Author Archives: Jeremy Mercer

About Jeremy Mercer

Jeremy Mercer is an author and translator who lives in in the Luberon with his fiancée, two children, five cats, two chickens, ten fish, and one pregnant dog. He is currently on the market for a cheap horse. More at http://www.jeremymercer.net

Forget the Holiday Boomerang

When I set out to buy this year’s holiday card supplies, I asked my fiancée how many cards she would be needing. “Nine,” she said. Nine? But last year she sent 25 cards? “Only nine people sent me cards,” she … Continue reading

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Functional Size Perception

In an ambiguous world, it is comforting to think we all share a few common, objective realities. If two people look at the same Granny Smith apple, they are essentially seeing the same thing, right? Not really. Our unconscious brain … Continue reading

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Advent Calendar Kick Off !

To mark this, the day of the opening of the first door, a few notes about advent calendars: * The term ‘advent calendar’ comes from the Latin ‘adventus’ or ‘coming’, and is a means of counting down the days until … Continue reading

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Is an ‘H’ just a sideways ‘I’?

Today’s New York Times crossword puzzle was somewhat vexing. It was a Thursday puzzle, a day often given over to puzzle twists or innovations. The conceit of today’s puzzle was ‘Turn Turn Turn’, meaning that several answers were meant to be read by turning the puzzle 90, 180, or 270 degrees. Continue reading

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Insulting or Not?

There is a scandal raging in Amercian sports circles at the moment because the basketball player Kevin Garnett allegedly told the basketball player Charlie Villanueva that he looked like a ‘cancer patient’. Now, this was during a heated moment in … Continue reading

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A Question of Translation …

In the splendid Travels with a Tangerine, Tim MacKintosh-Smith touches briefly on a translation problem that has always preoccupied me: aesthetic vs literal. In this case, he was looking at various translations for the title of Ibn Battutah’s accounts of … Continue reading

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Shooter (in Breda)

Apparently, Dutch shooting galleries offer a unique challenge: If you manage to hit the target, it triggers a camera shutter, and your prize is a photo of yourself eye-a-squint and gun-a-shoulder. Ria van Dijk, now 88, started visiting these shooting … Continue reading

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Stephen Pain’s (Son) Dante …

Stephen Pain – the mysterious, the bearded, the denizen of Shakespeare – has a son who runs a wacky video channel out of Japan. Hmm. The apple, close to the tree, falls. More here

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