Tuesday, July 31, 2018

Living is the best revenge

One of the few benefits of getting older is thinking back on your childhood up to your twenties, and remembering the people you knew, teachers and employers and co-workers, who were twenty or thirty years older than you back then, who were mean or abusive to you. And you think: "hah hah asshole, you're probably dead now."

I sometimes sit and reminisce about the many jobs I had when I was younger just so I can think of another nasty person who is probably dead. It's not a very nice thing to admit, but I can't help it. 

It's said that living well is the best revenge, but in some ways, just living is the best revenge.

Monday, July 30, 2018

Did Brigitte Macron and her first husband appear in an episode of "French in Action" - mystere et boule de gomme!

"Brigitte" says "we save it" ("On l'economize")
I am 99% sure that this brief clip from the 1980s educational TV series "French in Action" shows Brigitte Macron, current first lady of France.

The clip is part of a 20-second segment, originally, I think, an advertisement for a French bank called Caisse d'Epargne ("savings bank").

Here is the episode of French in Action in which the segment appears, beginning at 11:53.

The segment features a variety of French people being asked what they would do if they suddenly had a lot of money - they all say "put it in the bank" as far as I can tell. My French comprehension is still only about 70%.

A teacher in the 1990s
The woman in the clip not only looks a lot like Brigitte Macron, she's about the right age (late 20s/early 30s) and there are photos of her from her younger days where she wears the same exact hair style, and she has some orthodontic issues, fixed since then, which can be seen in photos from her teacher days.

The key to the mystery is the guy in the video next to her. It is impossible to find a photo of Brigitte's first husband, André-Louis Auzière online - and not even all the French language media has apparently been able to find one since even in articles about Auzière, they never run a photo. If it turns out he looks like the guy in this video clip then the mystery will be solved.

If nobody else has noticed this apparition of Brigitte Macron in French in Action except me it's probably because a. she wasn't famous until a couple of years ago and b. I have watched the entire French in Action series all the way through about ten times in the past year and even I didn't notice this until today.

Oddly, I had wondered if Emmanuel Macron would ever show up in the series - he would have been around ten years old - like in the background for one of the puppet shows they keep showing in the series. I hadn't considered Brigitte might show up.

French in Action - oh lah lah!
Also oddly, this clip is from a  commercial for a bank and André-Louis Auzière had a career as a banker. Maybe that's how they ended up in this video.

Also oddly, in this same episode of French in Action there is a scene of "Aunt Georgette" reminiscing about "the one that got away" - a guy named George who - spoiler alert! - she reunites with by the end of the French in Action series.

And he is much younger than her.

VIVE LA REPUBLIC! VIVE LA FRANCE!

Here is the clip of "Brigitte" from the French in Action episode.


Thursday, July 26, 2018

Doug Henwood constantly attacks feminists, has no criticisms of Putin

To nobody's surprise, Doug Henwood attacks feminists in defense of Trump/Putin. 

Now I have my own problems with Amanda Marcotte - in fact I blocked her on Facebook a couple of years ago when she defended one of her asshole friends who maintained that the Bronte sisters - who grew up in virtual poverty and worked their entire lives to support themselves in often horrible conditions - were "privileged" and so we shouldn't care about their books overmuch.


Speaking of differences of opinion with other feminists, I feel that my side of the argument over Anthony Weiner vs. Marcotte and her friend Lindsey Beyerstein has been fully vindicated. This is from 2011. I can't believe that's seven years ago already.





I certainly have had my differences with other feminists, but Henwood and his wife and their dirtbag left gang have a problem with all feminists. 

Just as the Right claims that professional misogynists like Christina Hoff Sommers are "equity feminists" the far Left claims that real feminists are women who don't focus on women's rights. As Henwood explained it:
“The side of feminism I’ve studied and admired for decades has been about moving towards that ideal [of a more peaceful, more egalitarian society], and not merely placing women into high places while leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged.
Henwood feels that "feminists" shouldn't spend their time thinking about the lives women are living in the here and now, but should rather devote themselves to the "peaceful more egalitarian society" of the ideal future. And screw that self-centered feminist project of getting women elected. 


In 2017 the Daily Beast mentioned Henwood in an article about how the Far Left was played by Putin. I have serious doubts that Henwood was played rather than went along - and is going along - quite willingly:
Another Nation staple, contributing editor Doug Henwood, has maintained a professional relationship with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, yet is apparently very tetchy about the collaboration, as I also discovered when I engaged him. 
Henwood had planned to work with Assange on putting out a book about Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches—Henwood annotating, Assange writing the foreword—transcripts of which were of course originally hacked by Russian intelligence and disseminated through WikiLeaks, at least according to 17 different U.S. intelligence agencies, two of which concluded that this was done with the express purpose of helping Trump get elected. When I brought up this pending project, as detailed both on the book publisher’s website and in multiple articles, Henwood called me a “fucking idiot.” 
(Henwood’s publisher, when contacted for this story, noted that Henwood was no longer affiliated with the endeavor, saying that he had now grown “weary of chronicling Hillary Clinton’s boundless political shortcomings.”)

Henwood's hatred of Hillary Clinton is partly explained, I believe by his own misoygny, but more and more I've begun to think it's also because he's aligned with Vladimir Putin. I've looked and although Henwood has mentioned Putinon occasion  and defended the Trump-Russia connection I have never found any evidence of Henwood criticizing Putin. 

And yet Doug Henwood has no problem at all harshly attacking feminists, none of whom have been accused of murdering journalists or meddling in US elections.

Wednesday, July 25, 2018

Robin DiAngelo and the specialness of whiteness

The name of the obnoxious Robin DiAngelo is still showing up in my social media feeds and so I've been forced to think about her again.

She included the incident of how she bullied a German woman named Eva in her book, which I discussed in this blog post and this struck me anew:
I was working with a small group of white participants when a woman I will refer to as Eva stated that because she grew up in Germany, where she said there were no black people, she had learned nothing about race and held no racism
I found this interesting because when I confronted a co-worker about her racist statements, a few years ago, the coworker said that I had to forgive her bigotry against African Americans because she grew up in Russia without black people. Which apparently was what made her racist.

DiAngelo continues:
I pushed back on this claim by asking her to reflect on the messages she had received from her childhood about people who lived in Africa. Surely she was aware of Africa and had some impressions of the people there? Had she ever watched American films? If so, what impression did she get about African Americans?
What I find interesting about DiAngelo's interrogation of the German woman is DiAngelo's assumption that just being made aware of African people or seeing American films with black people in them made Eva likely to be a racist. I don't see how that follows.

As far as American films, the biggest issue is the underrepresentation of black people. But when black people are portrayed they are often sympathetic figures - from Cleavon Little in "Blazing Saddles" to Danny Glover in the "Lethal Weapon" films to Samuel L. Jackson in "Pulp Fiction" to Morgan Freeman in "Shawshank Redemption."

Sure black people are sometimes portrayed as bad too, and the list of black leading characters I came up with off the top of my head doesn't include black women, but although black people are badly underrepresented in American media, when they do show up they are no more likely to be portrayed as bad, percentage-wise than white people.

Now that doesn't mean that growing up in Germany it was impossible that Eva felt superior to Africans or African Americans. But that's not a white thing - that's the human condition. People generally feel that their in-group, however they define their in-group and it's often on ethnic or nationalist terms, is the best.

This is an example of the "specialness of whiteness" that Thomas Chatterton Williams is talking about. DiAngelo apparently reckons that there is something associated with white skin that makes white people more likely to feel superior to the Other than people of any other skin color.

This is not supported by the data, but Robin DiAngelo isn't interested in data about this any more than she's interested in finding out what white people today actually think about the career of Jackie Robinson. DiAngelo says whatever she wants to say, and she is treated so deferentially by all who interview her that she will never be questioned about her more bizarre statements. 

And that's how Robin DiAngelo continues to have a successful career based on pushing extremist beliefs about the specialness of whiteness.

Sunday, July 22, 2018

Welcome to the trip


I finally launched the NYCPlaywrights podcast. So far the response hasn't been overwhelming.

It's still technically rough in spots, but it should get better as we go along and learn more. We'll see...



Saturday, July 21, 2018

In the kiosk

The kiosk at East 72nd - if it looks like it's listing,
it is - try keeping your rolling chair in one place
in that thing - it's not easy.
I had my second shift in a Central Park information kiosk on Friday. It's a three-hour shift and I have been completely exhausted by the end of each shift. I couldn't believe the woman who took the double shift in front of me. That's six hours, I don't know how she did it. 

The kiosk shift on Friday was at the kiosk right near Strawberry Fields - if I had a dime for every time I was asked where it was (the answer - go to those food carts, cross the street, up the hill) I'd be rich. Where did people go in Central Park before Strawberry Fields was installed? 

The more ghoulish tourists want to see where Lennon was shot (answer - go across Central Park West, the Dakota is on the north corner at 72nd.)

My big exciting moment on Friday was giving directions in French. The woman was very nice and said I spoke French well. I screwed up cinq and quinze (5 and 15) though, which is dumb mistake. But still - the entire conversation was conducted in French and there was mutual understanding. Formidable!

Friday, July 20, 2018

Randy Rainbow makes good

Randy Rainbow and I go back to 2005 when I paid him to perform a play by Brett Holland in the NYCPlaywrights fundraiser. He was going by Randy Rainbow even then.

I've been watching his videos on Facebook since he started making them and I'm thrilled that he's becoming an actual celebrity. Today I see there's a profile of him at ABCNews.

Brett Holland has also found success but via a more conventional path.

Although I love his Trump-focused videos to me this is one of Randy's funniest:

Thursday, July 19, 2018

IMPEACHMENT NOW

What did the President know?
Russia attacked our democracy by order of Putin.
When did he know it?
January 6, 2017
What did he do about it?
Continued to lie about it right up to the present in order to continue to commit treason.
There is no need to wait for Mueller any more.

IMPEACHMENT NOW!

Steven Pinker, still shilling for trashy alt-right Quillette


Pinker is such a contemptible alt-right friendly creep. And please note that professional racist Steve Sailer, whose career Pinker has promoted over the years, likes this tweet.

Wednesday, July 18, 2018

The Nation's Liza Featherstone (wife of Doug Henwood) of course defends Trump against charges of collusion




And of course she hates Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Because any non-compliant woman, especially feminists are the enemies of Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood and their little Hillary-hating cult.



I wonder how many people are aware of this small New Yorker article about Henwood and Featherstone and their love of Russia and nostalgia for the old Soviet Union? I know about it because I occasionally check in to see what these two assholes are up to in the name of The Nation. It appeared in the March 20, 2017 issue of the New Yorker:
Liza Featherstone, an advice columnist for The Nation, arrived with her husband, the economics journalist Doug Henwood. They’d been coming here for seventeen years; it was “the site of our failed first date,” Henwood said. At a nearby table sat a young woman in a knitted pink pussy hat. “I should have worn my penis hat,” Henwood remarked, to no one in particular. The bar’s Communist-red walls are festooned with posters of Soviet triumphs: victory over Nazi Germany, the first woman cosmonaut in space, Cheburashka (the U.S.S.R.’s answer to Mickey Mouse). KGB carries three varieties of Baltika, a decent proletarian beer brewed in St. Petersburg. The leftist power couple ordered Lagunitas I.P.A.s. “At no point would I have enjoyed living in the Soviet Union,” Featherstone said. “The seventies were pretty comfortable,” Henwood rejoined, pulling out his iPhone to share a 1978 photograph of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev lounging in turquoise swimwear. Featherstone was summoned to the podium, where she delivered a meditation on the complexities at the intersection of B.D.S.M. and feminism. Forty-six hundred and sixty-three miles away, in Moscow, Vladimir Lenin rolled over in his mausoleum. 
And the rest of us are rolling our eyes.

It's important to note that Henwood's economic interests don't end in simply critiquing capitalism. Not only has capitalism been good to the Featherwoods via real estate, Henwood also offers advice to high-net-worth individuals via what used to be called The Liscio Report but which is now called TLRanalytics. I assume Henwood makes a decent living from this publication since it offers extremely pricey subscriptions.



Henwood & Featherstone have a bitter hatred for bourgeois feminists or the bourgeois in general (and feminists in general) - I wonder how many members of the working class can afford a subscription to Henwood's content.

I believe that when all the info has come out about Russia meddling in the US, not only is Trump going to be a proven Russian asset, so will Featherstone and Henwood.

Tuesday, July 17, 2018

The Nation's Doug Henwood defends Trump against charges of treason

Anybody who has read this blog knows how much I've despised Doug Henwood since 2014


It was clear right away he hated feminists, or any non-compliant women, really.

But I didn't realize how friendly he feels towards Putin nor how shameless he would turn out to be in defending Trump against charges of treason.













And it seems he has decided to become pro-Trump. 

He needs to have his ass fired from The Nation.


Monday, July 16, 2018

ALL DARE CALL IT TREASON




One of the best takes I've seen yet on the #TreasonSummit 












Sunday, July 15, 2018

Exploring the "intellectual dark web"

Bari Weiss, conservative columnist at the New York Times in her infamous article on the topic, mentioned the people in the list below, as either members of or allies of the "intellectual" dark web. 

I believe what they mostly have in common is racism,  misogyny and anti-Muslim bigotry. Weiss glosses over the race issue as "identity politics" when she first describes the group in her piece:
Here are some things that you will hear when you sit down to dinner with the vanguard of the Intellectual Dark Web: There are fundamental biological differences between men and women. Free speech is under siege. Identity politics is a toxic ideology that is tearing American society apart. And we’re in a dangerous place if these ideas are considered “dark.”
I'll be looking at other ways they are connected, and not just the fact that Eric and Bret Weinstein are brothers and Heather Heying is married to Bret Weinstein. 

And eventually I'll create a visual guide to the interconnections among the IDW as I did with Steven Pinker's right-wing, alt-right and hereditarian connections. Several of the people in that chart are also identified as IDW, in addition to Pinker - Molyneux, Charles Murray, Sam Harris, and Claire Lehmann.
  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali
  • Mike Cernovich
  • Sam Harris
  • Heather Heying
  • Alex Jones
  • Charlie Kirk
  • Claire Lehmann
  • Abby Martin
  • Stefan Molyneux
  • Charles Murray
  • Douglas Murray
  • Maajid Nawaz
  • Candace Owens
  • Jordan Peterson
  • Steven Pinker
  • Joe Rogan
  • David Rubin
  • Ben Shapiro
  • Michael Shermer
  • Debra Soh
  • Christina Hoff Sommers
  • Eric Weinstein
  • Bret Weinstein
  • Kanye West
  • Milo Yiannapoulos

Saturday, July 14, 2018

Podcasting

In addition to the NYCPlaywrights podcast I'm about to launch, I'm toying with the idea of doing a podcast about the Intellectual Dark Web, or Steven Pinker's alt-right connections.

The thing is, there is quite a bit of overlap between Pinker and the alt-right and the Dark Web. However, there seems to be quite of bit of podcasting now about the Intellectual Dark Web, by its proponents like Bari Weiss, and none from critics. So I think that's a gap that needs to be filled.

I already have an evo-psycho bro series on this blog. Perhaps in preparation I'll start blogging while gathering material for the IDW podcast. 

I will start with Bari Weiss's infamous article for the New York Times. And by the way, my theory for why it is "dark" is because most or all of its members are "racial realists" - that is, they believe that Charles Murray was correct to suggest that black people are intellectually inferior thanks to evolution. So I will especially be exploring the race science aspect of the IDW.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

I have created a monster

Mr. Fuzz taking his daily constitutional
My two cats are getting on in years, they are both almost 15 years old and are showing signs of age.

Poor Miss Willow has a thyroid problem and has to have a topical treatment in her ears twice a day. She eats and eats thanks to the hyperthyroidism but is still too thin. I stopped giving her the medicine for a while because she's such a pain in the ass about taking it (she's semi-feral and hates to be handled too much by anybody, even me) and she almost wasted away. I won't be trying that again.

Mr. Fuzz, on the other hand, is too fat. And he has asthma and the doctor said it would help if he lost weight. So I have begun a regime of making Mr. Fuzz walk up and down our apartment building stairs once or twice or sometimes even three times a day. And he loves it. As soon as he gets in the mood to go down the stairs he will stand by the door and start screaming to go out. Ugh. But at least he's getting some exercise. I even got him a harness for cats, and although he tolerates wearing it for a few minutes after awhile he gets tired of it and flops down on his side in protest. And unfortunately I can't really take him for walks. The streets of this neighborhood, while relatively quiet for Manhattan are still too much for a cat who has spent all but a few hours (in total) of his entire life indoors. 

Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Robin DiAngelo - still a counterproductive, authoritarian, obnoxious charlatan

The name "Robin DiAngelo" has been cropping up again in social media because she's apparently published another book proclaiming all white people are racists and any white people who don't agree with Robin DiAngelo are not only racists but fragile too.

You can see that DiAngelo is still riding her simple-minded hobby horse in this latest article, in Medium. Most Medium articles come with a comments section, but DiAngelo's does not. Because DiAngelo must control the narrative. 

DiAngelo doesn't want a dialog about race, she wants to make a well-paying career out of her simplistic revenge narrative without having to respond to any questions about her statements and in some cases, her outright lies.

She ends her Medium article like this:
But we aren’t likely to get there if we are operating from the dominant worldview that only intentionally mean people can participate in racism.
You see, you cannot be trusted to be anti-racist merely because you consciously object to racism and because you've taken actions to oppose racism. Presumably even Heather Heyer, who lost her life opposing racism, is no better than "intentionally mean" white people.

Robin DiAngelo would like a life in which she can feel free to point at any random white person she sees and accuse them of racism, without knowing anything about them, and rather than the white person objecting to her accusation, instead, bow down to Robin DiAngelo and say: "oh thank you Robin DiAngelo for teaching me what an unconsciously racist piece of shit I truly am. Please allow me to give you money to say it again in front of a group."

And since DiAngelo controls the narrative and her audiences so carefully, this is almost always exactly what she gets. 

But every now and then DiAngelo meets a non-compliant white person and so she writes articles like the one in the Medium telling tales of those stupid white people.

It's important to note that Robin DiAngelo never admits to being wrong on this subject. She never admits to going too far. She has a true authoritarian personality and it shows, even though the cause of anti-racism is a good one. Her authoritarian personality twists the fight against racism into something else entirely.

I have spent the past six months poring over the literature of European and American white nationalism, in the process interviewing noxious identitarians like the alt-right founder Richard Spencer. The most shocking aspect of Mr. Coates’s wording here is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race — specifically the specialness of whiteness — that white supremacist thinkers cherish. 
This, more than anything, is what is so unsettling about Mr. Coates’s recent writing and the tenor of the leftist “woke” discourse he epitomizes. Though it is not at all morally equivalent, it is nonetheless in sync with the toxic premises of white supremacism. Both sides eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off of and legitimizing each other, while those of us searching for gray areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed, determinative and almost supernatural.
He could have had DiAngelo in mind.

DiAngelo's belief in "the specialness of whiteness" - the special evilness of whiteness - is demonstrated in this Medium article. 

There is a huge problem of racial inequality in the United States as a result of slavery and the various terrorist and apartheid systems developed by the white majority right up to the present time. There's a very specifically black/white dynamic, which I have written about at length in my evo-psycho bros series, in which I discuss the way evo-psychos and their sociobiology fellow travelers erase American history in order to maintain that there is something innately bad about blackness.

Robin DiAngelo has much in common with the evo-psycho brotherhood. The difference isn't in her approach to the concept of "race" though. They both believe race to be fixed and determinative, as Williams said - the only difference is which "race" is bad. 

And the evidence that DiAngelo has a problem with whiteness itself, rather than the race system of the United States is that DiAngelo does not only accuse white Americans of being congenital racists. She blames all white people for racism, as in her charming tale of the German woman named Eva. 

Of course we're never going to hear Eva's side of it. DiAngelo writes:
 I was working with a small group of white participants when a woman I will refer to as Eva stated that because she grew up in Germany, where she said there were no black people, she had learned nothing about race and held no racism. I pushed back on this claim by asking her to reflect on the messages she had received from her childhood about people who lived in Africa. Surely she was aware of Africa and had some impressions of the people there? Had she ever watched American films? If so, what impression did she get about African Americans? I also asked her to reflect on what she had absorbed from living in the U.S. for the last 23 years, whether she had any relationships with African Americans here, and if not, then why not. 
We moved on, and I forgot about the interaction until Eva approached me after the workshop ended. She was furious and said that she had been deeply offended by our exchange and did not “feel seen.” “You made assumptions about me!” she said. I apologized and told her that I would never want her to feel unseen or invalidated. 
However, I also held to my challenge that growing up in Germany would not preclude her from absorbing problematic racial messages about black people. She countered by telling me that she had never even seen a black person “before the American soldiers came.” And when they did come, “all the German women thought them so beautiful that they wanted to connect with them.” This was her evidence that she held no racism. With an internal sigh of defeat, I gave up at that point and repeated my apology. We parted ways, but her anger was unabated. 
A few months later, one of my co-facilitators contacted Eva to tell her about an upcoming workshop. Eva was apparently still angry. She replied that she would never again attend a workshop led by me. Notice that I did not tell Eva that she was racist or that her story was racist. But what I did do was challenge her self-image as someone exempt from racism. Paradoxically, Eva’s anger that I did not take her claims at face value surfaced within the context of a volunteer workshop on racism, which she ostensibly attended to deepen her understanding of racism.
If I was Eva I would have been very tempted to take a pop at DiAngelo's smug obnoxious face with her "internal sigh."

The German woman said what all white people can say about Robin DiAngelo: "You made assumptions about me!" Robin DiAngelo is the anti-Martin Luther King, Jr. She firmly believes in judging people completely on the basis of their color and never on the content of their character. 

  • In DiAngelo's world, you as a white person do not get to claim your own narrative about your life. 
  • Your pointing out that you were not raised in the US black/white apartheid system means nothing to DiAngelo. 
  • Your saying you think black people are beautiful means nothing to DiAngelo.
Robin DiAngelo has a ready-made narrative for you.

And if you push back against her simplistic literally black-and-white model of the world she will sigh at your stupidity and then write up your interactions to make herself the patient yet bemused heroine.

The best part of the Eva narrative is the gas-lighting. DiAngelo "challenged" everything this woman said about her life and her attitude towards black people because DiAngelo was clearly implying the woman was racist.

After DiAngelo recounts Eva's protestations, DiAngelo writes: "This was her evidence that she held no racism."

DiAngelo could not possibly be more obvious: she has heard the woman's evidence against DiAngelo's implied charges of racism, and Judge Robin has ruled Eva guilty of racism. And yet DiAngelo shamelessly states "I did not tell Eva she was racist."

DiAngelo doesn't even have the personal or professional integrity to admit what she did to this woman.

Thursday, July 05, 2018

Le français est incroyable

Translation:
"Those French are crazy."
This has been driving me crazy, the French over-use of the sound "sawn."

I made the letter "n" in "sawn" smaller to represent the nasal "n" sound that is so often heard in French. It's like "dawn" but instead of using the tip of your tongue against the top-front of your upper palate to pronounce the letter "n" you pronounce it behind your nasal passages.

This is an actual French sentence:
Cent sens sans sent sang.
According to Google Translate it means: "One hundred senses without the smell of blood." 

That is technically a meaningful sentence. Granted it's unlikely to be used, and when I flipped it back and forth between English and French translation it turned into "Une centaine de sens sans l'odeur du sang" which means "A hundred senses without the smell of blood." Which is damn close to the original sentence meaning in English.

In print "Cent sens sans sent sang" looks like five distinct, if somewhat similar words. But you can easily see they are different words. Visually. 

 Now this is why French, as spoken, is so hard for non-native speakers to understand. 

Because according to Google Translate at least, "Cent sens sans sent sang" sounds like this:
"sawn sawn sawn sawsawn"
That's right, those five distinct words are pronounced exactly the same way.

It's like the stereotypical French laugh "hohn hohn hohn" (see the French chef in The Little Mermaid for an example) but with an "s" in front of each "hohn."

I mean, sure, English has plenty of homophones, but I can't think of any you can use to make a five-word sentence.

And it's made worse by the fact that the French don't like to emphasize words when speaking sentences - they don't even like to emphasize syllables in a word, they try to make them all the same. Which is why French sounds like rat-a-tat-tat-tat.

Here is an article about French homophones which rightfully complains about this particular one.  And there are quite a few others.

And don't even get me started on "le souris qui sourit" which means "the smiling mouse."

The main problem, in my opinion is the French often don't pronounce the last letter of their words. In English we can tell the difference between sis and sit because we pronounce the last freaking letter. But in French, souris and sourit both sound like soo-ree. And BTW - it's not soo-ree where you grit your teeth together to pronounce the "r" sounds. Instead you have to make this gargling sound in the back of your throat for the letter "r." The letter "r" is probably the worst for English speakers - it gives me a sore throat after speaking French for a few minutes.

Ça me rend si fou!

Monday, July 02, 2018

My daughter-in-law is a famous chef