2020-10-22

sovay: (Rotwang)
Today was mostly, unfortunately, awful, but I spent some of the early afternoon on the back deck and enjoyed the turning leaves of the ivy in the yard and the fences beyond our treeline, plus the cross-hatched angles of a neighbor's third-floor deck against the dissolving blue of the autumn sky.

I drove a while to take my thoughts from home. )

Have some links.

1. Until a day ago, I had no idea that public education in Massachusetts was first established under the Old Deluder Satan Law of 1647. On the one hand, the general notion of the Devil working through ignorance and misinformation remains distressingly relevant. On the other, I hate to break it to the Massachusetts General Court, but Koine Greek existed for purposes other than confounding English Puritans.

2. Until this morning, I had no idea about the Kentucky Meat Shower of 1876, period. I was not expecting the vultures. Or, for that matter, the jelly beans.

3. I enjoyed Christina Lane's "Rebecca at Eighty: The Women Behind the Hitchcock Classic," but I am really pleased to see she has an entire book out about Joan Harrison.

4. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: Leonard Pierce, "The Working-Class Cinematic Legacy of Film Noir." As I said elsenet, film noir is only the most class-conscious of American cinema if you ignore pre-Code Hollywood, but post-Code? Absolutely. Points deducted for over-emphasizing as usual the frequency of the femme fatale (and WTF awarded for claiming that "noir's terror of these women" reveals "a sublimated fear of the working class" as opposed to, jeepers, could misogyny have played a part?), but I am a sucker for an article that appreciates Act of Violence (1948).

5. Courtesy of [personal profile] moon_custafer: Anubis-masked priest from the Temple of Isis at Pompeii.
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