The rose will grow on ice before we change our mind

I had a run-off-my-feet day, but I love the newly revealed cover for Afterlives 2024: The Year's Best Death Fiction, edited by Sheree Renée Thomas and shortly forthcoming from Psychopomp, in whose liminal mosaic is reprinted my queer, maritime, ice-dreaming story "Twice Every Day Returning." I am looking forward to that table of contents for myself. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of isis: British Airways' "May We Haveth One's Attention" (2024) may be the most charming safety video I have seen since the legendary "Dumb Ways to Die" (2012). My only excuse for missing it last year is that I can't remember sleeping that month.

2. Courtesy of moon_custafer: James Cagney, Chester Morris, and Edward G. Robinson on a Ferris wheel in 1934. The dark glasses donned by Mr. Morris are doing him no favors whatsoever except that he's making enthusiastic eye contact in the sun-flooded overhead shot.

3. Courtesy of fleurdelis41: "The thread about the Loyal Edinburgh Spearmen; a force of very doubtful military significance." The caricature of "Mr Dundas" with his beaver hat and spectacles reminds me irresistibly of an Edward Gorey character. The overenthusiastic lighting of the beacons actually made me laugh out loud.

4. I discovered the inimitably named Blackbeard's Tea Party some years ago with the furious drumbeat of their "Ford o' Kabul River" and then almost immediately lost track of them again, but as they seem to have come out since with the whaling EP Leviathan! (2018) and the nightmare siren song of "Mother Carey," we're still good. Since they closed their first album with "Chicken on a Raft," I am delighted that their recorded repertoire now also includes "Roll and Go."

5. I meant last week to link the Divine Comedy's "Invisible Thread" (2025), especially since it was my father who found it after I had sent him another song from the same album.

Her memory for a blessing, Darleane Hoffman who studied transuranic elements and still got to die at ninety-eight. She was not unstable.

Cigarette, Alka-Seltzer, career to the back of the place

I can't listen to podcasts. It's the same problem as audio commentaries. They are difficult for me to extract information from. I make the occasional effort for friends or colleagues and otherwise read transcripts where available.

I have just discovered that Bill Nighy has a podcast. Apparently it launched on my birthday. It is the half-hour ill-advised by Bill Nighy. I am as we speak listening to the first episode which I selected at not very random considering there are only three so far:

Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you are on the planet. Welcome to ill-advised by Bill Nighy—and the clue is in the title, particularly on the first word. The risk of getting to my age is that you can not infrequently be mistaken for somebody who knows what's happening or how to carry on, and you only have to take a quick look around the world to see how that's going, and how my generation are managing the planet, for instance. I mean, you may have picked up a few things along the way which might be of use, like, I don't know, parking, or online shopping, or not taking cocaine, obviously. But other than that, in all the big important things, I remain profoundly in the dark. But I try and keep a straight face when people start acting weird.

After which he immediately begins to tell the listener about his recent eye operation. It does eventually pertain to the nature of the podcast, but frankly it was such an ideal segue for a programme that bills itself as "a podcast for people who don't get out much and can't handle it when they do . . . a refuge for the clumsy and the awkward . . . an invitation to squander time" that it won me over to treating it as an audio drama whose laconically anxious and slightly acid narrator has a very good fund of self-deprecating stories that wind their way around to some species of advice, defined by Nighy as "not actually making things worse." He sounds unsurprisingly the way his interviews read. The difficulty of extracting information does not improve just because I like the speaker, but apparently I will now make the occasional effort for actors, too.

Update: the parking is a lie. Nighy spends most of the introduction to the second episode explaining that he cannot and never could park successfully. "I'd drive miles to find somewhere where you didn't actually have to park, you could just leave the car." Well done, Reginald?