After many travails and an extra plague year in transit, the latest of the Paleozoic Pals has made landfall from the Carboniferous.
My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of the Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.
First things first: no, this is not a comprehensive list of knife tip geometries! There are so many of them - and most of them so highly specialized - that, if you need one of them, you know... XD So, in order to give a "beginner-friendly" overview, I've narrowed it down to four types that are common enough you may actually encounter them in real life without having to look for them in a specialized store.
Let's look at these in some detail! (With the caveat that, of course, tip geometry is not the only thing that determines a knife's overall function. Material matters. Blade thickness matters. Grind matters. Handle design matters. Size matters. XD And so on. Really, this can only serve as a rule-of-thumb - but we have to start somewhere when trying to determine what a knife is for, right?)
Anyway... This (grossly over-simplified, I know) entry will hopefully help you identify what kind of blade you are dealing with, what its strengths and weaknesses are, and what tasks people will likely use it for. (None of this is intended as legal or professional advice; don't sue me, yadda, yadda. If you do dangerous shit with sharp objects, I'm not responsible.)
From environmental activist Laiken Jordahl, talking about the response to Mike Lee's proposal to sell off vast swathes of public land:
>>Senator Mike Lee is one hell of a coalition builder. He's got granola hippies locking arms with MAGA trophy hunters & motorheads, and the Center for Biological Diversity on the same side as Ryan Zinke. The whole West is united against him. <<
Fireside this week! Originally, I was thinking I’d talk about the ‘future of classics’ question in this space, but I think that deserves a full post (in connection with this week’s book recommendation and the next fireside’s book recommendation), so instead this week I want to talk a little about foreign policy realism, what it is and what its limits are.
Percy with his standard resting expression of mild annoyance. Although he seems quite happy with the way our little one stacked one of his cat beds ontop of another of his cat beds.
Longtime readers will remember that we’ve actually already talked about ‘realism’ as a school of international relations study before, in the context of our discussion of Europa Universalis. But let’s briefly start out with what we mean when we say IR realism (properly ‘neo-realism’ in its modern form): this is not simply being ‘realistic’ about international politics. ‘Realism’ is amazing branding, but ‘realists’ are not simply claiming that they are observing reality – they have a broader claim about how reality works.
Instead realism is the view that international politics is fundamentally structured by the fact that states seek to maximize their power, act more or less rationally to do so, and are unrestrained by customs or international law. Thus the classic Thucydidean formulation in its most simple terms, “the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must,”1 with the additional proviso that, this being the case, all states seek to be as strong as possible.
If you accept those premises, you can chart a fairly consistent analytical vision of interstate activity basically from first principles, describing all sorts of behavior – balancing, coercion, hegemony and so on – that ought to occur in such systems and which does occur in the real world. Naturally, theory being what it is, neo-realist theory (which is what we call the modern post-1979 version of this thinking) is split into its own sub-schools based on exactly how they imagine this all works out, with defensive realism (‘states aim to survive’) and offensive realism (‘states aim to maximize power’), but we needn’t get into the details.
So when someone says they are a ‘foreign policy realist,’ assuming they know what they’re talking about, they’re not saying they have a realistic vision of international politics, but that they instead believe that the actions of states are governed mostly by the pursuit of power and security, which they pursue mostly rationally, without moral, customary or legal constraint. This is, I must stress, not the only theory of the case (and we’ll get into some limits in a second).
The first problem with IR Realists is that they run into a contradiction between realism as an analytical tool and realism as a set of normative behaviors. Put another way, IR realism runs the risk of conflating ‘states generally act this way,’ with ‘states should generally act this way.’ You can see that specific contradiction manifested grotesquely in John Mearsheimer’s career as of late, where his principle argument is that because a realist perspective suggests that Russia would attack Ukraine that Russia was right to do so and therefore, somehow, the United States should not contest this (despite it being in the United States’ power-maximizing interest to do so). Note the jump from the analytical statement (‘Russia was always likely to do this’) to the normative statement (‘Russia carries no guilt, this is NATO’s fault, we should not stop this’). The former, of course, can always be true without the latter being necessary.
I should note, this sort of ‘normative smuggling’ in realism is not remotely new: it is exactly how the very first instances of realist political thought are framed. The first expressions of IR realism are in Thucydides, where the Athenians – first at Corinth and then at Melos – make realist arguments expressly to get other states to do something, namely to acquiesce to Athenian Empire. The arguments in both cases are explicitly normative, that Athens did not act “contrary to the common practice of mankind” (expressed in realist dog-eat-dog terms) and so in the first case shouldn’t be punished with war by Sparta and in the latter case, that the Melians should submit to Athenian rule. In both cases, the Athenians are smuggling in a normative statement about what a state should do (in the former case, seemingly against interest!) into a description of what states supposedly always do.
I should note that one of my persistent complaints against international relations study in political science in general is that political scientists often read Thucydides very shallowly, dipping in for the theory and out for the rest. But Thucydides’ reader would not have missed that it is always the Athenians who make the realist arguments and they lost both the arguments the war. When Thucydides has the Melians caution that the Athenians’ ‘realist’ ruthlessness would mean “your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon”2 the ancient Greek reader knows they are right, in a way that it often seems to me political science students seem to miss.
And there’s a logical contradiction inherent in this sort of normative smuggling, which is that the smuggling is even necessary at all. After all, if states are mostly rational and largely pursue their own interests, loudly insisting that they should do so seems a bit pointless, doesn’t it? Using realism as a way to describe the world or to predict the actions of other states is consistent with the logical system, but using it to persuade other states – or your own state – seems to defeat the purpose. If you believe realism is true, your state and every other is going to act to maximize its power, regardless of what you do or say. If they can do otherwise than there must be some significant space for institutions, customs, morals, norms or simple mistakes and suddenly the air-tight logical framework of realism begins to break down.
That latter vision gives rise to constructivism (‘international relations are shaped by ideology and culture’) and IR liberalism (‘international relations are also shaped by institutions, which can bend the system away from the endless conflict realism anticipates’). The great irony of realism is that to think that having more realists in power would cause a country to behave in a more realist way is inconsistent with neo-Realism which would suggest countries ought to behave in realist ways even in the absence of realist theory or thinkers.
In practice – and this is the punchline – in my experience most ‘realists,’ intentionally or not, use realism as a cover for strong ideological convictions, typically convictions which are uncomfortable to utter in the highly educated spaces that foreign policy chatter tends to happen. Sometimes those convictions are fairly benign – it is not an accident that there’s a vocal subset of IR-realists with ties to the CATO Institute, for instance. They’re libertarians who think the foreign policy adventures that often flew under the banner of constructivist or liberal internationalist label – that’s where you’d find ‘spreading democracy will make the world more peaceful’ – were really expensive and they really dislike taxes. But “we should just spend a lot less on foreign policy” is a tough sell in the foreign policy space; realism can provide a more intellectually sophisticated gloss to the idea. Sometimes those convictions are less benign; one can’t help but notice the realist pretensions of some figures in the orbit of the current administration have a whiff of authoritarianism or ethnocentrism in them, since a realist framework can be used to drain imperial exploitation and butchery of its moral component, rendering it ‘just states maximizing their power – and better to be exploiter than exploited.’
One question I find useful to ask of any foreign policy framework, but especially of self-claimed realist frameworks is, “what compromise, what tradeoff does this demand of you?” Strategy, after all, is the art of priorities and that means accepting some things you want are lower priority; in the case of realism which holds that states seek to maximize power, it may mean assigning a high priority to things you do not want the state to do at all but which maximize its power. A realism deserving of the name, in applied practice would be endlessly caveated: ‘I hate, this but…’ ‘I don’t like this, but…’ ‘I would want to do this, but…’ If a neo-realist analysis leads only to comfortable conclusions that someone and their priorities were right everywhere all along, it is simply ideology, wearing realism as a mask. And that is, to be frank, the most common form, as far as I can tell.
That isn’t to say there is nothing to neo-realism or foreign policy realists. I think as an analytical and predict tool, realism is quite valuable. States very often do behave in the way realist theory would suggest they ought, they just don’t always do so and it turns out norms and expectations matter a lot. Not the least of which because, as we’ve noted before, the economic model on which realist and neo-realist thinking was predicted basically no longer exists. To return to the current Ukraine War: is Putin really behaving rationally in a power-maximizing mode by putting his army to the torch capturing burned out Ukrainian farmland one centimeter at a time and no faster? It sure seems like Russian power has been reduced rather than enhanced by this move, even though realists will insist that Russia’s effort to dominate states near it is rational power-maximizing under offensive realism.
For my own part, I think declaring one’s self a specific ‘school’ of policy thinker is a bit silly, for the same reason I don’t declare myself a specific school of historian. These ‘schools’ are really toolboxes, with different tools valuable in different situations. Declaring one’s self a resolute ‘wrench guy’ becomes a problem if you are trying to hang paintings. I suppose I tend to be most skeptical of international law and institutions, which I often view simply as expressions of hegemonic power, but on the other hand customs and morals matter a lot, in no small part because they shape the perceived interests states pursue.
But these are, rightly understood, analytical and predictive tools, not normative ones. A school of IR thought can suggest what another state might do, or what might happen if you do something, but it cannot tell you what you should do. There is, after all, a reason that every realist appeal in Thucydides, the father of realism, is rejected by its audience – Sparta goes to war, the Melians reject the Athenians and in the end, after much misery, Athens loses the war. Realism can tell you how states generally act, but it cannot tell you how you should act.
Vertical Cat Stack (Ollie is in the chair, Percy atop the tower).
On to recommendations.
Speaking of realism and ideology in foreign policy, I wrote a response to Emma Ashford’s analysis of the Trump administration’s foreign policy. Ashford presented four explanatory models for the administration’s foreign policy (realism; domestic policy; first term priorities; GOP infighting), to which I responded that ideology as a fifth category offered more explanatory power than the other four, though all of these factors are clearly at work. I think it is deceptively easy for folks who have found their views excluded from the previous administration – and this certainly seems to be how many of the realists think – to rush to the new administration and proclaim whatever it does ‘realism.’ But many of the actors shaping foreign policy in this administration are strongly ideological and it shows.
Meanwhile, for the logistics lowers out there, Drachinifel has a long discussion with Sal Mercogliano (of What’s Going On With Shipping) on the logistics of US Navy operations in the Pacific during WWII. And if you like that, I should that Sal also did a sit down interview on his own channel with Jon Parshall (one half of the author team of Shattered Sword, everyone’s favorite Midway book) on shipping in 1942 in particular.
In modern military affairs, CSIS brought Michael Kofman on to their Russian Roulette program for a battlefield update from Ukraine, covering both the recent Operation Spiderweb (the impressive drone attack on Russian airbases) but also conditions on the front line generally. I think Kofman is one of the more sober and careful voices on the conflict in Ukraine and so it is well worth listening to him, as a curb for both excessive enthusiasm or inordinate despair. I should also note that Kofman has been discussing lessons on airpower from both Ukraine/Russia and Israel/Iran on his own podcast, the Russia Contingency over at War on the Rocks, but it is behind the member paywall there (but I’d argue well worth the price of admission if you are interested in security affairs).
As an aside, I have a precis on the Battle of Cannae (216) set to come out at War on the Rocks not next week but the week after, so keep an eye out for that if it interests.
For this week’s book recommendation, I want to present a bit of ‘meta-classics,’ as it were, W. Scheidel’s What Is Ancient History? (2025) which I suppose I must note, I was given by the author. This is one of those books with a somewhat narrower focus, not about the history of antiquity but rather about the study of the history of antiquity and in particular its place within the structure of the academy in the United States. It is thus a book about what ancient history, as a field of study, has been and an argument for what it ought to be. That sort of inside baseball might have somewhat narrow appeal, but the argument is necessary.
The essential background to this argument, discussed by Scheidel in the introduction and returned to later in the work, is the ailing state of classics, which is the name in most Anglophone3 universities for interdisciplinary departments focused on the study of ancient Greece and Rome, built around the initial core pillar of language and literary study of the corpus of surviving ancient Greek and Latin literature. The essential context is that these departments are broadly fading, besieged by falling enrollments, limited public funding and the (substantially accurate) sense that they are the product of an imperial European moment now past but not forgotten. The question, then, of what to do with the study of antiquity, is quite a pressing one: the house in which ancient history as a field was born is now collapsing.
Scheidel presents a strong argument that rather than attempting to save the house as it is, what we ought to do is build a new one. That is what this book is about: what is ancient history, what sort of institutional structure does that definition most fit and how do we get there.
Scheidel moves the argument in four steps, each with its own chapter. In the first chapter, he effectively presents a definition of ancient history designed to be more logically and intellectually consistent than the old definition of Greece-n-Rome. Instead, Scheidel argues that antiquity is an identifiable process (as much as a period), the processes by which the basic infrastructure of ‘civilization,’ – social complexity and stratification, writing, cities, literature, complex economies based on farming, states and so on – emerged. That definition certainly includes Greece and Rome, the latter representing a late stage in this process in the Mediterranean, but it is also much broader than just Greece-n-Rome because it turns out by this definition ‘antiquity’ was independently invented in several places (in modestly different forms) and thus happened at different times in different places. Scheidel thus presents early on his answer to the title question, “What is Ancient History?” – it is the study of antiquity (in any place), the period during which this process took place.
That definition in hand, the rest of the book is about the kind of structure – both historigraphical and institutional – such a definition demands. The second chapter looks at how we ‘missed’ the broad, global definition of antiquity in favor of a weaker, narrower one focused on Greece-n-Rome, as well as developing the failures of this definition. The third chapter then argues for a shift to an institutional structure based on conceiving of ancient history as a form of ‘foundation’ history, rather than one locked into either a junior position in classics departments (dominated by philology and archaeology) or in history departments (dominated by modern history) and in either case, divorced from specialists in other parts of the ancient world. The fourth chapter at last gets to the elephant in the room: what about classics, as a field: why Scheidel thinks it needs to go and how it can be made to do so.
As you might imagine, I have a lot of thoughts on Scheidel’s argument and the broader question of the study of antiquity and Rome’s place in it – so many thoughts they wouldn’t fit here. Instead, I expect at some point later this year to write something more substantive on my vision for where the study of Mediterranean antiquity ought to go – though my view coincides with Scheidel’s far more than it differs. That said, even if one is on the opposite side of the ‘classics wars,’ Scheidel’s careful argument demands consideration from anyone looking to have an informed opinion on where the study of Greece, Rome and global antiquity should go from here. If that’s a topic that interests you, Scheidel’s manifesto – his word, not mine! – is well worth a read.
And that’s the week. Next week is, of course, the week of the fourth and I think I might try to say something about the history of the civil-military relationship in the United States.
I'm not sure if it's a sign of improving mental health (less hoarding/control tendencies!) or a sign of worsening mental health (lack of interest/care about things) in that after discovering that, no, even logging in with my RSS reader to ao3 won't make archive-locked fics show up in RSS feed, my reaction is: eh, that's the author's problem that I never see their fic, not mine.
I fully disagree with a lot of the reasons people lock their fic on ao3 (especially the way many people on tumblr frame it as them being "forced" to do so) but hey, it's their decision.
Once upon a time, if you wanted people to see your fic, you would do things about it. Maybe you'd send it to a mailing list. Maybe you'd post on a LJ community.
And now what people seem to do a lot of is just post it to ao3 and never crosspost about it anywhere. Their assumption is, you'll see it on Ao3.
But I don't. Because a small one fandom archive, sure, I could look at it every so often and see the what's new.
But I'm following a lot of ao3 tags and I am not checking ao3 for 1) any locked fics, which don't show up in RSS, 2) any fics posted to collections which, because of changes ao3 made years ago, do not show up in the feed if there are 20 fics posted since that was posted.
And once upon a time, I was like "I need to see all these fics, especially ones in tiny fandoms I'd never see otherwise!"
And now I'm just like. Meh. That's their problem that I'll never see their fic, not mine.
Possibly this is because my "to read" list is so very very long and so is my author subscription emails that haven't been read yet.
But also it's like. If you make it hard for me to find your fic. Then you're just like those people back on LJ who would post a fic to a community with a note that they were going to friends-lock the fic after 3 days, and if you want to see previous ones in the series, you have to get them to add you to their friends list.
Because honestly why bother. If you're going to make it hard for me to read your fic, then clearly you don't want me personally to read it, and that's okay. There's plenty of others, from people who aren't making it hard.
Because, no, I am not going to be checking every single ao3 tag even monthly for archive locked/collections fics. I'm sure some people are checking them frequently. Those people will read your fic. And that's fine, honestly.
But I'm not putting in the work. And if I miss the world's great fic because I don't see it, then yeah, okay. That's fine. Go with god, do your own thing. Not my problem.
[A] barren and bewitching backdrop for a getaway. A vast swathe of this shingle headland is designated a National Nature Reserve, cradling around a third of all British plant species, with some 600 having been recorded, from rugged sea kale to delicate orchids. Exposed to the Channel and loomed over by twin nuclear power stations, Dungeness has, over recent decades, become an unlikely enclave for artists and a popular spot for day-trippers, horticulturalists and birders alike.
Looking at the criteria scored on, it really is rather weird: completely lacking in the hotels, shopping and seafront/pier categories and not much for tourist attractions but scores high on peace and quiet and scenery.
Perhaps there is a larger number of people looking for this kind of getaway experience, invoking a certain eerie folk-horror vibe, than one would suppose. Not really a Summer Skies and Golden Sands kind of experience, take it away, The Overlanders.
Surprised that somewhere like Margate didn't rate higher.
A schoolgirl abandons the UK's post-Brexit educational system for the comparative safety and comfort of a magical school designed to turn out magical soldiers in the war on eldritch horrors.
A few weeks ago, I was browsing the children’s section at the library, and I sent skygiants a photo of a book. “It’s about a Jewish boy who is evacuated during World War II and becomes a spy! Also he has a kobold and a dybbuk living on his shoulders!” I said. “You should read it!”
I was hoping hereby to offload the book onto someone else instead of adding it to my ever-growing to-read list, but of course this backfired and instead we both had to read Adam Gidwitz’s Max in the House of Spies.
Max, a child genius with a special gift for radios, escapes Germany on the Kindertransport in 1938. He ends up living with the Montagus, where he slowly realizes that Uncle Ewen Montagu is a spy, and sets his little heart on becoming a spy too so he can go back to Berlin and rescue his parents.
(“That Ewen Montagu?” some of you are saying. Yes, that Ewen Montagu, and this book also includes Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild who keeps blowing stuff up. I didn’t realize at first that these were real people, but skygiants and genarti clued me in, and now at last I’m going to read Ben McIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat, which Gidwitz mentions in the bibliography as the book that inspired this duology.)
(Also I didn’t realize going into it that this was a duology, but I just happened to see the second book on the processing cart when I was processing library books with my mother, which is fortunate because otherwise when I reached the cliffhanger ending my scream might have been heard round the world.)
Because Max is the plucky hero of a children’s adventure novel, he does in fact manage to finagle Ewen Montagu into recruiting him, and ends up going through a thrilling training regimen at Lord Rothschild’s manor, where he meets the aforementioned Jean Leslie, Cholmondeley, and Lord Rothschild. Fun training exercises ensue! (Fun for the reader, not for Max.)
Meanwhile, the kobold and the dybbuk are sitting on Max’s shoulders providing color commentary, which during the spy training mostly becomes focused on “I can’t believe they are sending an ACTUAL CHILD to spy in NAZI GERMANY.”
Now on the one hand, they certainly have a real-world point, but on the other hand, we’re not in the real world here. We’re in a children’s adventure novel, and it’s a convention of the genre that children can and should have deadly adventures, just like it’s a convention of cozy mysteries that one quirkily charming small town can have 50 murders in an indeterminate but relatively short time span without having any impact on that quirky charm.
No one reading this (well, no child reading this, adults can be spoilsports) is going, “Gosh, I hope they don’t send Max on a spy adventure.” We’re all rooting for him to go forth and spy! “Children shouldn’t be sent into deadly peril” is merely a killjoy obstacle to the adventure we all crave! The emotional dynamic here undercuts the moral point.
I also don’t think it quite worked to saddle Max with two mischief spirits who get up to no mischief beyond serving as a sort of mobile peanut gallery. I enjoyed Stein and Berg, but I also felt that the book would have been stronger without them, actually.
Criticisms aside! I really enjoyed this book, and I’m mad at myself that I didn’t get the sequel before I finished it, because it ends on a cliffhanger and now I will have to WAIT to find out what HAPPENS and the suspense is killing me.
reblogarythm (reblogarythm) wrote2025-06-2705:54 am
Comics Caught up on Order of the Stick (I was at about #1319, and the most recent one was #1328.) Welp, that was a thing that happened.
Things are also Happening in Dumbing of Age. I am looking at the title text in June 24's strip and glowering distrustfully at Willis after what happened last big finale.
Games Playing a lot of Simon Tatham's Puzzle Games on my phone. Slay the Spire: have now unlocked Ascension 4 on all four characters. Surprisingly (to me?) the hardest run on Ascension 3 was with the Defect.
A New Ballet by Underrepresented Artists: "The Little Mermaid reimagined as a disabled, queer and brown coming-of-age story for 7 dancers." The link is to a fundraiser, but even if you're not up for donating there's a video there from rehearsals that might be of interest. (Disclaimer: I can't be objective about this show, one of my best friends is dancing in it.)
Cats Ash is down an incisor and a canine as of last Tuesday. He was good and brave at the vet and, after he got home, patient with Dorian's mistaking him for a stranger because he smelled Wrong.
Phenology No new kangaroo visits. It's been very cold out.
1. I had a good birthday. I got flowers (which are still going strong!) and a Star Trek card game from sweettartheart and cards from lyr, decynthus, and princessofgeeks. Thank y'all! I also got lots of stationery stuff (a friend gave me a Yamamoto paper tasting set, Josh gave me a leather notebook cover, and I got various notecards and notebooks). The kids gave me amazing cards. The one they drew together said on the front, "You're Old," and inside it said, ( spoiler for Star Trek Prodigy ) This goes in the save forever pile.
2. I know one of my requests for Yuletide already. Mom and Dad watch westerns on True Grit pretty much 24-7, and this visit featured The Posse from Hell--the gayest cowboy movie that doesn't realize how gay it is of all time. I mean, y'all, the seasoned gunslinger tends lovingly to the greenhorn's butt wounds at one point, and they frequently stare into each other's eyes and kinda pant into each other's mouths, and THEY ARE SO IN LOVE WITH EACH OTHER.
3. I also want to request Star Trek Prodigy. We just finished the two-season series when we got back from my folks. I can't say enough good things about this show--from the callbacks to every Trek franchise and the little Easter eggs to all the voice actor/character cameos, this show is just a delight. I love that it is joyful and hopeful and kind; it's firmly a kids' show, but who cares? It's just an excellent watch. I highly recommend it.
4. Mom and Dad's was fine. They didn't turn on that horrific American Family Radio even one time, and there was zero craziness (which proves to me that when they're scared of losing contact with their grandchildren they do possess the ability to keep their mouths shut for a couple of days). They are clearly on the back foot and concerned that we're going to cut them out of their lives. Not gonna lie; it made for a much more pleasant trip.
Actually the temperature crashed by a solid thirty degrees Fahrenheit and with any luck will stay this moderately cool and dampish until everyone has rehydrated. Or we could just skip the next heat dome entirely.
I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway, spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).
The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.
Because I had showed spatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).
Katarina Whimsy (sorcyress) wrote2025-06-2611:39 pm
Well no, it started with floppiness and a slow wake-up and close cuddling of my beloved, and then helping finish the last few pieces of a puzzle and breakfast and things like that. But the walk was the first thing of note!
We saw a frog -very exciting, it was green headed and brown bodied in a somewhat surprising way- and a number of wee little waterfalls and at least one house hidden in the woods looking abandoned and a grand number of interesting flowers. I ate some sorrel and probably didn't wind up in any poison ivy. And I got to hold hands with Tuesday, and pull ker close against me and snuggle as we walked and that was all extremely good.
Then there was lunch and a bit of trivia, and hugs goodbye, and Cameron and I got in the car and performed the long drive back home to Maryland. It was a bit over five hours total driving, but actually a quite jolly adventure. There was much exchanging of music! I heard some very good Mariana and the Diamonds and Enya in exchange for Kate Nyx and Vienna Teng. We mutually grooved to Chappell Roan, the place our venns diagramed. Later, as we drove through some quite hard rain and a splashy sort of thunderstorm, we exclaimed over the rainbow chasing alongside us, occasionally joining in the spray of the water on the road to look like it was landing just in front of our car.
And very good conversation, including swapping stories of how we wound up entangled with our sweeties. It's really damn nice to have a partner's family I can groove with, is what I'm saying.
Mom and Barb picked me up in Baltimore, and there were hugs all around which was lovely to happen. And more driving and a stint in the grocery store and bringing in some heavy bags of salt from the car (why carry the 40# bags yourself if you've got a childe to do it for you?) and my bags. Before I did all the carrying, I stopped on the lawn to watch the grove of fireflies flickering across the driveway. That was a magical moment --maybe I should go out again and check if they're still there? It might be too late now, being as it's well past eleven. Still, nothing ventured etc. BRB.
Okay there were still a few, mostly up in the treetops instead of at knee height, but as I was standing there looking, I heard a bit of a noise and I was like "huh, that sounds like rain but it's....it's getting louder and closer. OH SHIT" and run run run back up the drive. I did beat most of it --but only most. It was very jolly, especially since there was at least one pale flash of lightning as I moved. It's been a very good day for storms!
At mom's house, I curled up on the internet with Tailsteak for our regular Taskmaster date, which we haven't had in _ages_ and won't be able to have again for _more ages_. But it was good to get a couple episodes in! Gradually catch up, as it were.
Now mom's doing some scanning and I'm writing my words, and it's a good close to the day. I hope your days are also nice!
Burberry has a series of ads on youtube that are one-minute movies, basically. Some of them contain in-jokes. This is the ur-movie with a snippet from each.
Also: Comicsrss got a cease and desist from Gocomics, so now all my gocomics feeds are borked. I should see if I can find those comics hosted somewhere else and get their RSS feeds, but ugh.
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made; Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow, Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings; There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow, And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore; While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey, I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
He's the patron saint of gardeners, and also taxi drivers (unofficially). See, an early and popular cab stand was at Hôtel de Saint Fiacre in Paris, and the carriages themselves began to be called fiacres, and it just spiraled from there.
What makes this even stranger is that he's an Irish saint.
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sovay) wrote2025-06-27 09:22 pm
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