Recently updated blogs

Reviewed by Harriet Sequels can be very enticing when the initial book has done well. Readers want to know what happens to a character they’ve connected with. So says a literary agent in this witty, exciting thriller, which is itself of course the sequel to Korelitz’s previous novel, The Plot, which I reviewed on here back in 2021. In that book Jacob Finch Bonner, a failing novelist, gets a job …

I achieved the dream of walking out of Tesco with something I hadn’t paid for. I bought a carton of oat milk that had a promotional price of £1.50 on the shelf edge, but after checking my receipt I saw that I’d been charged £2. Out of principle, I immediately headed for the customer service desk to point this out. The employee disappeared off to check and came back with …

Every Thanksgiving since 1924 (with a brief pause during WWII), towering balloon characters float above Manhattan’s streets, following a grand route from the West Side to Herald Square in a holiday tradition. This Scholastic video takes viewers inside the Macy’s Parade Studio, revealing how Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons are...

Here’s a special edition of my weekly picdump that features Thanksgiving-themed pictures, infographics, and meme. Happy Thanksgiving, and enjoy the pics! The post Special edition picdump for Thanksgiving 2024 appeared first on The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

My first serious foray into Oxon earlier this month yielded 32 ticks (well one was in Bucks but it is near enough to the border to be included). In true BRAPA tradition, I'm ranking them from worst to best across the next five blogs. Probably too early in my BRAPA career to rank all counties in a similar order, but if you imagine the current Championship league table, Oxfordshire probably …

Back in the early 2000s, there was this nebulous idea called the semantic web. It never really went anywhere, but I found it exciting at the time. One piece that particularly spoke to me was the notion of including data in websites so that web scrapers could easily get at it. This was supposed to make the web more open and interoperable. The problem was that the data needed to …

Dear Darling Ones, Recently, I had a social media that has been stuck in my craw since happened. On this particular day people are ranking their favorite Wilco go albums from best to worst. Since I stopped paying attention around “Sky Blue Sky,” I didn’t participate. Besides, everybody knows “Summerteeth” is the best one. However, I did jump in when one man said, “Hell yeah, dads are ranking Wilco.” Grrr. …

Book Now Available [limited] & Paperback Launching February 10, 2025. It took over a decade, but perhaps that timing is perfect? There is much concern and plenty of gloom-and-doom about the future. I’m reminded of one my favorite M*A*S*H episodes in which Hawkeye jumps upon on the table, bangs his tray, and leads a chant of “We Want Something Else.” This isn’t just another book about what’s wrong with capitalism; …

As usual, I am caught up in many things, including an article on Goethe's 1774 play Clavigo, which I am completing (the footnotes took ages) for publication. It is not a play that we in the U.S. hear much about, and at the time of its publication there were people in Germany who didn't believe it was by Goethe. It appeared in the same year as The Sorrows of Young …

Standing tall for centuries in the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan, the colossal Buddha statues were awe-inspiring monuments to the region’s rich Buddhist heritage and its role as a crossroads of ancient civilizations. Carved directly into the cliffs during the 6th century, these towering figures once symbolized harmony and cultural exchange along the Silk Road. Their […]

From 2008-2022, I aggregated every online year-end book list I discovered into one post. This year (like last year), I will collect essential and interesting year-end book lists in this post and update it daily. Please feel free to e-mail me with a magazine, newspaper, or other online list I have missed. Please consider making a donation or leaving a tip to Largehearted Boy to support posts like these, the …

Online reading“I feel connected to my organization’s culture.” Only 40% of leadership, 23% of management, and 19% of staff agree with this statement.My pal Jenny Zhang recently gave a superb conference talk on ways it might be more useful to think about values (fit/mismatch/tension) in the workplace, instead of culture.I particularly enjoyed this:The expected return of going to leadership with negative feedback is terrible. Risk alienating your boss for the …

Last year, we investigated a Dragon Touch children’s tablet (KidzPad Y88X 10) and confirmed that it was linked to a string of fully compromised Android TV Boxes that had also multiple reports of malware, adware, and a sketchy firmware update channel. Since then, Google has taken the (now former) tablet distributor off of their list of Play Protect certified phones and tablets. The burden of catching this type of threat …

Ideofoon 1 (1970-73) by Dick Raaijmakers (1930-2013)

I’ve created a 20 minute video based on my recently published slides. In this presentation, which is aimed at viewers who have heard little or nothing about amateur radio before, I try to explain what amateur radio is and what you can do with it. Please note that i am neither a professional video creator/editor nor that english is my first language. The video might be best viewed in 1.25x …