LA Michael and I were talking about mispronounced names today.

He heard Michael Chabon being interviewed on NPR a few weeks ago and the journalist introduced him as Michael SHAY-bun instead of shaw-BON as we've always called him.

And I told him that I feared that Douglas Coupland's name is really pronounced COOP-land, rather than COPE-land.

Michael gasped.

And before I continue with this story, let me just take a moment to fully appreciate a friend who will *literally* gasp when you tell him something like this. As if it has some extreme consequence in our comparably small lives.

And then he made me promise to ask Douglas the correct, on-the-record pronunciation of his last name the next time I happened to be stalking him.

Which reminded me to tell Michael that I bought the French version of Microserfs this weekend. I had wandered into Librairie la Hune wedged between La Flore and Les Deux Magots and once I invested the energy to actually find the fiction section, no small task for this French-illiterate, I just had to buy something.

My favorite part about the translation is the "glossaire" at the end filled with pop-culture references and tech-speak. It got me thinking about how it was difficult to "get" all of Coupland's references in English when I first read the book back in 1995. I could have used a Tech to English glossary at the end of my first edition hard cover to explain references to Altaïr and SGI and Larry Ellison.

But before I could tell Michael all of this, the conversation had shifted to Ed Harris and determining whether it was last year or the year before that he did not clap when Elia Kazan won an Honorary Oscar for Directing.

Just as well. After all, that subject has actual consequences.