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I was a little startled to see, quite so high up in the chart of UK's best and worst seaside towns, Dungeness. Which isn't really even a town (Wikipedia describes it as a hamlet), more a sandspit at the end of the Romney Hythe and Dymchurch Light Railway, famed for lighthouses, shingle beaches, nature reserves, Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage, and a decommissioned nuclear power station ('Long journey ahead' for nuclear plant clean-up).
[A] barren and bewitching backdrop for a getaway. A vast swathe of this shingle headland is designated a National Nature Reserve, cradling around a third of all British plant species, with some 600 having been recorded, from rugged sea kale to delicate orchids. Exposed to the Channel and loomed over by twin nuclear power stations, Dungeness has, over recent decades, become an unlikely enclave for artists and a popular spot for day-trippers, horticulturalists and birders alike.
Or even
The ghostly allure of Dungeness, Kent. It’s an arid and mysterious place, yet it’s precisely these charms that captivate visitors.
Looking at the criteria scored on, it really is rather weird: completely lacking in the hotels, shopping and seafront/pier categories and not much for tourist attractions but scores high on peace and quiet and scenery.
Perhaps there is a larger number of people looking for this kind of getaway experience, invoking a certain eerie folk-horror vibe, than one would suppose. Not really a Summer Skies and Golden Sands kind of experience, take it away, The Overlanders.
Surprised that somewhere like Margate didn't rate higher.
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Books
Still reading A Power Unbound.
Comics
Caught up on Order of the Stick (I was at about #1319, and the most recent one was #1328.) Welp, that was a thing that happened.
Things are also Happening in Dumbing of Age. I am looking at the title text in June 24's strip and glowering distrustfully at Willis after what happened last big finale.
Games
Playing a lot of Simon Tatham's Puzzle Games on my phone.
Slay the Spire: have now unlocked Ascension 4 on all four characters. Surprisingly (to me?) the hardest run on Ascension 3 was with the Defect.
Links
Cats
Ash is down an incisor and a canine as of last Tuesday. He was good and brave at the vet and, after he got home, patient with Dorian's mistaking him for a stranger because he smelled Wrong.
Phenology
No new kangaroo visits. It's been very cold out.
Still reading A Power Unbound.
Comics
Caught up on Order of the Stick (I was at about #1319, and the most recent one was #1328.) Welp, that was a thing that happened.
Things are also Happening in Dumbing of Age. I am looking at the title text in June 24's strip and glowering distrustfully at Willis after what happened last big finale.
Games
Playing a lot of Simon Tatham's Puzzle Games on my phone.
Slay the Spire: have now unlocked Ascension 4 on all four characters. Surprisingly (to me?) the hardest run on Ascension 3 was with the Defect.
Links
- The Bedbound Activity Masterlist: Part 1 (Also good for insomnia or for when it's too cold to be anywhere but under the covers, even if you're not bedbound.)
- A New Ballet by Underrepresented Artists: "The Little Mermaid reimagined as a disabled, queer and brown coming-of-age story for 7 dancers." The link is to a fundraiser, but even if you're not up for donating there's a video there from rehearsals that might be of interest. (Disclaimer: I can't be objective about this show, one of my best friends is dancing in it.)
- Crowdfunders for the UK's Trans+ Solidarity Alliance: Support Trans+ Solidarity Alliance and Maybe I'm Trans? (with badges). (hattip:
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rydra_wong) - Internet users advised to change passwords after 16bn logins exposed. As usual, HaveIBeenPwned, you know the drill.
Cats
Ash is down an incisor and a canine as of last Tuesday. He was good and brave at the vet and, after he got home, patient with Dorian's mistaking him for a stranger because he smelled Wrong.
Phenology
No new kangaroo visits. It's been very cold out.
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Todd Zeile: Pete's been chasing breaking balls
My brain: don't go chasing breaking balls, stick to the sliders and the fastballs you're used to
*facepalm*
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My brain: don't go chasing breaking balls, stick to the sliders and the fastballs you're used to
*facepalm*
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The thing that's getting to me about my part time gig - more than pretty much anything else - is that I keep having to defer to my client's doctor's appointments and other such obligations. I know how hard it is to get an appointment with a specialist in a reasonable timetable, and adding in factors like her having to schedule a car because she can't use the stairs to get to the subway, it becomes exponentially more difficult to arrange, let alone attend.
It's not the deferring so much as knowing if we met at least twice a week, we could build some momentum on tackling the decades of accumulated legal paperwork and really get going.
It's not the deferring so much as knowing if we met at least twice a week, we could build some momentum on tackling the decades of accumulated legal paperwork and really get going.
I admit this sounds rather startling, but then, being a historian of reproductive health among other things, I think of the fact that though we sometimes think our poor ancestresses were popping out progeny pretty much nonstop until death or menopause arrived, in actuality, fertility and subfertility were A Thing, historically. (Let us consider certain famed historical examples and a plethora of folktales on this theme.)
I have remarked heretofore about the assumption that Wo Unto The Sperms of the Modern Man, They Are Weak and In Decline, when I cannot see that there is any sound baseline of what the average male's average sperm count was and whether the little swimmers were even in prime condition at that even a very few decades ago. One assumes that any samples preserved in sperm banks (if they are and supposing they have not themselves deteriorated over time) would have been prime stuff from healthy young specimens. (Though given some of the stories that have come out about dodgy fertility docs, perhaps not.)
So this is not necessarily a story of Wo Wo Fertility B Declining, with side-order of Wymmynz B selfishly waiting Too Long to progenate, but of a problem which used to exist and was at the very least Not At All Easy To Fix (hopes and prayers, mostly, and try to relax....) has some chance of being resolved.
Okay, some percentage is presumably LGBTQ+ couples/constellations forming families.
And some of it is Older Mothers though again, historically, women have gone on Havin Babbyz well into their 40s and (Journal of Anecdotes Told to Me By Committee Members of Reproductive Health Charities) these days a significant % of abortions in the UK involve women who have misleadingly supposed from media myth that At Their Advanced Age their ovaries have shrivelled up and their fertility fallen off a cliff.
Though this is interesting:
The number of women freezing their eggs also increased sharply, with cycles up from 4,700 in 2022 to 6,900 in 2023. Egg freezing increased most among women in their 30s, but the number using their stored frozen eggs remained low, the report said.
Hmmmm.
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I got into a Zinefest in town - that only uses instagram and facebook for advertising, so I'm sort of SOL when it comes to like, connecting to them in any way but I'll save that for feedback, I guess.
I've got a short comics collection of HamsterBandit Industry pages, a short story about Snow White's ghost, and two very small squares of an old story idea project I did and a series of ghost story drabbles. I'm planning on making another set of two square zines and also printing a 16 page Batman and Columbo comic. I've gotten lucky on the last part that my dad's agreed to let me use his printer instead of me having to use Staples. It has so little colour in the actual comic that it felt physically painful to pay the price at Staples to double-side print so many pages.
Meanwhile, I'm watching Murdoch Mysteries and 3 thoughts:
1) The genre of 'if you have any hobby at all, you will be murdered' is alive and well.
2) You can really tell that this show was cast around Murdoch actor's (lack of) height.
3) By season 13, they have run out of short actors in Toronto.
You can see the opposite effect in Father Brown, where Brown's actor is a goddamn giant. The actors, including the women, were all cast tall so they fit in the shot with him I think. Bunty was 5'11-6'. The 'tiny' Mrs. McCarthy is, according to my searches... 5'8.
My gf is 5'8, I'm 5'3. She is like a giant to me. It's awesome.
I've got a short comics collection of HamsterBandit Industry pages, a short story about Snow White's ghost, and two very small squares of an old story idea project I did and a series of ghost story drabbles. I'm planning on making another set of two square zines and also printing a 16 page Batman and Columbo comic. I've gotten lucky on the last part that my dad's agreed to let me use his printer instead of me having to use Staples. It has so little colour in the actual comic that it felt physically painful to pay the price at Staples to double-side print so many pages.
Meanwhile, I'm watching Murdoch Mysteries and 3 thoughts:
1) The genre of 'if you have any hobby at all, you will be murdered' is alive and well.
2) You can really tell that this show was cast around Murdoch actor's (lack of) height.
3) By season 13, they have run out of short actors in Toronto.
You can see the opposite effect in Father Brown, where Brown's actor is a goddamn giant. The actors, including the women, were all cast tall so they fit in the shot with him I think. Bunty was 5'11-6'. The 'tiny' Mrs. McCarthy is, according to my searches... 5'8.
My gf is 5'8, I'm 5'3. She is like a giant to me. It's awesome.
Yesterday was largely a smoothly running operation. Once things got set up, it was easy to tell people to feed the ballot into the scanner until the machine caught it and to wait a moment for the confirmation screen, and being told to wait a moment as part of the general instructions helped people do so. There was a moment someone didn't wait, didn't see he'd marked his ballot badly enough it couldn't be read, and he was thankfully barely out the door for us to get him and tell him to fill out another one.
There was another moment someone used a red privacy sheet instead of a black one, which had us worried for a moment before we found out the only major difference in the sheets is the color and any ballot inside them's good to be accepted. A few affidavit ballots got spat out, and so did some with extra marks. Sometimes a ballot needed to be fed in from the other end to get accepted by the machine, and it never mattered which side faced up.
Setting up the machine was easy, except for the part where someone needed to come and troubleshoot one of them, leaving us to open about 15 minutes behind schedule. It didn't cause a backlog or an issue, and all in all, we serviced just over 1300 people - about the same as the election last November. There were more babies and animals this time, and about the same number of children, but beyond that, the adults of all ages blurred together after a while so I can't speak to the represented demographics. Just that a little over 1300 ballots were processed by all the machines, with people showing up early and still coming in at 8:59PM.
Closing the machine was trickier because while all the steps were direct and granular, there were still moments I wanted to double check a part of the process with someone, and with everyone working on something, nobody could say "I'll be with you in two minutes, hold tight until then," which didn't help. But we got it done, and while we were out a little later than in November, with the sunlight having lasted longer and the day itself being much less stressful, it evened out.
One amusing moment came when someone tried to juggle a paper takeout bag, an iced coffee in a plastic cup, and a ballot, and I told him to put the coffee down onto the floor. Which he did. Something in how I told him to do so had one of the other poll workers laughing throughout the day.
Another amusing moment came in the last fifteen minutes of the day. Someone wanted them to work faster and I said we could glare. They looked away and said sure, and when they looked back, they jumped and cried out - because when they'd looked away, I'd pulled out a hard stare to demonstrate the kind of glaring I was talking about. I broke into laughter and they did, too, but man, what a moment to have.
One other poll worker was reading the Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, which had us talking about systems of power, whether power corrupts or reveals, good research methods, and hypothetical Caro-level biographies we'd like to read. One person said Sacajawea and the LBJ reader said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I told him I'd want to read one on Tom Cruise, which, given it's a theoretical Caro-level biography, would talk about things like the history of cults and the rise and fall of various aspects of the American film industry to give full context the way Caro's LBJ books talks about the daily life of pre-electricity rural Texas and his Robert Moses book talks about the geology of Long Island to help the readers understand where those men were really coming from.
We also speculated on whether someone would get a 51% plurality and secure a spot directly from the ballot box. We chatted about market tonics and sourdough starters and the terroir of wheat. On occasion, one of the voters was upset about the concept of ranked choice voting, and sometimes they voted for one candidate instead of ranking anything and at least one person cast a blank ballot as a political statement. After twelve hours, I stopped saying people could take pens and stickers and simply told them to take pens and stickers. I ate lunch and dinner in a nearby park and otherwise spent most of the unpleasantly hot day in an air-conditioned building.
Overall, while parts of it could've gone better, I had a good enough time I think I'll probably be back in another few months.
There was another moment someone used a red privacy sheet instead of a black one, which had us worried for a moment before we found out the only major difference in the sheets is the color and any ballot inside them's good to be accepted. A few affidavit ballots got spat out, and so did some with extra marks. Sometimes a ballot needed to be fed in from the other end to get accepted by the machine, and it never mattered which side faced up.
Setting up the machine was easy, except for the part where someone needed to come and troubleshoot one of them, leaving us to open about 15 minutes behind schedule. It didn't cause a backlog or an issue, and all in all, we serviced just over 1300 people - about the same as the election last November. There were more babies and animals this time, and about the same number of children, but beyond that, the adults of all ages blurred together after a while so I can't speak to the represented demographics. Just that a little over 1300 ballots were processed by all the machines, with people showing up early and still coming in at 8:59PM.
Closing the machine was trickier because while all the steps were direct and granular, there were still moments I wanted to double check a part of the process with someone, and with everyone working on something, nobody could say "I'll be with you in two minutes, hold tight until then," which didn't help. But we got it done, and while we were out a little later than in November, with the sunlight having lasted longer and the day itself being much less stressful, it evened out.
One amusing moment came when someone tried to juggle a paper takeout bag, an iced coffee in a plastic cup, and a ballot, and I told him to put the coffee down onto the floor. Which he did. Something in how I told him to do so had one of the other poll workers laughing throughout the day.
Another amusing moment came in the last fifteen minutes of the day. Someone wanted them to work faster and I said we could glare. They looked away and said sure, and when they looked back, they jumped and cried out - because when they'd looked away, I'd pulled out a hard stare to demonstrate the kind of glaring I was talking about. I broke into laughter and they did, too, but man, what a moment to have.
One other poll worker was reading the Robert Caro books on Lyndon Johnson, which had us talking about systems of power, whether power corrupts or reveals, good research methods, and hypothetical Caro-level biographies we'd like to read. One person said Sacajawea and the LBJ reader said Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord. I told him I'd want to read one on Tom Cruise, which, given it's a theoretical Caro-level biography, would talk about things like the history of cults and the rise and fall of various aspects of the American film industry to give full context the way Caro's LBJ books talks about the daily life of pre-electricity rural Texas and his Robert Moses book talks about the geology of Long Island to help the readers understand where those men were really coming from.
We also speculated on whether someone would get a 51% plurality and secure a spot directly from the ballot box. We chatted about market tonics and sourdough starters and the terroir of wheat. On occasion, one of the voters was upset about the concept of ranked choice voting, and sometimes they voted for one candidate instead of ranking anything and at least one person cast a blank ballot as a political statement. After twelve hours, I stopped saying people could take pens and stickers and simply told them to take pens and stickers. I ate lunch and dinner in a nearby park and otherwise spent most of the unpleasantly hot day in an air-conditioned building.
Overall, while parts of it could've gone better, I had a good enough time I think I'll probably be back in another few months.
Not quite a paella, not quite a pilaf, not exactly a risotto. Certainly a cooked stovetop rice dish. Certainly based on a riff of a paella, working with what I had available. Certainly cooking the rice with the other ingredients and broth to make sure it all came out nicely. And pretty much all of it green, too.
Green spring onions from the market, because I had plenty of them. A stalk of green garlic, too, the cloves roughly chopped, the stalk sliced in half to infuse more garlic flavor. A couple of zucchini, sliced both thin and thick. A head of broccoli, cooked first to make sure the stalks got soft along with the florets. Herbs, spices - some parsley, a blend, a couple dried chili peppers, fresh black pepper, large-grain salt. Sushi rice since I had a cup and a half left in the bag and wanted to use it all up.
The original riff involved tomatoes, and I didn't want to go without any, and I didn't feel like adding anything red or even yellow to throw off the colors. So I used a can of chopped green tomatoes I bought a while ago because I'd never seen them before and found them intriguing, and they turned out to be exceptionally well suited to sweeping up a little corner of the kitchen.
Green spring onions from the market, because I had plenty of them. A stalk of green garlic, too, the cloves roughly chopped, the stalk sliced in half to infuse more garlic flavor. A couple of zucchini, sliced both thin and thick. A head of broccoli, cooked first to make sure the stalks got soft along with the florets. Herbs, spices - some parsley, a blend, a couple dried chili peppers, fresh black pepper, large-grain salt. Sushi rice since I had a cup and a half left in the bag and wanted to use it all up.
The original riff involved tomatoes, and I didn't want to go without any, and I didn't feel like adding anything red or even yellow to throw off the colors. So I used a can of chopped green tomatoes I bought a while ago because I'd never seen them before and found them intriguing, and they turned out to be exceptionally well suited to sweeping up a little corner of the kitchen.
In addition to various Spider-Man and Captain America-themed items, I ordered a Batman shirt and a Robin shirt for Baby Miss L and then I was like, but does she know who Batman and Robin even are??? So I went looking for toddler-friendly Bat-stuff, and lo and behold, there is a show called Batwheels on Cartoon Network (and HBO Max) about the Batmobile and other Bat vehicles (the Redbird, Batgirl's bike) coming to life like the toys in Toy Story! With DUKE as ROBIN and CASS as BATGIRL!!! I love this!!! (mainly because I was afraid it was going to be Damian as Robin and Babs as Batgirl and that's just weird.) I don't know if any of the other kids exist, but there is a Batplane they call Wing, so maybe Nightwing is around? I didn't watch it, just read the wiki, but I mentioned it to my niece, so maybe Baby Miss L can get started early on loving Robin, and she can enjoy Tiny Titans when she's a little bit older. (I am still sad and bitter that Tiny Titans was cancelled so unceremoniously because it was the best.)
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What I read
Finished Cluny Brown.
Defaulted to rereads of Agatha Christie, The Murder in the Mews, The Murder in the Vicarage, Towards Zero and Taken at the Flood.
Somebody on my reading list mentioned Meg Moseman, The Falling Tower (2025) - spooky goings on at Harvard involving the ghostly presence of Charles Williams among other things. May be just me but I found it all a bit rushed: then I realised that my bar for Weird Stuff Going On In Academic Setting was set very high indeed years ago by Pamela Dean's Tam Lin (I considered that there may also be issues around Times Have Changed).
Managed to find my copy of GB Stern's Summer's Play aka The Augs (1933/4) though couldn't lay my hands on The Woman in the Hall alas. Really very good. A problem for republishing may be a few casual allusions to blackface seaside entertainment of the period.
Because I've never actually read it though I've read other of her works, and it was being inaccurately discussed recently as lost, overlooked, neglected etc, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Homemaker (1924). This is what, like 40 or so years before The Feminine Mystique and 'the problem that has no name'?
On the go
Just recently republished (collation of two previous collections published in limited editions in 1994 and 1997), Simon Raven, The Islands of Sorrow and Other Macabre Tales. So Simon, very Raven.
I started John Wiswell, Someone You Can Build a Nest In (2024) which I know has been widely admired but I'm somehow just not vibeing with it.
Also well on into first of books for essay review, v good.
Up next
Dunno. The new Barbara Hambly arrives pretty much just as (DV) I am off to a conference.
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Despite the stress and a small number of concerning moments, I don't regret working the polls today. Partly because I didn't have to be online, largely because I was in an air-conditioned room most of the day.
I got up at 3:15AM and I got back to my apartment at about 10:30. I'm not sure how easy sleep's going to come tonight, which means I'm really very thankful I called everything off tomorrow.
I got up at 3:15AM and I got back to my apartment at about 10:30. I'm not sure how easy sleep's going to come tonight, which means I'm really very thankful I called everything off tomorrow.
So this morning I updated the board chair on expected attendance at today's board meeting, and she replied, should we just switch the meeting to zoom entirely, due to the weather? So that is what we did! And as much as I would have liked to have had dinner with Friend L this evening, I was much happier not having to schlep into the city in 101°F heat. The meeting went well, and now I can relax for a few weeks.
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So, today I had a physio appointment at the far from eligible hour of 1 pm, what is this even, do these people not have lunch hours? also it was at the uphill all the way clinic.
Anyway, I got there in very good time, and was able to ascertain the bus stop that would actually take me in the right sort of direction for getting home.
(It was actually quite a nice walk past people's flowering gardens or council floral bits.)
And it was a very good and useful session, with a senior person as well as my usual physio, and I think we may be getting to some habit-changing things that might improve matters.
So after I had come out I went and caught the bus, which is one that goes across rather than up and down (so much of London Transport being designed on the principle of getting people into Central London and back out again) and it is a nice bus that goes past Highgate Cemetery, even if it is the newer bit, and the hospital, and okay, ends up at a slightly non-intuitive place behind Archway, but I was able eventually to locate the relevant stop for an onward bus.
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And in other news, I have whizzed off an application for the Fellowship I mentioned and have had several kind offers from FB friends to provide letters of recommendation.
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(I did not know about Gladys Knight and the Pips version of The Boy from Crosstown!)
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