Recently updated blogs

The Daily Telegraph reports that an increasingly abstemious younger generation are blowing a large hole in the government’s revenue forecasts: Clean-living youngsters threaten to blow a multibillion-pound hole in public finances as alcohol and tobacco tax income declines, the head of the spending watchdog has warned. Richard Hughes, head of the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), has questioned whether assumptions about future tax income from what are often dubbed “sin …

The mountain got its name in 1911 when students of the local university, named New Mexico School of Mines, climbed up the hill and painted a 50 meter tall letter ‘M’ near the summit. Other Mines schools had their letter, so why not Socorro? And of course it had to be bigger than the other…

Editor’s Note: Matthew Chicoine interviewed Dcn Andy Weiss, Deacon in the Diocese of Las Cruces, New Mexico, via phone call on February 10th, 2024. Some of the questions have been rearranged and edited to provide the best reader experience without losing any integrity of the answers given. Tell me a bit about your faith journey. I was born and raised Catholic. I was in the Air Force and had a …

I have always found it hard to keep a grip on the pension drawdown options. There are so many fiddly yet peskily important details to forget about. So today we’ll try to capture all the crucial drawdown details in one place for future reference. Let’s take it one step at a time… What is a drawdown pension? Going into pension drawdown is one of the options you have when taking …

I've been thinking, especially since the recent Spotify layoffs, that I'm due to delete my Spotify account. I haven't paid for it in years, and I have also significantly reduced my usage. The other thing is that I've had this draft for ages and procrastinated on this topic. Luckily, today, I stumbled across this post from Raed explaining their reasonings for deleting their account. I thought, "Yeah, see, I had …

I don’t know about you folks, but the feed in the social media formerly known as twitter is currently dominated by “cute poop” ads (who seem to have displaced the chemtrailers) and flat earthers. The former is a mildly puzzling Japanese phenomenon, while the latter appears to be dominated by people who have not progressed past a pre-Babylonian view of the world, but who possess P1000 cameras they don’t know …

This past Saturday: finished the #InsideTrail Redtail Ridge 30k #trailRace in 6:00:59.A few notes:This was my first trail race of 2024, and first in over 6 months, since last year’s Marin Ultra Challenge 50k and Broken Arrow 23k races in June¹. Saw pal Henri after changing into my trail shoes in the Lake Chabot Regional Park parking lot. The storms had scared many away, fewer than 100 showed up to …

How we relate to the smell of a perfume can change over time. I purchased Myrrh Casati by Mona di Orio in 2014. There was something about it I couldn't relate to, which is why it was relegated to the back shelf in a fragrance storage closet. After reading mixed fragrance reviews, the only tangible sentiment I had for the luxury perfume was buyer’s remorse. Ten years later, the

Demon Sarcophagus, by SamanVia https://bsky.app/profile/samanbb.bsky.social/post/3klsyw467xv2y

The Lawyer Turns out, the two "heroes" of the Southern Baptist 'Conservative Resurgence' were: a tone-deaf autocrat who specialized in using DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender) to bully sexual assault victims and protect his friends & protegesa deeply cynical lawyer who used his position of power to actively groom and sexually assault young men over decades It's become clear that not only was Paul Pressler (the lawyer) passed …

The audience for a screening of 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' (1923) to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the Colonial Theatre in Keene, N.H. Wow! A screening of 'The Hunchback of Notre Dame' on Sunday, Feb. 18 was blessed with a very large and thoroughly engaged audience.From the reaction to the film, you could tell you were intent on having a good time.And that shouldn't be a surprise, as the …

Reluctant Recovery

It is 1920 in Littlehampton and Edith Swan has been receiving letters. They are of an obscene nature but she, and her family (she lives, as a spinster, with her father and mother), must forebear. After all, did not our Lord and Saviour also suffer? And yet, surely the wicked should be punished here on […]

WANNA BE IN MOVIES? REALLY? BRRRR! We open in a chilly Suffolk cottage in the rain (I am tonight probably the only person here to have come direct from a chilly Suffolk cottage, in rain. Call it Method Criticking). But in this case there is a sinister banging on the door, which opens to reveal – aaaagh! Jonathan Hyde as a gloriously convincing Vincent Price, veteran horrror movie star in …

This is what you see when looking through your EVF or at your LCD when highlights are clipped.This image is from a JPEG. The clipped highlight warning gets baked into any JPEG file so youcan't use this custom profile unless you are only shooting raw.This is from a raw file. As you can see, the black clipped highlight shown above does not get baked into these files. If you see …