sovay: (Lord Peter Wimsey)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2020-08-13 02:59 am

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] 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 [personal profile] 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.
lauradi7dw: (Default)

[personal profile] lauradi7dw 2020-08-13 03:05 pm (UTC)(link)
2. 13/20, but what a biased group of languages. The indigenous languages of entire continents (like ours, Africa, and Asia) are not represented, but two choices from Papua New Guinea? (I got moustache right).
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.
lauradi7dw: (Default)

[personal profile] lauradi7dw 2020-08-14 01:42 am (UTC)(link)
Dead Calm
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?
isis: (Default)

[personal profile] isis 2020-08-13 07:48 pm (UTC)(link)
I've seen a good article about the mask study pointing out it's NOT a comparative study of masks, but a proof-of-concept of a protocol for TESTING masks. For one thing they had a single person saying a test sentence into each mask, which is not a good range of either testers or testing. The upshot is, don't take what it says about neck gaiters as gospel meaning "these are bad" yet.
ethelmay: (Default)

[personal profile] ethelmay 2020-08-14 04:40 pm (UTC)(link)
And apparently that person was loud and a "spitter" (not necessarily visible spit, but producing more droplets than the average). The FB post I saw about it snarked, "Probably the PI [principal investigator, i.e., lead researcher on the grant project]," which made me laugh.