One of my kids started to play the piano at about 13. By the age of 18, he was playing pieces that were Royal Conservatory grade 10 level, and he was accepted into several universities.

He only had one hour of lessons a week during those 4 years of high school, but usually practiced 2 to 3 hours a day, without any pushing on my part. In some of his lessons he wouldn’t even touch the keyboard, they would just analyze a piece of music or discuss the theory behind it.

In university, the professors sometimes told other students to watch him play. His technique, they said, was not great (he himself admits that playing scales early on would have helped), but his feeling was superb.

I hate to tell you, but whatever the other company you went to is, it’s almost certainly Luxottica, the same people who make Ray-Ban now.

Why don’t Mennonites have sex standing up?

Because it could lead to dancing.

(Explanation: some Mennonite sects believe that dancing is inappropriate. Sex is not considered dirty, as long as it is within a marriage.)

The definition of dumb is very elastic.

There is one summer student who came to work at my software company. He was in a very specialized and elite program at a top-flight Canadian university. Both his parents were professors at this university.

One day he came to our boss, and said that his family always went to Europe for 2 weeks in the summer, and he needed time off. My boss explained that he had been hired because we wanted to do a special project during the summer, and it would be very difficult to not have him on the team for a significant part of it.

My boss asked the student when the vacation was going to start. The student replied, “tomorrow”.

At first, my boss was angry, but then realized that the student actually had no understanding that this was an unusual and onerous request. That’s about the time I started learning about autism (and later realized that I was somewhere on the spectrum as well, just not as far along it).

I was halfway through Googling this phrase before I remembered who said it and where. Well played!

Come to Quebec, where electricity is about USD $0.05/kWh. And over 99% of that is renewable (hydroelectric)!

It’s even more of a no-brainer in Quebec, where gasoline is almost $2/litre (USD $5.50 per US gallon), but electricity is only about $0.07/kWh.

“reasonable and generous”

Well that was their first problem. Trump interprets kindness as weakness. The powerful crush everyone around them and take one they can.

There’s an old saying in Tennessee—I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on…shame on you.’ Fool me—you can’t get fooled again."

George W. Bush – Nashville, Tennessee, September 17, 2002.

I have taught in Quebec schools this year, the first full year that cell phones were banned. I have not seen a single student using a phone. The teachers at my schools have also been unanimous in saying that there has been a significant improvement in the student attention, as well as communication and activity between students.

Streaming radio from around the world: Radio Garden

Best language lessons short of full immersion: Language Transfer

I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Saudi Arabia gave the United States military permission to use its air bases for direct attacks on iran.

It seems like an eternity ego that someone (Colbert?) coined the phrase, “reality has a distinctly liberal bias”.

At the circus, I would assume that they had a contract allowing them to use the music, but it also required them to make their best efforts not to allow recording.

Their best effort, of course, was to ask people not to record, and then they didn’t need to bother doing anything else.

Do you mean aside from hosting American planes, missiles, soldiers, intelligence, and ships, all of which were used to attack Iran?

The whole picture looks bad, like an AI rendering from several years ago.

Donald…I have a cask of very special wine I’d like you to try. It’s an Amontillado. Do come down into the bunker and have a taste.

St. Hubbins, the patron saint of quality footwear.

Japan doesn’t even bother with street names, except the largest ones in big cities. If you want to find a house, they are also not necessarily numbered sequentially. Sometimes the houses in a neighborhood are numbered in the order they were built.

If you want to find a house, you go to the neighborhood map and look there. At least, that’s how it used to be. Now everything is GPS. I was using GPS in a car close to 30 years ago, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the first place in the world to have consumer GPS, simply because they needed it.

C’mon, weren’t you blown away by the (at the time) novel digitized voice? “He slimed me!”

Of course, escape from Castle Wolfenstein did it even earlier (“was ist los, was ist los” and “ach, mein leben!”).