Liza and the French

I'm paying for my written progress and cleared grading backlog; my fingers and arm are a solid mass of pain today. This is my just dessert for never having learned to type properly and for hitting the keys rather, er, forcefully. The voice recognition software on my computer looks awfully complicated, but I may have no choice.

Then again, I'm no longer certain that I can trust my (much beloved) computer. A week ago, I installed the "shuffle" function for itunes. Out of several hundred songs I've saved, five of them are sung by Liza Minnelli. (Yes, yes, I know.) At least one, often more, of them turn up on every random playlist. I have fifteen or twenty Beethoven piano Sonatas saved; none of them have turned up yet. The computer is also very fond of Philip Glass.

Necessity breeds creativity, and I did manage to mark a few essays with my left hand; as I result, I learned that Maryland was founded in 1778 and is now known as Georgia. Another student, who noted my comment on an earlier assignment that "France and England spent several centuries at war," wondered if I'd ever heard of the 1066 Norman Invasion. You see, he said, it wasn't the French, but the Normans who invaded England...

Perhaps I could take up a neighborhood collection to repair the brakes. When I went outside this morning to feed the mailbox, I overheard the kids next-door who were waiting for the school bus say, "Look! Here comes the squeaky bus!"

Words Written: zero
Lessons Graded: ten