In a conversation between (Canadian) Christian Genest (whom I first met in 1986, in a dinner cruise of Lac Léman organised by the French Statistical Society for its national meeting in Lausanne) and David Bellhouse that recently appeared in the International Statistical Review of January 2025 figures the following bit that quotes my… review of Bellhouse’s William Playfair!
Christian Genest: More recently, you produced some very original work on William Playfair (Bellhouse, 2023), who is generally regarded as the founder of graphical methods in statistics. What about it?
David Bellhouse: The best I can do here is to quote from Christian Robert’s review of my book in Chance (Robert, 2024).
‘The impressions I kept from reading this detailed account of a perfect unknown (as far as I am concerned) are of a rather unpleasant, unappealing, unsuccessful, fame-seeking, inefficient, short-sighted, self-aggrandizing, bigoted, dishonest character, a ‘rascal’ in Stieglerian terms, running away from his debtors for most of his life, with many jail episodes for bankruptcy, while trying to make a living from all sorts of doomed commercial projects, ill-conceived scams, short-lived blackmailing attempts, and mediocre books that did not sell to many’.
I am glad David enjoyed the quote (to which I may have invested more effort than usual to give it a sort of Dickensian flavour). Incidentally, I learned there that David was a French horn player (which would have been my first choice of musical instrument had I been given a choice when starting playing music!)
Cooked a variety of spicy stir-fries while staying at a Warwick maths house with Josh and Stan two weeks ago, Josh adding the sweet-potato pancakes, which made the mini-nans somewhat superfluous. The common colour theme came from abusing the curry dispenser. Also had a great 
Made jars and jars of green tomato jam as the tomato plants had started to rot due to the enormous volume of rain we got in September and October. Also made a pie with chestnuts and chocolate and the very last raspberries, after my attempt at chestnut butter did not prove successful. With a sprinkle of matcha to substitute for sugar. (Figs are also almost done for the season, after a massive harvest that I mostly shared with my Dauphine colleagues.)
Wonderful day celebrating my long-term friend François Perron’s career, at the Université de Montréal! In full autumnal glory! 
With several long-time-no-see friends attending and presenting their work and connecting with François’ achievements, incl. Éric Marchand on Stein prediction for spherically symmetric distributions, where the predicted vector y appears in the same quadratic form as the observed one x, with the same location parameter, a setting that turns prediction into estimation of that parameter, a 
Mylène Bédard on a generalised optimal 
Yves Atchadé on 
and Alex Bouchard-Côté on escaping the curse of dimensionality by interpolations of the target, which is a variant of simulated tempering (quite the theme of the day!), and happened to be his invited lecture for the 2024 CRM-SSC prize, awarded right after. Unfortunately I had to catch my plane and face the notorious jams to the airport. (And, fortunately, I had attended Saifuddin Syed’s related 
