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Oh how the mighty have fallen; Committee A of the AAUP used to be a reliable defender of academic freedom, but since its capture by the enemies of academic freedom, it has been going downhill fast. The latest absurd statement...

Strangely compellingBack in August, I posted about an extravagant garden ornament at Peckforton, Cheshire in the form of a large stone carving of an elephant bearing a turreted castle on its back. I mentioned that the symbol of the elephant and castle was a medieval motif (which survives, for example, in the names of some pubs) and that one example of the medieval period was a wood carving in the …

With the track down, wired and tested; time for a little painting. In days of yore I would do this with a brush and it took an age. Now I wait for a reasonable day, take things outside and use the Nevard-lifted method of two or three colours of Halfords finest which takes a matter of minutes. Some cleaning up and a polish of the rail tops and it's done.Retesting …

They once said I couldn’t even give my book away, but I’ve proved them wrong and done just that, but only for a short time. ‘Part Knowledge memoir, part history book and facts of London, this is a wonderfully written gem, with lots of nuanced history about London of which I was totally unaware.’ – Tom Hutley, Member of The Worshipful Company of Hackney Carriage Drivers and top YouTuber with …

Max Pasakorn’s poem “Ghazal for My Gay Ass” bursts forth with playfulness, longing, and hope to be and to have a certain sort of boy.Here they share just one thing about the piece:“I love poetic forms, particularly ones with refrains or repetitions because they signal a kind of internal obsession with certain themes or tropes. When initially drafting "Ghazal for My Gay Ass", I knew one of my obsessions was …

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We are excited about what the changing of the season has brought us so far and with that, the Law Library of Congress is offering more educational webinars in November. The Law Library of Congress’s next offerings will be a Lunch and Learn webinar concerning the use of secondary sources, an Orientation to Legal Research webinar on federal legislative history, and an Orientation to Law Library Collections webinar with a …

Every once in a (great) while you get that rare someone who speaks with such clear resounding intellect (usually backed by righteous moral outrage) that it leaves one transfixed in awe and wonder. It's an ability to cut to the chase, not just for brevity's sake, but to calculatingly eliminate the subterfuge that lesser minds (as my own) would get needlessly bogged down in before possibly, hopefully climbing out. Two …

Orley Farm by Anthony Trollope published 1861-1862 Last year in the Clothes in Books Christmas scenes series, I looked at The Small House at Allington, a later book by Trollope, which had a tremendous description of a very boring Christmas. Around that time (but not in the comments to that post) someone told me to read Orley Farm for its Christmas-y content – alas, I do not remember who, please …

Most of the fishing I do nowadays could be termed convenient, I don’t travel too far, don’t take much gear with me and fish in a relatively simple way. But the autumn is different, it’s the best time of the year so I go all in, push out of the comfort zone and make a big effort. Over the next few weeks this will become the normal then by the …

This recipe for braised pork with 40 cloves of garlic is a Chinese-inspired riff on the classic French dish. The garlic is meltingly sweet, and when combined with pork belly and steamed rice, it is simply delicious. Do You Really Use 40 Cloves? Yes! 40 cloves of garlic in one dish. That’s about 4 to ... View Post

Morfff. From the archive. I’ve always been fascinated with creating physical analog objects from a coded digital process. A few years ago as part of the product offerings on @producedforuse, I created this form from code and concrete, generated from sine waves. It served as a note / letter holder or for anything else you might think to place in there. It’s now sold out but I still use mine …

Every year I try to see the final cut for the National Portrait Gallery's award. Find out more here. On this occasion, I visited with a friend and discovered that we liked a lot of the same paintings, which is interesting because none of our favourites won a prize, these having been awarded pieces that we'd given less than a few seconds of our time. I'm not a fan of …

The WebCard project is moving forward again. My latest work involved card initialization and URL visiting. When a new Web card is created, the associated URL is now inserted as text in the content area of the card. This is useful documentation and prevents the potential confusion of a blank card. Speaking of card initialization, the WCD.AskURL function that prompts for a URL initially prefilled the input buffer with https:// …

MATTHEW FLORIANZ - ONBEGONNEN Dutch sound designer Matthew Florianz (currently working in the UK) presents what could be called an 'evolving album'. Onbegonnen (or: not started) is a collection of 'archived music, experiments, stepping stones, live recordings, hard to find and unfinished work' (ironically, none of these are literally 'onbegonnen'). The album collects four tracks (32 minutes) coming from different periods, three of them previously unreleased. Onbegonnen can be downloaded …