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Bestselling author Louis Bayard has written nine historical novels over the past two decades and has researched them all at the Library, poring over maps, sorting through personal love letters, consulting societal details of the lost worlds that he brings to life. His latest novel, “The Wildes,” a fictionalized account of Oscar Wilde and his wife and children, was released this week. His penchant of weaving real people (Wilde, Abraham …

Recently I wrote about the Wendy’s SuperBar. The SuperBar was Wendy’s reaction to dwindling sales, which had been inflated by an ad campaign that took America by storm, “Where’s the Beef?” In a series of commercials and print ads, octogenarian spokesperson, Clara Peller challenged non-Wendy’s burgers size, asking simply, “Where’s the Beef?” The phrase spread like wildfire and would become an accepted phrase when one wants to question the substance …

I just learned that the painter, illustrator and writer known as Ul de Rico (his full name was Ulderico Conte Gropplero di Troppenburg) passed away on 3 August 2023, a bit over a year ago, aged 79. I've written about him before, and here is the link. The Rainbow Goblins has been a favorite of mine since I first discovered it not long after U.S. publication in 1978. His family's …

Many local people and businesses helped to crowdfund SE London BookFest, a new literary festival. We would like to say a massive thank you to the following:Heather MacFarlane, Yvette Rawle, Mark Baxter, Sue Walker, Tristan West, Damion Viney & all at Co-Accounting, Dominic Walker, HTW, Tuts, Ellie Wood, Julia Mlambo, Guy Ware, Anne Coates.Sanjit Chudha, Jill Cuthbert, Kim Smith, Julian Kenny, Rosemary Chapman, Guy Haslam, Hayley Farrant, Rebeka Russell & …

Recently I got an interesting performance bug on emoji-picker-element: I’m on a fedi instance with 19k custom emojis […] and when I open the emoji picker […], the page freezes for like a full second at least and overall performance stutters for a while after that. If you’re not familiar with Mastodon or the Fediverse, different servers can have their own custom emoji, similar to Slack, Discord, etc. Having 19k …

Or is the only alternative to keep displays on all the time?

As a title, Why Am I So Single? has the potential to elicit one of two responses: some people will be like a moth to a flame, and others will run a mile in the opposite direction. But hold on and don’t judge a book by its cover (or a musical by its title), as this new Marlow & Moss production is ultimately the story of two friends who discover …

With Robert Recorde (c. 1510–1558) and John Dee (1527–c. 1608), we have already looked at two mathematical practitioners, who were among the first to publish mathematical texts in the vernacular in sixteenth century England. A third member of this group was Leonard Digges (c.1515–c. 1559) who was a friend of Dee’s. Usually, if Leonard is known at all, it is as the father of Thomas Digges (c. 1546–1595) a much …

One of these is not like the other two This week I found out that fake chimneys are a thing.I was walking past a building site and noticed a couple of chimney stacks sitting on the scaffolding. My first thought was that they were pre-assembled, but then I realised, why would you do that? That would make them extremely difficult to install. Also, after a little more pondering, this site …

The Janus Stone – Elly Griffiths Another investigation with Dr Ruth Galloway and DCI ‘Baby Daddy’ Harry Nelson, this time in Norwich where an old children’s home is being demolished to make way for flats…. and a child’s body is unearthed. Delighted to find Cathbad is still around and in a slightly more positive and hopefully permanent role. I’d reserved the next in the series from the library but I’m …

(One of my summaries of the Dutch PyUtrecht meetup in Utrecht, NL). Joris started out as a bond trader, with his MSc in financial management. So definitively no programmer by education. Bond trading meant shouting on the stock market's floor, something that was in risk of being automated. So he moved on. In his case to Reuters, one of the two big financial information suppliers. Later he started using python …

"A microsecond passes, / I’m in memory’s territory— / a glazed light over alien shapes, / the land always speaking to me"

Ok, there are three kinds of mystery in stories--Classic 'What's Gonna Happen?' Mystery (diegetic mystery)This is a mystery to both the audience and the main characters in the story: They are wondering how events will play out (or, in the case of a Sherlock-Holmes-style-mystery have played out). What will happen to Jack, Wendy, and Danny in the Overlook Hotel is a 'What's Gonna Happen?" Mystery, as is who framed Roger …

most "blue zones," concentrated areas of supercentenarians, can be attributed to pension fraud or bad record-keeping #

What’s up, Internet? In the continued efforts to keep our young family entertained on the weekends we decended upon the Wellington Brick Show 2024 put on by the Wellington Lego User Group. If you think that all we do is attend Lego shows and exhibits, well, we don’t… There’s just a few of them on around the country at the moment 😛 We all really enjoyed the show. There was …