fact checking is everyone's friend

I tried to fight the urge to post about this, but sometimes someone is too wrong on the internet to ignore.

Siegfried Sassoon was an oficer, not an "ordinary enlisted soldier." His drawing "The Soul of an Officer" is a mildly satirical take on himself and his fellow officers, not an expression of "disdain." (When he did show disdain for those running the war--in which category he did not include junior officers on active service--he was a lot blunter about it.)

The fact that this example of stupid assumptions and failure-to-Google appears in a blog from NPR--National Public Radio, one of the most important and prestigious news sources in the United States--depresses me beyond words.


(In case the NPR blogpost gets edited, the bit I'm talking about reads "In a sketch in one notebook titled 'The Soul of An Officer,' Sassoon — an ordinary enlisted soldier — showed his disdain for those who were, quite literally, calling the shots. Under a picture of a figure in officer's cap, he scrawled 'death' and 'fear,' and below 'eating and drinking,' and 'commonplace chatter about war.'" The actual sketch can be seen at the BBC's more intelligent report about Sassoon's war diaries.)

my hovercraft is full of eels

I seem to have signed up to Duolingo.

To learn German.

Which is just about the least practical language I could learn*, apart from the second language I already have, which is French. Well, okay, least practical would be something like learning to read Akkadian cuneiform. Practical would be Spanish, since I live in an area with lots of Spanish speakers and many jobs give preference to bilingual candidates. However, I am not the least fucking bit interested in learning Spanish, apart from those practical considerations, and I doubt the practical considerations would make me stick with it long enough to gain any real speaking ability.

German, on the other hand, interests me.** And also I don't care if I ever learn to speak it, I'd just like to be able to understand and read it, and those skills are easier to acquire.



*No offense meant to Germans. If I lived in Europe, German would be practical! But alas, I don't.