Recently updated blogs

Thanksgiving is late this year, but it still crept up on us. We sometimes get so involved in house projects or getting back into a schedule, we forget the holidays are upon us in a snap of a finger. When we were kids, we felt the holidays would never come. Now they swoop right in and we’re always in catch-up mode. We managed to scavenge for all the feastly fixins …

Western Film Book Library – Part 9 It’s time for another survey of books on Western movies! This month’s column is prompted in large part by the publication of an important new book, The Cavalry Trilogy: John Ford, John Wayne, and … Continue reading →

Really digging Tom Bihn’s holiday product release aesthetic — dripping in that 1970s/1980s magazine ad style. Hoping they have some kind of digital circular they release onsite to showcase this work (and products, of course). Speaking of which, if you don’t already know — they make excellent bags.

Shawn Reynaldo's latest newsletter starts by asking what are the defining sounds of the first half of 2020s and then talks about how the current scene is dominated by revivalism, before reaching its reall subject (wait for it):Yet even as dancefloors have warmed to a wider range of tempos and drum patterns, they’ve also remained stubbornly in thrall to the past. Recycling has always been big in dance music, and …

While I’m still perplexed by the ever-present penguin in the new series of videos from Geoffrey O’Connor, I’m totally thrilled by his pop penmanship, as he’s written another swooning pop track I adore. Casually shimmying into the verses, he works the track like a singer controlling his audience; you can almost feel him moving across the stage as he locks

There is a crisis in technical education. The golden road to a career has always been through a college education. However, this “golden road” has developed deep cracks and is badly in need of maintenance. Postsecondary education is rapidly becoming unaffordable, even at public colleges and universities. Tuition has risen at a rate 50% greater than inflation. But there’s a deeper issue. Beyond the out-of-control cost, there is evidence that …

Okay, I lied. I will tell you about some deals—all software—that are afoot that might interest photographers. Unlike the other sites, though, none of this is via affiliate links or any kickback scheme (bold indicates the company has one or more products that are in my recommended software list): Adobe Creative Cloud (full suite) — It's a first year savings only, but at US$29.98/month represents a good value if you …

A fantastic Mail Call Tuesday today! I got my copies of Thirteen Parsecs.I am very pleased with how these turned out. The leathers look great and great with NIGHT SHIFT and Wasted Lands.I even grabbed a new dice bag!Can't wait to share more of this with you all.

One afternoon in the late 1980s, sitting in the company cafeteria, aerospace engineer Joseph Bendik found himself so bored that he took a coin out of his pocket and began spinning it atop the table. In a testament to the eternal paradox of boredom and wonder as two sides of the same coin — the currency of life that is attention — he was suddenly wonder-smitten by the exquisite elegance …

Rains of blood and frogs, mysterious disappearances, baffling objects in the sky: these were the anomalies that fascinated Charles Fort in his Book of the Damned. “For every five people who read this book“, wrote one reviewer, “four will go insane”. Joshua Blu Buhs recounts Fort’s early life, unfinished manuscripts (“X”, “Y”), and the philosophical monism that informed his research.

Buy the book! Sheidlower, Jesse. The F-Word, 4th edition. Oxford University Press, 2024. 449 pages. US$22.99. Back when I was a teen, c. 1980, some friends and I were cruising the streets of Seaside Heights, New Jersey on an off-season night. With us was a friend-of-a-friend, someone I did not know. He got into a verbal altercation with some other teens we had met on the street, and afterward as …

Ownership and control of social media platforms is a first-order concern for both domestic politics and international conflict. The most important battleground in the Russia-Ukraine war is elections in NATO member states. And there, Russia is clearly winning. Trump, obviously, but yesterday saw the stunning success of formerly fringe right-wing candidate C?lin Georgescu. In an unimaginably large polling error, CG won 22% of the first-round vote (and thus made it …

A few years ago, I went to an exhibition of art by Karla Knight, but for some reason have never gotten around to posting about it til now. Her work is very interesting, full of strange symbols and spacey-looking shapes. But of course I was especially intrigued since some of the exhibition included notebooks! I … Continue reading Karla Knight’s Notebooks →

In the fall of 2021, Malors Espinosa set out to devise a special type of math problem. As with any good research question, it would have to be thought-provoking, its solution nontrivial — something others would want to study. But an additional constraint stumped him. Malors, then a graduate student in mathematics at the University of Toronto, wanted high school students to be able to prove it. Source

It was once a ubiquitous cliché in your own home or on your favorite TV sitcom: Beleaguered Dad, in the middle of a pile of bills, yells, “You’re sending me to the poorhouse!”Do fathers still yell that? Does anyone even remember poorhouses? It is long forgotten now, but Cincinnati maintained a poorhouse for more than a century out in Hartwell where today stands the UC Health Daniel Drake Center for …