Recently updated blogs

The Good Old Days relaunched last month with version 8 and I spent last week dissecting the changes from the new theme made by Mr. Creosote as it’s always fun to get inspired. They also have a museum page where you can go back in time to see what the site looked like back in the day. One of the things I really like is the way The Good Old …

Big views in a really big canyon – that’s why the Grand Canyon’s famous, right? Fame notwithstanding, you don’t always get enormous canyon views from a river trip. In many stretches, the walls close in, you’re floating and camping in tight inner gorges that block lines of sight from river to rim. But in some areas, the cliffs spread out a bit, or perhaps you take an opportunity to gain …

Without an immediate change in approach, Somalia will remain a fragmented country populated by self-serving elites seeking foreign patrons. Photo by Abdullahi Maxamed on Unsplash The Horn of Africa, a region once described by Jeffrey Lefebvre as one of the world’s most “highly penetrated regional subsystems,” is on the brink of a dangerous turn as several actors intensify their displays of power in Somalia. Turkey, Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, and …

I decided to revive my Fichu pattern in the Digital Whimsy section of my Etsy shop. Please keep in mind this is a pattern I drafted 15ish years ago by hand. Many people absolutely Loved it. A few found it to be not professional enough being drawn by hand. Whether for a ball or a […]

Have you ever seen the inside of your own stomach? I got to see mine, live when I had a capsule endoscopy on Wednesday. You swallow a little capsule, about 20 mm long, with a camera and some LEDs at each end, and a couple of coils around the middle, and it sends a video feed out to a recorder box via some antennae wrapped around your trunk. They don’t …

This sculpture in front of ANSP is the first full-size reconstruction of the 100-million-year-old dinosaur, Deinonychus. It’s been a secret wish of mine to be a speaker at The Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (ANSP) in Philadelphia, PA. This museum has such history and has been the center of significant contributions to science, such as the start of the Great Bone Wars/Dinosaur Rush, and the construction of the …

As the foundations of Franco’s fascist regime in Spain gradually disintegrated through the late 1970s following the dictator’s death, the restrictions governing on-screen content in the previously censorious nation correspondingly collapsed, flooding Spanish screens with an unprecedented backlog of smut, eventually culminating the early ‘80s hey-day of the hastily codified Classificada ‘S’ certification for “adult” (but not quite porn) features. Soon to be celebrated in a new documentary from Severin …

Shrimp Boats in the Altamaha River, Darien. Darien, Georgia is an interesting small city with a long history. Founded by Scottish highlanders under the leadership of James Oglethorpe in 1736, it was laid out according to the plan Oglethorpe had established in Savannah, and is the second oldest planned city in Georgia.In 1863, Darien was raided by a troop of Union soldiers from a garrison stationed on St. Simon's Island. …

Why should we not look back in anger? Surely the recent past is as broken as our miserable present. With the Oasis reunion tour still in the news, the title of John Osborne’s seminal kitchen-sink drama — which kicked off the whole cultural phenomenon of the Angry Young Men on its first Royal Court staging in 1956 — has again become familiar, in its reminted version, to a new generation. …

“We’ve confused the measurements we use for signal for the things they’re meant to signify, and it’s warped how we in design systems see ourselves. Here lies, I think, the hardest questions queer theory poses to the practice of design systems. If scale and efficiency are what guides your work: Whose single truth are you making possible? Whose truths are you making impossible?” Great questions from John Voss, in a …

King Crimson’s ‘Red’ recently turned 50. And apparently it’s okay to broadcast one’s love of prog now. No longer requested in hushed tones, served under the counter in a brown paper bag. People are poring over this lurid filth in full view of the public. ‘Red’, ‘Close to the Edge’, ‘Mirage’, these were exceptions to an otherwise very reliable rule guys. Have you ever actually sat down and listened to …

I've seen Nassim Soleimanpour's second and third plays structured as cold reads for a different performer every night, but had missed his original hit which, out of necessity, created his signature format in the first place. But following the run of ECHO at the Royal Court a couple of months ago, White Rabbit Red Rabbit now returns for an equally starry West End run at @sohoplace, the theatre with a …

Or: what I drank on my holidays. In our perversely unseasonal family holiday in Swanage last year, I ticked off four of the town’s seven pubs and had beers from three different local breweries. This year’s perversely unseasonal return trip to Dorset took us to Weymouth, a much larger town and a considerably more serious proposition for the ticker; they’ve got two separate J.D. Wetherspoon’s! Dorset beer was considerably thinner …

The First Quarter Moon is Friday, October 11, the full Moon is Thursday October 17. This is a perigee ("super") Moon. Comet C/2023 A3 may be visible low in the evening twilight from the 13th and should be visible by weeks end not far from Venus. Mercury is low in the twilight below Venus. Saturn is just past opposition, and is visible all night long. Saturn is close to the …