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Happy Thanksgiving!Here's Joan Leslie whipping up some mashed potatoes for a Thanksgiving feast.With gratitude for each of you, I send happiest Thanksgiving wishes to all my readers!Previous Hollywood Thanksgiving photos: Jeanne Crain, Angela Greene, Ann Blyth, Marsha Hunt, Hedy Lamarr, Phyllis Thaxter, Loretta Young, Alan Ladd, Ginger Rogers, Janis Paige, and Esther Williams.Tweet

This song is one of twelve original songs Irving Berlin wrote for the 1942 film “Holiday Inn,” which also included “White Christmas,” the best-selling single of all time. In this film, the main character Jim, played by Bing Crosby, has given up a life in show business to work on his farm. He decides to turn the farm into a country inn, open only for holidays. As he goes through …

I’m thankful to the thousands of readers of this blog. Well, not the few submit troll comments from multiple pseudonymous handles, but the 99.9% who don’t. I’m thankful that they’ve stayed here even when events (as they do more and more often) send me into a spiral of doomscrolling and just subsisting hour-to-hour—when I’m left literally without words for weeks. I’m thankful for Thanksgiving itself. As I often try to …

In my recent Boost Your Django DX update, I added a new chapter on debuggers. Here’s an extra technique I didn’t finish in time for the update, but I will include it in the next one. Django templates can be hard to debug, especially to figure out which variables are available after several levels of {% extends %} or {% include %} tags. The template engine doesn’t provide a built-in …

I recently took Dr. Sophie’s Pharos Course Critical Thinking Approaches for Genealogy. One of the things that she encouraged us to do is identify our biases, so we can find ways to address those and minimize the impact on our research. That led me to thinking about the cultural biases I may have as a Dutch researcher. I grew up with the idea that the Netherlands is a tolerant country. …

The first profession I remember I wanted to pursue as a kid was that of what I called an inventor. Building new and useful things for others seemed like fun. I was eagerly spending my time searching for expendable things within our household and recombining them to look like new machines and invented a purpose for them. Then, I learned about space travel. I don’t remember what age I was …

The Suffolk coastal town of Lowestoft has the distinction of being the most easterly settlement in the British Isles, and thus the first place in the UK to see the sunrise. Nearby Ness Point is the actual most easterly point in Britain, and there is a marker here, overlooking the shoreline, which celebrates this unique fact. Once famed for its fishing industry, Lowestoft still boasts a thriving fish market, which …

Family photo My mother loved Thanksgiving. She died in February, at the ripe old age of 99, so this will be my first holiday without her for as long as I can remember. The ones in recent years weren’t elaborate. My uncles and stepfather had died and eventually my mother had to move to a care home. Although my siblings and I did our best to make it a special …

The Mad Hatter Looks FamiliarIt's not graffiti when there is an associated booklet. An intriguing first walk with the Worcester Ramblers takes me on an Urban plod around Droitwich. Net curtains twitching as a Goretex clad posse went through estates, with only one stop to report an abandoned mattress.7 works of art by would be Banksies, with everyone too polite to mention the added Johnson on the final mural. Droitwich …

On this week’s show we also touched on questions about diversification as a younger investor, a pep talk for younger generations, financial planning with Chat GPT and paying down your mortgage vs. investing in fixed income. Further Reading: Why I’m Selling Some Bitcoin The post Is It Too Late to Buy Bitcoin? appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...

The first time I heard Andy Paley’s name was when my New York friends Richard and Lisa Robinson gave me a copy of the first album by a group called the Sidewinders in 1972. It had been produced by their friend — soon to be mine, too — Lenny Kaye. It was on RCA, where Richard had taken a job as an A&R man. “Listen to the song called ‘Rendezvous’,” …

Thanks to Charlie Horse 47 and Killdumpster for their sponsorship of this post, via the magic of Patreon. ***I think we all dig looking into our ancestry but, this week in 1974, we were literally digging up our ancestry when a female skeleton from the hominid species Australopithecus Afarensis was uncovered in the Awash Valley, Ethiopia and subsequently named Lucy.How old was she?Only 3.2 million years.And, you know what? That's …

The 'Burds of the Brush' (see BLAG 03) movement was back for its third edition last month, and host with the most Tozer Signs is here to share what went down in Bristol town.The Burds in action in Bristol. Burds of the Brush in BristolLast month I hosted the third annual Burds of the Brush; a two-day event welcoming female, trans and non-binary signwriters from the world to my little …

This morning, I awakened realizing that Follow Me Here is a quarter-century old. I misremembered and thought it was actually twenty-five years to the day since my first post, but looking back I actually opened the blog on November 15, 1999. Too bad, it would have been fitting if the anniversary were Thanksgiving Day! It has been a tumultuous quarter-century and also a third of my life. My career has …

The University of Sydney (alma mater of such awkward squad stalwarts as Germaine Greer, Robert Hughes and Clive James) has been grappling with the issue of how to reconcile people’s right to speak about stuff that annoys them, with the right of people not to be annoyed by that speaking. To this end, they have commissioned an external review that makes a number of recommendations, most of them eminently coherent …