A word can suggest my likeness as a painting suggests distance
The weather remains, technically speaking, too darn hot. Have a lot of links.
1. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shewhomust: the Pineapple. I feel confident in saying that I find little to admire in a late eighteenth-century colonial governor of Virginia and the Bahamas, except that on his return home to Scotland he built himself a two-storey Gothic stone pineapple and it's hilarious. I was unable to think about it without laughing for at least a day after learning about it. I keep trying to imagine the reactions of the unknown architect confronted with such a commission. It is a national treasure in both the official and colloquial senses of the word. If I lived in the right country to stay in it, I would.
2. Courtesy ofisis: "Know your Hrvatski from your Old Norse?" As it turns out, I do, as well as my Russian from my Tok Pisin, but I was wrong about the language with the most native speakers and had no idea about High Valyrian. I appreciate deeply that if you answer the question about Polari right, the quiz briefly takes on the personality of Julian or Sandy.
3. Courtesy of looking for contemporary Burmese fiction and poetry: the complete time sink of the archives of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Now I have an even longer list of books I wish I could afford.
4. The title may as well stand as a content warning, but I loved this short story: S. Qiouyi Lu's "As Dark as Hunger."
5. I had never seen the beautiful autochromes taken of Christina Bevan in 1913 and in fact had no idea that a photographic process based on potato starch had ever existed.
6. Nor had I realized that the question of what happened with Orson Welles' unfinished film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) was actually kind of a rabbit hole. I would have watched a sea-thriller with that cast. The HFA could have screened it last fall for their all-night marathon of dark waters that I was too ill to stay for more than the first film of, which I still resent.
7. I may never see the musical remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), but I am really charmed by the technical notes from the headmaster of its filming location, Sherborne School: "I was last at Paestum when Katherine and Chips were there, so I have only vague memories. Can it be visited the same day as Pompeii? Are there broken pillars? Is it a temple of Apollo? Is the inscription there? I assume you will check the spelling in Greek, of 'Gnothe Seauton'. This anglicised form contains one mistake."
8. Just in case anyone has not seen the recent proof-of-concept: "Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech."
9. I had not read this sonnet before: Hartley Coleridge, "Long Time a Child."
I have been re-reading Sayers when I can't sleep—the Harriet Vane novels, specifically. My body is behaving in ways that are cranking my dysphoria up to eleven in addition to ordinarily hurting and there are a couple of things in these books that are not exactly consoling, but are useful for me to be reminded of. It is an unexpected side effect.
1. Courtesy of
shewhomust: the Pineapple. I feel confident in saying that I find little to admire in a late eighteenth-century colonial governor of Virginia and the Bahamas, except that on his return home to Scotland he built himself a two-storey Gothic stone pineapple and it's hilarious. I was unable to think about it without laughing for at least a day after learning about it. I keep trying to imagine the reactions of the unknown architect confronted with such a commission. It is a national treasure in both the official and colloquial senses of the word. If I lived in the right country to stay in it, I would.2. Courtesy of
isis: "Know your Hrvatski from your Old Norse?" As it turns out, I do, as well as my Russian from my Tok Pisin, but I was wrong about the language with the most native speakers and had no idea about High Valyrian. I appreciate deeply that if you answer the question about Polari right, the quiz briefly takes on the personality of Julian or Sandy.3. Courtesy of looking for contemporary Burmese fiction and poetry: the complete time sink of the archives of the University of Iowa's International Writing Program. Now I have an even longer list of books I wish I could afford.
4. The title may as well stand as a content warning, but I loved this short story: S. Qiouyi Lu's "As Dark as Hunger."
5. I had never seen the beautiful autochromes taken of Christina Bevan in 1913 and in fact had no idea that a photographic process based on potato starch had ever existed.
6. Nor had I realized that the question of what happened with Orson Welles' unfinished film of Charles Williams' Dead Calm (1963) was actually kind of a rabbit hole. I would have watched a sea-thriller with that cast. The HFA could have screened it last fall for their all-night marathon of dark waters that I was too ill to stay for more than the first film of, which I still resent.
7. I may never see the musical remake of Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1969), but I am really charmed by the technical notes from the headmaster of its filming location, Sherborne School: "I was last at Paestum when Katherine and Chips were there, so I have only vague memories. Can it be visited the same day as Pompeii? Are there broken pillars? Is it a temple of Apollo? Is the inscription there? I assume you will check the spelling in Greek, of 'Gnothe Seauton'. This anglicised form contains one mistake."
8. Just in case anyone has not seen the recent proof-of-concept: "Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech."
9. I had not read this sonnet before: Hartley Coleridge, "Long Time a Child."
I have been re-reading Sayers when I can't sleep—the Harriet Vane novels, specifically. My body is behaving in ways that are cranking my dysphoria up to eleven in addition to ordinarily hurting and there are a couple of things in these books that are not exactly consoling, but are useful for me to be reminded of. It is an unexpected side effect.
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It should probably be raining here. It's just hazy.
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It was so hot yesterday my fitbit thought I was actively exercising for 10+ hours! No, I was just existing in Too Much Heat.
Today it just started raining Quite Hard with thunderstorms.
Edit: forgot to mention that the Pineapple looks amazing, so much so that I went far enough to see whether we could get there by public transport (answer: only with a lot of walking, hmm).
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Agh.
Today it just started raining Quite Hard with thunderstorms.
Are they improving the heat? I want to know if your Fitbit has figured out that you can exist in a resting state.
Edit: forgot to mention that the Pineapple looks amazing, so much so that I went far enough to see whether we could get there by public transport (answer: only with a lot of walking, hmm).
I request pictures if you give it a try!
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It is distinctly cooler and my fitbit and I agree how much exercise I've done today :-)
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Oh, good!
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Klingon makes sense to me, but I hadn't realized High Valyrian was such a thing! [edit] I bet that explains why the Guardian's readership would be expected to know how to say hello in it.
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(I narrowed it down to two and chose wrong.)
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This is a great list of errors, especially "Tumbledown Dick's Insta." It sounds like a crossword puzzle clue.
I got most of my right answers by happening to know the relevant information or being able to rule out the wrong answers—if it hadn't been multiple choice, I would have done considerably worse. I feel like I slipped up on native speakers through failing to read the question carefully.
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I knew English didn't, but was tripped up by the available selection of alternatives. So, yeah.
What does it say about the setter that they ask about High Valyrian but not Sindarin?
I was also surprised, but interpreted it to mean that more readers would be expected to recognize Westeros than Middle-Earth. To be fair, I'm not sure that I know how to say hello in Sindarin, either. I just think I might have had a better shot at an educated guess, whereas I know linguistically zilch about High Valyrian.
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Still good things to be able to say!
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There's a passage in his Letters where Tolkien describes The Lord of the Rings as "an attempt to create a situation in which a common greeting would be 'elen síla lúmenn' omentielmo'". (It does come up in the book, but this is the context from which I remember it!)
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That's adorable.
Also, good job creating a false cognate in lúmenn[a]. I know which word in that sentence means "star" and it's not the one that looks like Latin "light."
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What prompted you to look for contemporary Burmese fiction and poetry?
The Lulworth Cove photos are so *modern looking*
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And now I know even more random facts about languages!
What prompted you to look for contemporary Burmese fiction and poetry?
Talking with
The Lulworth Cove photos are so *modern looking*
I know! I think it's partly the poses as much as the depth of color. There were a couple more images of the same model by the same photographer further down in the thread and the one where she's standing against the wall of wisteria was for whatever reason the first time I thought, beyond the clothes, that the picture looked like the 1910's.
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Looks like yes! Which I think is wonderful.
They are astounding. There's at least one with a whole lot of soldiers from the colonies as well, both in Africa and in Asia.
I am glad that was recorded by autochrome. I am not a person who finds black-and-white to be distancing—I watch too many old movies for that—but color does have an impact, and I love seeing the past as it actually looked.
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Speaking of tourist attractions
I was reading just the other day that the Western Front of the Great War is a tourist attraction now, which bothers some people.
But more, that it always was: Thomas Cook took tourists on package tours of the Front during the War (!!), and only stopped in 1915 when the French got hot about it!
Re: Speaking of tourist attractions
I don't blame them. I knew there was battlefield tourism immediately following the First World War, but I hadn't realized during. I'm impressed none of the tour parties ever got wiped out.
Re: Speaking of tourist attractions
I apologize for distracting from the original post, but yes, for a "world war" this one was very cosy. Boat-trains being what they were, officers who had dined at their club could be sitting in trench dugouts the next day. Civilians on the Channel coast could hear the heavy guns of a bombardment across the water, and when those colossal mines exploded at Messines they rattled the windows at No. 10 Downing Street. It was a family quarrel, at such close range and viciousness as those so often are.
(Trivial Pursuit® : Twenty-one mine shafts were dug, but only nineteen mines went off. In 1955 one more detonated with earthquake force; the last one has not yet exploded. No one is willing to probe for it even with geosonar - that might be all it takes…
Updated, literally - With Beirut force - each one of those mines was about on that scale. Nineteen Beiruts going off all at once - yes, that would jolt some seismograph pens! The Germans were horrified - they'd been outdone at chemical frightfulness, and they didn't forget it. Can you say, Flammenwerfer? (“It werfs Flammen.”)
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Is this a point for or against? (I do not want to put you in the position of explaining an entire administration, but I can't tell if it is loaded information or just biographical fact.)
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Literally just a case where I had no information and I think our own current government has made me slightly, if unnecessarily gun-shy. Discovering that a poet had a post in the Trump administration would seriously put me off.
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6. I have seen Dead Calm, not to be confused with the X-files episode Død Kalm, which I have also seen.
8. I had seen that, and had also seen some skeptical responses on twitter. My immediate reaction to the part about neck gaiters being worse than nothing was scoffing as well. That's what I wear to run (specifically, one with John Snow's cholera map printed on it). It definitely holds in water vapor and snot, but of course I can't see aerosolized particles to be able to tell if they are getting out while all those body fluids stay next to my face.
DLS have you read The Mutual Admiration Society? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44287172-the-mutual-admiration-society
I could loan you a copy, but I'd want it back, as it's autographed and the author is a friend.
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I suspect the second one was there to see if people had learned from the first example. Agreed the absence of entire continents is silly.
I have seen Dead Calm, not to be confused with the X-files episode Død Kalm, which I have also seen.
What did you think of it? I ran into mention of Dead Calm via Nicole Kidman and then The Deep via Michael Bryant and now I want to read the original novel, which annoyingly seems to be in print right now only as an e-book. I had this problem a few months ago with Helen Nielsen's Dead on the Level (1951) and I didn't appreciate it then, either.
My immediate reaction to the part about neck gaiters being worse than nothing was scoffing as well.
I went and looked at the supplementary materials about the neck fleece and their results did not seem implausible to me: "The neck fleece has a higher total droplet count compared to the control trial. When comparing the histogram, it appears that the fleece transmits fewer large droplets (above the resolution limit) and more small droplets (below the resolution limit). We interpret this as the neck fleece dispersing large droplets into several smaller droplets." It sounds like a filter problem.
I could loan you a copy, but I'd want it back, as it's autographed and the author is a friend.
I have not read The Mutual Admiration Society, but I would not risk your friend-autographed copy. I very much appreciate the offer.
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I don't remember why I saw it - I'm not usually a horror fan. It started out with tragedy, there was a lot of very tense stuff. But I was convinced that the central couple found catharsis and would do well together after a lot of bad experiences.
I could be under the influence of "seems like" (seems like if droplets are stopped, tinier particles should be as well). Or the findings might not be replicated in further studies.
Of interest - if there is aerosol transmission, why isn't it as contagious as measles, for example. There is so much that we don't know. https://api.nationalgeographic.com/distribution/public/amp/science/2020/08/what-airborne-coronavirus-means-and-how-to-protect-yourself-cvd?
Also, what we don't know, specifically about choirs
https://www.pri.org/stories/2020-08-13/choirs-age-coronavirus-new-study-looks-risks-singing?
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I will reword my link.
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https://www.sciencenews.org/article/coronavirus-covid19-neck-gaiters-masks-droplets-study
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Thanks!
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I love the Harriet Vane novels.
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I am glad I included all of them! I don't build up tabs, but I do collect links.
I love the Harriet Vane novels.
I re-read them more often than the rest of the series except Murder Must Advertise and The Nine Tailors. It's a remarkably short series considering how much space it takes up inside my head.
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He was governor of Virginia at the time of Patrick Henry and he left Norfolk burnt to the ground, so I think he was not what one would call competently horrible, but the actual punch line of this story is that the Pineapple was originally an orangery.
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I liked it, but I also liked the sound of it, which factors strongly into how I feel about the aptness of words in poetry.
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I have just discovered that Thomas Hardy wrote
"And now comes Einstein with a notion —
Not yet quite clear
To many here —
That's there's no time, no space, no motion,
Nor rathe nor late,
Nor square nor straight,
But just a sort of bending-ocean."
Probably neither great poetry nor great physics, but it has a certain charm.
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