kestrell | Reading

I know it is no longer news in the ravenous cycle of horrors that passes for the front page these days, but the fact that the man in the White House took a literal wrecking ball to it feels once again so unnecessarily on the nose, at least if it were satire I could be laughing. I know buildings are not human lives such as this administration ends and ruins with such pleasure of ownership, but the roses of the concrete-choked garden were real things, not just symbols, and so were the bricks and the tiles of the East Wing. I have nothing revelatory to say about this particular destruction in the midst of so much more personal violence except that I didn't want to let it slide into a tacit shrug, as if it were an ordinary exercise of presidential powers, another rock through the Overton window. Or a bulldozer.

Current Music: Niecy Blues, "The Architect"

sovay

In fairness to June Lockhart, the first time I ever saw her she was sharing the same episode of Babylon 5 (1994–98) as Londo's card-sharping tentadicks and the latter seared themselves rather more indelibly into my brain, but with less than five minutes of her own in T-Men (1947) she stole far more of the film for me, so much that even knowing that a century is a graceful point to depart from, I am still sorry the world no longer contains her and all of her time. She moved from film to television so early that I always wondered if she had been blacklisted like Marsha Hunt, but the answer looks like not. I loved finding out about her tastes in rock music and my experience of her most famous and long-running roles was almost nil. It means I remember her, perhaps unfairly, twenty-two years old and looking like the fair-haired avatar of all the white picket fences in the world, coming effortlessly up to speed on their shadows. She should have worked with David Lynch.

Current Music: Olivia Dean, "Nice to Each Other"

mark posting in

dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

cvirtue

I've been looking through (and printing out) stereograms from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, etc, to view on my stereoviewer. There are also some recently-published books of these which include a stereoviewer in the front cover.

Text from the back of the photo card; probably around 1930 (at the end of the popularity of stereograms)

"WHEN THE FROST IS ON THE PUN'K-IN, AND THE FODDER'S IN THE SHOCK" INDIANA. Lat. 40° N.; Long. 86° W.

Here is a genuine fall scene in the country You could almost walk across the cornfield by stepping from pumpkin to pumpkin. In the background are some fodder shocks, and beyond this lies the apple orchard. It is "gathering-in" time in the fall. In the bright days of autumn when the frost glitters in the early morning, farmers begin to gather in the crops.

James Whitcomb Riley, the Indiana poet, thought this the best time of the year. He tells about it in the poem that is the subject of this description. You have doubtless read others of his poems such as "When the Flag Goes By, "The Old Swimmin' Hole," "Out to Old Aunt Mary's." Riley was born in 1853 at Greenfield, Indiana. He had only a common school education. Then he went as an assistant to a patent medicine man. Later he began writing verse for the Indianapolis papers. He soon became popular as the "Hoosier Poet" , and is known all over the world where people like the poetry of common things. He died in 1916.

Whittier also wrote a poem on the pumpkin:

From his home in the north. On the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth, Where crook-necks are curling and yellow fruit shines, And the sun of September melts down on his vines.

What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye? What calls back the past like the rich pumpkin pie?

When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin, Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!"

The last lines refer to Hallowe'en when the shell of the pumpkin is used to make a head in which a candle is set.

137- (16755) Copyright by The Keystone View Company.

sovay

I can't listen to podcasts. It's the same problem as audio commentaries. They are difficult for me to extract information from. I make the occasional effort for friends or colleagues and otherwise read transcripts where available.

I have just discovered that Bill Nighy has a podcast. Apparently it launched on my birthday. It is the half-hour ill-advised by Bill Nighy. I am as we speak listening to the first episode which I selected at not very random considering there are only three so far:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are on the planet. Welcome to ill-advised by Bill Nighy—and the clue is in the title, particularly on the first word. The risk of getting to my age is that you can not infrequently be mistaken for somebody who knows what's happening or how to carry on, and you only have to take a quick look around the world to see how that's going, and how my generation are managing the planet, for instance. I mean, you may have picked up a few things along the way which might be of use, like, I don't know, parking, or online shopping, or not taking cocaine, obviously. But other than that, in all the big important things, I remain profoundly in the dark. But I try and keep a straight face when people start acting weird.

After which he immediately begins to tell the listener about his recent eye operation. It does eventually pertain to the nature of the podcast, but frankly it was such an ideal segue for a programme that bills itself as "a podcast for people who don't get out much and can't handle it when they do . . . a refuge for the clumsy and the awkward . . . an invitation to squander time" that it won me over to treating it as an audio drama whose laconically anxious and slightly acid narrator has a very good fund of self-deprecating stories that wind their way around to some species of advice, defined by Nighy as "not actually making things worse." He sounds unsurprisingly the way his interviews read. The difficulty of extracting information does not improve just because I like the speaker, but apparently I will now make the occasional effort for actors, too.

Update: the parking is a lie. Nighy spends most of the introduction to the second episode explaining that he cannot and never could park successfully. "I'd drive miles to find somewhere where you didn't actually have to park, you could just leave the car." Well done, Reginald?

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "Unsympathetic Parts 1 & 2"

boxofdelights posting in

wiscon

Hey you. Want to volunteer for a Feminist Inclusive Convention?

https://wiscon.net/volunteer/concom/

#WisConCommunity #WisCon #WisCon2026 #FeministSFF #Volunteer

sovay

I had a run-off-my-feet day, but I love the newly revealed cover for Afterlives 2024: The Year's Best Death Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas and shortly forthcoming from Psychopomp, in whose liminal mosaic is reprinted my queer, maritime, ice-dreaming story "Twice Every Day Returning." I am looking forward to that table of contents for myself. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of

isis: British Airways' "May We Haveth One's Attention" (2024) may be the most charming safety video I have seen since the legendary "Dumb Ways to Die" (2012). My only excuse for missing it last year is that I can't remember sleeping that month.

2. Courtesy of

moon_custafer: James Cagney, Chester Morris, and Edward G. Robinson on a Ferris wheel in 1934. The dark glasses donned by Mr. Morris are doing him no favors whatsoever except that he's making enthusiastic eye contact in the sun-flooded overhead shot.

3. Courtesy of

fleurdelis41: "The thread about the Loyal Edinburgh Spearmen; a force of very doubtful military significance." The caricature of "Mr Dundas" with his beaver hat and spectacles reminds me irresistibly of an Edward Gorey character. The overenthusiastic lighting of the beacons actually made me laugh out loud.

4. I discovered the inimitably named Blackbeard's Tea Party some years ago with the furious drumbeat of their "Ford o' Kabul River" and then almost immediately lost track of them again, but as they seem to have come out since with the whaling EP Leviathan! (2018) and the nightmare siren song of "Mother Carey," we're still good. Since they closed their first album with "Chicken on a Raft," I am delighted that their recorded repertoire now also includes "Roll and Go."

5. I meant last week to link the Divine Comedy's "Invisible Thread" (2025), especially since it was my father who found it after I had sent him another song from the same album.

Her memory for a blessing, Darleane Hoffman who studied transuranic elements and still got to die at ninety-eight. She was not unstable.

Current Music: Blackbeard's Tea Party, "The Diamond"

dewline

Yesterday, if memory serves, I added Public Health to my profile's list of interests. I consider that choice on my part long overdue.

Current Mood: busy

sovay

We had to wait until the clouds were only bands sliding across the stars like transparencies, but we saw the Orionids like sparklers in the southwestern sky, short streaks at the triple stars of the hunter's belt, one incredible fireball straight from the red coal of Betelgeuse at his shoulder. The air was softer than we had expected, but still clear enough for all seven of the Pleiades. Jupiter looked like gold inlay under the arm of Gemini. The DJ on WHRB commented melancholically on the cold turn of the weather and then played what she called a lot of warm songs to compensate. This is being a wonderful year for meteors.

Current Music: Dreamer Boy, "Lavender"

sovay

I liked so much of T. Kingfisher's What Stalks the Deep (2025), I just wish it had leaned as sfnally into its premise as it had the scope for.

( Or a fear that forces us to displace our identities? )

In conclusion, I enjoyed the novella, I argued with it, I finished it and wrote a long string of e-mails to

rushthatspeaks from which this post has been largely rearranged and went to bed and read Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) and "Vaster than Empires and More Slow" (1971). I can always re-read Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human (1953), too. And Elizabeth Bear's "Shoggoths in Bloom" (2008).

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "Consolation Prize"

dewline

I am seeing boxes of Kellogg's product in my suburban Ottawa grocery store. Branded Wednesday and Stranger Things Demogorgon Crunch.

My brain, of course, takes in the packaging on the latter, and flashes back to a first-season episode of Space: 1999 called "Dragon's Domain". Scared the hell out of grade-school-me when I first saw it on CBC Regina TV. I cannot help suspecting that if the the modern marketing mavens at Kellogg's saw that episode of that series, the title critter would be cartoonified on the front of boxes of something called Space: 1999 - Dragon's Delight.

Current Mood: nerdy

dewline

It's been fixed. City Hall's website is back to normal now. Since I posted my complaint on Bluesky...

https://bsky.app/profile/dewline.bsky.social/post/3m3qidgsrak25

Current Mood: satisfied

dewline

As noted on Bluesky:

https://bsky.app/profile/dewline.bsky.social/post/3m3qezg6ud225

"Blocked by our security service"?

Current Mood: worried

sovay

The rain eased off after four o'clock, but until I got to Chapin Beach I still thought I would be making an affectionately overcast farewell to Cape Cod Bay, not arriving just in time for one of those conch-pink flaming sunsets for which my camera creakily consented to make an effort for about five minutes before shutting itself back down again and stubbornly refusing to be coaxed further. I walked back and forth on the wet metallic sands and collected a fragment of white-and-purple-whorled shell and watched the clouds fade to peach and charcoal. I put my hands in the water where it ran clear over the wave-rounded litter all faintly green-tinged, just to feel it on my fingers colder than before. I had all the talismans necessary to remember myself.

( Did the shamrock on your shoulder bring good fortune and pay off? )

It was such good sea. I had not had so much of it daily in years. And it is not that I can get none of it in the still working seaport of Boston, and Cape Cod remains sandier than the mountain-folded ledges of Cape Elizabeth or the glacier-scraped boulders of Cape Ann, but it is still Atlantic and still cold to the touch and still live. I am home now and approved by Hestia for the second time in a month, an unusual sign of travel in my life these days. Dinner was with my parents and

spatch and came from Szechuan's Dumpling, who thanks to my being literally the last customer in and out of the restaurant threw in an order from earlier in the evening that no one had ever come to collect, i.e. free crab rangoon and what it just occurred to me to recognize as suan la chow show made by a kitchen that wasn't Mary Chung's. I did not get anywhere near as much done with my brain as I had wanted, but I am working on thinking of it as recharge rather than failure. I am not acclimated to unemployment. Tomorrow I plan nonetheless not to move very much.

Current Music: Dropkick Murphys, "Longshot (feat. The Scratch)"

dewline

So.

It's on, one more time.

Current Mood: busy
Current Music: "O Canada" by David Foster or "OK, Blue Jays"

alierak posting in

dw_maintenance

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

sovay

The oldest gravestone still extant in the Ancient Cemetery in Yarmouth dates back to 1698, but I did not encounter it as I photographed a small selection of winged death's heads and lichen. Afterward I went back to the salt marsh where my camera with unnecessary aptness apparently died.

( Wood and whisky, time and tar. )

Judah Thacher d. 1775 had a rather bland angel at the top of his gravestone, but some unusual stars and curlicues down the sides and above all both fancy lettering and the best memento mori I saw in the entire burying ground:

Reader ﬅand ﬅil & Spend a Tear
Think on the duﬅ that Slumbers he^re
& When you think on yͤ State of me
Think on yͤ glaas that runs for yͤ

I just side-eye my camera taking it to heart.

Current Music: Desperate Journalist, "No Hero"

sovay

Having somewhat wiped out my reserves with the glories of Corporation Beach, I only made it out to the salt marsh for about an hour between low tide and sunset, which was still great. I saw the copper-glaze glint of fiddler crabs in their burrows in the crenellated banks of mud. I saw the dark-fringed silhouette of an osprey sailing over the green-rusted brushes of cordgrass and salt hay, where they nest with the encouragement of the Callery Darling Conservation Area which includes the wetlands around the Bass Hole Boardwalk. The engine noise floating over from Chapin Beach turned out to belong to a powered paraglider who so annoyed me by effectively buzzing the boardwalk that I let all the other sunset viewers with their phones out enthusiastically take pictures of him. The long-billed, long-legged, unfamiliarly tuxedo-patterned shorebird stalking the deeper edges of a sandbar looks to have been a vagrant black-necked stilt. With the tide so far out, I am afraid there was little chance of another seal.

( Take a little comfort from the little you've done. )

After which I ate dinner, read a little, and passed out for about an hour and a half. Family and friends have been sending me pictures of No Kings, the necessity of which I hate and the turnout of which I cheer. My mother told me about her favorite sign she did not carry: a photograph of the butterfly, the only orange monarch we need. I loved everything about the spare, specific exploration of marginalized languages and historical queerness in Carys Davies' Clear (2024) until the slingshot of the ending as if the author had lost a chapter somewhere over the side in the North Sea. Since the Cape is still autumnal New England, I am drinking mulled cider.

Current Music: No Hero, "Comfort"

sovay

The very first thing that happened when I climbed over the huge barnacle-scaled chunks of granite and weathered pilings that form the breakwater at the western edge of Corporation Beach was that I saw a seal: sleek, dulse-dark, bobbing its head in the waves not more than two breakers offshore. It looked at me. I sang it the seal-calling song learned from Jean Redpath. If I had just spent the afternoon till sunset sitting on the breakwater and watching the tide come in serpentine-green under thick foam and burst into spray that showered me to the shoulders of my coat, it would have been a wonderful time.

( Penny on the water, tuppence on the sea. )

Being now officially unemployed after an internal ten and really fifteen years at the same job and having Robert Carlyle on my mind, I should probably just rewatch The Full Monty (1997). Tomorrow I plan on a salt marsh.

Current Music: The Watersons, "Hilda's Cabinet Band"

dewline

I'd love to go. I used to be a volunteer working with the organizing committee on designing promo stuff.

Two problems with going there in person:

1) No masking-required policy in place on public transit. If I can't walk to a destination or get a lift from a trustworthy driver, I only use public transit.

2) The venue is in Kanata, at the other end of Ottawa from where I live in Orléans.

So.

If you're going, please be careful. 😷