Notes and links from Sun 19 July

Status: Saved my batteries up today so I could go to the allotment to top up the compost. Went across the park on my own on the scooter and did the decanting at my own pace. Had a nice short chat with a lady I hadn’t seen for a while and then came home. All managed without any help from Fi. Reading: Still Expanding Those Minds — My spiritual weird uncle Erik Davis on recovering a podcast he made a decade-plus ago, but the best bit is an account of visiting one of those insane looking Mormon churches on the rare occasions they open them up to the general public. Erik addresses the building’s aesthetics ‌(“a baroque futuristic monument that rockets toward the heavens like two frosted X-wing fighters racing neck and neck”) and gets into the weird mix of the cosmic and the anodyne that epitomises the Mormon practice. It’s easy to laugh at it but that mix of the extremely ordinary and the extremely out-there is, well, it explains Battlestar Galactica. The Andy Burnham I’ve met over the…