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White Wagtails are one of the most familiar species of songbird across much of Europe and Asia, but here in North America, any time one of these Old World beauties shows up as a vagrant, it causes quite the stir in the birding community. And just before Christmas, that is exactly what happened on the coast of Central California, near the beach town of Santa Cruz.Rare White Wagtail in Santa …

Today’s newsletter begins: Raymond Carver liked to quote Isak Dinesen, who said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. “Someday,” he wrote, “I’ll put that on a three-by-five-card and tape it to the wall beside my desk.” The poet Tess Gallagher said Dinesen’s words were a “quiet banner of determination” that flew over the last decade of Carver’s life. I used to have an index …

First United Methodist Church, 2100 J St, Sacramento, CA 95816

I often wonder what it felt like for the ancient Greeks, circa 800BC, to be wandering in the ruins of the previous Mycenaean civilisation. These cities they can no longer build; staring at writing they can’t read. The Greeks had to re-discover literacy. I think perhaps they wouldn’t have known what they were looking at. I know that dinosaurs aren’t our ancestors but… it’s adjacent? We live in a world …

Mr. Lewis Sydney playing his Follyphone in September 1912 (Topical Press Agency/Getty Images) The future can be presented in a lot of ways. Sometimes we imagine it in the darkest of terms, a dystopian hellscape that shocks our sense of safety, making us fearful about what’s to come. Other times we imagine the future as utopian—joyful and wondrous with all of the things we could ever want at our fingertips …

Part three of my personal favorites, with 15 landscape & seascape photos from San Diego County, Yosemite Valley, and New England. Read MoreThanks for following Alexander S. Kunz Photography via RSS & keeping independent websites alive. Buy me a coffee? Support @ $3/month. Visit My Print Store. Browse My Photo Archive.

Plans to sell the Greenwich Equestrian Centre were given the green light by a panel of councillors on Wednesday after a challenge to the decision led to a party political row. Last month Greenwich Council’s cabinet approved a proposal to sell the centre on Shooters Hill, as well as a house next to the nearby […] The post Bid to halt sale of Greenwich’s Olympic equestrian centre thrown out appeared …

Bizarre post production flaw. But I liked it enough to keep it.tomorrow will be interesting for me. An old friend and sometimes video production partner recommended me as a still photographer on a film project he's involved with. The shoot will consist mostly of interviews with teachers and b-roll shots of youngsters who participate in a program and teachers. The majority of the set-ups will be outdoors, in a large, …

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager. This comment section is open for any non-work-related discussion you’d like to have with other readers, by popular demand. Here are the rules for the weekend posts. Book recommendation of the week: Long Bright River, by Liz Moore. It’s SO GOOD! It’s the story of two sisters, close as children but estranged as adults. When one becomes …

Global average temperatures in 2024 were the hottest on record, surpassing the previous record set in 2023 by a clear margin. In three global temperature assessments released on 10 January, climate scientists reported that temperatures across the world rose faster than expected, reaching 1.46°C–1.62°C above the preindustrial baseline. “The long-term trends are very, very clear,” Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told reporters at a …

It never ceases to astonish me that, in Britain during the mid-1980s, you weren’t strictly stuck with just BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4 for your viewing options. While most of the country soldiered on with this scant selection, pockets of progression were sprouting elsewhere. Cable television was slowly unspooling its coaxial veins in certain enclaves of the country, bringing with it a whole new world of programming.Enter Sky Channel. …

Welcome to the weekly Perfume Chat Room, perfumistas! I envision this chat room as a weekly drop-in spot online, where readers may ask questions, suggest fragrances, tell others their SOTD, comment on new releases or old favorites, and respond to each other. The perennial theme is fragrance, but we can interpret that broadly. This is meant […]

Selection: Blues World (long!) https://londonjazzcollector.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/sunao-wada-quintet_blues-world_three-blind-mice_tbm25_1974_ljc.mp3 . . . The selection “Blues World” runs the whole length of Side 2, around 19 minutes. The track is the only contribution on the album by the saxophone player, so you get a full quintet performance. It was easier to just let it run than try to edit a short sample. . . . Track List A1 Now See How You Are (O. Pettiford, …