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Our mark, let's call her “E”, doesn't know that this is a surprise birthday dinner. Cake is in play. We keep the conversation light in wait of the music. One problem - the card is still blank! So begins the great birthday card heist of '24. This was a Tanzwüste kinda week. Melodic and cheerful. Wednesday evening was a real highlight. I can only gush about how delightful it was …

The parasite serves as a useful simulacrum for post-modernism. Post-modernity engages us with a kind of viral discourse, which seeks to comprehend an object without subsuming it under a system of concepts; without, that is, deploying a regime of truth (Lorenzini, 2015) that dominates and forces the object into a conceptual grinder. Instead, it does something much worse. It attempts to open up a line of interactivity, where the object …

Sheila Gear’s Foula. Island West of the Sun (originally published in 1983) is a new edition of a timeless memoir of life on a croft on Foula, an island 20 miles or four hours’ rowing to the west of Shetland. For all that the author was writing about crofting and the island in the 1970s and 1980s, … Continue reading Sheila Gear, Foula. Island West of the Sun →

The teaching profession is one of the most important vocations in terms of its impact on future generations. Yet at the same time, teachers are undervalued and in each decade, they have to tackle particular ‘problems’ and ‘mindsets’ that are unique to each generation. Invariably, the present generation is viewed by society as the ‘most misbehaved’. The only thing that is consistent is that schools are underresourced and ‘problem pupils’ …

Harry Spear was born Harry Sherman Bonner on December 16, 1921, in Los Angeles, California, to Joseph Bonner and Louise Spear. He was born at French Hospital in Los Angeles and initially resided at 5619 Fernwood Ave., Hollywood, California. His father served in the Navy, and his mother was a homemaker. After his parents divorced, his last name was typically listed as Spear. Spear worked as a child actor and …

Contemporary Belgian artist Alain Biltereyst works on abstract paintings characterized by bold patterns and colors. Most of the time, the shapes he depicts are not purely the result of chosen arrangements but act as a sort of “found art”: they are extracted from existing signs, advertisements, commercial signage, graphic decorations on trucks, billboards, and streets. These shapes silently inhabit our urban environment, possessing inherent graphical qualities, yet often going unnoticed …

Some people may think that Carla Rossi has done the sensible thing and slipped quietly into well-deserved obscurity, hoping that memories are short and people will forget that she was exposed as serial plagiarist by several independent newspapers, other organisations, and many individual scholars from at least six different countries.Perhaps encouraged by the fact that for several months I have not bothered to respond to, or refute, her tediously repetitive …

An 1851 San Francisco paper described a city of immigrants… I found a lovely line in an 1851 San Francisco newspaper that celebrates the diversity of Gold Rush San Francisco—a boom town whose residents included “Hindoos” (South Asians), “Mussulmans” (Muslims), and people “from the fairy lands of Persia and Arabia”: “In our streets, the fair European jostles with the swarthy Kanaka or the darker Hindoo; the pious Mussulman says his …

We’ve all been there — there comes a time when we must update our Python version to meet a different Python version yet, be it at work or when working on personal projects.Just a quick search about “update python version” and we will be bombarded with suggestions to run python --version followed by brew upgrade python3 or sudo apt-get update.Okay cool. Problem solved right?Not really. Probably 9/10 times an upgrade …

It takes a certain kind of temperament to be a bus driver. My uncle told me that. He drove city buses for forty years and during that time he saw some crazy shit. Women going into labor, couples getting into explosive arguments, people pulling knives on each other, the full spectrum of human experience crammed into 30,000 pounds of steel on wheels. You have to have an even keel, he …

Fancied dusting off the pike rods, so when I saw that the wind was due to ease on Thursday, accompanied by relatively mild temperatures, I booked the morning off and made the necessary preparations. Was up nice and early and made the short trip down the motorway, the moon setting to my right and the first glimmers of orange appearing to my left.Bumped my way down the track to find …

Snow Country – Sebastian Faulks The intertwined stories of Lena and Anton. Set in Austria in the first few decades of the 20th Century. Slow and thoughtful, it left me feeling quite sad at the end. Author page: Snow Country – Sebastian Faulks

This post presents bits and pieces of Hollywood history appearing in an assortment of little-known films, many unavailable for decades. I closely follow Dave Glass’s invaluable YouTube channel. You never know what brief scene from an obscure film will reveal more Hollywood history. To begin, check out these scenes from the 1924 Billy Bevan comedy Bright Lights, starting at 05:25 HERE and again at 06:05 HERE. Do they look familiar? …

Wow, just wow, muchachos… Now, admittedly I’ve turned into something of an astronomical Luddite who is easily impressed by modern technology. Hell, I’d still be using NexRemote if they’d update it to a version that would take advantage of all the features of my 10-year-old Celestron Advanced VX mount. What’s an ASAIR? What’s plate-solving? What sort of witchery is all that? If I didn’t write the occasional Sky & Telescope …

The following was published in issue 13 of MacGuffin Magazine. It recapitulates some of the contents of my interrobang series and adds some new details to boot. I think — I hope! — it’s a little more Enjoy! The Speckters lived in a postwar apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan. Their collection of printing presses lived in a rented apartment across the hall, a three-thousand-pound Columbian press balanced carefully across …