The Khagan Weekly: Pretending To Care Since 2014 (Issue 5: 11/23)

NEWS BRIEFS
French for Dummies
Kara found a great little book on learning to read French for me. It only arrived on Thursday, but I quickly began working through it. There are countless problems with the book, especially since it is geared toward a science student, but overall it has a nice feel. The book focuses on learning the important aspects of reading, such as understanding which word types are which. It also isn't overly heavy on vocabulary. Did you know that half of the French language is composed of English cognates? That means words that look like and mean the same as English words. Unfortunately, the other half is a maelstrom of words, some of which are partial cognates (multiple definitions, only one of which is the true English cognate) or false cognates (looks the same, is totally different). The book focuses on the gendered issue of French a bit more than seems necessary, though I have partially learned Spanish, French, Latin, and German, all of which are gendered languages. Perhaps people unfamiliar with this concept will have difficulties. Honestly, it rarely seems to matter in trying to get the gist of something anyway.

Vocabulary is the thing I have the most difficulty with and this book throws new vocab around like I'm a sponge. Hint: I'm not! It also doesn't have answers to the section conclusions, which usually consist of reading a few paragraphs in French and then answering questions. How do I know if I got the answers correct? Who knows!? I certainly don't, and in the last two chapters I had some questions that I couldn't find answers to. I find this a bad thing. The book also doesn't always translate things into normal English, choosing to give as literal a definition as possible, which often sounds strange. Au contraire, some of the sections are so not literal that I have no idea how they even came up with that translation. Consistency is apparently lost on these guys. Oh, and this book could have easily catered to a more balanced audience. I know Marie Curie and Pierre were great and everything, but let's pick some examples of sentences that don't involve math and science terms I don't understand even in English!

Public Speaking Tips
We went to the Postgraduate Showcase on Wednesday, which was a meeting of postgraduates from Canterbury, University of Otago, and Lincoln University (all in the general area). We were decidedly not amused. It was a 8-hour day of people giving 15-minute speeches and some of these people truly need help in delivering their information. The full gauntlet was here, from people that didn't even seem to understand their topic to people that knew it so well they forgot we don't. From people that are so afraid of public speaking that I think they wet themself to people so confident that they seem to have forgotten to stay on topic. Some speeches were decent, but none were great. At least none that we saw. And the Humanities were not at all represented. No English, History, Political Science, Law, Language, Music, Drama, etc., student bothered to show up. The two History students that I knew who were going dropped out at the last minute. While Humanities is definitely suffering at the Uni, this is a bit ridiculous. At Point Loma, this speech was required to earn your honour's stamp on your diploma; it should be required here too. Academia in general here is rather lax on a number of things and participation, even when required, rarely has a major impact if you don't do it.

Defining the Objective
On Thursday morning, I met with my PhD supervisor for the fourth and last time for this year. He is going on an extended two-month vacation/work trip to Europe and will be out of contact for most of that time. He has a habit of getting off track and I had a long agenda to cover, so naturally only about half of it got done. After asking him about various things, we got into the meat of the topic: my timeline. Apparently I hadn't given myself enough time to work on each chapter, so he suggested I spread it out more. That brought me perilously close to the end of the third year, though, so I'm going to have to try and keep my own schedule that is more abbreviated. Hopefully I can stick to it.
We weren't able to cover all topics that I wanted to touch on, but we made some good progress at least. I had to write him a follow-up email later just to cover the last few points. At least he liked my genealogies I wrote for my PhD. I'll post them up here at some point for all your viewing pleasure.

Cooking The Hard Way
After weeks of difficulty, Kara and I are finally managing to make some foods successfully. Last Sunday night, we made a scrambled egg casserole for the entire week and it worked magnificently. We dropped bacon from our diet and switched to two eggs per morning. We toss some nice mozzarella and Colby cheese on top to add to the flavour.

On Saturday, I successfully made my first batch of sourdough here, using the bread machine for the actual cooking cycle. It let it rise for 24 hours without adding any sugar, which means only the gluten in the wheat was there for the yeast to eat. In the end, it may have been too much. Low gluten bread doesn't rise as much, which means the bread is much heavier. But the lack of gluten makes it quite a bit healthier overall. The next thing I am trying to fix is the sour quality of it. Even after 24 hours, it isn't sour enough and doesn't taste very...San Francisco-y. So I tried adding a special type of yoghurt instead of water to my new starter to see if that works. Fingers crossed!

On top of those, last week I made my first home-made salsa. I used bottled jalapeños because my own aren't ready yet, and food processed them with onions, vinegar, and a few other bits. It really needs cilantro but we haven't found that here yet. It came out less flavourful than I was hoping, and our food processor is not very good, so we may buy a Magic Bullet blender and try again with that. The price of the Magic Bullet, though, is a fortune and they only seem to sell the large box version here, which we really don't need. Regardless, we have enough salsa to last at least two months, I think.

Finally, we made a batch of tomato basil soup today from scratch-ish. We used tomato paste as the base and just started mixing cream, water, basil, pepper, and salt until it tasted good. It wasn't perfect and it may need garlic and onions to really bring out the flavour, but it was quite tasty with my new sourdough bread.

Boxing Day vs. Black Friday: Fight!
Christmas is coming and in New Zealand, there is no Thanksgiving/Black Friday to flag the start of the race. Instead, it just starts. Slow at first (Christmas stuff has been in stores since mid-October) and eventually taking over (Santa started at the mall today). Sales are not as spectacular and there is not much to say about door busters, but Christmas music is playing at the mall and you can feel the spirit growing in the air. One thing that is strange, though, is that everyone keeps talking about their Christmas barbecues rather than their Christmas roasts. That is something we're still getting used to.

Instead of Black Friday, there is Boxing Day, a national holiday the day after Christmas where all the stores try to clear their remaining inventory by the end of the year. It is apparently just as big or bigger than Black Friday, and we've never experienced it because in Wales, we went home for Christmas. This year we'll be here and we are waiting to see if we want to try it out. It may be a good chance to get some needed things, but do we want to go into that chaos? We'll see. As it is, I have already been buying stuff online for Black Friday week even though I won't see most of it in three years. Do I have the money for this? Probably not. Do I need it? Probably not. Can I refuse such discount prices? Absolutely not!


DISCLAIMER
The Khagan Weekly is the unofficial news outlet for an American living in Christchurch, New Zealand. Anything he says can and may be used against him. His statements should be taken as factual, except when they are not. All rights reserved, except where prohibited...like in Russia. They prohibit everything there. Psh. Punks. Let's start a punt Putin day. That'd be fun.