I turned 70 on July 8, a milestone I guess if you count using a base ten system. My sisters Susan and Mary came down from the wilds of Maryland to help me celebrate. That's Mary on the left, and Susan on the right. It had been quite a while since the three of us had been together, and it was an excellent and wonderful way to spend a birthday.
And in other news...
Is anyone else amused by the Trump/McCain thing, and especially at all the people in the media and elsewhere falling over each other to proclaim their belief that McCain is indeed a "war hero?"
For me McCain is not a genuine war hero. He would have been, if he had refused the order to drop bombs on people who had never done anything to us and whose chief crime was wanting to be free of French colonial rule.
And...
Bill Cosby is in the news all day, every day, for allegedly(?) giving multiple women drugs and then having sex with them. But he lost me way before this in the wake of the 1996 Oakland School Board's attempt to legitimize African American English when he referred to it as "that crap." This is a person with a doctorate in education. Of course, he was not alone: Maya Angelou and the Rev. Jesse Jackson also ridiculed the school board's perfectly reasonable (from a linguist's perspective) desire to use AAE as a positive part of children's language arts education.
Linguists get no respect, which is one of the things that make me cranky.
