Ria Bacon: editor & writer

Linguist with wanderlust,
From the hills of New Guinea to the halls of the Sorbonne,
From the beaches of Bassam to the fields of Friesland,
From the catacombs of Rome to the Blue Mountains of Jamaica.
From the heather of the Veluwe to the dust of Dakar ...

Currently resident in the Land of Sea with a small tribe of kids and Mr B.

Tweet Blender

Fisher slash artist http://t.co/bjKvMdJbw4
1 week ago
Helemaal Dancehall — the video http://t.co/U30G2Y83Vm
3 weeks ago
Helemaal dancehall http://t.co/MNiFXIrtSM
3 weeks ago
Have you heard ‘Helemaal dancehall (D0gg3d mash)’ by ... me (!) on #SoundCloud? https://t.co/Q3t5GOW9Hc
3 weeks ago
Lies, damn lies & Excel: This Was Reinhart and Rogoff's Biggest Mistake. http://t.co/joGtbGQq1N
1 month ago

Stet in a cloud

Photo Galleries

Now hear dis!

FYI

Stet means "Let it stand" and is used by editors to indicate that the original text should be left untouched.

...in Arcadia ego is a pun on a painting by Poussin.

Stet is a proud member of


    expatriate

Contact

Ria[dot]Bacon[at]gmail.com

Fatal conflict: Teacher 2.0 and Student 1.0

Details

Issue: Incompatible integration of module Teacher 2.0 with multiple versions of Student 1.x

Type: Bug

Priority: Major

Description

Since September I’ve been working with first-year nursing students on a series of language tasks to improve their professional knowledge of English. I used our online platform moodle.hz.nl as an interactive learning space to present new

Continue reading Fatal conflict: Teacher 2.0 and Student 1.0

New oxymoron: Legitimate rape

The outrage following congressman Todd Atkins’ comments about “legitimate rape” was racked up again when he corrected himself (sic):

I was talking about forcible rape. I used the wrong word.

For those latecomers, the controversy began with an interview in which Atkins’ compounded his oxymoronic thinking with the purely moronic:

 

New oxymoron: Legitimate rape

Feuilles volantes

While waiting in the basement for the washing machine to finish, I picked up a book from the open boxes stacked under the stairs, the remainder of our unpacking from … almost two years ago *gulp*. The book was a well foxed paperback of Victor Hugo’s Choses vues, a sort of memoir of major and

Continue reading Feuilles volantes

A slew of …

In a CNN Money article yesterday about the Facebook vs Google+ rivalry, my editor’s antennae started twitching when I read

“But defensive moves are not Zuckerberg’s style, and in September, at the company’s F8 developers event, he unleashed a sea of new features that alter the current service radically.”

“A sea of features”?

A

Continue reading A slew of …

I’m pink, therefore I’m spam

Cogito ergo sum

Descartes’ dictum states that humans are conditioned to rationalize their experience … even to the point of maintaining ideas that contradict other accepted theories.

A case in point: fern seed. In earlier times, the fact that ferns did not appear to have any seeds was a puzzle for naturalists. They concluded,

Continue reading I’m pink, therefore I’m spam