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The cool temps aren't as cool as I'd hoped, but will take them over the high 20s forecast next week. Am seriously considering returning Amina for the next person because what I want is easy care, tried and true Brit stuff, Miss Silver and Inspector Littlejohn, not complicated fantasy. However, Damned finally appears in the middle of postal shenanigans, so shall read that as a compromise: Brit (alright, European) fantasy. And thanks very much, G.

mallorys_camera

Damn.

Well, yesterday started out well enough.

I pulled out the last six wheelbarrels of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & other assorted weeds from my New Paltz community garden plot.

Before:

After:

I deserved a treat!

So, I trotted over to Hudson Valley Chocolates, and found Stephanie hard at work:

Stephanie is the French-born choclatier who supplies bonbons for the Mohonk Mountain House and various other upscale venues around the Hudson Valley. She has a small shop here in town that keeps whimsical hours: It's open when she feels like being open.

Wallkill is a place where the men walk around in teeshirts that say, Unvacinated, Unmasked, Republican, Straight. In the spring, summer, & fall, Wallkill is an intensely beautiful place, but it is filled with the most horrible people, so there's no reason to go anywhere near it.

But if there was a reason to go near Wallkill, that reason would be to visit Stephanie's shop, Hudson Valley Chocolates:

Got home. Nibbled chocolate. Began Remunerating. Ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

Remunerating is dry stuff. I have to keep wiping my brain clean of excess jargon in between those weighty bouts of regression analysis. To do that, I surf the web—journal entries (and y'all do not write enough!), blogs, celebrity scandals, and when I'm really hard up, news.

Yesterday, the news was unrelentingly horrible.

From Ice Barbie's press conference at which a United States Senator—a Senator!—was handcuffed and brutalized to Israel's massive bombing of Iran.

This is all so fuckin' NUTS.

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I can't remember the name of the podcast I sometimes listen to that once did a show about superpowers. Specifically: What superpower do people most wish they had?

I do remember that time travel was the most popular superpower—though not by a huge margin.

And if you drilled down into the sample of people who wanted to be able to time travel, they all wanted to be able to time travel for the same reason—so they could kill Hitler!

Well, now we all have the chance to kill Hitler.

That must be the silver lining in the current cloud, right?

lauradi7dw

The claim in this article is that the Better Bus program routes for Lexington will finally be implemented by the end of the summer. I have been living in town since the late 1980s and there has never been service on Sundays. If this really happens, it will be amazing, worth trading for not having a bus come to my nearest stop much in the middle of weekdays.
https://lexobserver.org/2025/06/12/lexingtons-mbta-bus-service-to-expand-in-august/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=d73cb0db17-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_06_13_02_55&utm_source=Lexington+Observer&utm_term=0_-d73cb0db17-644144057

conuly

No, but I'd like to tell you that you urgently need a proofreader. Are you aware that you just made me answer the same question about my desired salary three different ways? Once was plenty enough! Also, why are you asking what currency I want it in, and since you are asking, why is one time US dollar at the top of the drop down and the other two times it's alphabetical under "United States"? Did you even look at this before posting, and once again afterwards?

(These people really urgently need help with this, but unless this is a Secret Test I guess telling them wouldn't help me much.)

Alternative answer to the question: "Yes, I'd like to tell you that I really need money, please give me some, with or without hiring me first."

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mtbc

We have been somewhat lucky with the weather recently. We had a lovely day for when my two children visited for some walking and shopping in Glasgow city centre. We similarly had a lovely day for visiting Edinburgh, we finally got to explore the botanic garden. Our luck runs out this weekend: we had planned to go camping again. Last time went well but the weather forecast for tomorrow looks grim so we will get things done here at home instead.

sovay

Current events currenting as they are, I appreciated reading about Gertrude Berg and hearing the news from Spaceballs: The Sweatshirt.

spatch came home with T-shirt swag for the latest Wes Anderson film and it is almost parodically minimalist with its screen-print of Air Korda.

I enjoyed Agatha Christie's Ordeal by Innocence (1958) so much that I am mildly horrified to discover that of the one film and three television adaptations to date, none appears to be simultaneously faithful to the novel and good. It doesn't push its interrogation of the amateur detective as far as Sayers or Tey, but it does care about what the question of justice looks like when the first fruits of a well-intended posthumous exoneration are neither closure not catharsis but instant rupture down all the fault lines of resentment, distrust, disappointment, and malice that the open-and-shut obviousness of the original investigation glossed over. Was justice even the spur to begin with, or just a belated alibi's anxious sense of guilt? The plot wraps up like its dramatis personae all had somewhere else to be, but until then it hangs out much longer in its misgivings than many of Christie's puzzles. Some of its ideas about adoption and heredity have worn much less well than its premise, but I liked the scientist explaining that his work in geophysics is too technical to afford him to be absent-minded.

In all the studio-diorama aesthetic of the video for Nation of Language's "Inept Apollo" (2025), the shot of the Tektronix 2205 made it for me. I grew up with a 2465.

Current Music: Nation of Language, "Inept Apollo"

conuly

Well, that kinda covers the gamut of illness there, so maybe figure it out?

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lauradi7dw

I was about to post a thought here that felt monumental when I thought it but seems goofy when typing it out.
My little stable of faithful readers doesn't need to be burdened with a self-revelation about socks.
Also, is it rude to reach out to a friend who was part of a group apartment in the late 1970s to ask a question about a conversation from the time? Arthur was another one of the friends in that apartment, and I'm not reaching out to ask him.

lauradi7dw

Mel Brooks is looking pretty good.

Watch on YouTube

conuly

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mallorys_camera

Did my four wheelbarrows of thistles, brambles, bee balm, & loose ground cover at the New Paltz garden early-ish yesterday morning.

Then one of the garden elders came down the path, pushing a rototiller that does everything but make coffee. Nodded at the approximately one-third of the garden that still needs to be cleared. Asked, Would you like me to use this to...?

And I said, No, because beneath the thistles, brambles, & bee balm, I keep uncovering delicate plants that were once part of some previous occupant's ornamental garden, and I wanted to give those delicate plants a chance to thrive once more.

And the garden elder nodded as if I had passed some sort of test!

"You're doing it the right way!" he proclaimed. "Give a holler when you've finished clearing the big stuff & I'll come back with this & help you with the low weeds."

Which would indeed be a God send. I really hate digging with a shovel.

Shortly, I will be scampering out to log today's wheelbarrow quota before it gets hot.

###

Other than that, I have been feeling super-anxious about the political situation.

It has occurred to me—and to 50 million other armchair analysts—that Trump's vanity birthday parade this Saturday with all those tanks is really just a pretext to turn the White House into some kind of armored fortress for when Trump declares martial law. Which will also be on Saturday. I mean, Saturday is fuckin' Flag Day! Could the symbolism be any more flagrant?

And I am anxious, and I am scared, but I am also disgusted: All of this was outlined in exhaustive detail in Project 2025. It's like American voters failed an open book test.

Hoping I'm wrong.

But the dots seem to connect, and the picture is one we've seen before.

Humans are ridiculous and territorial, and they never, ever fuckin' learn.

flemmings

I sometimes zone out into semi-sleep and have fragmentary dreams that confuse me when I come to. Haven't done it in years and don't even know if I did it this morning, but all through physio I was tormented by the idea that I'd been googling something or saw something on Facebook that involved scheduling for something and I couldn't remember what it was. Which might have been doom-scrolling with half my attention or could actually be a mental glitch. Not helped by air quality, mug, TO definitions of too hot, or whatever else that was futzing with my breathing. We'll be back to the mid-teens briefly by week's end, which will help. I am part Pratchett troll and my brain doesn't operate at anything over 20C.

Finished The Scholar and the Last Faerie Door, and Sethra Lavode, also a couple of Miss Silvers. Must start The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi.

SND texts me about is it OK to get an arborist in to cut the branches of the cherry that overhang her yard, on account of cherries not being good for dogs. Never bothered Sadie but Ollie is a very young pup and a different breed. I of course said yes and offered to split the cost. Knew there'd be a major expense this year to offset my virtuous thrift, but oh well.

sovay

I got home to find the day's mail had brought my contributor's copy of Not One of Us #83, containing my poem "Below Surface." It is a poem of empire; I wrote it at the start of the third week in January after shouting, "I ran out of curse tablets!" It bears about as much relation to the realities of the Emperors who died at Eboracum as the medieval Welsh legends of Constantius and I see no reason that should impair its efficacy. The issue it belongs to is gone, showcasing the elusive fiction and poetry of Steve Toase, Christian Fiachra Stevens, J. M. Vesper, Vincent Bae, and more. John and Flo Stanton contribute interior art as well as the reliable spirit photography of their front and back covers. You might as well pick up a copy before it disappears.

I photographed some ghost windows. I bought myself some white chocolate peanut butter cups.

selkie's gift of tinned mackerel with lemon did not survive the night.

Current Music: Billy Bragg, "A Pict Song"

lauradi7dw

On Monday I went to hear/see the Tallis Scholars with The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble

This is the 50th year for Tallis Scholars, although I am not sure that any of the original people are part of the group except founder/director Peter Phillips. He is just a couple of years older than I am. Did anything I did at that age have lasting value to the world? Maybe not. I first remember attending a concert they did in the 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tallis_Scholars
The English Cornett & Sackbut Ensemble has been around for 38 years but have also had personnel changes, including fairly recently, I think. At the time Peter Phillips was getting together a bunch of his student friends to sing, I was briefly playing sackbut in an early music ensemble. Badly. I played trombone in high school, which meant that my arm was always going to the wrong place on the slide out of muscle memory. The sackbut is different enough that it made me off-pitch. I gave up soon and went back to playing bass recorder in the group. For most of the music I was playing, the bass was just long tones while the other players were doing more complex stuff, so it was OK for me (not worrying that I would mess up) and a relief for them, because they didn't have to take turns doing the "boring" part, not that they ever expressed it quite that way.
The "see" part mentioned above was about internally critiquing their clothes. PP's looked just a little too tight. He could conduct fine anyway. One of the cornett players (there were two, and I don't know which is which) was wearing a jacket that didn't quite match his trousers. The jacket looked like it had just been tossed into a bag and then badly steamed. I probably spend too much time reading https://dieworkwear.com/
Some of the sopranos and altos had sparkly stuff on their outfits. This is not uncommon for women performing classical music, but I found it distracting.

Yesterday I was pleased to see the Keytar Bear in the Harvard Red Line station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keytar_Bear

I can't prove that this is continuity - has it been the same person inside the suit for 14 years?

mallorys_camera

Cool car I saw in the parking lot at the gym:

Shortly, I must toddle off to the New Paltz garden for more weeding as it's supposed to get hot this afternoon.

Yesterday, I did very little of anything except tromp (Winding Hills, steep) and start rereading Tracy Daugherty's biography of Joan Didion—which is not as good as Tracy Daugherty's bio of Larry McMurtry.

I suspect Didion simply did not engage Daugherty as much: She is an excellent prose writer, but comes across as an unsympathetic human being, unspontaneous, unlikeable, studied to an extreme. One gets the impression that Didion hovered over her words like a vulture hovering over a skull, wondering, Did I miss anything the first time I picked this clean? It probably took her half an hour to write a single sentence.

McMurtry, in contrast, was a kind of mad, slapdash writer. Every morning of his life, he was up and at that typewriter by 7:30 a.m., typing away like a maniac. By 9 a.m., he'd have produced 10 pages. And then he'd stop.

Ten pages in an hour and a half! That's crazy fast!

And probably accounts for his uneven output: Easily half of what McMurtry wrote is really baaaaad.

But McMurtry draws the reader in in a way that Didion is simply not capable of doing. One must parse Didion's sentences. And that is exhausting when one is reading for pleasure. Hence, one never reads Didion for pleasure.

Interestingly, both Didion and McMurtry are ultimately what you might call regional writers. Didion's region was California; McMurtry's region was Texas. And each writer's finest output amounts to kind of a harvest of regional tropes: Didion's basket is "the pioneer," while McMurtry's is "the American West."

conuly

As always, Evil!Janeway is hot, though less so than the Living Witness version. It's the eyes - our main characters all have huge eyes, so the somewhat more realistically animated adult human characters look slightly uncanny valley, even though their eyes ought to make sense.

Also, damn, Chakotay has got some arms! Is this true IRL? I don't remember ever seeing the live actor ever without sleeves....

Also also, I honestly love every time Gwen gets a moment of happiness, no matter how small. She really has had a miserable life. Every second chasing replicated pie over the ship, or squirting whipped cream into her mouth, or, one hopes, finally spending some time playing goofy holodeck games, is a second worth living. And so, I will say, I appreciate that the animators took the time to let her smirk a little when Evil!Chakotay proposed starting his torture session with "the cute one", aka Murf the Indestructible. You gotta find those moments of joy when you can, sweetie!

(Question: Are mirror tribbles... nice? What about their new team pet, Bribble? Would Bribble have a goatee and be evil in the mirror verse? How sapient is that thing, anyway?)

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conuly

I don't want this getting lost in the links: A Journey Through the Dystopiaverse (some of those poems hit hard)

In personal news, how many nos is one expected to get before they get a yes?

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( I managed to find some non-doom-and-gloom links to shove in here as well )

conuly

Watch on YouTube

sovay

Under the circumstances, I had different weird dreams than I would have expected: writing a poem, watching some incredibly threadbare film noir with no waking equivalent, hearing a performance from a musical theater star ditto. I am beginning to think the pop culture of my dreams actually is the hell of a good video store next door, leavened in the last few nights by dreams of re-reading real-life authors currently in storage like P.C. Hodgell or Joan D. Vinge. I remain physically fried, news at nowhen. At least the rain seems to have kept off the neighborly leafblowing which perforated so much of yesterday. The news continues to feel like stupidly lethal cosplay, which I remember from the last round of this administration, which doesn't make me hate it less.