Recently updated blogs

“Next: the Festival…” I wrote at the end of my previous post, trailing a planned post about the Stockport Beer and Cider Festival. What happened then I’m not entirely sure, but it’s now a good two months since such a post would be in any way timely. Still, I thoroughly enjoyed this year’s festival, and it seems a shame to let it go by without any form of comment, so …

Once again it’s time to continue with my slow-burn zoo review series. I’ve just returned from a trip to Tokyo, you see, and while there I visited two zoos. Today we look at the first of them: Ueno Zoological Gardens (usually just called Ueno Zoo), located in Ueno Park in Taito City, central Toyko… Caption: some zoos have awesome, attractive entrances. Ueno Zoo... maybe not so much. Having said that, …

This week I designed & built a new 11ty site to support an advocacy effort among primarily Canadian zine creators opting out of a major Canadian zine festival due to the founder's genocide denial. It's called Can't Zine. This is the first Eleventy site I've hosted on Cloudflare Pages, and there were a couple small hiccups to work out. Overall though, the setup process was pretty painless, and now that …

Christopher Dresser, tea kettles with lid, 1889–1890. Silver, gilded and silvered white metal. Made by John T. Heath and John H. Middleton for Hukin & Heath, Birmingham, England. Via philamuseum

at the poetry reading, people, standing around, talking, and you sort of - someone asks you are you a poet, and you say oh no i don't understand anything about literature. i don't know what it is you say - literature - i don't know you say. bc you had not wanted to talk about what is holy to you what can only reach on v rare occasions. you also …

September is a month of fullness in the garden and the pantry with the crops at their peak and all … Harvest time Read More »

The Bronze Age burials at Pendleton contained one of the most significant and intriguing prehistoric finds in Lancashire. In a burial pot containing a child cremation, a vanishingly rare rolled gold bead, together with other unusual and rare offerings, was discovered. The site in the small picturesque village was found by chance, during routine building […]

Out of the thickly falling midnight snow and into Ma's Diner came Gerry "the Brain" Goldsmith, the gentleman philosopher. The usual assortment of stumblebums and bindlestiffs sat at the booths and the counter, and down there in the middle perched on a stool was Smiling Jack.Gerry brushed some snow off his old camel's hair chesterfield, took off his twenty-eight-year-old fedora and flapped it against his side, loosened his frayed and …

Por favor todos guarden silencio. Por favor, por favor, por favor! Silencio!!!!!! This is 157, featuring: Chrystabell, David Lynch, Buffalo Daughter, Paul de Jong, Yoshio Ojima, Tape, Sneaker Pimps Yuji Takahashi, Keiichiro Shibuya, Maria, Tarter, daily rituals, come le onde, Hania Rani

and mellow fruitfulness. Keats was right about many things but particularly the joys of autumn – read all about it here Autumn has indeed descended with the mist and the mellow fruitfulness in my garden. I’ve had a veritable plum glut, timed for a weekend when I was on my own in the house and quite unable to get through them all myself. So that led to a flurry of …

On August 27th, I posted a mid-to-late 1940s photo of two Black sailors browsing books in a library section marked “Negro Books." In response, a couple people on my socials expressed outrage or sadness over the segregation they thought they were seeing. That makes sense if one doesn’t consider the book titles I mentioned or the link to a related post here titled Reading about Black Librarians and Knowledge Formation. …

Mrs Tim Flies Home by D.E. Stevenson This is the final book in the Mrs. Tim series – a run of books which details through her fictional diaries the life of a wife whose husband is an army officer. Hester Christie is resourceful, articulate and capable, which she must be owing to her husband’s frequent long absences when she is left to cope with her children, her maid companion, and …

Andrew Cranston, "The Invisible man," 2024. From Terry R. Myers' review of "One day this will be a long time ago," Cranston's show at Karma: The 'time' of painting has always moved in multiple directions, and all of that movement (not to mention what we call memory) is incapable of being anywhere except the present.*Bee-shaped woven palm bag.*Cody Hoyt, "Square Chair."*Walter de Maria, "Boxes for Meaningless Work," 1960.*Gena Rowlands, in …

On August 25th I found myself sleeping under a tent at Black Rock City (BRC), the temporary city where Burning Man takes place. It was my first time going. A month before that I had no plans to get there though earlier in the year I had thought of going but made no definite plans. I thought well, perhaps next year, which is what I had also thought the year …

Genre: DeathCountry: HollandYear: 20241. The Death Of Everything2. Marked By Blood And Darkness3. Hogtied In Rope4. Torn From The Jaws Of Death5. Christ Immersion6. Putrid Remains7. The Pinnacle Of Suffering8. Through Pain And Emptiness9. Those Who Wished Me Dead10. Tear All The Flesh Off The Earth6th album by Severe Torture, 14 years after their last one. Brutal death metal rarely sounds as enjoyably engaging as this, and it’s purely down …