Wasteland Wrap-up #47

Walking around Paris, LeMay's bloodthirstiness, The Perfect Neighbor...

Last week was one of work, work, and a little bit more work. And some non-work. As it goes. A container of some bulky items was meant to arrive, after several weeks of transit, so I had cleared out a lot of my schedule to help receive and unpack the stuff. But in the end it was delayed another week or two, for reasons unknown — the boat just hasn’t arrived yet. One would think that would be easy to track and be aware of well in advance, but…

Lyndon regards the Jardin du Luxembourg as his personal hunting grounds, always on the watch for birds to stare at.

I’ve been taking Lyndon to the Jardin du Luxembourg pretty regularly, as he enjoys walking there and it is a good place to sit for a little bit and practice my French (on Duolingo). I got a teacher subscription to Le Monde, which is not very expensive, and has a useful feature where a voice (probably AI?) will read any article to you exactly as it is written. My little routine is to listen to an article while walking, then read along to it being read to me again. I don’t catch everything, obviously, but that’s not the point: I’m just trying to calibrate my sense of how the language flows, where one word starts and another begins, and improving my pronunciation instincts.

The late French lawyer/politician Robert Badinter was inducted to the Pantheon last week, to much fanfare. He was the one responsible for ending capital punishment in France in 1981, to considerable controversy at the time, but in retrospect his reputation seems to have only improved.

The day-to-day of learning continues to feel slow, but I do notice improvement in my ability to hear and speak, and my confidence levels in dealing with French interactions. I have had a few interactions that were entirely in French recently that almost felt natural. They were not excessively “deep” in terms of their vocabulary or anything, but feeling like I can construct a sentence on the fly, and reply to a question (even a simple one like, “are you taking the dog for a walk?,” and I reply, “yes, a short walk”), feels pretty good. I wanted to imagine that “immersion” would feel like instant magic, even though I know that isn’t how it works. I can see that it would look like instant magic to someone who only saw one’s progress after a year or so, though.

Looping around the north side of the Jardin du Luxemborg. The fall weather here is not too different than in New York. We are much further north, though, so the hours of lightness and darkness are very different — it is darker earlier, lighter later.

Lyndon has been enjoying the Paris dog parks, and was quite pleased to team up with a young beagle to harass a much larger schnauzer, to every dog’s delight. Lyndon doesn’t normally feel compelled to scrap with other dogs (in a playing way) these days, so we are happy to see some of his youthfulness when it reappears.

I wrote up a post for Doomsday Machines this week about General Curtis LeMay, in case you missed it. I had started out with the intention of it being a sort of general profile of him, but while looking up some things from his very strange “memoir,” Mission with LeMay, I thought I would focus on the latter, as it is just so very bizarre:

It’s just so strange. I found one review which described it as the worst military autobiography ever written. I can’t decide whether that’s true, or whether it is the best military autobiography ever written. It is just… something else. It captures the man and his mindset perfectly. It’s a grim thing to look at, but it still needs to be looked at.

I’ve been working on a few other posts relating to the Strategic Air Command in LeMay’s day, which may be why he has been on my mind. I am hopeful at least one of them will be ready to post next week…