owlectomy

I am not encouraged to read the actual book, but this is amazing BURN:

beneath the carapace of difficult writing and literary allusion, there’s the gratifying gooey centre of a blockbuster PG western, with limited nudity, violent scenes and oddly simple moral choices.

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I was thinking that surely there is a class factor involved here, i.e. parents who can actually afford to be this over-involved in their offspring? When Helicopter Parents Touch Down—At College. Okay, am of generation which is quite aghast at this - I bopped off to New York for a summer during my uni years when making a phone call would have been prohibitively expensive.

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Like I am always going on, 'exotic' ingredients have a long history in global circulation, c.f. lates from the Recipes Project: Globalising Early Modern Recipes

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This is amazing and fascinating: The most widely used writing system in pre-colonial Africa was the ʿAjamī script - so widespread.

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Lost grave of daughter of Black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano found by A-level student:

Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), also known as Gustavus Vassa, escaped enslavement to become a celebrated author and campaigner in Georgian England. His memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was a bestseller.
His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe at a time when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.

Myths about people debunked:

‘Heroic actions are a natural tendency’: why bystander apathy is a myth Modern research shows the public work together selflessly in an emergency, motivated by a strong impulse to help

Debunking “When Prophecy Fails”

In 1954, Dorothy Martin predicted an apocalyptic flood and promised her followers rescue by flying saucers. When neither arrived, she recanted, her group dissolved, and efforts to proselytize ceased. But When Prophecy Fails (1956), the now-canonical account of the event, claimed the opposite: that the group doubled down on its beliefs and began recruiting—evidence, the authors argued, of a new psychological mechanism, cognitive dissonance. Drawing on newly unsealed archival material, this article demonstrates that the book's central claims are false, and that the authors knew they were false.

I.e. after all the faff and fuss and distraction

I GOT THE REVIEW DONE!!!

And then spent a fair amount of time fiddling around with it and niggling at it and trimming it and so on -

- but then I managed to upload it to the journal site, via a link from the Reviews Editor which may not have required me to either remember a password I created in the dim mists of past time or create a new one, but still involved the inordinate amount of annoying these journal sites are.

And lo and behold, this very morning after, it has been accepted, no corrections, no revisions, now in the editing process, copyright form forthcoming.

Phew.

One last book to review on the pile, should I put myself forward to review v interesting work just out from old mate? Have other stuff to be thinking of....

As previously mentioned, also managed to get the downstairs backroom communicating with the world again. Though getting the unwanted TP-Link returned looks a bit more arduous.

Plus, have had a haircut.

Dept of, Wow symbolism: Garden shed of vaccine pioneer Edward Jenner added to heritage at risk register:

It was there that he first trialled a vaccine for smallpox in the late 18th century. The hut, built from brick and rubble stone with a simple thatched roof, was christened “the Temple of Vaccinia” by Jenner.

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Dept of, maybe the murmuration is trying to tell us something: Starling Spectacular over the Avalon Marshes - is something foretold stirring???

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Dept of, no, really, I am trying to avoid going 'urgent phallic much' over this arboricultural saga....: How the giant sequoia came to England:

Lobb collected seed, shoots, and seedlings. In fewer than two years’ time these would give rise to thousands of saplings, snatched up by wealthy Victorians to adorn great British estates. The larger-than-life conifer, so symbolic of the vast American wilderness, suddenly became a status symbol in Britain.

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Dept of, now thinking about ancient books bound in selkie skin as basis for fantasy: Eight pages bound in furry seal skin may be Norway's oldest book. You know, the Danes really do not have a very good record:

But when Denmark ruled over Norway, old books and manuscripts were sent out of the country. The Danish king was the one who claimed important relics of the past.

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Dept of, are cockatoos actually parrots (apparently yes)? There’s a statue of a dead parrot in Greenwich.

What I read

Finished Eve's Hollywood, pretty good even if not quite up to Slow Days, Fast Company.

Finished Reader's Liberation, some of which was great and some of which struck me as 'pieces the author wanted to get out somewhere and here was as good as anywhere' i.e. it's a collection of essays themed around reading/writing.

I had been havering over Ben Aaronovitch Stone and Sky (2025) as on recent showings I am not really up for paying hardback or even trade paperback prices for the ebooks - this was a Kobo deal at the weekend, and I feel my judgement on this was vindicated, because phoning it in and spinning it out....

On the go

Still dipping into Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960–1967.

Have gone back to Lanny Budd and commenced upon One Clear Call (#9) (1948). Just possibly a certain amount of making occasions for getting up to speed with All The Backstory, but still, I was glad to get back to this which I had just started when I found Stone and Sky in the bargain bin.

Up next

I imagine Lanny is going to keep me occupied for a while, but I have The Scribbler Annual and the latest Literary Review. Also am at stage in review writing where I can contemplate moving on to the next volume I am committed to doing.

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*After ordering what turned out to be the wrong type of Powerline from Argos, and re-ordering the same model as we had previously been using (which Argos didn't have) from Amazon (hiss boo, but not really much in the way of alternatives), and then the actual setup was much less of a strain than I'd anticipated.