i finished my end-of-term report for the editor-in-chief/english language editor positions at my journal.

the report was almost 11 000 words long. yeesh.

as you can tell, i don't trust my successors to do anything, with good cause. see, i wrote everyone an e-mail saying, 'hey, congratulations on becoming editors. since we'll be working together, we should introduce ourselves...'

the incoming eic sends this message:

"As John wants to let me be the EiC, I accept the job. After what I saw of everybody's work and background, I am very confident that we will be able to work together in a very efficient way.

Finally, here is the story of my life :

I grew up on a farm located about 45 minutes from Quebec City. After high school, I studied two years in Quebec City in the International Baccalaureate (IB) program. The IB really was the true beginning of my intellectual life : there, I learned to think and to love knowledge, the World and its peoples. After that, I moved to Montreal, where I still live, for my undergraduate math and physics studies. Two years out of three have now passed. After that I intend to go on with graduate studies in physics, if possible in a prestigious American university, for the reason that it is there that I will find the best supervisors in my domain. I am interested in "fundamental" theoretical physics. By that I mean all that is linked to the structure of the Universe, interactions, fields, etc. I have a natural inclination towards mathematical rigor and beauty. Last Summer I worked (thanks to an NSERC grant) on a problem in quantum field theory related a precise lagrangian. This Summer, my supervisor gave me a larger project that lies somewhere at the intersection of (super conformal) field theory, string theory and general relativity, which means a lot of reading for the next weeks but also a lot of excitement and learning."

was that not the most pretentious thing you have ever read!?

god!

i wonder if i should tell him he sounds like an ass so that he'll stop inadvertently offending people, which will inevitably happen, or whether he already knows and just revels in being a total drip. i think it must be a language thing, mostly. he's still pretty high on himself in french, but it's not nearly that bad.

so should i talk to him about it?