Today's hat tip goes to one of a favorite comedian and wordsmiths from my misspent youth, the guy who recorded My Son The Nut, the great Allan Sherman (1924-1973).Here's Allan on the popular daytime program The Mike Douglas Show. Love Allan's appearance on Jay Ward Productions' Fractured Flickers.Allan was a frequent guest comic on The Dean Martin Show.Well, whatdaya know - found The Allan Sherman Show (1968) on Internet Archive - yippee kayyoh kayyay!
I read the James Bond novel Seafire while on a business trip. This is from 1994, which is late in the John Gardner era — he only wrote one more original Bond novel after this one.It was…okay. I've never loved Gardner's work. Here’s my review.
It remains too hot. The heatwave is enduring, although luckily it has never quite reached the heights of earlier this year where the humidity made my sleepy Cotswold cottage feel like a sauna. But it has remained warm and basically didn't rain at all during July which seems bad. The soil is dust. We look to the skies and dance. Life The biggest thing that happened this month is we got a new cat. Her name is Betsy, she's two years old, tiny and very cheeky. It's nice having a creature in the…
Will Dormann made a nice post with Firefox settings that a security-/privacy-conscious user may want to enable: If anybody else is making the switch to (or back to) Firefox, there are a few settings that a security-/privacy-conscious user may want to enable: Enable the Block AI enhancements toggle to disable all AI-related nonsense globally. Disable Telemetry & Data Collection. Disable "Firefox Home" Use "Strict" tracking protection Enable HTTPS-only mode Bonus: In about:config, set:…
Yesterday, I turned 30. 12 years into adulthood. A new decade of life. A new decade for World of Matthew. I’m working on several projects. From repairing tech to designing new parts for this website. Waiting for parts to finish repairs on the WH100-XM5 (pretty much finished but waiting for T7000) while I have ordered a AMD BC 250 for a few projects involving GPU compute and gaming (going full “ghetto” with keeping costs other components down).
Peter Davis1 delivered the Graduate English Address as a Harvard Law School graduate at Harvard’s 2018 Commencement. His speech is titled A Counterculture of Commitment. The defining characteristic of our generation, says Davis, is keeping options open to the point that commiting to something—even trivial like watching a whole movie—becomes strange. We are stuck in infinite browsing mode, not only in our devices but for everything in our lives. It’s OK to keep our options open but if we want to…
This week was mostly conversations — new scope, new people, a lot of catch-ups. When you step into a bigger job, the temptation is to start deciding. The better move is quieter. Four things I was reminded of. First listen 1. In a new mandate, your first job is to listen, not to fix. Most of my calendar this week was one-on-ones and intro meetings. I went in with topics, but the goal wasn’t to land opinions. It was to understand how the work actually flows and where people feel friction before I…
Having arrived back home with no particular difficulty, I am actually kind of relieved that studios are still giving The Odyssey and Spider-Man a bit of space, so I can watch some suddenly-good baseball and write movie reviews. I opted to skip The Samurai and the Prisoner at Fantasia once I saw that it was booked at The Coolidge Corner Theatre; so I'll get a chance to catch the new one from
Kroyer, Hip, Hip, Hurrah! 1888, Gothenburg Museum of Art, SwedenImpressionism was at first a French art movement, starting in the second half of the C19th. Impressionist techniques included visible, thick brush strokes of pure colour, creating a vibrant effect, and capturing the essence of the subject matter rather than focusing on minute details. Impressionists often painted outdoors to capture the effects of sunlight on their subjects, favouring natural poses and domestic scenes, creating a…
This week I am reviewing a wild card read, as I was not quite sure what to expect. Antony Carr (1916-1995) wrote five mystery novels during the 1950s. Online information is limited but two of his other mysteries appear to be A Comedy of Terrors (1955) and The Man in Room 3 (1958). The title for Candles of the Night is derived from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.
It’s been a while since I’ve tried making a game. I write little ideas down in my notebook here and there, snippets or ideas that I think might be fun to do something with, but it’s been I think two years since I’ve made a finished game, my last one being Monarch’s Flight for the NES. So I was pretty excited when a while back I got an idea in my head, and started playing around with a concept in Gdevelop. The idea started off as an homage to Paperboy, a game I used to love playing on the NES…
In Port Tennant, Swansea, in the late 1950s, Sunday school was not negotiable. You went to school, you played endless games of Kick the Can on the patch of wasteland we called the Bank, and on Sunday you were scrubbed, buttoned into something uncomfortable, and marched off to the Ebenezer Gospel Hall on Wern Fawr Road. Nobody sent you there out of burning religious conviction. You went because it was expected, and because it bought the grown-ups an hour's peace. The hall was squat and smelled…
Why read the book? Yossi Cohen served as director of Mossad from 2016 to 2021. In The Sword of Freedom he describes how Israel has faced existential threats and still found ways to defend itself. He explains key operations, including the 2018 seizure of Iran’s nuclear archive and the killing of an Iranian nuclear scientist. He also writes about the work that helped lead to the Abraham Accords. Cohen shows the importance of human intelligence, careful planning, and the will to act. The book…
How does the situation keep turning out to be worse than we know? How much should we update, therefore, that it is a lot worse than we know, after accounting for all the things we now know? At some point, when the ‘oh this was a harmless thing’ defenses for AIs doing misaligned actions get demolished enough times in a row by news a few days later, you want to update in advance that usually the reports are not referring to the harmless ordinary versions of things. Either way, buckle up for the…
He stepped inside, arms full, milk tea from Auntea Jennie in his right hand and various plastic bags holding plastic containers and featuring a cute yellow duck. The post The People of Jiangsu, and How to Confuse Them first appeared on Correr Es Mi Destino.
Five Curious Habits of My Poodle The offering Most dogs aren't happy if someone stands beside them while they eat. If you are standing next to mine at mealtime, you might get a piece to taste, just like he sometimes gets one from our food. Yes, my poodle spits out his very first kibble right at the feet of the person standing next to him. It almost looks like giving a symbolic share of the prey. He only does this if a loved one is standing nearby. Since he always eats only the amount he needs,…
There's certain topics and writing styles that do really well on the indie web; especially on Bearblog's Trending page. There are enough joking and seriously annoyed posts about it every now and then. We cannot stop talking about how tech is bad, analog media is good, blogging is good, and how good RSS is. I was wondering whether LLMs are trained on enough data from here to generate a post that would do really well, and is realistic, while also parodying us bloggers a little. So I prompted:…
A poemAre there any good guys? Like, the rich pedophile billionaires that run the country; are there any good ones that aren't pushing for an authoritarian rule over the country? I hope so! A Blow'emIn my desperation and loneliness, I have begun wearing the single right-ear earring in hopes of attracting a mate, like a skinny-fat bird of paradise. I finally got the earring in after not wearing one for like 3 years. I had to push it through a layer of scar tissue, hearing a pop as it finally…
In which I, yes, stare at the navel a little bit. I'm waiting for pizza in the festival line when the clock strikes midnight. We're sweaty, tired, and ecstatic all the same. Greasy cheese becomes a delicacy. K comes back from the washroom and I show her the time. Nineteen, I say with a shrug. She says the standard congratulations, and we wander home through residential Budapest. i. The window is open, breezy, smelling of the last traces of summer, and I'm all alone once again. Everything in my…
The Beginning Place by Ursula K. Le Guin (Tor, 1980) Hugh, suddenly overwhelmed by the dreary, lifeless routine of work-television-work, runs from the house he shares with his mother. He does not know where he is going. He runs down streets and past suburban homes and finds himself at a strange and beautiful creek. The water is cool and revives him, brings him back to himself. He soon visits this place as often as he can, finding in it something sacred and unspeakable. He thinks he is the only…
It has been almost 65 years, since Martin K. Speckter dreamed of the better world, the world where we do not waste punctuation marks. It was one gloomy night he was by the fireplace with his wife, when it hit him. “Honey, we need to save puctuation marks! We just can’t waste two of them to express excitement, confusion, disbelief and the like … right‽” “WTF‽”, said his wife. Even she had gotten used to her dear husbands outlandish ideas, head of the advertisement company after all, this one was…
As part of the beyond tellerrand partnership with TYPO3, TYPO3 invited me to curate a few slots at this year’s developer days. For one of the slots we picked Matthias Ott. Great talk once more, reminding us what creating with the web actually means and why this is important. Reply via Email
The doomer take on the internet is that it is designed to divide, to polarize, to isolate, to weaponize… maybe in the pursuit of monetization but usually - according to the pundits - a more nefarious purpose. While I consider myself to be a default optimist, the algo does infiltrate my positivity at times. For a few months, I found it hard to hop out of the doom cycle, the negativity. That lasted until I started talking to Emmett every day. I should actually say that he started talking to me.…
Writing is a sample of the sonorous inner monologue of life: a handful of the words that seem to mean something; that carry with them weight: greeting, friendship, questions, realisations, hopes, dreams, anxieties; sounds that carry life, and how we use language to coalesce all that we take in, transforming our ideas into something others can read in their own voices.As I write, I sit on the precipice of three voices: one I create, one I imagine, and the other that you, the reader, fill in. The…
Now, I do not know whether Auden is to be considered as an English or as an American poet: his career has been useful to me in providing me with an answer to the same question when asked about myself, for I can say: “whichever Auden is, I suppose I must be the other.” — T. S. Eliot in 1953 One was born in St. Louis but became a British subject; the other was born in York and became an American citizen. One was straight, the other was gay. One was born into a Unitarian family but later became an…
Tomorrow I’m heading to the Loreley! 🤘🎸 The open-air stage sits high above the Rhine and was built as a Nazi “Thingplatz” in the 1930s. And what makes it awesome now? These days, it’s hosting anti-fascist concerts. Hot Water Music and the Broilers. That’s going to be awesome! 😈🔥
Hellelil and Hildebrand, the Meeting on the Turret Stairs, Frederic William Burton, watercolor and gouache, 37 x 24 in. (95 x 61 cm), in the collection of the National Gallery of Ireland. Link is to a Wikipedia page with access to a large image. Taken from a medieval ballad is the story of Hellelil, who falls in love with her bodyguard, Hildebrand. This is to the displeasure of her father, who sends Helleli’s seven brothers to kill Hildebrand. Much unpleasantness ensues. Burton has chosen a…
My relationship with my father has always been unstable. As I was growing up, I have always been the "good boy". Every aspect of my life was his design. He even tried to influence my children. I never dare to say no to him, but the resentment builds within me. Eventually everything boiled over in my early 40s. We did not have a fall out; I decided to do what I see and feel is correct. Many times, his words, his actions become my problems as I need to undo the damage or maintain peace at home. I…
A look at the CSS line height unit and how it works.
Since deciding to try and hunt down all of the butterfly species of the UK, I've visited the north of England a couple of times and also spent an afternoon wandering around Grafton Wood on my way back from fishing with Ben down in Pembrokeshire. In the process, I've manged to see another seven species of butterfly and photographed six of them. My first brown hairstreak didn't want to be photographed sadly, so I'll need to try again at some point in the future. Here are the half dozen that were…
