Recently updated blogs

Experience the tranquil beauty and unique customs of Japanese temples and shrines. Discover the rituals, cultural significance, and etiquette for visiting these sacred sites. While traveling in Japan, you’ll undoubtedly come across countless shrines and temples of all designs and sizes. In December 2019, The Agency for Cultural Affairs reported approximately 84,000 Shinto shrines and ... READ: Etiquette Tips for Visiting Shrines and Temples in Japan

I use a tool called Sonarr to, uhh1, keep track of when new episodes of television shows are released, regardless of what platform they’re on (Netflix, Prime, iPlayer, whatever) and notify me so I remember to watch it. For several years, I’ve used IFTTT as the intermediary, receiving webhooks from Sonarr and translating them for Slack: This worked for years, but it’s time to retire it. IFTTT‘s move to kill …

Homer, Iliad 9.412-416 (Achilles speaking; tr. A.T. Murray): If I abide here and war about the city of the Trojans, then lost is my home-return, but my renown shall be imperishable; but if I return home to my dear native land, lost then is my glorious renown, yet shall my life long endure, neither shall the doom of death come soon upon me. εἰ μέν κ᾽ αὖθι μένων Τρώων πόλιν …

Back to work after too long of a break. Today was spent doing some finishing work in order to call those officially done. This started with replacing all of the bedroom door hinges on the second floor which were a hodgepodge of basic 1990’s henges like these: Which I replaced with restored Victorian henges: Jason also worked on installing a small piece of trim at the top of the stairs: …

Genre: Progressive Metal Year: 2013 1. Anthem for the Defeated 06:18 2. Flower of the Dead 08:52 3. This Bitter Farewell 04:14 4. My Lonely Hell 10:20 -DOWNLOAD-

The current shelf thing is done woodworking wise. When I killed the lights at 1530 I finished the last woodworking needed. Or at least I thought I had. If there isn't something that pops up tomorrow, I will wax it and call it 100% done. not a good startI forgot that I had already sawn the sides to width yesterday. These will work and I saved the off cuts. The …

The interiors are every inch a classic Moroccan riad, but Izza Marrakech also gives guests a hefty side serving of contemporary art and culture in the heart of the Medina. Each of the Marrakech hotel’s 14 rooms, which start from around €165 per night, are designed as tributes to big names from the world of culture, such as Grace Jones, Allen Ginsberg and Marella Agnelli. And when guests aren’t relaxing …

The longlist for the 2024 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction has been announced today! Thanks to this prize, I have discovered lots of great books and authors and always look out for the longlists and shortlists; in fact, trying to read all of the shortlisted titles since the prize began in 2010 is a personal project of mine (you can see my progress here). There are twelve books on …

I usually don’t do a blog post about a restaurant, unless it is particularly remarkable. Lambert’s Cafe fits that criterion. We went there for lunch, and it was quite the experience. Their claim to fame is “throwed rolls” — they have a guy roaming around, throwing freshly baked rolls to patrons. Which sounds like a bad idea, but is actually rather fun. (And this from a guy who doesn’t do …

In this special guest blog, David Musgrove, content director for BBC History Magazine and HistoryExtra, considers the amazing life of the now-forgotten Victorian showman, athlete, and wheelbarrow pedestrian Bob Carlisle, and how his clever manipulation of newspapers marks him out as a 19th-century influencer. Did the Victorian period have influencers? Yes, but rather than using social media and camera phones, they employed letter-writing and wheelbarrows. I’ve been researching the story …

Terry Carroll Obituary and Cause Death, Who Was Terry Carroll? & Is Alive Or Not?If AI didn’t write that then I’ll be interested to know who went to heaven to hear that final performance.

I recently added (or added to) a couple of metapages about this site and myself, including a brief Charles Wade page, which points to old blog posts that feature the great man. Doing so reminded me / rubbed in the fact that a lot of my archived blog posts are b0rked, mainly in terms of image URLs and placement. This is - of course - as a result of transferring …

Lately (as in the last six months, I’d guess) I have really intense dreams every couple of nights. Not nightmares or action-packed adventures, just dreams that feel very real with people who seem like well-rounded persons. Days after these nights are always a bit weird, especially when the grey weather turns the daylight dull and reality seems less real than the dream I just had. And while some locations keep …

Michael Grasso / February 21, 2024 Near the end of Richard Nixon’s first term, the forces of conservatism and reaction were in the ascendancy in America. This public resurgence of “traditional values” was itself a counter-revolution against the turmoil unleashed by the young in their opposition to the Vietnam War and their support for the civil rights struggle, which had swept through America’s streets over the previous decade. America’s traditional …

I’m a little obsessed with web performance. I like being able to check a page’s core web vitals quickly and easily. Four years ago, I made a Lighthouse bookmarklet. Whatever web page you were on, when you clicked on the bookmarklet you’d get the Lighthouse results for that page. Handy! It doesn’t work anymore. This is probably because Google are in the loop. Four years is pretty good innings for …