Carnival-like US Open – Flushing, New York Did you guess where we were going for our first New York City event? We headed to the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. That’s where they host the US Open every year at the end of August. I’m only a modest tennis fan, but my wife loves and plays the sport. The big reason we went to New York at this time was to attend the open. I was there for the first time during Fan Week, which happens just before the official tournament begins. The great…

Molinard is a house whose name echoes my own; I find the "Miller" of Italy to be quite the interesting fragrance house. Fragonard, Molinard, and Galimard are all Grasse firms whose lineage stretches back into the 18th and 19th centuries, with Molinard citing 1849 on the purple boxes of its "Les Fleurs" range. I've always wanted to own the now-discontinued Violette EDT, and finally got a chance to

I love what Jason Calhoun has to say about this first song from his upcoming album revelations of divine love: I enjoy working with abstracted, gestural melody that isn’t necessarily connected to a traditional beat. The tapping ‘bass drum’ rhythm in ‘tolstoy tatsoi’ offers a subverted sense of rhythm which feels disjointed yet in place with the rest of the track — similar to tapping your foot to a song in your head while the radio plays something else. As my daughter has gotten old enough to…

Ghost train is best train.

When I started blogging in 2004, I had one site where anything could go. Any topic. Short or long posts. It didn’t matter. I didn’t care to focus on one or two areas. And because I posted about whatever, nothing felt out of place. That worked for a while, up until I started making zines in 2020. I started posting zines to my blog, because that was the only site I had. But it felt odd. My zine posts felt more put together. Finished work. Info on where to purchase the zine. Process photos and…

My uConsole computer finally arrived after a 10-month delay. I started kicking the tires by installing fun software on it, and quickly realized it’d run better if it looked cool. Here’s how I did it. Change the boot image Raspberry Pi OS uses Plymouth to make show a boot splashscreen. By default, it displays the image file at /usr/share/plymouth/themes/pix/splash.png. I’m sure there’s a “better” way to do this, but I simply replaced that file with my own 1280x720 image (to match the screen’s…

In June 2026, the Salish Lodge & Spa celebrated its 110th anniversary. Perched above the magnificent and sacred Snoqualmie Falls, the lodge opened in 1916 as Snoqualmie Falls Lodge. Since that time, millions of people have visited the 268-foot waterfall, so naturally there are plenty of postcards for people to remember their trips. This card... The post Snoqualmie Falls and Lodge Postcard by Ellis Postcard Co. – 145022 appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.

Spending the day with the grandkids. And today my grandson and I decided to climb a few trees. Actually he decided to climb a few trees. I just snapped the pictures. And it was good. Thanks for reading. You can subscribe to this blog if you care to. You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

Back in late 2022 when I built my current desktop computer, I opted for a mini-ITX case rather than the typical huge ATX case. I’d been interested in liquid cooling for a long time, and for such a small case, it seemed like the best fit. Liquid cooling promises superior cooling performance, quieter operation, and is better suited for compact builds which lack space for high air flow rate. Things didn’t work out that well: my PC has been quite noisy, and I had suspicions of thermal throttling,…

This post is by Phil.Some time ago I wrote some thoughts about “Neuromancer” ( https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/06/12/what-does-neuromancer-have-to-teach-us-about-the-role-of-ai-is-society/ ), which features two kinds of artificial intelligence, one of which seems like it could be realized with a Large Language Model, i.e. we could pretty much make it today. The other is something more powerful, an artificial general intelligence that not only has computational power but also…

After visiting the Yanesen area a month ago while walking between Ueno and Nippori, we made a re-visit, this time checking out the recommendations of some friends who live in the area. First stop on the list was armadillo bakes&coffee, a little cafe near Sendagi station. They made a good first impression with their armadillo mascot (look at that cute guy on the front of the store!) and we were excited to see that they had some pour over on the menu - and there were quite a few beans to choose…

The Lowe Institute published another of their excellent annual reports on Australian public sentiment. The polling results are unsurprising: Cactus spines are produced from specialized structures called areoles, a kind of highly reduced branch. Areoles are an identifying feature of cacti. As well as spines, areoles give rise to flowers, which are usually tubular and multipetaled. That’s clearly the wrong article. Let’s try again: Australians are wary of Donald Trump’s America. Only 31% of…

🇳🇴 Gotta say, that stadium collective boat row thingy is my favourite group football action since the Mexican wave.

For some reason my family has phenomenally crappy luck with Macbooks. Our second one in three years just died, right as my wife was needing to put together some slides with it. The thing is completely and utterly unresponsive, suffering the same mysterious fate as its predecessor three years ago. But that’s a story for another day once I have a chance to dig more into it. The main thing is that we were down a computer and my wife still needed something to get work done on. I decided to test out…

My longtime friend Catherine Hennessey died in March at the age of 92. Catherine was an inveterate collector of things: books, scissors, art, bells, building materials for a house she planned to build herself.As she aged, contracted, downsized, she moved this archive of interesting things from place to place, home to home, storage locker to storage locker. At one point she occupied 13 lockers in the parking garage at Harbourside, despite being only entitled to one.In an effort to consolidate,…

My brother sent me a link to an article in The Denver Post to the effect that the University of Denver is shutting down two departments, of Religious Studies and of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I thought this curious in part because DU had closed the entire College of Engineering about 1975, then revived it.(In this part of Colorado, the 'U' goes last in the abbreviation, wherever it appears in the name. The University of Denver is DU, the University of Colorado is CU, and references to…

My movie watching is outpacing my progress on the James Naremore book, so I don’t know the whole deal with Norman Foster and this Mercury Theater production, but it stars all my Kane and Ambersons buddies and is obviously a part of the big Welles picture. Annoyed to discover that there’s a longer reconstructed version with ten extra minutes that played MoMA a decade ago, but which never came out on video, so I watched the dull censored version, and it was still pretty great. The Kane Boys: An…

A Below Deck Med season 11 guest of Johnny Damon was so obnoxious someone fled the boat and a crew member may get fired for fighting him. Here's my recap!

A 1001 MIDNIGHTS Review by Newell Dunlap RUSSELL H. GREENAN – The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton. Random House, hardcover, 1973. Fawcett Crest, paperback, 1973, Bantam, paperback, 1988. Algernon Pendleton hears voices from unexpected sources — from philodendrons, for example. But his favorite voice source is Eulalia. a Worcester porcelain pitcher, and it is only with Eulalia that he carries on long conversations. In fact, this is pretty much the essence of Algernon’s existence — chatting…

🎧 Human Touch is the Phil Collins-est of Bruce Springsteen albums. From one Oscar winner of the 1990s to another.

Some music sounds like a throwback to the past. Other jams sound eerily apt for the moment. Then, there is the stuff that sounds straight-up from the future in some fashion. Bands that are ahead of their time, experimenting sonically in some wild fashion. Perhaps it is a new technique with technology that nobody else has attempted--think of the KLF and how they were doing sample-heavy mash-ups before, "Mash-Ups," were even a trend. The Pet Shop Boys feel like they were beamed straight from the…

In addition to the stuff we've seen, there were few other sci-fi/spacey things acquired at the recent Sandown Park toy fair, and we're looking at them now! Just a bit of fun! There was an astronaut too, but he was too silly, this at least has the saving grace of being an alien, and they might actually look silly . . . except, Fermi says they probably don't exist! Rocket USA 'Big Key',

This morning, I got a message from one of the rescue people, asking if today was a good day to bring back Domino. We were ready to set her up in the isolation shelter. She was spayed just 4 days ago, and should be in there for 10 days. While the rescue people where on … Continue reading Domino is back, and Damocles got checked

––– Anniversary favourite: Flagg’s 1917 Uncle Sam (top left) and Leete’s ‘Your Country Needs You’ Kitchener cover (top right) Alfred Leete’s brilliant illustration of a pointing Lord Kitchener created one of the world’s greatest visual memes. The combination image of two front covers above shows US artist James Montgomery Flagg’s version on this week’s Sunday Times Magazine and Leete’s artwork used in a similar way for the Daily Telegraph‘s centenary celebration magazine in 1955. The Sunday…

Book 17 for my 2026 goal of 36 books for the year! What do you know, I’m back on track for the year! My link to the book is through my bookshop.org affiliate account, which means I may earn a small commission if you buy from there. A couple of weeks ago, I raved about the delightfully strange and compelling novel Strange Houses by the pseudonymous author Uketsu, and I knew I would have to check out any other works of his that are available. This meant picking up the more recent release, Strange…

The most controversial part of last week’s article on the Midjourney ultrasound scanner was medical experts’ recommendation against whole-body screening (including existing whole-body screening technology using MRI).Isn’t this crazy? Whole-body screening can save lives by detecting serious diseases like cancer. The experts counterargue that it finds so many false positives - minor zit-like imperfections that would never have caused problems, but which cost patients time, money, anxiety, and…

I made this for the Lisp Game Jam Spring 2026, and a month later I have a much more complete role-playing game: UNDER STONE 1.1 release! Complete game with: Help! Saving! Job change! Items! Merchant! Second dungeon! WOW! $10 or PWYW. Get it now on itch.io

If you've ever had to search for "how to make Excel quit removing leading zeroes," I have an app for you. SmoothCSV won't turn some random number into a date and then refuse to change it back. In fact, it won't format anything unless you expressly tell it to. It doesn't try to be a lightweight spreadsheet; it's a grid editor, first and foremost. It leaves your data as it is, with no helpful "guesses" at what you might be trying to do. That's the pitch, and it's enough to make this my CSV editor…

If you've ever had to search for "how to make Excel quit removing leading zeroes," I have an app for you. SmoothCSV won't turn some random number into a date and then refuse to change it back. In fact, it won't format anything unless you expressly tell it to. It doesn't try to be a lightweight spreadsheet; it's a grid editor, first and foremost. It leaves your data as it is, with no helpful "guesses" at what you might be trying to do. That's the pitch, and it's enough to make this my CSV editor…

My interview with Dr. Claudio Vellutini on The Blue Hour is now available as a podcast. In this conversation, I speak with Dr. Claudio Vellutini, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of British Columbia School of Music, about opera in Vienna and the cultural exchanges that shaped one of Europe’s most influential musical centres. Drawing on his recent chapter in Vienna: A Musical History and his book Entangled Histories: Opera and Cultural Exchange between Vienna and the Italian…