davidgillon | Reading

jazzyjj posting in

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

bookscorpion posting in

common_nature

a comedy in four acts:

greylag goose flyrunning on the water

( Read more... )

oursin

Happy birthday,

jambiscuits!

kaberett

Reading. She's A Beast archives, forever and always (by which I mean that I am now up to October 2023).

Another few pages of my Wicked Problems (Max Gladstone) reread.

Also an absolutely baffling academic paper that is technically relevant to my academic interests but which... doesn't really explain why what it's doing is better than state-of-the-art, sure as hell doesn't demonstrate it adequately with an appropriate range of reference materials, and cites only my reference materials paper and not my one on actual real life rocks, which it absolutely should, especially as it is citing [redacted for professionalism] like it's a solid contribution to the field.

Writing. Manuscript is over 10k words???

Listening. Hidden Almanac continues; presently we are relistening to another chunk I've theoretically heard once already but actually slept through. Knitting during it continues a good way of preventing myself from falling asleep. I continue to enjoy myself. (Eminent Domain and Tapping Of Ley Lines is the chunk we're currently in.)

Playing. Games various with... nieces and nephews??? plus A's other relatives, particularly Boggle, Shithead (to which I have been newly introduced), and Five Crowns.

Cooking. ... I made a big batch of chilli? I made a big batch of chilli.

Eating. Many and various exciting cheeses. Some excellent potato dauphinoise that I didn't have to cook.

Exploring. North Leigh Roman villa, Chedworth Roman villa, some surrounding woodlands, and Davis's Copse near Curbridge (BLUEBELLS).

Making & mending. A's glove progresses, by which I mean I've stalled a little over the past few days because I foolishly decided I didn't need to bring my circs with me and therefore I am knitting flat on DPNs and it is Suboptimal. But. Nearly ready to turn around for the other side of the flap. Nearly.

Growing. Lemongrass much cheerfuller for having been put back into the warm box. No evidence of aubergine yet (yes I know I'm late). Broad beans now actually properly coming up!!! Oca doing nothing. Cherry finally just about ready to start blossoming as of Wednesday; josta definitively blossoming and really quite green; project Build Up Spinach Seed Stash progressing nicely.

Observing. Pheasants! BLUEBELLS, both as a sea in woodland and on banks with primroses. Cowslips. So many excellent spring flowers. Pheasants; COOT EGGS; Egyptian goslings; and I have spent the past couple of days being Menaced by a Canada goose that is OUTRAGED whenever anybody... passes it... on a tarmac drive... even if they're doing so in a motor vehicle. All extremely satisfactory.

cosmolinguist

haggis and her 5-year-old visited briefly this afternoon. The kid sat right down with her paper and markers to draw a picture of Gary, and write a story about Gary.

The previous time she was here, I think I wasn't around but both V and D separately told me that she'd talked to them about Gary, she recognized his photo above the couch. She said "He was in the corner [we put his little fence up when the toddler was visiting, of course] and I was very little."

She was very little! The last time she saw Gary, she'd have been 3.

I cannot tell you how heartwarming it is that, even now, such a significant fraction of her life later, apparently our place is just "Gary's house" to her.

So now, on our fridge, is her drawing of Gary: a kind of trapezoid with eyes, pointy ears, spots (I think; Gary had black spots on his back), and a smiley mouth.

(Incidentally, it's held on to our fridge with magnets including a tractor and a Minnesota one; you can tell these happen to belong to me, right? Both were gifts! The tractor was a gift from V and D, found on their travels back before we all lived in the same house.)

oursin

This week's bread: a loaf of Marriages's Moulsham Strong Malted Seeded Bread Flour, turned out nicely.

Friday night supper: penne with Romano peppers chopped and sizzled in oil oil with chopped chorizo de navarra.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, 50:50% strong white/wholemeal spelt flour, Rayner's Barley Malt Extract, dried blueberries, turned particularly well.

Today's lunch: lemon sole fillets, which I cooked more or less thus, only with juice of half a lime which worked a lot better for making a paste; served with Ruby Gem potatoes roasted in goosefat (was going to do in beef dripping but it was way past its BBF), Bellaverde sweetstem broccoli garlic-roasted with chopped baby peppers (left over from last week) (other half of the lime squeezed over at the end), and spinach cooked according to Dharamjit Singh's recipe in Indian Cookery.

umadoshi

We're not observing Easter in any way, other than being grateful for the four-day weekend (today being the third day). The work crunch continues, so this reprieve is a real mercy. (Am I starting a rewrite after this post? Yes. But I did take yesterday fully off, and Friday's work consisted only of reading through this translation.)

Reading: Very, very little, although I've been picking away some more at Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts: Stories and Recipes from Five Generations of Black Country Cooks.

Watching: The main thing is that, since the crunch has not kindly wrapped up, I've given up on my initial notion of holding off until it's over to start season 2 of the live-action One Piece.

scruloose and I are two episodes in. (If we'd decided to actively dedicate the weekend to it, we could've watched the whole thing before Tuesday, but have opted against that.) No Chopper yet. *vibrates*

Weathering: Yay for spring and all that, but so far it's a very Nova Scotian spring--a lot of the province had a bunch of snow and ice on Friday, with more of the same today. We're mostly getting very chilly rain here, which is bad enough.

Meat-puppetry (kinda): Within the last week or two, the length of my hair went from "this is more effort than I like to keep it off my face, but hey, having a ponytail is still novel" to "IT'S TOUCHING ME MAKE IT STOP", and thankfully Ginny was up for chopping it (mostly) all off last night when she and Kas were over. It's now back to being VERY short without the drastic step of simply buzz cutting it; there's even enough length at the front that some of it's still dyed from (I think it was?) December. Such a relief.

(Ginny cuts her own hair, Kas' hair, and my hair, and mine is veryvery different from either of theirs--dead straight and slippery and, although I didn't know this until I was at least in my thirties, very thick despite being very fine. So when she does my hair, there just keeps being more of it, even with a quarter or a third of it buzzed right down in an undercut, and it slides away from whatever she's trying to do with it. On top of that, I only actually get her to do it maybe twice a year, so she doesn't really have a chance to get used to my hair, but she gamely makes it work anyway and I appreciate it. ^_^)

Current Mood: sleepy

oursin

Happy birthday,

shiv!

sovay

I freely admit that I ground my way through the protracted heteronormative anxieties of Strange Lady in Town (1955) for the continued presence of twenty-three-year-old Lois Smith as Spurs O'Brien, one of those mixed-up motherless tomboys who just needs her gender trouble sorted out by her father's remarriage to a strong feminine role model if you believe the screenplay and looks such a late nineteenth century baby dyke in her ranch jacket and jingling boots that you feel she's just waiting for motorcycle clubs to be invented. Her crush on a cavalry lieutenant is narratively doomed and might in any case have been envy. Put her in a ball gown, she's right back in trousers and string ties the next scene, heedless and gallant as any young grandee. I mean when Dana Andrews drags his heels on the sub-screwball romance through which the picture manifests its stresses over the place of professional women, Spurs does her best to run off with Greer Garson herself, all the way back to Boston. "I don't know, Doc, except—well, except I can't figure out any sort of life without you." What did the film think it was doing with her? I don't even know what it thought it was doing with the slap-kiss of its textual couple, but I took an awful screencap just because of the lingering way Spurs sees herself out of a room with Garson's Dr. Julia Garth in it. Once she gets over the rebound, she'll make some Eastern belle ring. "But what a woman!"

Current Music: Amindi, "Green House"

nanila

Death in Paradise, the newest series. I really like the new DI, Mervyn. “I'm not insensitive! Other people are just too sensitive.” Yeah, that's totally it, dude. Also, I feel you, mate. As ever, the actual murder mysteries are silly and improbable, but it doesn't matter because the scenery is beautiful and I love the characters and their relationships.

Agatha Christie's Seven Dials. Bumpy pacing and gaping plot holes aside, I enjoyed this because of Bundle's inquisitive angry little face, her coterie of hapless male admirers / accomplices, and Helena Bonham Carter's snooty lady-of-the-crumbling-manor.

Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man. Weirdly slow and ponderous, and according to the kids, quite confusing if you didn't know the back story. And yet they watched the entire film with us and thought it was good.

I was reminded of the Eddie Izzard sketch where he (at the time) talked about the differences between British and American films. How British films were all “A room with a view and a staircase and a pond”, and featured people walking into rooms and not saying things to each other. “Oh, I…” “What is it, Sebastian, I'm arranging matches.” “I'd better go.” And how you can't eat popcorn to that sort of thing. This film was like that, all long pauses and people staring moodily into the middle distance, punctuated by the occasional scene of ultraviolence and wrestling in pig muck.

The kids liked the atmosphere and the cinematography and the characters. Their one serious criticism: “That is NOT a Brummie accent.” They should know. Keiki’s still got one, and Humuhumu can code-switch effortlessly.

Oh, and we did eat popcorn during it.

Bonus pic: Ozzy the Bull with his PB flat cap on

jesse_the_k

Short update on our new dog Shadow, who’s getting really really bored. He’s starting to move quickly around corners — there’s an energetic pup in there who has been healing all this time. Hasn’t tried zooming yet, and we’ll be screwed if he takes off inside. I hope that if he has the urge to zoom it’s proof he’s well.

He came with an (ugly) collar, and MyGuy found a very spiffy hot red collar with retroflective threads, a sliding D-ring that can be opposite where the tags depend, and white reflector. But because he’s so wary of things happening on top of him, we’ve needed to making snapping on the leash less traumatic.

Today I’ve gone through this routine four times:

get a handful of treats, shake the container
call his name
treat 1 when I can reach my hand to his mouth
pull back my hand and come! plus kiss-kiss to get him closer, with a treat for each stop along the way.
when I can readily reach the D-ring, I snap on the leash and dispense 2 treats
I rotate the collar around his neck clockwise and counter-clockwise a few times.
another treat
unsnap the lead
2 more treats
speak all done! & ASLsign FINISH

MyGuy’s leash always leads somewhere very high-value: today he's been taken around the block twice and for three backyard excursions.

Eleven days left until FREEDOM where he can run in the back yard.

cosmolinguist

I've found the most me thing ever: Baseball Scores, a website that procedurally generates ambient music during MLB games, based on the game situation - the score, count, runners on base, how many outs there are...

It ends up kinda musique concrète, which I also love.

Last night I was watching my Twinkies with this in one ear, and it was so fun to notice the sound change every time the game state does (and it's still fun during commercial breaks).

The creator of this said "I grew up listening to baseball on the radio, that was the first ambient music I ever heard"...and, I just, yes, I love this so much. I love baseball, I love listening to baseball, and I love ambient music; I never thought about these things as related but of course they are.

hunningham

Last year, my father-in-law's eyesight went phooey and he was no longer an old man living very happily on his own in a house full of books, but an old man who couldn't see anything, couldn't read, couldn't cope. He's going to move into a flat down the road, but this is very much a work-in-progress.

This week he's staying with my in-laws (to give me a break), so we decided that this was a good time to deal with some of the books. Father-in-law was an avid reader, a collector and a lover of 2nd-hand bookshops. There were a lot of books. He's taken a small selection to keep, and asked us to depose of the rest.

An antiquarian bookseller from Chorley has taken a lot of them, and some have been sold to specialist dealers. The rest will go to Oxfam, but Oxfam do not want all the books all at once (limited storage space), so I am to store them in my attic and take a bag a week into the local Oxfam over the next 3 - 4 months.

So I spent Thursday clearing up and organising my attic. And then going to storage unit with brother-in-law, and unpacking crates, and finding boxes of books, and transporting boxes of books, and carrying boxes of books upstairs to the flat. The boxes are too heavy to carry up the ladder into the attic, so I had to unpack, haul books up the ladder in ikea bags, repack into boxes in the attic. (Brother-in-law gone home by this stage). About halfway through, I worked out that once a box was two-thirds empty I could lift it up on top of my head, balance it there with one hand and get it up the ladder that way. That helped.

Oddly satisfying day. Physical work, lifting things and moving things, which I just don't do very much. I ended the day in a very good mood.

(I also found that the attic has an infestation of carpet moths which may require professional aid. I carried a lot of carpet remnants & two chewed-up rugs down the ladder and out to the yard. I need to make a trip to the town dump sometime very soon.)

jazzyjj posting in

awesomeers

oursin

It's like the fact that anyone has studied it just gets erased from the record?

24 scientists contribute a preprint on Neuroanatomy of the clitoris:

The clitoris is one of the least studied organs of the human body. The detailed anatomy of the clitoris is challenging to address through a gross dissection, as most of its parts are embedded internally, surrounded by pubic bone and several pelvic organs.

Helen O'Connell and colleagues, 2005, Anatomy of the Clitoris?

O'Connell does feature in the citations, I see. Along with various other scientists who boldly went where no man....

Because one does rather want to enquire 'Least studied BY WHOM???'

Take it away, Lil Johnson:

Watch on YouTube

I feel that this is sort-of related: Founder of ‘orgasmic meditation’ company gets nine years in prison in forced labor conspiracy" - a bit more on What the Hell is Orgasmic Meditation: What to know about the controversial practice of ‘orgasmic meditation’:

“One rule of thumb when exploring sex-positive spaces might be to ask: ‘Is someone getting rich from this?’” says Dr Anouchka Grose, a writer and psychoanalyst in London. “If the answer is yes, there’s a distinct possibility that money is more important to the organizer than your wellbeing.”

Or any spaces, really.

rachelmanija

Click on my Ruth Chew tag to see what sort of books she's known for: small-scale children's fantasies focusing on magic-infused everyday objects and creatures in Brooklyn. This is her hard-to-find first book, which is not a fantasy.

The main characters are a brother and sister who were left, along with their never-seen younger brother and sister, in the care of their grandmother who feeds them canned tomatoes - yuck! They leave a note saying they're doing a long sleepover at a friend's house, then run away to the site where they often went camping, buy a cheap boat, and live on an island.

This is entertaining enough on its own, but mostly of interest because it shows how she course-corrected in her fantasy books: the flaws in this book are corrected, and she melds its strengths (likable kid characters, a focus on the practicalities and small details of both the human and natural worlds, a friendly old woman) with excellent small-scale magic. In all the rest of her books, there are just two kids - no unnecessary and off-page younger siblings. There are no mean kids or bullying (this book has two mean bullies who just drop out of the story). The parents are around but the kids' adventures take place out of sight, so there's no implausible runaway plots. And the old ladies are witches, which makes them even better!

nanila

Do you like the look of your country's currency (bills and coins)?

Yes, I do. I still don't live the plasticky feel of the new bills - they don't fold very well - but grudgingly concede that they are far more durable.
Regardless of their actual value, do you like bills or coins better?

I like the UK's coins. Especially the £2 coin, it's very pretty and has a pleasing weight in the hand. A shiny new coppery 2p piece is also quite attractive.
What is your favorite foreign currency? And why?

Euros. You can use them in so many countries. And they're also very pretty.
Do you collect coins or bills? Elaborate.

Not formally, I haven't got an organised folder or anything. But I do try to save a few coins/bills from trips to other countries as souvenirs.
Do you think human society could make do completely without money? Explain.

No. I think the sheer number of us and the vast variety of goods and services we use as individuals would make a bartering system very cumbersome. And it is still useful sometimes to conduct transactions in cash rather than card.

nanila posting in

awesomeers

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

sovay

The moon looks like a Constable watercolor in black and olive and cratered parchment. I have seen the latest pictures of Earth. I can't turn off the part of my brain that brings around you may leave here for four days in space, but I worried so much about that launch.

This morning was marked by the municipal pruning of trees on our street. When the racket moved far enough around the block to become merely obnoxious, I went back to listening to byways of Flanders and Swann. In the afternoon Hestia saw a cardinal in the yew and almost went through the glass.

I recognize that midlife m/m amid the mussel beds of North Wales is the single most stereotypical choice I could make out of this year's lineup for Wicked Queer, but I am still seriously considering On the Sea (2025). It would be a sure bet if I didn't have to think about parking at the MFA.

I would like the next week to involve much less talking to doctors. None would be an ideal.

Current Music: Bren Joy, "Headline"

ysabetwordsmith posting in

followfriday

Got any Follow Friday-related posts to share this week? Comment here with the link(s).

Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die".