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andrewduckerAs far as I know Gideon has seen neither anything with Guardians of the Galaxy's Yondu or an Alabama Sheriff, but when we're heading into combat in Zelda he does an amazing impression while yelling his battle cry of "C'mere Boy!"
Edit: Aha! Turns out it's from a school friend!
oursinThings happen over a long term.
Things that look at the time like a failure or even a disaster may be sowing seeds or releasing spores and having an impact that will go on.
Or even have a counter-intuitive impact at the time: okay, The Well of Loneliness got convicted for obscenity in 1928 but 1000s of women realised they were not alone just from reading the reports in the newspapers, and 1000s of them wrote to Radclyffe Hall.
Just because something does not endure does not endure does not mean it had no influence.
Am currently reading book by a friend which makes quite a thing of long-term impact of small obscure organisations of early C20th I worked on.
Was a piece in Guardian Saturday today which doesn't appear to be yet online which was doing the ever-recurrent WO about 'I see no feminists' and I wonder what they expect them to look like and perhaps they are supposing something flashy and dramatic, which can be appropriate at times. But the work is not necessarily drawing attention to itself.
Further thought: I was a bit irked to see this: Lifeline is both a musical following Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the first antibiotic and a warning about the threat of superbugs in the present day, because the Fleming narrative erases the immense amount of work that Florey, Chain and Heatley had to put in to make pencillin actually viable.
lydamorehouse
andrewduckertamaranth
Dex believed in coincidences, and fate, and signs and wonders, and the great interlocking gears of the universe telling him to do things, and though he’d gotten pretty good at ignoring what the universe was telling him to do (most recently: quit your soul-sucking job and open a karaoke bar!), it didn’t mean he couldn’t still hear it screaming.
[loc. 2810]
Tuesday Mooney has a comfortable life: she lives alone, except for her cat Gunnar: she tutors Dorry, her teenage neighbour who's still mourning her mother, and excels at her job as a prospect researcher for a hospital fundraising team. Her best friend is Dex (short for Poindexter), who works in finance but craves a career in showbiz. Her best friend was Abby Hobbes, but Abby vanished one night when they were both fifteen. (Tuesday tried to contact her via Abby's Ouija board, but nobody ever answered.)
( Read more... )
oursinGosh those people with the archivists' sales team are persistent! I've heard again - okay, different name and email, exact same wordage - TWICE, second time with added 'Worth a chat?'
No, sir, not in the least.
***
This week I got the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society payout, which was an agreeable sum, maybe it would not actually support me in My Old Age, but it is Better Than A Bat In The Eye With A Burnt Stick. Furthermore, as it is itemised - all the tiddly sums that get totted up - it is a Revelation of what works of mine are still being looked at, wow.
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Church attendance report pulled after YouGov finds 'fraudulent' responses:
A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed.
The Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" report had been widely reported on since its publication last year and became an accepted part of discourse among many Christians.
Now YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were "fraudulent".
It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error.
....
But academics questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England's own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.
Experts said that YouGov's methodology - gathering data from volunteers who received cash rewards for their time - left it vulnerable to "bogus respondents" skewing the data.
***
Pepys ‘curated’ letters to conceal being offered enslaved boy as bribe – research:
Howe wrote to Pepys to “crave your acceptance” of a “small” enslaved boy, which “I brought home on board for your honour … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.”
Pepys wrote back indignantly rejecting the offer. But Edwards argues this was not because of ethical concerns about slavery, but the optics of looking like a man who could be bribed.
This is quite resonant with discussion I was having this week apropos of my 1930s feminists and the less visible ways in which the work was happening, so much so that it's been supposed (it was being claimed at the time) that Feminism Woz Ded: The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism.
andrewduckerI've seen occasional confusion from people over the last few weeks "Why is it so cold, isn't it Spring now?" - and I thought I should say a bit about one of the major causes that I almost never hear people talk about - the polar vortex.
This is a swirling wind around the Arctic that exists for basically the whole arctic night. One of the things it does is keep the freezing polar winds from coming further south in to Europe. But when it finally collapses in the Spring, it finally allows those winds out, and you get a sudden burst of cold air as all of that freezing weather escapes down to us.
Normally this happens some time in late February, but this year the collapse seems to have been a month later.
The other major factor is largely down to circulating high pressure areas (imagine slow large hurricane shaped wind "objects") that constantly move around the North Atlantic. Put one of these off of the west coast of Ireland, going clockwise, and it will pull air down from the North even further/faster. See this short video I took from the NullSchool site (my favourite wind visualisation site). In it you can see cold winds pouring down from the North Pole, funneled further by the circulation. And if you click on the link there you can see that currently the wind is instead being pulled off of the Altantic, where it's a few degrees colder.
If you'd like to read more, then this is quite good.
(And apologies to anyone who actually knows anything about the weather for any appalling mistakes I've made.)
andrewduckeroursinBit of a flurry of Misguided Spam: this one is quite funny:
[W]e're working with other archivists that are offering historical resources.
I’m currently working with a few archivists on campaigns that are getting their sales teams meetings with warm leads every month. We’re targeting people who need historical resources using personalized email sequences.
If I could help you connect with potential clients like this, would that be helpful to you?
Another one of the usual 'Contribute your article/join our editorial board/reviewer team' from an international journal... offering a space for the exchange of powerful ideas among academics and experts which cannot distinguish between the title of a book I reviewed and anything I actually wrote my own self.
This one is frankly cheeky, if presumably being spammed at a vast array of people?
I am sure you're quite busy, but I would appreciate if you could take a moment to my below request.
Well, our Open Access Journal of Advances in Complementary & Alternative Medicine (ACAM) is scheduled to release its Volume 9 Issue 2 by 6thApril, but we are in deficit of one article. So, is it possible for you to support us with any of your manuscript to achieve this goal?
Appreciate if you could provide your acknowledgement within 24 hrs.
Am also being followed on Bluesky by very dubious looking 'Global' conferences within my fields of interest. Suspect these are a racket.
***
However, in realm of being A Real Nexpert, gave a presentation at Institution With Which I Am Now Affiliated yesterday and I think it went quite well, insofar as there was a certain amount of discussion and people coming up and asking questions afterwards.
Also got 2 compliments from much younger persons on hair (green streaks in) though as one was outside the Scientology HQ in Tottenham Court Road I fear this may be one of their recruitment strategies.
andrewduckertamaranth
Human is very similar to pork, after all. (I know, I know. Religious pundits say that cannibalism is forbidden in the Quran anyway. The ghouls say that this isn’t quite the same.) [loc. 61]
Despite the title, there's very little (if any) actual cannibalism in this novella. True, Rupert Wong (ex-mobster with a murky and karmically unpromising past) works as a chef for a wealthy ghoul family, serving up gourmet meals concocted from the bodies of hapless tourists: but that's only one of his jobs. He's also working off that karmic debt through community management: ( Read more... )
oursinWhat I read
Finished High Stakes. I previously noted a pattern in Dick Francis of the conditional rather than utter win.
Antonia Hodgson, The Raven Scholar (Eternal Path Trilogy, #1) (2025) - think I picked this up as a Kobo deal, because people were mentioning it? I realise that I am no longer in the habit of reading fat multi-volume fantasies of this ilk. I found it all a bit much, really.
Then did some nibbling (what do Tiggers eat?) and then settled into a re-read of Barbara Hambly, The Nubian's Curse, not one of the top Benjamin Januarys perhaps but still pretty good. Possibly when I am in that sort of phase I should just go Hambly/Haddam/Paretsky/Cross?
Currently Reading
Dorothy Richardson, Honeycomb (Pilgrimage, #3) (1917) for online reading group.
Up next
Today's Kobo Deal was the latest Jonathan Kellerman Alex Delaware thriller, Jigsaw, so probably that.
Then possibly more Hambly.
At some point must read Adania Shibli, Minor Detail (2017) for the in-person reading group.
andrewduckerandrewduckerI wonder at what birth year over half of people have never seen a western.
Obviously very young people won't - but if we look at people age 25-40, who have had a chance to watch a bunch of movies, I wonder if outside of classic movie afficionados you'll have seen many people see any. The last minor resurgence would have been Tarantino's Hateful Eight and Django Unchained, and I don't think either of those were that massive. Before that you're probably back to Dances with Wolves and Unforgiven, which is now around 35 years ago.
Which would mean that the main cultural touchstone for young people would be Red Dead Redemption 2, released in 2018 and the 4th best-selling game of all time.
(Curiosity triggered because in the most recent University Challenge nobody recognised John Wayne.)
tamaranth
Ardnakelty has no time for Guards. The townland will run its own investigation, spreading unseen beneath the official enquiry like ancient trailways underlie the brash modern roads; it'll reach its own conclusions, and deal out its own justice. [loc. 1069]
Third in the trilogy that began with The Searcher and continued with The Hunter. Cal Hooper's life in the small village of Ardnakelty seems settled: he's more or less engaged to Lena, and Trey is finding friends and possibly even romance. Then a young woman -- Rachel, fiancee of local big-shot Tommy Moynihan's son Eugene -- is found dead in the river. ( Read more... )
andrewduckerThe kids are watching an episode of SpongeBob where he's failing to write an essay. It is, frankly, stressing me the fuck out.
oursinOkay, it was lovely to see the heron again on my walk today. I wonder if it had decided that the eco-pond, with its shoals of Invasive Predatory Goldfish which people have dumped in it to the detriment of other life (frogs, newts, dragonflies) is a delicious all-you-can-eat buffet.
Assuming it is the same heron and that the first did not just tell a friend.
***
In more annoying news, today partner had a go at fixing my printer, which has been giving 'Paper Jam in Tray 1' error messages -
- and after doing pretty much the equivalent of open heart surgery on the thing, lo and behold, there was, entirely concealed from view, a page jammed in the works.
I depose that having to eviscerate a printer to discover this is something of a design fault?
Unfortunately, once the printer was put back together, it decided that the gate was open and it was not going to print anything.
Partner is going to have another go at it tomorrow, but I suspect that New Printer is in the future.
***
Meanwhile, I copied my paper for tomorrow to a memory-stick and took it to partner's computer so that I could print it out there.
This was accomplished successfully.
tamaranth
You may value their lives above your own; I cannot do so, for to me you are worth far more than all of them. I will not obey you in such a case, and as for duty, I do not care for the notion a great deal, the more I see of it. [p. 196]
Audiobook reread: I first read this as an arc in 2005, and reread in 2019. I still love this book a great deal, and had a better sense of the pacing when I listened to the familiar procession of events. Splendidly read by Simon Vance, who gives Temeraire a very slight 'foreign' accent, perhaps hinting at his mysterious origins. I'm so tempted to buy the audiobooks of the whole series...
andrewducker - Life with two kids: You Scream and You Leapoursin - There is not one single immediate thing doing changelydamorehouse - Cat Picture!andrewducker - Interesting Links for 28-03-2026tamaranth - 2026/044: Tuesday Mooney Wore Black — Kate Racculiaoursin - Friday miscandrewducker - Behold - The Polar Vortex!andrewducker - Interesting Links for 27-03-2026oursin - I am a Nexpert, but not That Nexpertandrewducker - Interesting Links for 26-03-2026tamaranth - 2026/043: Rupert Wong, Cannibal Chef — Cassandra Khawoursin - (no subject)oursin - Wednesday had sushi for lunch for the first time in aaaaggggeesssandrewducker - Interesting Links for 25-03-2026andrewducker - I'm curious about whether young people have even seen a westernoursin - (no subject)tamaranth - 2026/042: The Keeper — Tana Frenchandrewducker - Life with two kids: School Days Revisitedoursin - Not sure the nature was exactly healing to the troubled spirit....tamaranth - 2026/041: Temeraire — Naomi Novik