Here and There
Apr. 24th, 2026 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sartoriasFriday er several, things noted
Apr. 24th, 2026 07:05 pmoursinReform UK will tell Welsh museums how to present history, manifesto says - and I am getting out a whole school of, er, perhaps not codfish, something more sustainable and perhaps with nasty spines, for Reform UK, who prate on
Reform leader Dan Thomas told BBC Wales there were "some museums that take a very niche view on our past that may talk about slavery, without the whole picture of the fact that the British empire was the first to abolish slavery, and that other countries have done it for, you know, millennia".
I am pretty sure that back in the early C19th the ancestors, whether actual or in general leanings, of Reform UK, would have been screaming loudly at the very thought of abolishing slavery and denouncing Wilberforce as WOKE. But now they are able to claim abolition as Great Achievement of the British Nation.
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I do wonder whether fellow Esperantists actually read these, it sounds niche to the point of eccentricity, not that that was exactly uncommon in those circles: Why Was the Discovery of the Jet Stream Mostly Ignored? Maybe because it was published in Esperanto:
The somewhat eccentric Ooishi was not only the director of Japan’s Tateno atmospheric observatory but also the head of the Japan Esperanto Society, proponents of the artificially constructed language, created in the 1870s as a means of international communication. Ooishi announced his discovery of the swift, high-altitude river of air in the Tateno observatory’s annual reports, which he published in Esperanto. Not surprisingly, his research was ignored[.}
On the other hand, would they have gained much traction beyond Japan anyway - observatory annual reports hardly usual scientific journals mode of dissemination.
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Urban life: The LCC and the Arts I: The Open-Air Sculpture Exhibitions - do wonder if there is a slightly condescension of posterity going on in the assumption of 'the elite aesthetics and values of its ‘natural’ middle-class constituency'.
The Disappearance of the Public Bench
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Tourist finds rare chunk of oldest sea crocodile - actually turns out she was an amateur fossil hunter on a guided walk along the Lyme Regis shore, although she had no idea just how rare a find she'd made (She Was No Mary Anning...)
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I like this: The Destructive Myth of “Getting Outside Your Comfort Zone”.
Expense of spirit
Apr. 23rd, 2026 05:55 pmoursinInvolved in proving, for certain life admin purposes, that partner and I are real people who are who we say we are, involving downloading an app, which one then has to validate by entering one's ID and they will send a code by text 'may take a few minutes', they have a very capacious definition of 'few minutes', ahem. Then entering various details, scanning various documents to a satisfactory quality (don't ask, just don't ask, I have done screaming now, thanks), and taking a selfie.
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Do we even wish to detain ourselves over Michael Billington's ranking of the works of the Bard? I pretty much Dorothy Parkered, as much as one can with a newspaper, when I saw he had not only put Much Ado 20th out of 35, but considers B&B the subplot.
Light the barbecue in the marketplace, I have a heart to eat there!
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Though it is hardly anywhere near the same class for utter crassness of this - honestly, why are these people? A tourist has been charged after allegedly climbing a colossal marble statue in Florence to touch its genitals for a pre-wedding prank.
side-effect of shuffling playlists
Apr. 23rd, 2026 01:15 pmwychwoodSo basically these are all the same song, right:
- Paul Simon - Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover
- Avril Lavigne - Girlfriend
- Robyn - Call Your Girlfriend
What else am I missing that goes on this list? And are there any equivalents about boyfriends? The only thing that came to mind was the Dandy Warhols - Bohemian Like You, which isn't quite the same vibe.
Wednesday saw two magpies on the back fence
Apr. 22nd, 2026 07:11 pmoursinWhat I read
Finished The Tortoiseshell Cat, which was Royde-Smith's first novel, and rambles around a bit before it gets going, and the protag is really somewhat unbelievably naive about the world and its ways, but it's still pretty good and readable. Okay, there is character who turns out to be a Predatory Lesbian with a backstory of relationships with other women with masculinised names, and it got namechecked by Lilian Faderman for being bad representation of the period (1920s) but there is a certain ambivalence (VV is awful but is the sapphic desire itself bad? Gill seems to feel a certain reciprocity.). And there is a certain amount of evidence that Royde-Smith had leanings at least, and did write another novel with v sympathetic lesbian lead. Anyway, quite aside from Here Is A 1920s LGBTQ Pioneer Who Is Not Radclyffe, would read more of her if it was only available.
Some while ago picked up Le Guin's The Books of Earthsea omnibus as a Kobo deal and while I think I have all except maybe some short stories on my shelves or somewhere, it's handy to have them all together with Ursula's commentaries. Made my way through the initial trilogy, found the narrative style rather reminded me of the various myths and legends recounted in works of my youth (and probably hers too). I do wish, see earlier post, she had had some contact with Mitchison's works but I don't know if they were even published in N Am.
On the go
Took a break from going straight on to Tehanu to do my re-read of Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel (Pilgrimage, #4) (1919) - the text I originally downloaded from Project Gutenberg was no longer playing nicely with the ereader but I downloaded the most recent version and it's fine. This is the one that is embedded in bits of London very very familar to moi - even if Euston Station looks quite different these days.
Up next
Probably back to Le Guin and Earthsea.
Search maintenance
Apr. 22nd, 2026 09:19 am![[staff profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user_staff.png){kind=small}
mark posting in ![[site community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/comm_staff.png){kind=small}
dw_maintenanceHappy Wednesday!
I'm taking search offline sometime today to upgrade the server to a new instance type. It should be down for a day or so -- sorry for the inconvenience. If you're curious, the existing search machine is over 10 years old and was starting to accumulate a decade of cruft...!
Also, apparently these older machines cost more than twice what the newer ones cost, on top of being slower. Trying to save a bit of maintenance and cost, and hopefully a Wednesday is okay!
Edited: The other cool thing is that this also means that the search index will be effectively realtime afterwards... no more waiting a few minutes for the indexer to catch new content.
Next book: Death in the Andamans
Apr. 22nd, 2026 10:39 amthemis1 posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
girlmeetstroubleThe next book will be 'Death in the Andamans' by M M Kaye, which I am hosting.
I plan to start on May 19th (due to commitments earlier in the month). I'll post every Tuesday.
There are 24 chapters, so I'll do two at a time.
See you then!
why not here
Apr. 21st, 2026 07:18 pmthistleingreyIf you know which Korean surnames are border-straddlers, you'll find them well represented amongst Soju Club's associates, either directly or via central-casting allusions to kpop/kdrama stars' names (including the voice actress for Meitantei Conan's Korean dub, if I'm not mistaken). One character totes around a copy of The Golden Compass, thus named. The Oxford around Soju Club and another pub is barely sketched in, a liminal space for crossings, as though to assert that there's no need for the Arctic; southern England is unlikely enough.
Soju Club is the type of novel that, while layering secret-handshake refs that most readers wouldn't see (I caught the doublings related to Sacheon in Yeongnam, but I know I've missed a bunch), tries suggesting that it doesn't matter that gyopo Park did his homework for those resonances and evocations as though preparing for a Suneung he never took. If you catch the Korean bits, you won't catch the UK-related or NorAm-related ones.
All you need are the sense that you won't catch everything Park has learned while touring himself out of some boxes, and the fact that he did a master's at Oxford and then some writing/managing for computer games. The latter furnishes the novel's vignette-driven scrambled sequence: turn the page or tap the screen to find the next puzzle-segment.
I think that Park, with this debut novel, doesn't imagine the author to be dead.
Rejoice, we triumph, sort of
Apr. 21st, 2026 08:15 pmoursinThat is, I have finally knocked off a review that has been hanging over me for months, probably needs a little more fiddling with but it was very much I had got to the stage of 'just sit down and write the bloody thing' and did it. It's a book I'm fairly lukewarm about, doing fairly useful work with what it does but it feels a bit all over the place and hard to get a proper grip on.
Also, yay, am feeling rather less washed out than the past few days following vaxx.
We have appointment to see solicitor about our Testamentary Dispositions next week - finally found one in the fairly close vicinity through the Law Society Find a Solicitor facility.
Have just been getting Documentation from the local authority who are actually paying me to go and talk about johnnies in their collections in just under two months, so I guess that's sort of the next thing on my agenda.
Though am gradually making my way through ms by deceased colleague, though there is not major urgency on this as my collaborator is still in academic life and overwhelmed with the responsibilities of that at present.