I will be moving to Paris this summer, and my excitement about this move can be explained by my belief that my life there will be something along the lines of this:
(hat tip to res.cogitans)
Read MoreTag "travel"
So we’re leaving on a crazy road trip this weekend, which involves the states above, plus some others on the way back. The initial goal is the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy (hah hah, yes, Grice, is there any “inexact philosophy”, implicature, etc.) and then who knows. Yellowstone, visiting our friend Melissa (formerly of Merce Cunningham and lately of Headwaters Dance Company) in Montana. Then maybe a Cary Grant-esque jaunt through Mt. Rushmore, and across the UP (where perhaps we’ll see our “wife at the K-Mart“), down to the family, and then back home.
Apparently there are no escalators in Wyoming. We shall investigate. Stay tuned, or whatever.
Read More
The Port Authority is going to raise the PATH fare and also the Holland Tunnel charge — but in a surprising turn of events, they’re giving a break to those who drive low-emission vehicles! This is great news.
Read MoreIt’s getting tedious not knowing where I’ll be on Thanksgiving. We’re waiting to hear whether we’ll be going to Merry Olde England [tm] where they (obviously) don’t celebrate Thanksgiving, which is pretty much my favorite holiday, bred for its skills in magic (obscure reference assistance available here). I don’t like football but I do love a holiday that is focused around cooking and eating.
Read MoreThere were many points during our around-the-world trip last summer (more here) where we realized that if we ever tried to do such a thing with kids it would have to be completely different. Not that it seemed at all impossible, but there were lots of risks we took (not really risky risks, but risks that I would only feel comfortable choosing for myself, not foisting on a minor) as well as grueling schedules we self-imposed which would not have been possible had we had children in tow. This is not to say that I think traveling with children is worse than without, just different, and it’s always been my perception that other people were more cautious (or I would say “over-protective”) than I and wouldn’t want to spend time in foreign countries with their kids. That’s why I was glad to see this article in the time (http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/11/04/travel/04heads.html) about the trend of taking your children out of school (mostly middle school, it seems), and traveling around the world. I’m all for this — for one thing, middle school sucks, and for another, I know I greatly benefitted from the international traveling I did with my parents when I was growing up. Secret gap in my educational record: I missed second grade. My father took his sabbatical from the university (back in the day when they regularly gave decent benefits to professors) and somehow my parents never enrolled us in school. I seem to recall there was some subterfuge when we returned about “getting the papers transferred” from my apocryphal other school, but fortunately I did go on to finish elementary school. That secret’s out of the bag now…
Read MoreI haven’t been posting here much recently as I’m madly trying to finish my qualifying paper, proofread hundreds of pages of a dissertation (not mine, sadly), and plan our trip AROUND THE WORLD! Ahem. So Walt is giving papers at two conferences this summer, one in Greece and one in Xi’an, China, and I have some research to do in Sri Lanka on my Sinhala phonology project, so we decided to make it into an around the world trip. Strictly Speaking will go on hiatus as we’ll mostly be posting at our “around the world” site. We’re still working out the itinerary, and then there are visas, ticketing, arrangements, etc. as well as a week of kayaking in Maine before we leave. I’m sort of in denial at this point about how much work I have to do (on all fronts) before we go, but once we get on that first plane it’s going to be great.
Read MoreI went to Chapel Hill, NC to attend a conference and present a paper. Things turned out well, in that I wasn’t too nervous, the audience was friendly, and I got some good questions. Also, it was great to get out of town. Here, in no particular order, are some things I saw on my trip:
1. A woman wearing a wedding dress, posing for pictures on the main lawn of the UNC campus. Why was this worth mentioning? Oh yes, because the floor-length strapless white wedding dress had an attached extremely long train which was Tarheel Blue. No one in the immediate vicinity appeared to find this strange.
2. A stack of New York Times, Sunday editions, no less, on a desk in the UNC student union, with a sign saying “Free — take one. Courtesy of the Union and the New York Times.” As of 4pm Saturday, the plastic band on the bundle hadn’t even been cut.
3. A booth outside the union featuring a large-haired female offering “free kisses if you buy a misprinted Bible.” Not really sure what this was about. There was a small crowd of kids I would tend to classify as “popular kids” (although I’m sure I’m too old to really do that accurately anymore) and someone had a video camera, so I’m hoping it was a student film. I didn’t see anyone actually get a kiss, and there were no Bibles evident.
4. A surprisingly beautiful campus! Who knew that the red brick colonial architecture I associate with the Northeast extended down to warmer climes? I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised, after all, UNC lets pass few opportunities to remind you that it was the first state university in the nation.
The vagaries of an academic career require that you be prepared to end up almost anywhere in your pursuit of a job; I would think you could do much worse than Chapel Hill, NC.
Read More