#classics #pigeon #odyssey #odysseus
High on a throne of royal state.
Gustave Doré, from "Milton's Paradise Lost" New York: [ca. 1880?] #illustration #art https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/illustrations/high-throne/
Works entering the public domain include:
Written work by: Agatha Christie, Baroness Orczy, Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust, Upton Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf
Art by: Ansel Adams, Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and Tamara de Lempicka
Films including The Jazz Singer, Metropolis, Napoléon, and Trolley Troubles
I had an awful time building the blog because of errors fetching content from Twitter. This, I suspect, has to do with their new policies on unauthenticated access. So I’m getting rid of my link files dating back to 2016 (though I’m keeping them archived just in case). I’m still keeping my account, but not adding anything that isn’t already going to be available on my presence on Mastodon or Facebook. In the unlikely chance you might have had something bookmarked, sorry. To me, it’s just not worth the trouble.
I’ve been on the platform for a number of years, but have been following the crowd reducing the exposure to the turmoil on Twitter. Here are a few of the items from the last few months I marked as favourites. The styling isn’t quite what I want, so I might change some of the tooling to bring it more in line with the other pages here.
I thought I’d put out another collection of tidbits I ran across that give me ideas of things I might want to do or create. There are lots of other preoccupations in my mind besides these, but I prefer to collect the ones worth keeping around
Like most people, I like roaming around the web looking for cool things, and sometimes get the feeling that I’ve run across something worth bookmarking, something I want to mull over in the future. Some of them are worth saying a few words about, and I was thinking I would put these up on the blog in hopes that someone might find them fascinating too.
There is a controversy out just now about whether holders of doctoral degrees other than medical doctors ought to use the title of Doctor before their names. I have some thoughts on the subject as a PhD holder in Physics.
When I was in graduate school we would joke about the German practice of using honorifics for people according to their precise level of advancement, so a Herr Doktor would be outranked by a a Herr Professor Doktor and so forth. I was working at places which related to my subject for about eleven years after then and used the title partly not to be confused with graduate students who didn’t yet have access to it, partly because it was the thing that other people at my level just did. When applying for grants, there would be places where one was to specify one’s educational background and it would be foolish to leave any of that out, as though there were something to hide. My father liked using this form of address immensely but pretty much no one else outside of academia and not everyone within it.
This is the third year I engaged in the discipline of writing and posting a poem on the Yahoo groups Scifaiku list I’ve been a member of for a dozen years or so. In past years I maintained a scifaiku writing timetable. One year, I wrote a new poem every single day for the entire year to see how much of a challenge that would be for me. Two other years, I kept a five month long, twice weekly schedule on the mailing list, which I repeated in much the same form this year, from January till the end of May. In the end, I had generated a total of forty-four stripped-down verses, either a single nine syllable lines or a three-line stanza of twelve syllables. Additionally, the verses portrayed some topic drawn from either science fiction, fantasy, or horror. On our Yahoo list, the members adhere to the Japanese renga convention of posting answering verses linked to the preceding one and yet shifting the emphasis to a greater or lesser extent. True to our haiku roots, the verses we write are as short as possible, forcing the writer to omit anything unnecessary while still trying to remain intelligible. With each linked contribution, the thread as a whole is apt to veer quite a ways away from the idea that sparked things in the first place. Plus, the vagaries of email communication with its unpredictable delays can also bring about forks in the chain which can co-exist side by side following sometimes very different paths.
For every post here I write maybe three for my own use over on Penzu as a sort of diary of what’s going on. I’ve learned that it’s too easy to forget a lot sooner than you expect just what you were experiencing and saying and doing if you don’t leave some kind of traces for yourself to get back into your head in times past. What I write are things too personal or professionally sensitive to want to put out on a public blog like this, or more often things that only I figure I would be interested in knowing about. For me there needs to be a kind of a space between what I think about and what I put out there, which I think is nothing like the way a lot of people approach their social media presence.
