Recently updated blogs

Back on September 10, ABC preempted its entire Sunday prime-time lineup for Africa, a four-hour documentary that combined a look at the many new countries born from the end of colonialism with segments on African history and culture, featuring music by Alex North and performances from Miriam Makeba. The documentary was not only a critical success, going on to win a Peabody award, it was also a surprise ratings success, …

Portrait of Marthine Cappelen Hjort, b. Kiær, by Asta Nørregaard, pastel on canvas; roughly 48 x 33 inches (122 x 85 cm); link is to Wikimedia Commons; original is in the collection of the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo Norway, which has a zoomable and downloadable version of the image. This wonderful portrait by late 19th, early 20th century Norwegian artist Asta Nørregaard is one of those …

Blue Line, Chicago, IL

Aspens and Lodgepole Pines at DeMotte Campground north of the Grand Canyon. My film cameras and film stock.For a number of years I've been keeping a few rolls of film in my refrigerator. (Refrigerated film will last a long time without changing color.) You can see what I have -- three rolls of Fujichrome Provia in 35mm, a roll of 35mm Fujicolor 400, three rolls of Fujichrome Provia in 120 …

Kitchen sink dramas are filled with ideas about two worlds colliding, past and future most obviously, particularly the clash between the generation who fought the war and their contemporary now adult children who crave a different kind of life, as well as the consequent disillusionment as that bright freedom is replaced by the drudgery of […]

Mother Jones today has an excellent story on Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book “Stolen Pride.” This quote in particular: “We live in both a material economy and a pride economy, and while we pay close attention to shifts in the material economy, we often neglect or underestimate the importance of the pride economy. Just as the fortunes of Appalachian Kentucky have risen and fallen with the fate of coal, so has …

We’re one day away from the release of Be Ready When Luck Happens!!!!!! To celebrate, I’m re-sharing my 50 favorite Ina Garten recipes! This isn’t a definitive list, as my favorites fluctuate based on cravings, mood, and season, so consider this a snapshot of my favorites today! You’ll see a lot of crossover with my regular rotation list, while that list contains all the recipes I make on a regular …

One more Japanese band to discover: Dida Dida Doo. I had forgotten about that very good compilation “Wheels Go Round” that had White Town’s track “Anal Sex”. Yeah. Do you know this compilation? It has this lovely, cute, artwork by Megumi Yoshimura and then you read the tracklist and the first track is that one. It is odd to say the least. A Trumpet Trumpet Records put out this 10 …

Our Mission Specialist for this episode is Benz Kotzen, a Professor at the University of Greenwich. He’s here to tell us about his FEEDING MARS project, which showcased a live experiment growing vegetables, herbs and fruits in Martian simulant soils, using fish effluents from an aquaponic system as fertilizer.

The film follows an extraordinary band of feisty grandmother warriors waging a spirited battle against vast oceanic threats. Often called real-life mermaids, the haenyeo divers of South Korea’s Jeju Island are renowned for centuries of diving to the ocean floor — without oxygen — to harvest seafood for their livelihood.

Here’s another in my series of ten year old photos, this time from September 2014. We were now fast approaching the November 2014 state election, as you’ll see in some of these snaps. Flinders Street Station’s clocks – if you look closely you’ll note some line names were modified as late as the 1990s (Cranbourne) but not since (St Albans, Broadmeadows). From this angle, Ikea at Springvale looks pretty impressive. …

“Lifer,” a new poem of mine, is published in the 17 October 2024 issue of the New York Review of Books. Please check it out! In other news, I’ll soon be leaving the derelict building where I’ve rented a writing studio for the past dozen years. The new owners plan to turn it into apartments. If you happen to have read Melville’s novel Pierre, you will have an idea what …

An approach for creating masonry layouts in vanilla CSS is one of those “holy grail” aspirations. I actually tend to plop masonry and the classic “Holy Grail” layout in the same general era of web design. They’re different types of layouts, of course, but the Holy Grail was a done deal when we got CSS Grid. That leaves masonry as perhaps the last standing layout from the CSS 3 era …

I’m excited to offer the next giveaway, 10 licenses ($15 value each) for Moom. Whether you know it yet or not, window management on a Mac can change your computing life. Imagine being able to fly windows into organized dimensions and locations with the click of a button or the press of a key. Moom is the best app for managing windows that I’ve found, and I get lost without …

How do you re-narrate the totality of someone’s life, whether your own or someone else’s? It would seem that providing as much detail as possible will help an audience understand the person in question. But as Édouard Levé demonstrated in his book Autoportrait, the accumulation of the most precise and minute statements only produces an incredibly compelling and magical piece of art, without bringing a reader any closer to the …