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FDR has always been one of my favorite presidents, second maybe to Lincoln. Both were men the establishment assumed were one of them until, to their horror, they governed like they weren't. Both could trash the opposition in one breath and take the moral high ground in the next. One of my favorite Roosevelt lines growing up came from Madison Square Garden, October 1936, standing before a crowd that included plenty of people who wanted him dead:Never before in all our...
3 April 1945. Original Caption: “Dragon teeth on the Siegfried Line presented an obstacle to tanks of U. S. Seventh Army in the Wissembourg area, France. Note teeth extend to mountains which raise a natural barrier.” Signal Corps Photo 111-SC-203387 Photographer: Sgt. Robert G. Heller. Fast forward some 80 years, and the line has moved well East but still looks much the same, only a bit less angular and more…NATO.
Some 110 years ago this month. Imperial Russian Army pilots and observers training in Kiev, Ukraine, August 1916, with American-made Colt 1895 pattern “potato digger” machine guns, likely made by Marlin-Rockwell. Contrary to the common trope of being underarmed, the Tsar’s purchasing agents were fond of all things machine gun, with Cossack cavalry carrying Madsen guns in Manchuria in 1904 and the Tula Arsenal putting the Russian version of the water-cooled light Vickers...
In the Newsletter this weekAnalysis: Passengers can't complain about trains they cannot take because they don't exist: in defence of German railBullshit Meter: European Sleeper & RDC Bruxelles - Malmö Sleeper in 2028Good week: Cross-border link Daugavpils - Turmantas - Vilnius finally to be fixedAlso a good week: 10 trains a day Berlin - Warszawa from DecemberGood week, probably: Finally a direct train Madrid - Lisboa?What were they thinking this week: Financing of new...
Some 85 years ago this week, on 22 August 1941, at the Navy Gun Factory (now the Washington Navy Yard), Mine Recovery School Class No. 1 graduated, minting 10 officers (three of them Coasties), five chiefs, and eight ratings in the art of Navy EOD. Note the distinctive broad eagle cloth cap insignias on the three USCG officers in the front row, standing out from the smaller eagle devices on the USN officers These men, who all certainly went on to risk life and limb around...
It was Chang-ma who corralled the women of the First Mandarin Baptist Church of Praise into their midweek meetings. “Mother of Prayers group (MOP),” she explained in her first e-mail summons, “will be a place we can share our struggles and support each other spiritually, where we discuss our role in church as mothers and in Chinese community as Christians.” … They’d talked of matters high and low, traded anxieties and dispensed advice. They’d prescribed each other Bible...
Fujifilm X-E5; 16-55mm f/2.8 II lens @ 55mm; 1/160th sec. @ f/11; ISO 320(click to enlarge)We’ve already had a few new camera introductions this year, but my sources tell me that over the upcoming months, particularly from September through the end of the year, there will be additional cameras introduced. So, some of you might be in the market for a new camera body. If so, I have a series of questions for you. When you consider buying a camera, how do you choose? Do...
The press was jumping up and down about this one, and you can read about it on European Sleeper's website here. 3 departures a week each way from Bruxelles and Amsterdam to København and Malmö. And - unlike the seemingly ever postponed plans for a train to Barcelona - I do think European Sleeper will be able to do this Malmö route, in the main because of the partnership with RDC who know how to get carriages approved to run through Denmark.This is going to leave European...
Rachelle and I are really good at watching TV and we have opinions about what we watch. Here are our favorite TV and movies from 2026 so far. You can see my rating scale here. The ratings are mostly about how much we enjoyed it and have less to do with the quality. Shows # A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms Season 1 - Widows Bay Season 1 - Honorable mentions: The Bear Season 5 - Rooster Season 1 - DTF St. Louis - Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat - Movies # The Odyssey -...
Hey people! Today I thought I would share with you a traditional tune that’s got a bit of a strange history to it. From the title of it, one could easily expect it to be Scottish – Galloway is, after all, a region of Scotland. But it’s actually Irish, and the “Galloway” is more than likely a corruption of Galway. Already the first collection of tunes that it appears in misspells the name as “Gallaway”. The lament later travelled to London and Scotland as well, and in...
A while ago I shared cove.town as an experiment with atproto self-hosting. It’s driven by a bunch of little docker composes and contains a PDS, a knot, a spindle and a hold. The PDS owns the accounts, the knot owns the repo itself, the spindle builds the images it runs on, and the hold is the docker registry the composes point at. It’s a tiny little almost self-sufficient atproto ecosystem. I’ve now shared write ups for how to get all these components set up, step by step,...
Donald Trump doesn't seem to understand that the Great Lakes, with the exception of Superior, were named for native tribes and that those names are fixed by international agreement. They are not subject to change by the whim of a demented dictator. So to make things easier for him, I have issued my own Executive Order wherein from now on all the lakes will be called "Lake Canada", as Canada is also a native word (its approximate meaning being "village"). Lake Canada of...
Templo del crepúsculo, Ito YuhanDesde el día en que habitaba en aquella cabaña, Hiro había notado que el bosque siempre estaba cubierto por una espesa niebla.Siempre estaba ahí, envolviéndolo todo como un humo denso que apenas dejaba entrever lo que estaba delante. Aun cuando el día lo iluminaba todo, Manzo, el dueño de la cabaña y quien lo había rescatado cuando se hallaba perdido por aquellos parajes debido a la bruma, siempre salía con una lámpara para que le alumbrase...
I had 4 players this time: Boris, ex- (free?)mason Bennett, extreme sports enthusiast Borg, miner Angela, Reform councillor It's been a week since the first expedition up Mass 2 ended in disaster. Since then security has been tightened up massively, with robotic police sentries and stationed officers keeping a close eye. these fucking things Angela, however, has a grand plan to claim Mass 2 for England, and has been at work all week pulling strings. It all makes sense to...
Sun in the treetops. A doe emerges from the woods to browse the road bank, followed by her two grown fawns already in their unspotted, gray-brown winter coats. Head up, her ears swivel toward a distant crow.
Modern technology is truly a miracle. A hundred years ago, if you wanted to travel from New York City to Chicago, the fastest way was by train, which took a minimum of 20 hours. Whereas today, thanks to technology, you can simply go to an airport, and in less than three hours you will be notified that your flight has been canceled. This notification will be transmitted at the speed of light via orbiting satellite to an “app” conveniently located right on your phone, a...
It feels as if I’ve been writing about our autumn holiday in 2024 for a very long time. As it turns out, I’ve just looked back, and I wrote the first blog post in the series, about Godstow in Oxfordshire, in October of that year. Anyway, after we had a wonderful break on the Isle of Skye, our next stop was eastern Scotland, where we hadn’t been for quite some time. After a very long drive, we arrived in the rolling farmland of Angus to revisit some old haunts. The weather...
In my latest Film Data Scientist video, I’m going deep on “The Greatest Movies Ever Made”©®™ to understand what makes a movie great and why that classification may slip over time. I am uploading new video essays every couple of weeks, so make sure you’re subscribed on YouTube to get notified when another drops (also, subscribing will really help me out with the Algorithm Gods, so it would mean a lot to me - thank you!).https://www.youtube.com/@TheFilmDataScientistAnd to...
There's a bright yellow lump of a play structure in Brooklyn built at exactly the height a grandmother can sit on next to her granddaughter, and somewhere in the metaphysical ether, an Indian prince who died in 1966 nods approvingly.Let me back up.The Urban Conga, an award-winning Brooklyn studio sounding like a jazz trio but building public spaces, recently dropped a new playscape into the open ground at Marlboro Houses, a NYCHA campus in Gravesend. Their whole thing,...
The “frog days” of summer are coming to an end and the first hints of fall — changing leaves, cooler nights, and shorter days — are more and more present. That means it’s time to return to my Friday tradition of quick hits and varia, although I suspect I’ll continue to post some “Photo Fridays” as well. This weekend is “Week 0” for college football, although not many games of note are taking place. The Fighting Hawks won their home opener, though, last night, and the...
Today is my last day of work until 2027. I’m going on parental leave for four months to welcome our third, a baby girl! She is due next week, which gives me just enough time to try and reset, recover from burnout, and attempt to catch up on all the little things before we have a newborn in the house again. 🫠One of the biggest trade-offs of working for myself is that I can take as much time off as possible for life events like this. The downside? It’s unpaid. Most of my...
Let’s discuss the big scandal at the center of the novel. What did the L— family’s cancellation expose about the state of race and class in Hollywood? Many of Raj’s thoughts about post-2020 Hollywood are scathing and cynical. Is this attitude justified? In what ways do the rich people insulate themselves from discomfort? What blind spots do they willfully ignore? How was Raj’s meltdown in the O’Connor home different from performing the scene with Jim? For those of us in...
The monkey-punchers at Google never quite seem to finish any of their apps. There's always some useful bit of work left undone, or showstopping bug which remains unfixed, a thousand jagged edges as yet unsolved by the greatest minds of their generation. I wanted to subscribe to an events calendar. I had a URl. I had my Google™ Pixel® phone running the latest Android© 17 with an updated calendar app. Is it possible to click on a calendar link and add it to my phone? No....
Clodoald (522 - c.560CE) was (along with Theodebald and Gunthar) one of the three sons of King Chlodomer of Orléans. When Chlodomer was killed during an expedition against the Burgundians, his sons were taken in by their grandmother, Clotilde.They were all very young, but as heirs to Orléans, they were an obstacle to anyone who wanted to take over Orléans. One of the people who wanted to rule Orléans was their uncle, Chlodomer's brother Clothar I. Clothar, King of...
One has a ruler, one doesn't. One is in the common vernacular one is new. One is about ownership, one is about shared home-land/sky-scape. I'd like to introduce a new word for our time (long overdue): KINDOM. Perhaps you'd like to consider using it? Or at least changing the spelling, or deliberately losing the 'g'! Could we 'word spell' something more enchanting? I'm 'musin' and choosin'. Heads up this is a musing of the slightly rambling kind ... My imaginary dictionary...