"The Road Goes On Forever" by Robert Earl Keen Listen on Apple Music Your browser does not support the audio element. Describe the perfect song for a road trip and why it works. - The Road Goes on Forever by Robert Earl Keen The song is basically Texas outlaw mythology compressed into four minutes. Sonny and Sherry are not heroes in any moral sense, but Keen writes them with enough speed, grit, and sympathy that I just lean into it. It is kin to “Pancho and Lefty,” “Me and Bobby McGee,” and old…
Open source web application for learning to play piano that listens to your MIDI instrument input while you play to songs displayed as sheet music or falling notes, both with extra notation to help beginners such as named notes (alphabetical and fixed do) and colors (Settings icon on top-right → Display → Visualizer ). You can also free play, choosing different instruments, and record your own performance into a MIDI file to use later in your DAW, or load custom ones.
i really vibed with his music. have not watched any of his interviews before a couple of days ago, but now that i have, i feel even sadder. i don't like many people or many musicians, and it's sad that he's gone. his music was a quiet presence in my life for many years, his art has supported me throughout some hard times. i don't really have much else to say, other than that. he seemed to value freedom, honesty, and the connection between people. i treasure that as well. stupid fucking…
This section of a great interview with Magic Tuber Stringband in the June 2026 copy of The Wire really struck me. It relates to the influence band member Courtney Werner’s field recording work on a former nuclear weapons production site in South Carolina had on the band’s Heavy Water album. “Werner’s field recordings appear on every Magic Tuber Stringband recording, sometimes as a textural element added after the music was played. But on Heavy Water, found sounds are used in a more interactive…
In April, Jonathan Pike, a professor of philosophy at Open University, submitted a formal complaint about the appointment of his colleague, professor of philosophy Sophie Grace Chappell, a trans woman, to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2029 subpanel for philosophy. [Detail of cover of Transfigured by Sophie Grace Chappell]That complaint has now been dismissed, according to Professor Chappell, who, in an email and also on Facebook, wrote: “On June 15th… UKRI’s independent adjudicator…
While I ran websites and newsletters before, I've only been blogging for almost 2 years. By coincidence I found Bear, and I immediately got drawn to it. Not only did it look like a good platform, it also hosted a great community. So while I got started, I got to know other bloggers and learned from them.I enjoyed my blogging experience. And my blog grew. I added snapshots, app reviews, ... And the more I published, the more visibility I gained. People started to reach out to me. People linked…
Learn how Expressive can improve a Laravel application by keeping Eloquent as the database layer while moving business logic to fully typed objects. Read more
Always fun to update this collection of Hawkgirl/Hawkwoman pics from time to time. Hawkgirl truly is an iconic character with a rich history. Hawkgirl's History
Your monthly hit of all the things that are fit to print without a better place to live. Today is election day here in New York City, so again a reminder that if you are a registered Democrat and live in NY-12 today is the final day to vote for Alex Bores for Congress, and as per my argument yesterday that this matters a lot for ensuring we have a sensible Congressional response to AI. RIP FiveThirtyEight ABC and Disney completely take down FiveThirtyEight and all its articles, after telling…
We constantly see different variations of "just build it, you can make it better later" on LinkedIn and other places dedicated to recycling cliches. Normally, the writer is a CLUMS (short for cliche-loving, unimaginative, mindless soul) who labels the opposite approach as perfectionist and rejects it on that grounds. In practice, what CLUMS has in mind and rejects is not perfect, but only well-built (perfection goes well beyond their imagination). Of course, CLUMS is not suggesting that sloppy…
The ethics of fly fishing for bull trout are nebulous. They’re also a bit ephemeral, depending on where you’re fishing and your intent. The endangered char of the Northwest is protected by law in both the United States and Canada, but fishing for them throughout most of their native range is legal, so long as they’re released unharmed.
As a man, the opportunities available to us to cry, progressively decrease. A part of adulting as a man is to forgo emotion, to be detached. To avail the cry ticket, there are but a few opportunities: Your parents' death. Wedding. Childbirth. That 3AM night. To cry is to put yourself out there, to reveal yourself in what, one might argue, is the most vulnerable position. Yet, each tear holds something. A beckon to something, a release of a held emotion, an opportunity to embrace that…
The papacy, people say, counts in centuries, and perhaps never even thinks of counting, because its goal is eternity.1 It has been a pleasure every few months to buy the latest volume in the new translation of À la recherche du temps perdu. I've now read the third, by Peter Bush. The Oxford World's Classics paperbacks are affordable, easy to hold open and, while the typeface is small, it's not too small. Overall, this is the ideal edition for those planning to read Proust in English for the…
I mentioned this before but I thought I’d expand on this a little. I head to Madrid for the Grand Prix in September. That’s not what this post is about but is what, by happenstance, gave me a focus. I need goals I look back at my athletic achievements (wow, that’s an odd phrase to even think about, let alone write) and they are all usually something I’ve had to plan for, something I’ve signed up for in the future knowing it will push me to exercise and give me a focus. Regardless of the reason…
“Evil itself may be relentless. I will grant you that, but love is relentless, too. Friendship is a relentless force…the human spirit is relentless.” - Dean Koontz, “Relentless”Hello friends! It’s officially summer, but it felt wonderfully like spring today. It’s not often I have the windows open at the end of June! It appears the brown booby departed from her Kansas City location about the time my post went out yesterday, but I heard the painted bunting still today. You never know!Here are my…
TRAVELER’S Notebooks are more popular than ever, and we have a fresh shipment that arrived yesterday. Currently we have Passport-size Starter Kits in Black and Blue, and Standard-size Starter Kits in Olive, as well as most refills and accessories with more on the way for those items that are currently sold out. If you prefer full A5-size notebooks, we’ve also received a fresh restock of handmade OnionBrand leather covers. OnionBrand is a local Nashville maker specializing in leather, and I’m…
I discovered Harris when looking up who played the delicate, beautiful piano part in Yusef Lateef’s performance of Love Theme From Spartacus and then found this series of videos put together by pianist and teacher Frans Elsen. A wonderful resource.
For some reason, people are buying my book – and I wish they’d stop, at least for a while. This one, I mean: The Scientist’s Guide to Writing. I’ve written two others, and if you’d like to buy one of those, go right ahead! Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider is “more fun than […]
Michigan-based Trijicon won an Army contract to build an optic for the vaunted “Ma Deuce,” and the sight has made its first appearance in the field. First announced in July 2021, the Army tapped Trijicon to deliver its Machine Gun Reflex Sight, or MGRS, specifically for use with the M2A1 .50 caliber heavy machine gun. It basically looks like a huge RMR with a flip-in magnifier. Constructed of 7075-T6 aluminum, the MGRS is designed to withstand the jarring, rapid recoil produced by fixed and…
A collection of beautiful, high-resolution photolog scans reveals a colorful world of pastel-colored cars and whimsical signage.The very first post of this newsletter back in 2022 was about Connecticut’s highway photologs from the 1980s. Photologs were essentially an early, film-based version of Google Street View. Almost every state had one of these photolog programs with tricked-out vans logging every mile of road in their state, with some dating back to 1961. The Connecticut footage is a…
Some 70 years ago this week. A great view of LT(j.g.) H.C. Arnold of Attack Squadron (VA) 83 “Rampagers” taxiing his cutting-edge Chance-Vought F7U-3M Cutlass toward the port steam catapult on board the Essex-class attack carrier USS Intrepid (CVA 11) during flight operations 22 June 1956. This was during Carrier Air Group Eight’s (CVG-8) 1956 Mediterranean cruise (12 March to 5 September) aboard Intrepid after the carrier had received her SCB-27C conversion to better operate jets. The nose of…
Tough to get a great LSO image, but this one rocks. Remember the magic of long exposures in low light, folks. Official caption: A sailor signals to a Bell AH-1Z Viper attack helicopter aboard the amphibious assault ship USS Boxer during flight operations in the South China Sea, June 13, 2026. The helicopter and aviators are assigned to the Marine Corps’ 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit, deployed with the Boxer Amphibious Ready Group to provide deterrence and crisis response in the Indo-Pacific…
My recent blog post about categories was inspired by a discussion with Thomas about work he was doing on his site. Thomas then wrote a blog post in response to mine, and several people reached out with their ideas. I was delighted to see how much discussion and inquiry can come from a single blog post. Source: Bringing people together with the web - James’ Coffee Blog This used to be the norm. I am fairly confident that my preference for longer form writing isn’t just my penchant for verbosity…
Create one of those Uses pages. Still a work in progress, but there's a good chunk of the stuff I use on there now. https://kevquirk.com/uses Thanks for reading this post via RSS. RSS is ace, and so are you. ❤️ You can reply to this post by email, or leave a comment.
This week will probably just be a writing log. 500 words down yesterday. I always console myself that Graham Greene only ever wrote 500 words a day. The start of a prose piece is always slow for me, because I’m finding the voice and the pace of the thing as I go. Those first 500 will get revised to death once I have my full first draft. It speeds up as I go – I wrote the last three thousand words of DEAD PIG COLLECTOR in a single day.
Anyone planning for FIRE 1 knows it’s hard to think about retirement living standards while you’re still having a blast in your 20s and 30s – or even when you’re neck-deep in your responsible 40s and 50s. Like a precog from Minority Report, you can only glimpse fragments of your future. Happily, intrepid retirees have sent us back reports from the frontier. And they’ve supplied just enough detail to fill in the ‘Here Be Dragons’ gaps in your FI map. The resultant research – Retirement Living…
I’m a heavy user of voice-to-text. It’s a key part of my workflow, and it improves my productivity — but only about sixty percent of the time. Lower than I expected when I first started using it. Here’s what I’ve realized. Voice-to-text improves the efficiency with which I get an idea down. But that’s only a gain when the bottleneck is the speed of capture. A lot of the time, the bottleneck is actually the thinking itself — and the act of typing, with its slight slowness, gives me the time to…
We'll take advantage of using temporary mpv chapter markers and FFmpeg to avoid needing to re-encode the video.
June 16th is always ringed or highlighted on my calender every year, not even birthdays get that level of note, it was and still is the day I get most excited about fishing, once again on running water and the thought of pootling around the Fens in my boat, stalking R.Thames and R.Lea carp or in this instance getting straight down to business with the 40 Rivers Challenge where I am currently on 30 completed rivers and have been settled on that figure since mid-August 2025!. There was to be no…
D got the first coat on the chassis and one end wall yesterday. I was even allowed to do the top bit as there are no windows for me to cover in paint! And today we are starting the next really daunting task, waxing on and off inside the cabin. So far the heat is bearable but we are only at 27 degrees with 32 forecast later and the cabin has less tree shade in the afternoon.
