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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-06-07 12:29 pm
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Photo cross-post


My brother Mike got me this for my birthday, and it just takes a weight off my mind being able to say "bring the steam temperature up to 95 degrees and hold it there"

(Control over oil temperature when frying eggs is also awesome.)
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.

oursin: Photograph of Stella Gibbons, overwritten IM IN UR WOODSHED SEEING SOMETHIN NASTY (woodshed)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-07 03:50 pm

Some of these are downers and others not

Actually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.

And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.

Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.

***

Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:

[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"

Plus, this was the era of the baby boom, one imagines maternity wards may have been a bit swamped....

***

A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:

[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.

***

I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'

While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as

One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.

Okay, I mark him down a bit for the macho ' I don’t go to books for comfort', but still, not bad for a bloke, eh.

oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-07 12:32 pm

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] sally_maria and [personal profile] spiffikins!
jesse_the_k: Head inside a box, with words "Thinking inside the box" scrawled on it. (thinking inside the box)
Jesse the K ([personal profile] jesse_the_k) wrote2025-06-06 04:08 pm

99PI Staffer Goes Deep Into Assistive Tech

99pi.org/adapt

Kurt Kohlstedt has spent ten years creating audio and print stories for the design podcast, 99% Invisible. He also co-authored the 99% Invisible City book.

Last year, 99pi’s Kurt Kohlstedt suffered a severe injury that incapacitated his right arm and dominant hand. In the aftermath, new everyday challenges led him to research, test, and evolve accessible design solutions. These experiences set the stage for Adapt or Design, a twelve-part project of 99% Invisible in three acts, available at the short link 99pi.org/adapt

The Adapt or Design series includes many groan-worthy puns related to hands; six essays exploring assistive designs for people with one functional hand; three design hacks and mods that helped Kurt manage long-term rehabilitation; and three final essays diving deep into adaptive writing technologies including a free one-handed "mirror keyboard" for Windows PowerToys.

While the first article posted in April, I just heard about it via the 99% Invisible podcast 630, where Kurt and Roman talk about all these things.

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peeeeeeet ([personal profile] peeeeeeet) wrote2025-06-06 08:30 pm

(no subject)

A gem from one of the afore-mentioned magazines: Norman Cook in his post-caravan of love, pre-fat boy slim period:

"I write everything in C, because there are no black notes."

(To answer your next question: A minor)
andrewducker: (xkcd boomdeyada)
andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-06-06 08:20 pm
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The Sickening Has Me

I spent the day feeling bad for lacking focus, and wondering why I couldn't get anything done.
And then I slept for an hour on no notice.
And now I'm very wobbly and all of my muscles gently ache.
So I think I'm going to chalk it up as "The Plague" and hope I feel better tomorrow.
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-06 07:07 pm

Nostalgic Music Party!

After a few distinctly less than summery days, today has been quite sunny.

Okay, I think I've had some of these before.... maybe.
Summer Nights


The downside: Summertime Blues:


Not sure if Summer Wine is for drinking then, or made then, with sinister summer herbs:


Obligatory Lovin' Spoonful


Kinks chilling on a Lazy Sunny Afternoon:


Carole King another one wanting it to be over:

spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-06-06 04:55 pm

In which there are phrenologists and campness

- Current reading quote: "My phrenologist has advised me to get more excitement in life, for the sake of my health".

- Friday Five with questions to warm the cockles of USian market researchers....

1. Have you ever been to summer camp?
No, we didn't have US style summer camps. Going camping (in tents or less often huts) for a weekend or even a whole week (!) with the Scouts / Guides &c used to be a relatively common childhood experience in the UK, and some schools went Youth Hostelling or to outdoor centres (usually owned by local councils before they were mostly privatised) for loosely geography/biology themed field study trips, but I never did. Specialised summer schools for formal study were uncommon, although older posher kids might attend a week or two for music or languages or whatever posh kids do when their parents want rid of them and boarding schools are on hols. Brits also used to have a lot of language student exchange trips with Europe usually organised by secondary schools.

2. Have you ever made a s'more?
I've seen them in USian movies and they appeared to be rubbery pink sugar melted over dry crumbly "cookie" sugar, thus removing the only joy of campfire toasting which is crunchiness. Why would anyone want to do that? I can only assume the level of advertising to children that would be seen as brainwashing anywhere else.

3. Have you ever slept under the stars (no tent/tarp)?
Yes, and so did all the rural kids I grew up with and my entire early adult friend group, and all the women's group members I knew, and all the greens and neopagans I knew (and probably most of the leftists at some point). Why wouldn't anyone living in a temperate climate, with predictable meteor showers &c, want to sleep out? I dislike camping though because it's too much faff for no reward: minimalist bivi bag or middle-aged mo-ho for me, ta.

4. Have you ever had a member of the opposite sex sleep over at your house?
Ah, yes, the two sexes, and the owning of houses. Definitely another question aimed at my demographic, lmao.

5. What type of bed do you have (queen, twin, bunk, etc.)?
A comfy one, obv. Primarily cotton sheets / pillow cases (pillow case can be refrigerated in summer) and duvet with blanket over in winter. And when I was very ill a few years ago I swapped my hot water bottle for an electric heat pad at the foot end of my bed. [insert emoticon of comfy smugness here]

6. Have you had your bumps "read" by a phrenologist?
/jk, that's not a FF question. Have you though? I bet you have! You look like the type!! I can tell from the shape of your head!!1!! (I was persuaded to have a Kirlian photo of myself taken once. I refused to pay extra for a "reading" but the "psychic" insisted on persuing me to the door while earnestly explaining that I had a strong secondary female presence in my "aura" that was watching over me, lmao.)
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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-06-06 03:39 pm
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History Repeating Itself (Labour and ID cards edition)

I see we're back at the "Labour attempt to introduce a mandatory ID card" stage of history*.

My feeling last time, was that the main problem that they always have is that they *start* with the cards being mandatory.

If you start with "Here is a thing that makes your life much easier, that you can carry about if you like." then that will get you 85% of the way there. And then, once you have a voluntary ID card that's not causing any problems for anyone, and that 85% of the population is using to make their life easier, *then* you move in and say "The only people who don't carry an ID card are weirdos and troublemakers, and they're causing friction in the system, we could make it all run more smoothly if only they *had* to carry one."

But no, they always try to go instantly from "Nobody has an ID card." to "Everyone must carry one at all times." - which forms a coalition of all sorts of people from across the political spectrum, and ends up being far more politically costly to them than if they'd just boiled their frog slowly.

(None of which should be taken as me taking a position on ID cards. I'm just constantly bemused by their inability to get things done by trying to rush them through in the most authoritarian manner possible.)

*Younger readers may not remember the fuss in 2006 (repealed in 2011)
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-05 05:07 pm

I think this article is saying It's All More Complicated?

I did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.

But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:

When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.

We get the sense that the project was constantly escaping from any endeavours to confine it within meshes of 'evidence-based medicine': 'Trying to fit the square peg of reading into the round hole of evidence is where things sometimes get awkward.'

Larfed liek drayne:

In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.

spiralsheep: Sheep wearing an eyepatch (Default)
Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-06-05 11:08 am

In which I read therefore I am

- To Read shelves, 72 on 1 June, which is down from 90 on 1 Jan 2025.

- Reading: 63 books to 5 June 2025.

56. Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, by Heather Fawcett, 2023, fantasy romance (het), 4/5.
I liked the readable prose, presented mostly as diary entries, and especially the protagonist, but all the she-forgot-herself and voila she's a queen now with a wannabe prince charming waiting to rescue her from her unwanted king was tedious to me. However the author does emphasise, as do traditional folk and fairy tales, that aristocracy is arbitrary, capricious, and cruel, which took the edge off my discontent, lol. I especially enjoyed Fawcett's characterisation of the "common" fae "Poe" who lived in a tree by a hot spring and exchanged gift-for-gift with humans.

Unnecessary nitpicking which in no way spoiled my enjoyment. )

57. Never Anyone but You, by Rupert Thomson, 2018, novel historical (lgbt+), 4/5.
A historical novel about Lucie Schwob (Claude Cahun) and Suzanne Malherbe (Marcel Moore) which managed to combine the historical and the novel aspects very well.
Warning for the Second World War, plus suicides, and anorexia.

Quote: But they realised they didn't have anything we wanted, and they took our self-sufficiency as a kind of rejection, or even as an expression of contempt. If money, beauty and fame aren't coveted by the people who don't have them, they lose their value for the people who do.

59. Bad Influence, by C.J. Wray, 2025, technically a crime novel, 3.5/5.
If this was What Three Words it'd be heartwarming.popular.tropes.
Warning for spoilery but exceedingly obvious trope wrt elderly protagonists.

60. Priest Turned Therapist Treats Fear of God, by Tony Hoagland, 2019, poetry, 3.5/5.
Specifically post-2016 dissatisfactions from Hoagland, to add to his usual satirical tendencies.

61. God on the Rocks, by Jane Gardam, 1978, literary slice-of-life novel, 4.5/5.
Half a point too Booker for me. :D

62. Oliver VII, by Antal Szerb (translation from Hungarian by Len Rix), 1942, ruritanian farce, 3/5.
I blame James Davis Nicoll. :-)
oursin: Photograph of small impressionistic metal figurine seated reading a book (Reader)
oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-04 04:57 pm

Wednesday had text and phonecalls about credit card fraud BEFORE COFFEE*

What I read

KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025): somehow not among my top KJCs.

Finished Bitch in a Bonnet Vol 2, perhaps even better than vol 1.

Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House (1949): not quite sure why this got to be picked as a Virago Modern Classic: WO WO Iron Heel of THEM i.e. the 1945 Labour Government, moan whinge, etc etc; also several rather repetitious passages of older generation maundering to themselves about the dire prospects that await the younger members.

Finished Dragon's Teeth, the last parts of which were quite the wild ride.

Latest Slightly Foxed, a bit underwhelmed, well, they can't always be talking about things that really interest/excite me or rouse fond memories I suppose.

On the go

Have started Upton Sinclair. Wide is the Gate (Lanny Budd, #4) (1943) simply because I had very strong 'what happens next? urges after the end of Dragon's Teeth, but that gets answered in the first few chapters, and I think that in this one we're already getting strong hints that Lanny is about to head southwards to Spain, just in time for things to start getting violent. I might take a break.

I have just started a romance by an author I have vaguely heard well of and was a Kobo deal but don't think it's for me.

Up next

Dunno: perhaps that Gail Godwin memoir.

***

*Even barely woken up I was not at all sure that this was not all one of those cunning scams that is in fact a fraudster telling you they are your bank/credit card co, but it turned out it was actually about somebody making fraudulent charges - in really odd small ways - on my card, when I got onto the website and found the number to ring - the number being called from with automated menu bearing no resemblance to the one on my card, ahem - went through all the procedures and card is being cancelled and new one sent. SIGH. This is second credit card hoohah in two days, yesterday got text re upcoming due payment for which bill has so far failed to arrive, for the one for which logging into website involves dangers untold and hardships unnumbered and having the mobile app. (Eventually all resolved.)

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Humph ([personal profile] spiralsheep) wrote2025-06-04 11:45 am

Aurora Australis readalong 7 / 10, Erebus

Aurora Australis readalong 7 / 10, Erebus by Nemo (Ernest Shackleton), post for comment, reaction, discussion, fanworks, links, and whatever obliquely related matters your heart desires. You can join the readalong at any time or skip sections or go back to earlier posts. It's all good. :-)

Text of the poem Erebus by Nemo (Ernest Shackleton):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aurora_Australis/Erubus

Readalong intro and reaction post links:
https://spiralsheep.dreamwidth.org/662515.html

Reminder for next week, An Ancient Manuscript by Shellback (Frank Wild):
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Aurora_Australis/An_Ancient_Manuscript

Links, vocabulary, quotes, and brief commentary )
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oursin ([personal profile] oursin) wrote2025-06-04 10:04 am

(no subject)

Happy birthday, [personal profile] starlady!
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andrewducker ([personal profile] andrewducker) wrote2025-06-03 12:08 pm
Entry tags:

Photo cross-post


Terribly comfy under these trees.
Original is here on Pixelfed.scot.