Who Were the Sea Peoples?

And I want to both apologize and explain. Three points are relevant: 1) I have carpal tunnel syndrome. 2) At this point, I have 474 draft posts waiting to be put up at this blog. In other words, I have far more ideas than I am able to write up properly. 3) I often find myself with free time while sitting on a bus, train, or subway. Last week, my 30-mile ride to White Plains took me three hours on Metro-North. (Someone had committed suicide by jumping in front of a train ahead of mine.) Today, my five-mile bus ride to the White Plains train station took 50 minutes. (Holiday traffic.) The combination of the above three factors has been leading me to often try to use Siri to catch up on my posting. And Siri generates a whole lotta errors. I do my best to catch them, but if I am, say, on the bus, I am reviewing the post on a tiny cell phone screen while starting to feel motion sickness from looking at it. So, I am sorry. I have to up my efforts to catch these problems. But now y...

I mentioned that as a treatment for carpal tunnel I am trying to dictate a lot; so far, not so bad, but the text does need a lot of correcting after I dictate it. Any human secretary who made as many errors would certainly be fired. One day perhaps I will let all posts go up just as Siri renders them because many of them are very entertaining. Today, for instance, she decided I had said, "whether I need to have that ready for a full sugar charnel or not"! Any guesses as to what I had really said?

I'm trying to use Siri to take notes as I drive, something I have to do, since I seem to get an idea for something to write about every five minutes as I drive, every one of which disappears as soon as I stop the car. The guy on my current Italian CD say "Essere is used to form the passato prossimo with intransitive verbs of motion, with reflexive verbs, and with verbs like piacere." The last struck me as amusingly unhelpful: verbs like piacere in that they relating to being pleasing, in that they start with 'p,' in that they have four syllables...? I spotted a chance to make fun of someone: Time for a note. The next several minutes in the car went like this: GENE: Siri, send a message to Gene Callahan. SIRI: [Eerie silence.] GENE: Siri, send a message to Gene Callahan. SIRI: [Eerie silence.] GENE: Siri, send a damned message to Gene Callahan. SIRI: I'm sorry, there seems to be a problem. Try again in a mile. [She can't understand the one singl...