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.
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
Contact Ria[dot]Bacon[at]gmail.com
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The Dutch like to think of themselves as an exceptionally, even uniquely, tolerant people. The precedent is often cited as Amsterdam’s reception of refugees fleeing religious persecution in the 17th century, although London too hosted Huguenots and Jews, in perhaps greater numbers than Amsterdam. And to the outsider today, the Netherlands is not obviously more
Continue reading The limits of tolerance
We are just entering a two-week period of exams and already my desk is beginning to overflow with papers to grade and regrade. While invigilating one exam this morning, filled with familiar faces of students taking the same exam for the nth time, I was inspired (actually the opposite) to make a little satire of
Continue reading A little light relief
News just in: seven out of ten Dutch people have participated in a poll about Geert Wilders.
Whatever issue Wilders addresses becomes the discussion of the day, and in such a way that Wilders himself becomes the issue once again. I’m not usually one for conspiracy theories, but I read somewhere that someone’s brother-in-law overheard
Continue reading Thanks a lot, Voltaire
Since the start of classes in September, I’ve had very little time to blog. In addition to teaching and its concomitant demands, I’ve been getting busy with developing a learning management system (LMS) for the modern languages department. It’s based on Moodle, one of the most popular LMSs around, and offers almost infinite possibilities of
Continue reading Hiatus interruptus
It might come as a shocking fact to learn that in the Netherlands hundreds of children, some as young as five years old, are living in the most primitive conditions, sheltering from the rain in makeshift huts made from disused wooden pallets and scraps of cloth they managed to scavenge from the piles of trash
Continue reading DIY slum
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