Recently updated blogs

Herbert in comments has been asking me about urban rail on ring roads; Nuremberg has such a road with an active debate about what to do with it. Ring roads are attractive targets for urban rail, since they tend to be wide commercial throughfares. The one in Nuremberg is especially attractive for a tramway, or possibly a medium-capacity metro if one can be built cheaply; this is an artifact of …

The Three Investigators #23 The Mystery of the Invisible Dog by M. V. Carey, 1975. Shortly after Christmas, a frightened man, Fenton Prentiss, calls the Three Investigators to his apartment to help him. Mr. Prentiss is an elderly art collector, and he says that he is being haunted. Things in his apartment get moved around when he’s not there, and he can tell that someone has been reading the mail …

My last book spine poem was made last winter, on a seasonal theme.* With autumn slipping in and the evenings becoming short here in Ireland, a new book spine poem (aka bookmash) suggested itself. * Sleep the Big Sleep When the lights go down One by one in the darkness, Teach yourself to Sleep the big sleep, The great escape, The pursuit of oblivion – Dreams, nightwood, White noise beyond …

Oregon Department of Transportation is repaving portions of Main Street in Ashland. And when I say “portions” I mean it. They are just repaving the strips where the rubber meets the road. So far they’re just completing the center lane. They may come back and do the other lanes later, but it’s kind of funny to look at the road and see the two strips of fresh asphalt in the …

Hi Darling Ones, I spent the last few days in La Piscina de K-Dizzle (what I call Sister #4’s pool), but managed to appreciate some other things this month. Kris Kristofferson I mentioned on Bluesky that there were a billion reasons to adore Kris Kristofferson, then I linked to “Sister Sinead”. Shocking, when “Jody and the Kid” was right there. Sinead trumps stupidly-spelled, male-narrator Jody songs. When I think of …

A rare example of a crazy wall in the real world or, at least, as the background for a press photo.(Thanks Šmingvin.)

Guest post by Nettie Williams (no relation) as part of my ongoing series. The shop choice is well-timed – today is World Vegetarian Day. Neil’s got a lot on partly because he’s promised to review all the shops on the Triangle. Pressure! Franchise it out, I suggested. And now here I am, in between jobs, with time on my hands, doing a review to help a mate out. The shop …

Dear Captain Awkward, I have a travel dilemma I’m hoping you can help with. I’m part of a group of 6 friends (all mid-thirties, she/her) who started hanging out as freshmen in college and who’ve been very close nearly as long. One of these friends will be working in Europe for the next few months, and the rest of us are considering taking a short trip to visit her/sightsee a …

This is the one

I thought that everything would change when I got the surgery. For years, I’d been utterly miserable. Everything and everyone seemed to communicate that I was unworthy, unlovable, and inhuman. Growing up, I figured maybe things would change down the line. It got to the point where I went to bed praying that God would fix me. But that never happened, and by the time I hit college I was …

Near the end of Aristotle's Eudemian Ethics there appears the passageFurther, if a man prospers or fails to prosper because he is the kind of man he his, just as a man sees poorly because he is blue-eyed, then not luck but nature is the cause.(Translated by Anthony Kenny.) Earlier in Chapter 2 of Book VIII, there is a reference to the superior eyesight of the black-eyed. This is not …

I was getting the feeling lately that I’ve been writing a lot here lately, and I already had an export of all of my blog posts, so I decided to check my word count each year over the last 8 years. As of yesterday, I’d written 167,824 words for this site in 2024. It turns out that’s a ton! Apparently I wrote my ass off in 2020 (187,535 words), but …

Bad Climate Socialism by Hamilton Nolan [T]here is a difference between socializing the costs of things we need more of, and socializing the costs of things we need less of. Universal public health care would be good. Universal public insurance for people to continue to build more beachfront homes that scientists tell us will be at ever-increasing risk of destruction from climate change—allowing us to delay our ultimate reckoning with …

Spoiler: It’s nothing scandalous or bad. Every once in a while, someone posts this photo on Twitter to attempt to dunk on furries: Midwest FurFest 2018 Over the years, I’ve seen this discourse play out several times. The people that post this photo usually don’t elaborate on why they think this photo is meaningful, they just let it stand alone and expect their audience to fill in the blanks. So …

A September Yo-Yo in SoCal; Record hot to cool to hot again September was a bit of a roller coaster month in California (especially SoCal). In the southern half of the state, a record-breaking early Sep heatwave kickstarted a major wildfire outbreak that coincided with a major late monsoonal surge–leading to a dramatic mix of […] The post Major autumn heatwave to continue streak of record heat in interior Southwest; …