fishlifter | Reading

andrewducker

1. The Commissioner for human rights for the Council of Europe warns that Britain's treatment of trans people could breach the ECHR: (tags:rights europe uk transgender lgbt )
2. Have you made the Ur-Ur error?: (tags:language history )
3. A human-faced stone from 12 thousand years ago was found in Karahan Tepe (Turkey): (tags:turkey archeology prehistory )
4. Afghanistan commando who served with British Army is deported to Taliban (because the Home Office failed to get paperwork done): (tags:Afghanistan UK military migration OhForFucksSake )
5. How UK recognising Palestine helped win Arab support for Trump's Gaza deal: (tags:UK Gaza Israel diplomacy )
6. Enzymes successfully converted a kidney to universal type O for transplant, marking a major step toward faster, more compatible organ donations.: (tags:organdonor technology GoodNews )
7. Waymo's Robotaxis Are Coming to London in 2026: (tags:taxis automation Technology london uk )
8. So far, in 2025, Britain has wasted more than £1Billion switching off wind turbines and paying gas plants to switch on.: (tags:waste electricity uk OhForFucksSake )

tamaranth

2025/160: Olive and the Dragon — Victoria Goddard

Olive had dreamed of the next days a hundred times, for all it was no necessary tragedy for any of them, seeing fragments play out of a hundred different choices.
No necessary tragedy, if she chose aright.[loc. 61]

A novella set well before the beginning of the 'Greenwing and Dart' series, Olive and the Dragon focuses on Jemis Greenwing's mother Olive (deceased before the series proper) and her gift of seeing possibilities and probabilities. ( Read more... )

Current Mood: cheerful

calimac

Ursula K. Le Guin's Book of Cats (Library of America, 2025)

The Word for World: The Maps of Ursula K. Le Guin, edited by So Mayer and Sarah Shin (Silver Press and AA Publications, 2025)

Le Guin, cats, and maps - three of my favorite things. How could I resist? I ordered both of these (the second is from the UK, and is in connection with an exhibition) in advance, not knowing what I was going to get.

The Book of Cats is not a regular Library of America publication - it's short (about 100 pages) and on thicker, lightly tinted paper. It's not a complete collection of her writings on cats - no Catwings, no essays on the life of Pard. But it does have a lot of cat poems, only some of which have been previously published, and a couple of author-drawn picture stories, one on the art of cat arranging (or how to lounge in a typical feline fashion), which has only been seen before as a rare pamphlet, and a cat-and-mouse superhero comic, and some other illustrations, and a delightful series of letters among cats about proper behaviors, like Head Scratching:

When the Female Human is facing the wrong way in bed she needs to be rearranged, so I come and scratch the top of her head until she turns over and faces the correct direction so that I can lie down beside her pillow with my butt in her face and go to sleep.

Lastly, an annotated and dated list of all 20 cats which had custody of UKL in her lifetime (plus a photo of her at age 3 petting the first in the set), from which I figured that the one I met on my one visit to her house was Lorenzo aka Bonzo, whom she introduced to me as an "elderly gentleman" as he lay cradled in her arms.

The Word for World intersperses maps, mostly hand-drawn by UKL herself, with essays by various hands. Some of the maps are previously published, some are not. The unpublished ones include maps of Earthsea with tiny differences from the published ones, further talismanic maps of the Valley of the Na, diagrams of seasons on Werel (the one from Planet of Exile - keep up, now), and most interesting, a map of the provinces, principal cities, and major rivers of Orsinia, which does look a lot more like Hungary than it does like Czechoslovakia - I always thought it would.

I've never found critical writings on Le Guin to be as interesting as those on some of my other favorite writers, and that's true here too. The only essay I got much out of was the one by her son Theo, which talked about influences - the vital role of the ranch Kishamish in her life, a map of St Helena she found in France which may have affected her style, a comparison of her aesthetics with those of Tolkien. I really appreciated that.

andrewducker

Today I spent £108 on getting myself vaccinated against Flu and Covid.

Which led me to wonder what the cost of days off is to the economy. And how far off we are from it being worth the government vaccinating everyone.

tamaranth

2025/159: They Called Us Enemy — Justin Eisinger, Steven Scott, George Takei

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, over a hundred thousand Japanese-Americans (the majority US citizens) were relocated to internment camps. George Takei's family was among those affected, and this is his account of what it was like, as a small boy, to be taken away from everything he knew. At the time it was a great and often joyous adventure, but as a teenager he raged against his father for not standing up to the authorities. Only in later life did he come to understand how his parents did whatever they could to protect their three children.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

calimac

Today the first rains of the season arrived. It poured heavily and wetly for about four hours, which is longer than the heavy downpours usually last around here. Nevertheless I ventured out into it, and I was far from the only one, to the local history museum for an evening talk about Eichlers.

No veteran residents in Silicon Valley need to be told what that means. An Eichler is a home built by the developer Joseph Eichler, who in the 1950s-70s was one of the many builders busy turning the local orchards into tract housing developments. Eichlers came in various models, but they all had a strong family resemblance, and until the imitations ("Like-lers") came along, looked like nothing else for sale in the middle-class housing market.

For one thing, they were built in post-and-beam construction, with no load-bearing walls. That meant those walls could be light or intermittent or even made of glass. The resultant opening up to the outside (many Eichlers came with courtyards or atria) and the Prairie School-like expansiveness of the beam-driven construction is what made Eichlers feel like "Frank Lloyd Wright for the masses," more effectively than Wright's own Usonian houses.

Eichlers are easily recognizable from the outside by their beam ends, grooved wood on the facades, and low-slung roof rises. To this day there are whole blocks in this area with nothing but Eichlers.

The speaker was a real estate agent who specializes in Eichlers. He talked a lot about maintaining sale value and on remodeling to update Eichlers (original construction was a bit shoddy) while keeping the mid-20C spirit of the original. Most of the audience were Eichler owners concerned about whether their neighbors were going to build second stories. I grew up in an Eichler but haven't lived in one for many years; I may have been the only person there whose primary interest was in architecture as an art form. Nevertheless when I asked a question along those lines, the speaker proved to be well-informed.

I learned something of the history of Eichlers, both the firm and the style of houses; and where exactly they are. I learned that the realtor keeps maps of Eichler developments, such as this one of my town; my family's Eichler was in Fairbrae Addition, the big red blotch in the middle of the map. Here, this is a typical Eichler.

andrewducker

1. Wikipedia:List of citogenesis incidents: (tags:Wikipedia fraud memetics )
2. Forget EVs. Cycling is revolutionising transport: (tags:transport cycling )
3. The UK Supreme Court is quietly editing the Human Rights Act out of existence (and has been for years): (tags:UK rights law OhForFucksSake )

tamaranth

2025/158: The Summer I Ate the Rich — Maika Moulite and Maritza Moulite

...what I am doing is only leveling the playing field. I have claimed my power for myself just as these wealthy people have done time and time again. And I will not feel bad about it, even if I am bending the rules to my will. [p. 319]

Brielle Petitfour is seventeen, Haitian-American, a gifted cook who's planning to start up a supper club in order to pay the bills. Her mother Valentine is in constant pain, and her health insurance won't pay out for the medication she needs. Brielle's father is out of the picture, and isn't the father of her half-sisters in Haiti, who form a Greek chorus (they're named after the Muses) to contextualise Brielle's family history. Brielle's best friend Marcello, also a chef and helping with Brielle's supper club, is expected to go into the family business: his grandmother runs a funeral parlour, which for complicated reasons is popular with the wealthy of Miami.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: cheerful

calimac

1. The concert I went to up in the hills was a wind octet concert I was reviewing for the Daily Journal.

With a remote winery setting and with a fancy hot hors d'oeuvres and wine buffet out on the balcony beforehand (the grilled salmon skewers were delicious), this was a concert designed for the well-off to enjoy themselves. The general location, in the thoroughly Well-offville part of the area, and the extremely steep admission price, also contributed to the effect. I wouldn't have gone if I hadn't been comped as a reviewer.

However, I'm glad I did go, because the music was excellent, and so were the acoustics of the tiny hall. Two each of oboe, clarinet, bassoon, and horn played one of Mozart's serenades for that combo. (No flutes? Some claim Mozart didn't like the instrument. Others claim that that's false.) Then a piece by Ruth Gipps, who is one of those mid-20C women composers like Florence Price who is slowly bubbling up from obscurity. And a modern arrangement of excerpts from Smetana's 19C opera The Bartered Bride, complete with a narration amusingly emphasizing how confusing the plot is.

2. Up in the City, the Attacca Quartet took a brisk and compact Haydn quartet (Op. 50/5) and a brisk and compact Bartok quartet (no. 4) and played them to be even more brisk and compact. Also a piece by David Lang (daisy) in his characteristic style of repeating fragments until they add up to something; and a collection of miscellaneous pieces that weren't listed in the program and which I didn't catch what the first violinist said about them.

On my way to this concert, timing was such that I was able to stop off at a farewell party for a household of three that I know who are moving to Ireland this week (one of them being able to claim citizenship there by virtue of ancestry), not the only people I know leaving the US for good. Fortunately the dire implications of this did not dominate the conversations, and everyone was in a rather cheery mood. Many people there whom I knew in the 1970s and '80s but haven't seen much since. We're all a lot older.

3. Harmonia California, a little nonprofessional string orchestra, did a gratifyingly good job on some Mozart (including the delightful but little-known K. 136 Divertimento) and Bach (the Double Violin Concerto), and then ventured into two obscurer pieces from the turn of the 20C, both excellent works it was a pleasure to hear: Anton Arensky's Variations on a Theme of Tchaikovsky and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Four Noveletten. Gratifyingly well worth going to.

andrewducker

The children have located Christmas.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

calimac

Well, maybe not that accursed. This is the fourth time I've given this paper - it was premiered less than 15 months ago - and only the second time something went wrong.

The first time was the other time. I was ill and isolating at the conference and couldn't read the paper. So the papers coordinator did it for me.

This time was for a regular meeting of a Zoom group online. In the middle of reading it from the Word copy on my screen, my computer froze. I had to apologize and take a break. In the end, I had to hard-reboot the computer (i.e. press the power button) and it took almost 20 minutes to get everything up and running again, counting all the kerfluffle I'd spent trying to avoid having to do that. How embarrassing.

The other two times went very well indeed. So yes, maybe not that accursed.

tamaranth

2025/157: Saltwash — Andrew Michael Hurley

English delapidation was... the blistered formica on the tables of a seafront cafe. Derelict gift shops and thrift shops with whitewashed windows. A pub with steel plates over its doors. Cracked, pebble-dashed sheters along the promenade, roosted by gulls. [loc. 168]

I've enjoyed Hurley's previous novels (The Loney, Starve Acre, Devil's Day -- I note that I read all those in the space of two months!) but found Saltwash thoroughly depressing: bleak, nihilistic and devoid of joy. The setting (the eponymous Northern seaside town in November, delapidated and down on its luck) is dispiriting, and the protagonist is dying of cancer and raddled by guilt.( Read more... )

Current Mood: disappointed

andrewducker

My mum had a heart attack yesterday afternoon, followed by an angioplasty.

She was sitting up in bed and drinking coffee by 9pm last night, and seems to be fine now. They're keeping her in until Monday to make sure, but panic over.

Turns out that an angioplasty is nowadays an outpatient operation under local anaesthetic, with over 97% success rate. Modern medicine is awesome. And thank fuck for the NHS!

calimac

Some time ago I wrote of my delighted discovery of Taylor Swift's Tiny Desk Concert, in which she played her songs in simple arrangements I found agreeable, unlike the overproductions of the Eras Tour which was Not For Me.

A few commenters gave suggestions of other TAS numbers I might find agreeable, but they didn't mention what turned out to be the gold mine. DGK sent me links to a couple videos extracted from a documentary film called folklore: the long pond studio sessions, which is on Disney+. The songs are a bit much of a sameness for me to want to listen to all at once, especially with the documentary natter in between, and the songs are more immediately impressive than they are lovable, though the ones I heard first are growing on me rapidly - but only in these versions; I listened to other performances and, nah. Any one or two of them - not just those two - are in this version very much the kind of popular music I want to hear.

Apart from the addition of a guest vocalist on one song, it's just her and two guys, variously on piano and acoustic guitar, occasionally a little light percussion or a soft electric guitar which only once threatens to get even slightly loud. Very soft and gentle and intimate, and quite sophisticated and complex songwriting.

Here's the two songs DGK sent me. The rest can also be found on YouTube with a "long pond studio sessions" search.

Watch on YouTube

tamaranth

2025/156: Dreamhunter Duet — Elizabeth Knox

'I was finished. I wanted time to stop, and to let me stop with it. And I wanted revenge.
I ... said to the land, 'Bury me, and rise up. Rise up and crush them all.' [loc. 5131]

Rereads, after reading Kings of This World -- which is set in the same alt-Aotearoa-New Zealand, rather later than the Dreamhunter duet, which begins in 1906. My original reviews from (OMG) 2005 and 2007 are here: The Rainbow Opera and The Dream Quake.

The link points to the first of two volumes: the second has only just become available on Amazon.

( Read more... )

Current Mood: thoughtful

andrewducker

1. How to weigh an octopus in only 8 wriggly steps: (tags:octopus weight video )

tamaranth

2025/155: Sabella — Tanith Lee

There are genuine ruins (beware tourist traps) here and there. Thin pillars soaring, levelled foundations crumbling, cracked urns whispering of spilled dusts -- all the Martian dreams that old Mars denied to mankind. [loc. 53]

Another reread, when I was (unsuspectingly) coming down with a migraine: I last read this in the last millennium, and had forgotten much of it. It's a short novel, an SF vampire romance set on Novo Mars -- like original Mars, but pink rather than red, with rapid sunsets and mutated earth-import flora and fauna.

The novel opens with Sabella Quey receiving an invitation to her aunt's funeral. There's an ominous bequest (her aunt was a devout Christian Revivalist, and knew about Sabella's unsavoury youth) and a gorgeous young man who tracks Sabella back to her isolated home, and does not question her about her aversion to sunlight, or the bottles of red juice ('pomegranate and tomato juice... my physician makes it up for me') in the fridge.

( Read more... )