisphere.

There are also folks who will tell you that it is the "shortest day of the year". I checked last year and the day of the December Solstice was 1,440 minutes long just like the day before or after it (or the day of the June Solstice for that matter).

The December Solstice IS the day when the sun, as viewed from Earth, is at its southernmost position in the sky.

The December Solstice is an astronomy related event. here are a couple of astronomers talking about it.

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As somebody on the spectrum, I don't get how isolating already people who are already somewhat socially isolated is supposed to "cure" them.

At this point, people talking about cures for autism are to be viewed with extreme suspicion.

I'm rereading my old thesis on the diagnostic history of ASD and wow my (not-so-much) younger self had a bone to pick with some of the sources I was writing. Like, I can really pick up on my own seething contempt for Ole Ivor Lovaas and his contemporaries as I read back through this.

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^^^ Good for those guys!

We need contemporary events to display public disdain for superstition (including astrology 🤮) and to smack down conspiracy theories.

Apparently The Anti-Superstition Society of Chicago was still around in 1962 to salute astronaut John Glenn.

Superstition Ain't The Way!: The 13th Anniversary Jinx-Jabbing Jamboree And Dinner of The Anti-Superstition Society of Chicago, held on Friday The 13th, 1941.

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When people we know suddenly disappear from the radar, it may be a good idea to make a concerted effort to find out what happened to them.

When Luigi Mangione went dark earlier this year, there was some effort by friends online to reconnect. This is from the New York Times.

When somebody who previously was viewed as a positive and even beneficial member of society suddenly disappears for months with no trace, that calls for something more than just pokes on social media. Perhaps we'll learn more in coming days; but a missing person report should have filed after a couple of weeks.

I'm not saying that everybody who suddenly falls out of sight will become a murderer and ruin their own life. But an abrupt and unexplained disappearance usually signals some sort of problem which deserves timely attention.

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The ability to create fonts is awesome.

I made a font inspired by an old 1940s "Bird Lore" magazine nameplate!

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This is an essay version of the 2024 McLuhan Lecture given by writer Cory Doctorow in Berlin. A vid of his lecture (and more) is included in the link below.

The inventor of the word "enshittification" outlines the process in detail. He describes this era as the "enshittocene". Before you despair, he does offer some remedies.

Pluralistic: My McLuhan lecture on enshittification (30 Jan 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

An excerpt...

[T]he capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and woolly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize. The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams. The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality. But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

If you'd like to see the internet de-enshittified, quit using platforms which contribute to the process. Not mentioning names, but they're run by multi-billionaires who could afford to buy entire countries.

While no platform is 100% perfect, Tumblr has been rather resistant to enshittification. Cory Docterow has an account here if you wish to follow him.

@mostlysignssomeportents

The tech oligarchs have turned the internet into a tool for extracting resources from us as if we were one large collective strip mine. Their only goals seem to be the preternatural accumulation of even more wealth and the ability to manipulate those in power. We need to become more aware of our own part in this and put distance between ourselves and the monopolies which we now help to prop up.

If you remember nothing else from this...

DON'T FEED THE OLIGARCHS.

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Recording cultural history.

When the American government set out to erase indigenous culture, one woman set out to save tribal music, traveling far and wide with her cylinder phonograph, trousers, and bow tie. This is her story.

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I was checking out the AQI (Air Quality Index) for places around the world and one had me do a double take.

A monitoring station at Burari Crossing, New Delhi currently has a reading of 1739.

For comparison: Istanbul's AQI is 61, Kyiv's is 57, Nairobi's is 55, Lima's is also 55, Seoul's is 50, London's is 44, NYC's is 40, and Vancouver's is 15.

An AQI of 1739 for 24 hours is the equivalent of smoking 83.61 cigarettes.

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That inscription is Egyptian, not Mesopotamian. 😉

can anyone find me that mesopotamian clay tablet telling you to marry a party girl because she'll bring you joy

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Thanks for introducing me to the term ledger art.

Ledger art and indigenous cultural continuity

Wooden Leg's ledger book, 1879-1881

Ledger art is part of a long tradition of Native people documenting their history on their own terms. Many Plains Native communities started chronicling events pictorially on materials like rocks and buffalo hides. Beginning in the mid-19th century, they used pages of ledger books obtained from settlers.

An example of adaptation and agency, ledger art is deeply embedded in the sociopolitical context of a given time. In the face of mass removal, assimilation efforts, and other genocidal actions taken by the U.S. government, Native communities found ways to continue observing their traditions and cultural practices using what was around them––in this case, repurposing found pages of ledger books when materials like buffalo hides became scarce.

Depicting everything from scenes of warfare to courtship, ledger art books tell readers about the memories, values, and presence of the communities who authored them. The images are drawn with a variety of materials, including colored pencils, crayons, and ink...

Read the full post at newberry.org

Black Horse ledger, 1877-1879

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By coincidence I took a COVID-19 test on Monday. Negative. 👍🏼

Though that means I have mild flu – though getting better.

We should all get the latest COVID booster – before The Orange One and his buddy RFK Jr. ban vaccines.

July 24, 2024 - 9th and Wabash