Two weird and wonderful conferences have come through my inbox in the past few weeks. I thought some of my gentle readers might be interested. There is a face-to-face conference on the f word in France, and an online conference on the medieval world in computer games in Vienna. Linguists are where historians are going (nobody but other linguists knows what they do) but they have fun! These involve Jesse Sheidlower of the Oxford English Dictionary and Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, and James Baillie the British specialist in medieval Georgia.
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BC had a slightly more exciting than ordinary election, in which the party which had the second most seats and formed government from 2002 to 2017 changed its name and dissolved itself, a party which got less than 2% of the vote and no Members of the Legislative Assembly in the last election came three seats short of a majority, the former head of the Green Party said he would vote for someone whose party is not sure that climate change is real and worth taking action to reduce, and there were bomb threats and hangings in effigy. Amidst that, party politician Kareem Allam is talking about why he changed parties, and he says:
we had MLAs that had been there for 15, 20 years, and we had staff that were 20 years old. All they had ever known were these MLAs, and things changed a lot, and things in society change very quickly nowadays. So it wasn’t reflective and there weren’t really debates of new ideas and new approaches, and there was a sense of stagnation that was occurring around that.
Now, its hard to be eloquent in an interview, especially when you are trying carefully not to offend former or current allies. But that makes me think about the history of the Salish Sea about 150 years ago.
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