Can't believe it's Holy Week already except that that was definitely Palm Sunday last night. The weather's been oscillating between "too warm for the start of spring" and "too cold for the start of spring", which is relatively normal, but on Wednesday we had rain, sleet, hail, and snow, which actually stuck on the ground for a bit! And the Wednesday before was 17C. It is, however, definitely spring now and not late winter. Friday was the first day I got tricked by the lengthening days into not realising that it was later evening than I thought, and the clocks hadn't even changed then! We're into BST now, though.
I feel like I've been busy but I couldn't say with what. The big testing thing at work is now into week seven of two, and is certainly not going to be done before Easter (...admittedly part of this is because the team in charge have had to go away and make some decisions about how things are going to function in the new set-up, because apparently it didn't occur to anyone that they needed to agree basic processes before they went into UAT...). Choir has been a contributor, as ever, and I'm off shortly for a double Sunday rehearsal. I have done a little bit of socialising, but not as much as I would like.
However, today's big achievement is that I finally! managed to de-DRM my Kindle books, and am now putting them into my ebook reader at LAST. A triumph.
I finished s4 of For All Mankind with mixed feelings - you can read my review of the season 4 finale here, which goes into details as to why - but not so much that I wasn't curious about s5, which started on Friday.
Today is brought to you by diffrentcolours, who rescued me from missing lift club by offering to drive me there when I slept through my alarm and woke up ten minutes before we'd have had to leave the house.
(This also means that we could deliver the outdoor cat shelter, which is no longer needed by our neighborhood cat, to a friend who's in the process of being adopted by what had been his next-door neighbor's cat.)
And then this afternoon he drove V and me to the garden center to buy compost to re-pot a giant houseplant and straw mulch (it's called Strulch!) for the outdoor gardening season. And then to B&M to buy a bag of rocks. V is working on making a barrel pond for the backyard, which leads to some funny purchases -- last time I bought three random biggish rocks, called "rustic slate."
And then sadly D was too wiped out to go to a gig tonight that we'd been kinda planning to, which is a shame but probably would've meant that if we hadn't done errands this afternoon we wouldn't have gotten much further than the bus into town before he was wiped out. Still calibrating as recovery goes on.
And I was pretty tired too, having lifted all the bags around. The rocks were tricky because we couldn't get a shopping cart so I just had to fireman-carry the bag around the store. It wasn't super heavy but it was really awkward, and I was worried about tearing the bag. Plus the rocks were cold, seeping the body heat out of me. The bag was labeled "North Sea cobbles" and I feel like they remembered their chilly home while pressed to my shoulder.
So I made easy dinner (bangers and mash) and we watched the Twins second game. Which they won! But I was so pessimistic the whole time, D made fun of me. The bullpen didn't collapse! Royce Lewis had a great game! It was weird but I hope this happens every day!
It was a nice day. And tomorrow we have D&D -- the DM spun up a character for me last time, but we ended up just watching the movie (sadly without audio description this time!), but I offered to come along this week as a couple of the usuals won't be there because they're sick. I'm a fighter, my favorite thing to be, and the DM described the niche as Utility Himbo so that's basically his name. Bo, for short! So I'm looking forward to that tomorrow.
Here's the thing I've been helping to organize! Just picked up my posters for distro today.
A blurb:
Come celebrate the Rachel Reid book that started the whole phenomenon. Attend Victoria Festival of Authors' spring fundraiser at the Sports View Lounge above Oak Bay Rec on May 8th (7-9 pm). There will be burlesque, drag, and 🌶🌶🌶🌶 readings from real-life Victoria residents who have broken barriers around gender and sexuality in Canadian sports. Even better than the cottage!
As far as I know Gideon has seen neither anything with Guardians of the Galaxy's Yondu or an Alabama Sheriff, but when we're heading into combat in Zelda he does an amazing impression while yelling his battle cry of "C'mere Boy!"
As promised, I am being more diligent about the non-book media that I am consuming. We’ve watched two TV series since I last updated on this line, How To Get To Heaven From Belfast on Netflix and Small Prophets on the BBC.
How To Get To Heaven From Belfast is an eight-part story about three friends who receive news than an estranged fourth friend has died in Donegal, and team up to try and find out what has happened. Here’s a trailer.
The leads are Sinead Keenan, who was also one of the leads in Being Human and was an alien in the two-part Tenth Doctor finale, and Roisin Gallagher and Caoilfhionn Dunne, who were both new to me. Gallagher, playing Saoirse, a TV dramatist in a failing relationship who gets entangled with a young Garda in Donegal, has the best arc and performance of the three. The scripts are by Lisa McGee, creator of Derry Girls, and there’s an actual fanvid showing the actors who appear in both.
Those crossovers include Bronagh Gallagher (35 years on from The Commitments!) doing some first-class villainous glower, and Ardal O’Hanlon turns up playing the same character that he has played since 1995, but that’s presumably a contractual obligation for any Irish TV series these days. It was also fun to see Patrick Kielty playing himself – it brought me back to the cellar of the Empire on Botanic Avenue in Belfast in the mid-90s, when he was the compere of the Comedy Club and was usually funnier than the visiting acts.
I felt that there were some great moments here but that the overall plot didn’t make a lot of sense. Some of the individual lines are hilarious, and there are some great set-piece scenes – the two that linger in my memory are the moment when the three encounter a pilgrimage in County Fermanagh, and the moment when Saoirse unexpectedly ends up talking live to Patrick Kielty on The Late Late Show while zonked to the eyeballs on tranquillisers. But the mystery became both implausible and incomprehensible, or perhaps I was just not concentrating. I was talking to an Irish friend yesterday who said that she had watched the first two episodes and wasn’t planning to watch the rest, and I think that’s fair.
Small Prophets is a different matter. Here’s a trailer:
It is written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, who I remember particularly as the gormless Gareth from The Office, though apparently he was also in the third season of Game of Thrones; and he appears here as the manager of the garden centre employing the protagonist, Michael Sleep, played by Pearce Quigley who was new to me but whose quiet, comedic performance is devastating. Michael’s father is portrayed by Michael Palin (who turns 83 a few weeks from now); his vanished partner’s brother is Paul Kaye, who was Thoros of Myr in Game of Thrones and has also been in Doctor Who, though I particularly remember his spoof celebrity interviewer Dennis Pennis. Apart from Quigley in the lead role, the performance that grabbed me most was Lauren Patel as Michael’s co-worker Kacey – I had previously heard her as the voice of PC Mukherjee in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (where Paul Kaye played her boss).
Like How To Get To Heaven From Belfast, Small Prophets is very much set in the world of today, and in a particular place, in this case Manchester. The core story is that Michael, whose partner disappeared without trace several years ago, listens to his father’s advice about creating bottled homunculi which will always answer questions truthfully, in order to try and find out what has happened to the missing Clea. That’s basically the plot; the rest is character and incident interacting, with a hilarious ending combining a meteorite and a valuable ornithology book. Most of the characters are single-beat, but sometimes it works just to point them at each other and let them interact. And the six episodes are beautifully directed.
It’s interesting that both of these shows feature their own creators in different ways. Saoirse in How To Get To Heaven From Belfast nibbles away at the fourth wall, and the subplot of her travails with her TV production company while attempting to spin narrative gold out of the straw of daily life cannot be very far from Lisa McGee’s lived experience. Mackenzie Crook, as writer and director of Small Prophets, self-deprecatingly puts himself on screen as the annoying character who gives orders to everyone and gets steadily more annoyed as his instructions are ignored and defied. I guess it fits the age of Tiktok.
Things that look at the time like a failure or even a disaster may be sowing seeds or releasing spores and having an impact that will go on.
Or even have a counter-intuitive impact at the time: okay, The Well of Loneliness got convicted for obscenity in 1928 but 1000s of women realised they were not alone just from reading the reports in the newspapers, and 1000s of them wrote to Radclyffe Hall.
Just because something does not endure does not endure does not mean it had no influence.
Am currently reading book by a friend which makes quite a thing of long-term impact of small obscure organisations of early C20th I worked on.
Was a piece in Guardian Saturday today which doesn't appear to be yet online which was doing the ever-recurrent WO about 'I see no feminists' and I wonder what they expect them to look like and perhaps they are supposing something flashy and dramatic, which can be appropriate at times. But the work is not necessarily drawing attention to itself.
So I'm reading all these books of Tolkien scholarship as part of the jury establishing the finalists for an award, and I'm not sure what to do when an otherwise admirable book makes a boneheaded error. Here's a detailed exploration of Tolkien's methodology in making his sub-creation which repeatedly uses Valar and Ainur as synonyms. The Valar are actually a subset of the Ainur, as is perfectly clear from Tolkien's writings on the subject, the most relevant of which this scholar examines in detail, but how closely did he read it? Then there's the book on Tolkien's religious philosophy which defines Methodists as a subset of Anglicans. I don't know what to do with things like this, I really don't.
I thought of that when I got the program leaflet for yesterday's concert of the orchestra in which B. plays viola, and found that it featured works by Ludwig von Beethoven. No such person, though people in Beethoven's time made the same mistake.
Anyway, they made it fairly crisply through the abrupt opening chords of the Coriolan Overture. The Eighth Symphony was extremely hairy, full of sloppy playing and a few big clams, but fun to listen to - more than it was to play, B. says, as m.d. George Yefchak took it very fast. Also on the program, a gentle early string suite by John Rutter and a lively arrangement of that song from K-pop Demon Hunters, much more attractive than the original. Additional pieces for solo piano, string quartet, and bassoon duo made it into something of a variety show rather than an orchestral concert.
April has two uni Nationals weekends in Sheffield (one each with Womens Blues and Huskies), a hockey camp in Hull, three other hockey games, hopefully some more theatre trips, and a movie date next week with Tony.
My children rickroll me pretty regularly, so That Song gets stuck in my head.
How long do they last?
Not very long. My brain is usually too preoccupied with other sources of worry and stress to spend long on an earworm.
What do you do to get rid of them?
I don't know if this will sound contradictory, but on the rare occasions when an earworm sticks, I find that playing the actual song gets rid of it.
What is the worst ear worm you've ever had?
There's this Robyn song that I dislike intensely, and it popped in and out of my head for a week. I don't like the song so was very reluctant to employ my usual remedy.
Do you get some guilty pleasure in passing the ear worm along?
Not unless it's reciprocally rickrolling my children.
In today's team meeting when we were talking about the upcoming week, my boss (gently!) made fun of me for not realizing that next Friday is a bank holiday -- the other day when I was talking to someone about a thing that had to be rearranged from another day next week, they suggested Friday so I told my manager she could do Friday and he had to tell me Friday's the bank holiday.
To add to the making fun of me, I said it was extra bad of me to not know this because it's D's and my anniversary. That made my manager properly laugh, heh.
Then he asked "How many years?" and I just made an "oh god..." kind of noise, which sounds suitably middle-aged like who's even counting any more. But really all it means is that the long run-up of being good friends makes it feel like we've been together longer than the technical answer (seven years now). I will always treasure the memory of when we'd been dating only like three months, getting a train home at night, a young woman who needed help gravitated toward the table we were sitting at and we got chatting. She asked where my accent was from and I told her and we talked about that, she looked at D and asked him if he'd ever gone with me, and he said "not yet!" (which was true, it'd be another four years before he did!). She'd clearly been assuming that we'd been a couple for ages, and I don't blame her at all because I do think we gave off that vibe. So then she asked how long we'd been together. And I was delighted by D's casual answer, "a few years," splitting the difference between the technical reality of three months or so, and the vibe of people who'd been close for more than a decade.
I tried to channel that spirit to answer my manager's question, split the difference, especially when he added "estimate!" I think I said "fifteen?", dragged out to have about fifteen e's in it, and as many question marks at the end.
Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming. [loc. 2810]
Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)
Gosh those people with the archivists' sales team are persistent! I've heard again - okay, different name and email, exact same wordage - TWICE, second time with added 'Worth a chat?'
No, sir, not in the least.
***
This week I got the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society payout, which was an agreeable sum, maybe it would not actually support me in My Old Age, but it is Better Than A Bat In The Eye With A Burnt Stick. Furthermore, as it is itemised - all the tiddly sums that get totted up - it is a Revelation of what works of mine are still being looked at, wow.
A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed. The Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" report had been widely reported on since its publication last year and became an accepted part of discourse among many Christians. Now YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were "fraudulent". It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error. .... But academics questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England's own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance. Experts said that YouGov's methodology - gathering data from volunteers who received cash rewards for their time - left it vulnerable to "bogus respondents" skewing the data.
Howe wrote to Pepys to “crave your acceptance” of a “small” enslaved boy, which “I brought home on board for your honour … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.” Pepys wrote back indignantly rejecting the offer. But Edwards argues this was not because of ethical concerns about slavery, but the optics of looking like a man who could be bribed.
***
This is quite resonant with discussion I was having this week apropos of my 1930s feminists and the less visible ways in which the work was happening, so much so that it's been supposed (it was being claimed at the time) that Feminism Woz Ded: The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism.
The sunset last weekend looked very simple, but I liked its casual glow stretched on the clouds. Less than 10 minutes later my partner called me to come look at the sky and the red in it was astonishing.
Het Nederlandse West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, tekende voor de voetgangersbrug die een smalle duinenstrook verbindt met de Uitkerkse polders, een eeuwenoud weidelandschap, waar veel vakantiehuisjes en caravans staan. Op het eerste gezicht ziet de brug eruit alsof wind en golftoppen een enorme lading afvalhout langs de vloedlijn hebben gedeponeerd. De omkisting van een overboord geslagen scheepsvracht? De lambrisering van een verwoeste scheepska-juit? Wie zal het zeggen?
The Dutch firm West 8, Urban Design & Landscape Architecture, designed the footbridge that connects a narrow strip of dunes with the Uitkerkse polders, a centuries-old meadow landscape dotted with holiday cottages and caravans. At first glance, the bridge looks as though the wind and wave crests have deposited a huge pile of driftwood along the high-water mark. The hull of a ship’s cargo that has washed ashore? The panelling of a wrecked ship’s hull? Who can say?
I got this for F a few Christmases ago, a guide to 111 “crazy places” in Belgium. I was already familiar with a few of them – the Vlooybergtoren, Baarle, the church in Borgloon that isn’t there, the Atomium, Rédu. We’ve been inspired also to try and find a couple more thanks to the book – the cubes of Herne were a success, but the Post-Imdustrial Pagodas had been destroyed in 2021. Reading the whole book has given me a couple more ideas.
Most of the places mentioned are simply large and odd works of public art, with a few cases of usable architecture and one or two bits of natural landscape. Useful for anyone planning occasional excursions around Belgium. The text is in Dutch, but the photographs need little explanation and the locations are clearly given, with a map at the end.
The author has also published lists of 222 equally crazy places in the Netherlands, and a less ambitious but presumably longer list of 1000 things to do in the Netherlands. I’m glad that he also turned his attention southwards. You can get De gekste plek van België here.
I've seen occasional confusion from people over the last few weeks "Why is it so cold, isn't it Spring now?" - and I thought I should say a bit about one of the major causes that I almost never hear people talk about - the polar vortex.
This is a swirling wind around the Arctic that exists for basically the whole arctic night. One of the things it does is keep the freezing polar winds from coming further south in to Europe. But when it finally collapses in the Spring, it finally allows those winds out, and you get a sudden burst of cold air as all of that freezing weather escapes down to us.
Normally this happens some time in late February, but this year the collapse seems to have been a month later.
The other major factor is largely down to circulating high pressure areas (imagine slow large hurricane shaped wind "objects") that constantly move around the North Atlantic. Put one of these off of the west coast of Ireland, going clockwise, and it will pull air down from the North even further/faster. See this short video I took from the NullSchool site (my favourite wind visualisation site). In it you can see cold winds pouring down from the North Pole, funneled further by the circulation. And if you click on the link there you can see that currently the wind is instead being pulled off of the Altantic, where it's a few degrees colder.
British weather tends to be more chaotic than the weather north or south of us. This is because Spain (for instance) is fairly reliably in the warm weather caused by the heating tropics. And Norway is fairly reliably cold, due to proximity to the North Pole. But Britain can be part of either weather system, as the "barrier" between them is pulled North or South by a few hundred miles depending on the movement of the high pressure areas in the eastern part of the North Atlantic, either funnelling the warm air up to us or channeling the cool air down to us.
You can see that at the moment the warm weather is being slowly blown North-East, now that the cold weather isn't pushing its way down to us:
So, next time we get a period of warm weather at the end of Winter/start of Spring followed by a sudden burst of freezing weather for a few days, that's the polar vortex collapsing. And if we suddenly go from warm weather to cold (or vice versa) it's because we've switched weather system.
I got a text this morning from Chase, asking me about a suspicious charge. I tried to log in to their website to look at it, but couldn't get them to send me a one-time code, so I went ahead and sent back "NO," telling them to cancel/replace the card in question. Now I'm going to have to update a _lot_ of recurring charges and stored payment methods.
So far I have had enough trouble finding my other credit card that I went ahead and gave Chewy a debit card for the auto ship order they're in the middle of processing. I then looked further back in the same drawer, found the other credit card, and put it in my wallet. I'm going to wait for the new card to arrive, and use it for most of the recurring charges, because I get slightly better points/cash back on purchases. But this is going to be tedious and time-consuming, and I will almost certainly forget at least one recurring charge.
I think I can make a list of the monthly charges by looking at last month's bill, at least.
Wednesday was just another snowy spring day when this guy showed up!
OMG! A Northern shrike!!!
I was upstairs in my office when I heard the budgies flapping and didn't see the problem at first.
Then I saw this beautiful, but deadly bird!
He flew at the window and scared the budgies again, so I moved the cage away. He sat there for a good long time and flew away. He was not bothered at all by me standing right at the window looking at him.
Shrikes impale small birds and animals "for later", so I'm going to keep an eye on my bird feeder because I don't want my rose bush to become a graveyard. I haven't seen it again so far today, so perhaps the snow derailed his travel plans like everyone else lately.
A Parliamentary election causes considerable upheaval to the summer plans of Society in general, and of Clorinda and her circle. But besides any choices concerning the government of the nation, several of them find that they have to make decisions touching on more personal matters.
though there is alas some delay in the production of the Google edition.
It is anticipat'd that the work will shortly be available via Overdrive for libraries.
The icon on the DW and LJ versions of this post is a caricature of Haydn, and for once that's really appropriate, for this concert consisted of 3.5 Haydn string quartets. The 0.5 was his final quartet, which he was only able to half-finish. This turned out to be about 1.0 more Haydn quartets than I wanted to hear in one concert, and I grew itchy during the last one. This was a gentle and dignified interpretation of Haydn, without much that was witty - though Haydn often demands a witty approach - and not much more that was energetic, though there was some zip in a few places, notably the finale of Op. 20/4. And that's about all I have to say about a pleasant but unexciting concert. I wonder if I'd have been able to come up with more if I'd been assigned to review it and had my close-listening ears on, though that would require that I have taken a caffeine pill to be more alert, and those are off the menu for me right now for physical pill-swallowing reasons. I fear my fine discernment may be atrophying, or at least I'm experiencing fewer opportunities to exercise it.
Crash upshot: I didn't even get a headache. Fuckin' weird. Calluna was basically vague and headachy and a little concussed for 2 days, and is now mostly OK.
In other news, I have now gotten one of my new ATM cards, but not the other, and I haven't gotten my new updated-address driver's license or registration yet, nor my new wallet, so I have presents still upcoming. (Presents from myself. I like presents, so sue me.) The new wallet will be purple, and is redundant for now, since I was able to (finally) get to the Arlington Police Department a couple days ago and get my old wallet, which still had my $20 cash in it, and also my cat's prescription for her meds, and all the cards and stuff, so thank you universe for being gentle.
Also, I have been being frustrated in my photography habit because I couldn't find the charger for the specific camera I really wanted to use, currently, and I found two of them in my excavation of my car! Woo. (There's another one *somewhere* that I carefully packed in *some box or bag*, but I don't know where it iiiiiis. I was about to buy another one, but now don't have to.)
And now, a picture of my car (at the scene, with cell phone), cut because one cuts pictures. For some reason I didn't take any pictures, at the scene or elsewhere, of the entire length of the passenger's side, but one can see the issues. Also, I have been trying, for the past more-than-a-month, to fix my passenger side mirror, which I had munged in my garage. I kept having to reschedule because of Other Things Going On. So uh, don't have to worry about *that* anymore...
We've had a resolution on the insurance question of the U-Haul driver who clipped my car three weeks ago. I'd made a statement on the phone to his insurance company, which they recorded with my permission. The driver has admitted liability, as he bloody well ought to have, so what I get is a reimbursement for the large deductible on my car's repairs. I wonder if I'd have been reimbursed if I'd had to get a rental car too. No reimbursement for the trouble of having to work out using B's car for my errands (mostly medical appointments) for a week. On the other hand, the repair shop nicely cleaned up my car above and beyond the results of the accident, so I get that gratis.
Current Rebellion on Treasure Island, by Bali Rai Among Others, by Jo Walton Uncertain Sons and other stories, by Thomas Ha
Last books finished That Very Witch: Fear, Feminism and the American Witch Film, by Payton McCarty Simas (did not finish) The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac Star Flight, by Paul Hayes Cities Are Forests Waiting To Happen, by Cécile Cristofari The River Has Roots, by Amal El-Mohtar Religion and the Politics of Identity in Kosovo, by Ger Duijzings
Next books The Lost Dimension, Book One, by Nick Abadzis et al From Kosovo to Kabul and Beyond: Human Rights and International Intervention, by David Chandler Enchanted April, by Elizabeth von Arnim
Next of my run of Titan Doctor Who comics acquired in 2022 (and I’m actually getting near the end, I expect that I will finish them this year). Ghost Stories is, unusually for this content stream, a direct sequel to a broadcast Doctor Who episode, The Return of Doctor Mysterio, visiting the new family of Grant the ex-superhero, Lucy the journalist and Lucy’s daughter Jennifer several years after the Christmas 2016 episode. This had a promising beginning with the dynamic between superhero and Doctor nicely portrayed, but petered out into a standard quest story with guest characters in the second half; also the art notably fails to make the Doctor look much like Peter Capaldi, never mind the other established characters. For completists. You can get Ghost Stories here.
I swear I remember reading a due South fic a while ago that opened with RayK belatedly realizing he kissed Fraser when saying goodbye to him while leaving a bar after work (iirc they weren't together yet), but I'm not having luck finding it on AO3. Does it sound familar to anyone?
Bit of a flurry of Misguided Spam: this one is quite funny:
[W]e're working with other archivists that are offering historical resources. I’m currently working with a few archivists on campaigns that are getting their sales teams meetings with warm leads every month. We’re targeting people who need historical resources using personalized email sequences. If I could help you connect with potential clients like this, would that be helpful to you?
WOT. Unless this is some kind of operation like that BM curator who was selling off stuff from the storerooms, what kind of money do they honestly think there is in ARCHIVES??? Sales teams - No Can Haz.
Another one of the usual 'Contribute your article/join our editorial board/reviewer team' from an international journal... offering a space for the exchange of powerful ideas among academics and experts which cannot distinguish between the title of a book I reviewed and anything I actually wrote my own self.
This one is frankly cheeky, if presumably being spammed at a vast array of people?
I am sure you're quite busy, but I would appreciate if you could take a moment to my below request. Well, our Open Access Journal of Advances in Complementary & Alternative Medicine (ACAM) is scheduled to release its Volume 9 Issue 2 by 6thApril, but we are in deficit of one article. So, is it possible for you to support us with any of your manuscript to achieve this goal? Appreciate if you could provide your acknowledgement within 24 hrs.
Presumably they are anticipating recipients will stick prompts into ChatGP or whatever, though you'd think if it's that urgent they'd do it themselves.
Am also being followed on Bluesky by very dubious looking 'Global' conferences within my fields of interest. Suspect these are a racket.
***
However, in realm of being A Real Nexpert, gave a presentation at Institution With Which I Am Now Affiliated yesterday and I think it went quite well, insofar as there was a certain amount of discussion and people coming up and asking questions afterwards.
Also got 2 compliments from much younger persons on hair (green streaks in) though as one was outside the Scientology HQ in Tottenham Court Road I fear this may be one of their recruitment strategies.
Human is very similar to pork, after all. (I know, I know. Religious pundits say that cannibalism is forbidden in the Quran anyway. The ghouls say that this isn’t quite the same.) [loc. 61]
Despite the title, there's very little (if any) actual cannibalism in this novella. True, Rupert Wong (ex-mobster with a murky and karmically unpromising past) works as a chef for a wealthy ghoul family, serving up gourmet meals concocted from the bodies of hapless tourists: but that's only one of his jobs. He's also working off that karmic debt through community management: ( Read more... )
A new rug arrived today that V bought for the spare room. I took it upstairs and was admiring how soft it is. It's very differently printed -- leaves and swirls on a teal background -- but seems to be made of the same kind of material as my "space rug" in my bedroom, which has a colorful stylized rendition of the solar system.
Gary would love this, was my first thought. Because he loved my space rug. He'd rub his face on it and wiggle all over its soft smooth finish.
The other day I opened the box my new webcam came in, and admired how its internal cardboard packaging, along with its size and shape, would've made it the absolute perfect box for Gary, we liked to use the cardboard recycling to hide treats in for him to find. We re-used the ones he didn't joyoualy tear apart, but we were always on the lookout for new Good Boxes. And I guess that habit hasn't died out yet.
Apparently this week is one with too few hours and too many tasks...I'll be pulling a late night or possibly all nighter to try to catch up!
Annoyingly driving home tonight I was fiddling with my ear piercings and popped both the back and the little cabochon off the smallest one on the left hand side - which is now somewhere in my car, so I'll never find it. Back to the lovely Willow I go on Friday to get a replacement stud and I'll get one or two helix piercings done at the same time.
I postponed the work thing I was due to do on Saturday because I need a full weekend to:
* spend some time on the allotment - 26 bags of compost to spread from last weekend * sort out what I'm taking to Wales besides all my dirty laundry (which will get done up there) * chill out a bit- maybe? * sort out the chaos of 300 open tabs over 3 windows.. * make a start on decluttering the living and bedrooms
Seen on insta today all of which sum up my life right now:
* I don't have a train of thought, I have 7 trains on 4 tracks that narrowly avoid each other when their paths cross and all the conductors are screaming
* My ducks are not in a row. Some are missing, one's on fire and I'm pretty sure one is a pigeon.
* A reminder that Persephone is the goddess of flowers and also the Queen of Hell, so don't ever think that you have to fit into just one box.
I have far too many insta posts saved about tattooists doing fantastic floral and botanical work - which is what I want on my left arm. Currently I'm torn between fineline blackwork or something more colourful. I think I may need a proper vision board to help me decide. The aim is to get new ink before the end of the year. Then I can start planning for the right arm!
Also we're in the middle of fools spring - 19 or 20 degrees, brilliant sunshine and blue skies for the last week lulled us all into a false sense of security. Today the temps plunged and we had 4 seasons in 30 mins including torrential rain, sleet, and sunshine. Likely frost overnight - at least I don't have any tender plants outside yet.
Annnnd our office move - which was supposed to happen on Friday so I would have had 2 days to unpack before going away - has been postponed until 6 April - slapping in the middle of my holiday. What's the betting I come back on 13 April and my stuff will have disappeared into the ether?
Right - time for a giant pot of coffee, a rug to snuggle under and to fire up the work laptop.
Finished High Stakes. I previously noted a pattern in Dick Francis of the conditional rather than utter win.
Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy, #1) (2025) - think I picked this up as a Kobo deal, because people were mentioning it? I realise that I am no longer in the habit of reading fat multi-volume fantasies of this ilk. I found it all a bit much, really.
Then did some nibbling (what do Tiggers eat?) and then settled into a re-read of Barbara Hambly, The Nubian's Curse, not one of the top Benjamin Januarys perhaps but still pretty good. Possibly when I am in that sort of phase I should just go Hambly/Haddam/Paretsky/Cross?
Currently Reading
Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb (Pilgrimage, #3) (1917) for online reading group.
Up next
Today's Kobo Deal was the latest Jonathan Kellerman Alex Delaware thriller, Jigsaw, so probably that.
Then possibly more Hambly.
At some point must read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) for the in-person reading group.
Second paragraph of third tale (“The Trade that No One Knows”):
When, however, the boy had grown up, he said to his parents, “I am a man now, and I intend to marry, so I wish you to go at once to the king and ask him to give me his daughter for wife.” The astonished parents rebuked him, saying, “What can you be thinking of? We have only this poor hut to shelter us, and hardly bread enough to eat, and we dare not presume to go into the king’s presence, much less can we venture to ask for his daughter to be your wife.”
A collection of fairy tales supposedly collected in Serbia, but actually culled from five collections, one published in 1889 and the others during the first world war. I recognised one or two from other sources (King Midas and his ears), and the themes of course are very ancient; virtuous young men, beautiful young women, family and social dynamics, occasional magic spells and enchanted beasts, long journeys where odd things happen. Nothing that especially jumped out, though if I were still dungeon-mastering there would be some useful material. You can get Serbian Folktales here.
The announcement of the Lord Ruthven Awards, named for the vampire in Polidori's pioneering tale, reminds me of another well-known Ruthven in literature, the baronet Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd in Gilbert and Sullivan's Ruddigore, and an error associated with him.
Sir Ruthven had been living in disguise as a yeoman farmer called Robin Oakapple, but at the end of Act 1 he is unveiled and forced to take up his baronetcy and the family curse associated with it, which is what he'd been trying to avoid. He reintroduces himself as a bad bart in this sung verse, which Sullivan set to sinister music:
I once was as meek as a new-born lamb, I'm now Sir Murgatroyd - ha! ha! With greater precision (Without the elision), Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd - ha! ha!
Now, Gilbert and Sullivan companies know that the name Ruthven is pronounced 'Rivven', and that fact is noted by Ian Bradley in his Annotated G&S when the name first appears in Act 1. But at this point, Bradley makes a mistake, his only one that I've noticed. He says that "without the elision" means that this one time, the name should be pronounced as spelled, and since his volume originally came out in 1984 I've noted that most G&S performances follow his advice, whereas earlier on they didn't.
But Bradley is wrong! Look at the earlier line: "I'm now Sir Murgatroyd." (A complete error on Gilbert's part, by the way - 'Sir Lastname' is never used in Britain and is the mark of complete illiteracy - but Gilbert, for all his genius, was often clumsy where scansion forced his hand.) The elision is of the entire first name and not of a letter or syllable. Accordingly it is put back in in the subsequent line, but there's nothing about how it's pronounced. If I were playing the part, I would insist on pronouncing it normally. (Although if I were good enough to play principal roles in G&S, I'd prefer to be cast as Ruthven's brother Despard, with B. as his wife, Mad Margaret, so that we could perform the song celebrating their release from durance vile, which you can watch Vincent Price with Ann Howard in here.)
This was the novel I bought to accompany my journey home from the cruise. When I got home there were a couple of thick review books requiring my immediate attention so it took a little while for me to get back to finishing this book. But I am so glad I did, it is a wonderfully affecting read. https://ttdlabyrinth.wordpress.com/2026/03/25/the-wall/
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wychwood
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