spatch

Last Sunday I was walking across City Hall plaza after ringing and heard drums. I like drums. I may have even said so out loud, to myself. Someone handed me a flyer with the order of the groups - Haitian, Irish, Chinese, Malian (sp?), Lebanese?, two different indigenous groups from Massachusetts, someone from the African American history museum on Beacon hill doing a dramatic reading, probably others I've forgotten. Not just drums, but other instruments, but rhythm was a theme of the afternoon. It was great. I ended up listening for an hour and a half. There were not very many people in the audience. I had not heard of the event beforehand. They should have done more publicity.
Have members of various groups pulled into a dabke

At today's pungmul practice I felt that I had suddenly been rocketed into several levels past my comfort zone. The leader would recite a rhythm and expect us to do it? We've started singing? There was an earnest discussion about her perception that we were rushing. I said that I don't have basis for comparison, but that it wasn't clear to me that it was happening. I made the point that rushing is different from being fast, generally. This is a problem with my tap class sometimes - even if the music is fast, it doesn't mean that you should rush past the beat. I didn't mention this thought. I may have insulted the buk player by saying that I was basing my speed on hers. I certainly didn't mean to imply that she's not doing a good job, because I think she is.
Buk
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/F8oAAOSwQVNjkap7/s-l1600.webp
Out of the blue the leader asked if I would like to play the jing at a workshop in a month or so. I immediately said yes. I think she was startled. How was she to know that I would be itching to play a low-pitched bronze percussion instrument?

I would have to be walking around while doing this at the time. The buk player pointed out that it's heavier than my drum. I've watched a bunch of videos and everybody holds it in their left hand while striking it with the right. My right arm is stronger - if necessary, could I do it the other way around? I don't know why not. Maybe I'll start walking around the house with a dumbbell, just to bulk up (as if, one might think).

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!

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"

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"

lauradi7dw

I posted several times when Cory Booker was in the midst of his long talking streak in the senate. I didn't do the same thing the other day when Jeff Merkley did 16 hours.

Watch on YouTube

The easily distracted woman (me) wonders how many shift changes there were for the stenographer, hands seen lower right.

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"

asakiyume

I added two new books to my reading mix: Breath Warmth & Dream, by Zig Zag Claybourne. I enjoy the author's social media posts (when I happen to see them, which isn't that often), and he and C.S.E. Cooney are big mutual fans. So I decided to try something of his, and so far, I'm enjoying it. It's told in a leisurely way, and I like the characters. Here, Khumalo, a powerful witch who's waiting for her daughter to return from a sea journey, talks with a beggar woman at the harbor:

“You’re so tall,” Orsys remarked.

“Do you like that?” Khumalo said kindly.

“I do.” When Orsys smiled, every wrinkle on her sun-bleached face moved like sudden lightning flashes, brightening the old woman’s visage immeasurably.

“How many people have come off ships hoping to see your smile, dear one?” said Khumalo.

I'm reading this as an ebook, which means the other ebook I've been reading, The Apothecary Diaries, is taking a temporary back seat.

Then there's also Butter, by Asako Yuzuki. I was intrigued by

osprey_archer's review, but it's not a book I'd pick up for pleasure. However, it **is** the sort of book I'd read in my book group, and I had to pick the next book, so I've picked it. Only in the beginning pages, but enjoying it so far.

Neruda's Book of Questions isn't the sort of thing I read cover-to-cover; I prefer to dip in. How will I know when I'm done, though? What if there are ones I keep on missing? A Problem.

As I dip into it just now to find something to share, I'm coming across ones I *don't* like: they're opaque to me, or the images or juxtapositions don't speak to me.

But I like the bottom half of one:

Why do [waves] strike the rock
with so much wasted passion?

Don't they get tired of repeating their declaration to the sand?

And I like the whole of this one:

You don't believe that dromedaries
keep moonlight in their humps?

Don't they sow it in the desert
with secret persistence?

And hasn't the sea been lent
for a brief time to the earth?

Won't we have to give it back
with its tides to the moon?

He uses questions in the negative a lot.

lauradi7dw

I can't find the discussion, but sometime in the past year,

kshandra and

nosrednayduj suggested that I buy an electric mattress warmer. I considered it, but since I don't like buying things online, especially not from Amazon (1) I didn't get it. This fall I decided to start looking earlier. I read reviews. A member of the knitting group said that as long as it's UL listed, the differences aren't big, so buy whatever was available. I called around. I looked physically. I heard that Kohl's might have them. On the phone they said no, but when I was in the area yesterday anyway, I stopped by. They had one Serta brand version for each bed size. One was enough, so I bought it. I didn't start early enough in the evening getting everything set up, so it was at least an hour later than I planned before I went to bed. The directions were clear that it had to be plugged directly into the wall, so I had rummage around behind the desk instead of just plugging it into the surge-protector extension cord. I read that much of the instructions, but apparently missed the part where you're supposed to push not just the power button but also the "preheat" button. I spent a long time wondering whether I'd bought a defective one, but caught the error eventually. I probably should have put on my reading glasses. I had it on long enough to warm things up, then turned it off. I spent a while being the princess and the pea, convinced that I could feel the little wires, but got used to it and slept warmly, under only three layers of covers instead of four. Sample size of one night, but it does seem to be a quality of life improvement.

I had never had an inflatable yard decoration until this year. Over time, I admired a large dragon that used to be in Lowes in the fall, but never invested. Last year I saw a BT21 (2) decoration and decided that if I could find one this year, I'd buy it. I got it on Ebay for $106. More directions to be followed. I immediately lost one of the little tent stakes, but I had all the others and it seems fine.

The large outdoor-rated extension cord is plugged into the socket on the screened-in part of the porch, so the screen door is propped open. I have a timer somewhere, but haven't looked for it. Maybe I should, because I keep forgetting to turn it off, and it has had two overnights on. Last night may have just as well. It seems to cope OK with the rain, but when it was deflated during the day on Monday, puddles formed all over it.Possibly last night's rain just rain off the inflated item.

(1) I was unaffected by the Amazon outage, but know someone who teaches CPR classes. He couldn't register people through the American Heart Association page because it was down.

(2) Each BTS member made up creatures for some sort of promotion. Merch is available. See icon above, with Koya on my backpack. It's the same Koya that is on my lawn inflatable.

gingicat posting in

davis_square

I am seeking anecdotal advice about cycling in the Somerville-Medford-Malden area. Even the amazing Susan McLucas could not teach me to ride a bicycle (I can't keep myself from looking down on a turn) so I am considering investing in an adult tricycle with or without power assist. (I can fall down and bang myself up while walking with something in my hands that throws my balance off-center, too.)

My issue is that as a motorist, I have noticed that I often don't have room to pass a cyclist. I keep pace with the cyclist until I can safely pass with two or more feet between the side of the car and the cyclist. I very much appreciate the roads painted with the indication that cyclists are allowed to ride down the middle of the car lane!

How well is this honored? Am I a typical motorist when it comes to cyclist safety?

lauradi7dw

Watch on YouTube

lauradi7dw

My maternal grandmother's birthday was October 14. She died 30 years ago and wasn't particularly famous, so no celebrations occurred this year. But I've had three dreams in the past week set in her house or the vicinity. As I was growing up, it was just my grandparents' house and my parents' house in woods, mostly, plus yards and my grandparents' gardens. * The bit that I remember from last week's dream was that Arthur and I were both living in her house (in separate bedrooms) and were arguing about how high to set the thermostat.
First dream last night: Arthur and I were throwing meat out into the woods but before the wild boars could get it, a bobcat showed up. This makes no sense in any context - we wouldn't have had meat to begin with, and while there were woods, there certainly were no wild boars or bobcats. The second dream had some members of Stray Kids in my grandmother's kitchen. That is at least as implausible as the wild animals. I don't think I need to notify Audrey and her family (who live in that house now, although the kitchen is nothing like my grandmother's) to watch out for global stars.

*after she died, my mother and her brother sold most of the land, and now it's a 20+ house development.

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)"

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"

moon_custafer

I don’t usually have dreams within dreams, but I kept trying to tell various uninterested parties about the dream I’d had about a Saturday matinee on a spaceship, with a handful of kids down in front watching some old black-and-white serial on the screen, and a throuple of shapeshifters making out in the back row.

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"

lauradi7dw

First part of today's schedule was the No Kings assembly in Lexington Center. I took lots of pictures. I think this was my favorite sign.

The combination of a joke (orange monarch being Trump and the butterfly) with a positive action (planting milkweed) seemed ideal to me.
I didn't see many people I knew very well, but passed folks I hadn't seen in a while, including some I probably hadn't seen since our daughters were in Girl Scouts. Some people look just the same, some look so old to me. One of the speakers was Ed Markey. He seemed full of energy as always when he's doing public speaking. He's 80. I kind of agree that there should be an age limit (or term limits?) for public office, but I'm not sure what it should be.

The buses were running late due to traffic (no marchers in the streets, but many cars), so I left early enough to walk two miles to be on time to a memorial service. Packed church, almost no masks. Fond remembrances, moving music. Same thing - people I hadn't seen in a while, some visibly older, others pretty much the same. The person being memorialized was 81 and had been in ill health for several years.

After that I went to the river for some Head of the Charles experience. One of the races I watched was mixed gender quad (four people, each with two oars, no coxswain). Many of the crews were family groups. In one of them, the announcer made it a point to say that there were three generations, including someone who was 81 years old.

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"

I like drums

So can we say we'll never say the classic stuff, just show it?

Database maintenance

Cigarette, Alka-Seltzer, career to the back of the place

The rose will grow on ice before we change our mind

Should have mentioned

I can see the alchemy

Is it the lustre of immortality?

Reading update

new electrical devices

advice/thoughts on local cycling

A special edition of the we do not care cllub

Is it because it was just her birthday?

Did karma do you justice when you're down and out and lost?

AWS outage

Distant as a northern star

Dream Journal

You don't have to fly into the sun

Thinking about aging again (including multiple 80 year olds)

And deregulate the couple at the bottom end

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