New York Spring 2021 Fashion Week is entirely online this year. (Fashion Weeks typically are about six months before the actual season because they're targeted at fashion buyers and the fashion media as opposed to consumer customers.) I'm not the only one to notice the Spring 2021 collection overall is more restrained. It might be the worldwide pandemic and it also might be that the absurd won't work online like it would with a runway show. The New York designer Badgley Mischka had a particularly nice show IMHO. Their show also reminded me, once again, of why my modeling career was never destined to go platinum. Look at the photo below. I think that's a gorgeous dress. The model is lovely. But, my God, the woman must be close to seven feet tall. She has to be nearly eighteen inches taller than me. That is the hot look if you want to be a model. You have to be that tall or you'll never break into the big leagues. Sure, you can get some catalog work and some commercial spots if you're shorter. But you'll never be a superstar.

New York Spring 2021 Fashion Week is entirely online this year. (Fashion Weeks typically are about six months before the actual season because they're targeted at fashion buyers and the fashion media as opposed to consumer customers.) I'm not the only one to notice the Spring 2021 collection overall is more restrained. It might be the worldwide pandemic and it also might be that the absurd won't work online like it would with a runway show. The New York designer Badgley Mischka had a particularly nice show IMHO. Their show also reminded me, once again, of why my modeling career was never destined to go platinum. Look at the photo below. I think that's a gorgeous dress. The model is lovely. But, my God, the woman must be close to seven feet tall. She has to be nearly eighteen inches taller than me. That is the hot look if you want to be a model. You have to be that tall or you'll never break into the big leagues. Sure, you can get some catalog work and some commercial spots if you're shorter. But you'll never be a superstar.

wild boar steals nudist's laptop

Sometimes things happen in real life that, if they happened in a movie or a novel, they would be dismissed as implausible. Take the recent incident of the German nudist whose skinnydipping idyll was abruptly interrupted when a wild boar grabbed a yellow bag containing his laptop and ran into the woods with two piglets in tow.

The man raced out of the water in his birthday suit and took off after the porcine thief, loudly clapping his hands and waving about a stick. He caught up to the porker and managed to retrieve his bag and laptop. No word exactly how he did that. Maybe he threatened it with an apple and a 350-degree oven.

I am reminded of the modern German classic film Run Lola Run where the central character spends nearly the entire movie running desperately to save her boyfriend's life. It's a hard movie to describe, but if you haven't seen it, you might want to check it out. It's a real treat.

I fixed the toilet

Several months ago, the flush handle on one of our toilets broke. Made from cheap plastic, it was not built to last.

My husband said he would fix it, but somehow it never made it to the top of his to-do list. I didn't want to nag, but I grew tired of having to take off the back lid, manually pulling the chain, and replacing the lid every time it needed flushing.

Yesterday, I decided I would try to fix it myself. I went to a nearby hardware store, looked at the various offerings for flush levers and arms, and bought one.

I brought it home, opened it up, read the rather confusing instructions which seemed to be badly translated from Chinese, and partly assembled the guts of the thing, relying instead on my common sense. Using a common spanner, I then installed it in the toilet, adjusted the lever and the arm, popped the lid back on, and turned on the water.

I gave it the maiden flush and it worked like a charm! When the tank filled, I flushed again, proud of my success. Waiting for the tank to fill several more times, I flushed again and again. It works perfectly.

I showed the husband when he came home. He seemed a bit put out. "I said I would fix it for you."

I just smiled and refrained from saying "when, ten years from now?"

yonks

I heard our four-year-old son use the word yonks last night and it made me smile. It's a slang word unknown to Americans, commonly used by Brits, and somewhat less commonly by Aussies.

It means a long time but no time period is specified. It's usually paired with the word "for" as in "I haven't seen him for yonks."

It sounds like a very old word but it's not. It didn't come into common use until the 1960s. While the exact origin is not certain, slang dictionaries report that it's a bastardization of the phrase "for donkey's years."

That phrase has never made particular sense to me. Donkeys live no longer than other equines, so why should "for donkey's years" mean a long time?

delarivier

In my reading offline yesterday, I encountered a reference to Delarivier Manley, someone I'd never heard of, who was described as the first professional female journalist writing in the English language. She was born in the 1660s and lived until 1724.

A Google search showed me that, in addition to being a journalist, she was a novelist, playwright, satirist, essayist, editor, and more. Her first work as a professional writer came when she began writing plays around 1690, which were performed by a touring company, and became quite well known as a result, so much so that her own work was satirized.

While some of her plays and novels are in print and available in their entirety online because they've long been in the public domain, no modern biographer has published a mainstream press book about her. That's odd, considering the number of biographies of late eighteenth and nineteenth century women writers.

I was talking about her to my husband last night and the fact no mainstream biography about her has been published. He said I should write one. I thanked him for his confidence but reminded him that I'm not qualified to write something like that.

I'm not conversant in either the politics or the literature of that era. I would have to do a tremendous amount of reading in order to be, something that would take years. By the time I finished that, I'd probably hear near the end of all my reading that some famous biographer was about to publish a book on Manley.

If I was going to attempt anything, I'd try writing a novel with her as the central character. Make it a historical mystery thriller with a fictionalized Delarivier getting into trouble when she poked her nose into something best left alone.

The real Manley was quite a sexual libertine, from what I've read. I'd certainly have a lot of fun writing a fictional character like that.

questions, always questions

Before humankind made rugs, what did carpet beetles eat?

Before humans ground grain, what did flour weevils munch on?

Before people distilled vinegar, where did vinegar eels live and what did they eat?

Before humans wove woolen cloth and knitted woolen garments, what did wool moths chew full of holes?

Before people built wooden-structure houses, where did carpenter ants live?

Before humankind refined petrol, where did tank lichen grow?

A lot of species are wholly dependent on human civilization. It makes you wonder how they survived before humans became civilized.

I mentioned this to my husband recently. He laughed and said only I could think up questions like this.

But now I want to know the answers.

the history thief

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, until recently, held one of the preeminent collections of rare books and maps in the United States.

When it came time to inventory the collection, however, officials soon discovered that the heart of the collection had been stolen by unknown parties at an unknown time. Hundreds upon hundreds of the library's rarest books and manuscripts were missing. The loss was pegged at a minimum of $8 million, but many of the missing objects were unique and truly priceless, so the total dollar value almost certainly was higher.

The theft and its aftermath is the subject of an interesting article in the current issue of Smithsonian magazine. The crime was so surprising because the rare book room had seemingly impenetrable security measures.

The culprits were eventually caught. One was the co-owner of a nearby rare book shop, widely respected in his trade.

The second thief was none other than the head of security for the rare book collection itself. Over the course of some twenty-five years, he had picked the library clean of its most valuable objects.

What struck me most about this piece was how short-sighted the thieving security manager was. He has a master's degree yet he couldn't figure out that, almost certainly, his crime ultimately would be discovered and the scope of the crime almost certainly would make him the primary suspect from the get-go.

Criminals often seem to have an absurd optimism about their crimes, particularly when they're repeated year after year. Bernie Madoff is another good example to come to mind.

The other thing about the article that's striking is the surprising sentence handed down by the court to both the security manager and the rare bookseller after their conviction. I'll allow you to read that part yourself so you can form your own reaction.

the zone of interest

Last night I finished reading The Zone of Interest, a 2014 novel by the British writer Martin Amis, his most recent published book. I had never read Amis before and heard it was his most accessible work, notwithstanding that nearly all of the book takes place in Auschwitz during World War II.

Needless to say, there are parts of the book I don't think I'll ever forget. It is as horrifyingly memorable as Cormac McCarthy's The Road. The depth and breadth of Amis's research is obvious throughout the book.

Zone has been described by some as satirical, but I don't know if that is entirely precise. I think absurdist would be a better description — not because there are any historical inaccuracies but because it so deftly unpeels the thinking of some of history's greatest monsters and how banal they often are in their rationalizations and distractions.

If you want a truly compelling novel and aren't leery of a difficult subject matter, I strongly recommend The Zone of Interest. I now will make a point to read some of Amis's other novels and soon.

the black death and the renaissance

Recently, the New Yorker published a really interesting article about how the Black Death in the fourteenth century directly caused the Renaissance as well as a number of other important improvements in the lives of ordinary Europeans. The piece also looks to a lesser degree at how other major pandemics in history led to major changes in humankind, both good and bad.

One pandemic can also lead to a chain reaction. The 1918 influenza epidemic brought about women’s suffrage but also the Roaring Twenties, which lead to much greater wealth inequality, then made much worse by the Great Depression. That in turn helped fuel the growth of totalitarianism, which ushered in World War II. After the war, the world saw a major shift in power alignment with the United States becoming the strongest economic power in history, thanks in great part to middle class dominance and prosperity.

This poses the question, therefore, of what our current pandemic will do to change the future of mankind, perhaps radically. Arguably it's far too soon to tell because the economic aftermath is only just beginning and some parts of the world still have not tamed the crisis within their borders.

We can only hope the outcome will be largely positive. We can't be sure of that, however, as history tells us all to well.

shaming names

One of the things I love about Harper's magazine is the way the editors mix serious journalism with irreverent bits about odd human behavior. The most recent issue contained a list of ten names some babies were given in the early months of the pandemic.

Names like Covid Rose and Lockdown and Sanitizer. WTF? Great way to scar your baby for life with a horrible name that he or she will have to go through not inconsiderable trouble getting changed into something that isn't humiliating.

The parent or parents should be ashamed of themselves. There are thousand upon thousands of names in naming websites online. They couldn't take the trouble to pick out some nice ones?

Congratulations on giving your child a name that will cause teasing and argument for years on end. I bet you're real proud of yourself now.

dinner. . .or yard waste?

In cookbooks and in articles for food magazines, photography until recently was generally of the three-dimensional variety seen below in the first photo. Food was meant to look as if someone was bringing to your table.

More recently, however, in the trendy cookbooks and magazine articles, food is shot directly overhead like a two-dimensional aerial photograph. You can see an example of that in the second photo below.

In my opinion, the first style of photography makes the food look much more appealing. The second photo makes the selection look more like lawn clippings or food scraped into the bottom of a waste bin. It's not nearly as appealing, if at all.

It's a small and subtle difference but I think it makes all the difference in the world.

like pigeons, except cute

It took about a second and a half for the humor of this cartoon (enlargement) to penetrate my brain, but when it did, I couldn't stop laughing. The one sneaking in the window made me laugh the most.

alien spacecraft. . .or hydrogen spaceberg?

Two years ago, a mysterious needle-like object a quarter to a half mile long entered our solar system. Some experts believe it is a solid hydrogen space iceberg of sorts, while others opine that it is an alien spacecraft moving by its own propulsion, created by a civilization far more advanced than ours.

The object, nicknamed Oumuamua, is expected to leave the solar system in 2022 opposite to where it entered. At its peak speed, it traveled at nearly 200,000 miles per hour as it passed by the sun. Now it has resumed its normal speed, traveling at nearly 90,000 miles per hour.

Oumuamua passed through earth's orbit but just kept on going. Given it's probably been traveling for hundreds of thousands of years, presumably no living creatures are aboard, unless they're in some kind of lengthy suspended animation.

This is the first known object traveling from outside our solar system. Although moving much faster than any human created spacecraft, Oumuamua still takes 11,000 years to traverse the equivalent of one light year.

Hence, Oumuamua demonstrates how interstellar space travel of the sort seen in science fiction is likely not possible for a very, very long time, if ever. An advanced alien species would need to create a device that could travel at hundreds of millions of miles per hour to travel from one solar system to another within a reasonable period of time without suspended animation.

So aliens may be out there. But they likely will never come here.

extreme slut shaming

I was reading offline about "Regulation 40D," a British law during World War I, when women could be prosecuted and imprisoned for giving a soldier a venereal disease.

Apparently the first prosecuted case was a woman named Lucy Adams. She was married but, while hubby was away in military service, she had a brief fling with another soldier and gave him an unspecified social disease. Presumably she was originally infected by her husband.

She was prosecuted in a highly public trial and sentenced to six months in prison with hard labor. She said in her defense during her trial she did not even know she was carrying the disease. That didn't sway the judge who said she would be a risk if not imprisoned and hoped, once released, "she would become a proper citizen."

Of course, whoever infected Lucy was not charged nor put on trial, too. Only women could be prosecuted under Regulation 40D.

Poor Lucy. I wonder what became of her once she was released from prison. Did her husband ever find out?

The picture below shows prostitutes circa World War I (enlargement). Presumably the stern one on the far left is their madam. She looks like she didn't take any wooden nickels.

the war on cling wrap

Like many people, we use cling wrap (aka plastic wrap aka cling film) for food storage and more in the kitchen. And like many, both my husband and I struggle to keep the wrap from clinging into a ball when we want to use it.

I always poke in the tabs at the end of the box when opening it for the first time. And I always store the opened roll and box in the refrigerator to cut down on static as well as wet the rim of any bowl or plate we want to cover.

But that doesn't always work. The real problems come when you try to tear a sheet off the roll. It always looks so easy in TV commercials but in reality it isn't.

So I've given up that fight. If I'm going to wrap something in cling wrap but not on a plate or in a bowl, I pull out the length I'll need, lay that flat on the counter, and weigh down the already cut end with something like a wooden spoon. Next, I lay the food item to be wrapped directly on the plastic on the counter. Then I use a pair of scissors and simply cut off what I want right at the metal strip on the box.

In short, I'm just circumventing that metal strip and instead cutting it directly at that point. Something of the same process can be used to wrap a plate or bowl. You put that down on the counter first, pull the plastic wrap over the item to be covered, and partially wrap the end opposite from the box. Then once again using the trusty scissors, cut right at the metal strip on the box. Finish wrapping your plate or bowl.

I suspect part of the problem is I buy cheaper cling wrap. Maybe this wouldn't happen with a premium brand. But I'd rather save the money and just do my scissors trick.

the impostress

Over the weekend, I read a magazine interview piece with an author who has a new book about Mary Toft, one of the strangest figures from history. In 1726, Toft became an instant celebrity in her native Britain when she claimed to have given birth to rabbits.

The true aspect of this story is that, after losing a child in miscarriage, either Toft or one or several of her relatives inserted butchered rabbit parts up inside her womb. She then "birthed" these in front of learned physicians, who believed she was indeed delivering parts of stillborn rabbits.

The author interviewed in the linked piece has a rather modern, post-feminist explanation for why Toft perpetrated this hoax. She concludes that Toft was apparently coerced into doing so by family members, yet that explanation doesn't seem to pass a logic test. Why would a relative want her to do such a thing, given that the family apparently earned no money from this hoax?

I wonder if the real reason was psychological on Toft's part and had nothing to do with coercion. Toft had suffered a recent miscarriage. Women in such circumstances sometimes engage in self-harm with behaviors like cutting, kleptomania, hair pulling, eating disorders, and more.

Perpetrating a hoax and knowing you will suffer serious problems once discovered is a form of self-harm. Indeed, Toft was imprisoned for what she did once the hoax was exposed.

Regardless of the above, I want to read the author's book and see how she makes her case. Is it pure speculation based on extrapolated contemporary theories or is there real historical evidence backing up her conclusions?

the kinky judge

This past week, a Kentucky judge faced a five-day hearing on 12 misconduct charges for a variety of alleged offenses, including making civil servants work on her reelection campaign, using coercion against lawyers in her courtroom, making sexual advances on several lawyers, and engaging in threeway sexual activity in her judicial chambers with her boyfriend and her secretary.

Reportedly, at least one of the purported threeways was loud enough to be heard in the hallway by court employees. If found guilty of any of the charges, she could be disciplined or even removed from the bench.

This almost sounds more like the plot to a porn flick than an actual judicial proceeding. If the judge is removed from office, I can't imagine she has much future in the legal arena. Perhaps a porn career might actually be something she should look into.

photorealistic emperors

Trapped at home because of the coronavirus, many people have increased their creative activities. So too has artist Daniel Voshart, who used machine learning and image editing software to create photorealistic portraits of emperors from ancient Rome.

Using 800 images of classical busts and ancient coins as a starting point, Voshart then turned to digital wizardry and software plus his own artistic skills to bring the portraits to life.

Looking through his gallery, many of the faces indeed look real and like people who could be living in the present day. A few look like film and TV stars. And I'm struck by how young some of them are. They look more like skateboard punks than imperial heads of state.

While not part of the images, Voshart does provide some general facts about each emperor. A whole lot of them were murdered by their own guards or troops. Being an emperor was a knife-edge gig. You had a lot of power while in office, but that could all vanish in an instant if you pissed off the wrong people.

Picture below is Voshart's rendering of Augustus. He looks like he could be related to Steve McQueen.

music pet peeve

I was listening to a very nice jazz CD yesterday that I borrowed from the library. Until I hit one track. I heard this odd insect-like noise. I thought a big beetle had flown into the room.

And then I realized it wasn't a bug. It was one of the jazz musicians on the recording singing along to the music, badly out of tune.

Hence my musical pet peeve: classical and jazz musicians who insist on singing along, often poorly, to their music while performing as it is being recorded. Glenn Gould, Bud Powell, Herbie Hancock, Keith Jarrett, Stephen Scott, Errol Garner, Slam Stewart, and more were all famous for having done this.

I'm sorry, but I consider this unprofessional. You would never see a ballet dancer or a gymnast worth her salt making faces or singing along to the music during a performance. A musician should be able to exert some self-control and cut that crap right out. Now stop it.

fun fact

I saw the "fun fact" meme below on Reddit (enlargement) and wondered if it was true. Some fast internet research established that it is, indeed, correct.

Humans are one of the three types of deuterostomia, specifically the chordate, as are all other vertebrates. During the early phases of our development in the womb, the first orifice that appears is the blastopore, which in time develops into the anus. The mouth develops a little later.

For whatever reason, I am reminded of the only memorable line of dialog from the otherwise forgettable movie Gardens of Stone. It goes like this: "Opinions are like assholes. Everybody's got to have one."

poor mary anne evans

Female novelists published their novels under male pseudonyms or anonymously in the first half of the nineteenth century. This was for several reasons, the principle one being that it was considered vulgar and shocking for a woman to do so under her own name.

Charlotte Brontë published as Currer Bell. Louisa May Alcott became A.M. Barnard. Jane Austen was simply "A Lady."

Today we know all of these writers by their real names, not their pen names. Except for poor Mary Anne Evans.

She wrote under the name George Eliot. And she has remained George Eliot. Few know her real name.

Why is this? The reason is likely morality. After their deaths, writers like Charlotte Brontë and Jane Austen gradually lost their pseudonyms and anonymity when it became known that the real women behind the words were unmarried young virgins who spent much of their time caring for aging parents before they themselves died young. Their lives became known as virtuous and selfless.

But not Mary Anne Evans. She wasn't darning socks while tending to an aging father. She was shacked up with a married man who wasn't her husband.

Her unconventional, "shocking" lifestyle for her time and several eras thereafter kept her identity and private life hidden. Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë came to be spoken of admirably. But not poor Mary Anne Evans. Her scarlet letter is still a burden to her to this day.

double-occupancy reincarnation

I recently read an article offline about various reincarnation beliefs in different faiths. While this is all entirely speculative, it is nonetheless interesting and potentially romantic, too.

I always thought reincarnation beliefs were in agreement that one soul moved from body to body to body with each lifetime; therefore, a body held only one soul. However, I learned that certain faiths believe a soul can share a body with another soul and/or that a soul can be split and reincarnated into several people at once.

I like the first idea about how two souls occupy one body. If true, hopefully I would share a body with my husband and not some complete stranger. While we may not know anything about our past lives when conscious, perhaps in our subconscious we know. Thus being with someone you love would make it all the nicer.

rough and rowdy ways

I will admit I am not Bob Dylan's biggest fan. I put him in the same category as Bruce Springsteen — talented but overpraised. I think both often have affected singing styles and both are better songwriters than performers.

I happened to hear excerpts from Dylan's latest album "Rough and Rowdy Ways" on a podcast and found it more appealing than much of his music. The affected style is gone because his voice has become so rough and gravelly and he mostly speaks the lyrics as opposed to actually singing them. The album was released in June, his first in eight years.

Dylan has posted most if not all of the tracks online, which raises the question of why he's letting so much of it go for free. Maybe he's so rich now he doesn't care.

So if you're not the world's biggest Dylan fan, you might want to give "Rough and Rowdy Ways" a listen. One of the tracks can be heard below.

bluto face

I've notice both in real life and in online photos that jet black face masks seem to be trending among younger males. You see some younger women wearing these but not nearly as many.

The black mask sort of blends in for men who have a darker or more olive complexion and black or dark brown hair. It sort of looks like they have a really full beard until you're up close.

On light skinned and very fair men, however, I think it's not the best choice. Unless you're up close, they almost look like they're completely lacking the lower part of their jaw.

Some men, particularly if they're big in the shoulders and chest, look like the cartoon character Bluto if they wear a black mask. You may remember that Bluto was Popeye's nemesis in the comic strip and the cartoons.

I told my black mask-wearing husband this and he responded by calling me Olive Oyl. I threatened to burn his spinich.

unnecessary changes

Once again, Google/Blogger is making format changes and users have to adopt them whether we like it or not. I don't think any of the changes will be visible to blog readers; it's only on the "dashboard" part of the site that bloggers themselves see.

So Blogger unveiled a new "dashboard" format and all users will have to adopt it by the end of the month. You can use the older "legacy" format for only a few more weeks.

I don't hate the new dashboard but I certainly don't love it. It wastes a lot of screen space. Scrolling through to find something takes twice as much scrolling. If you have future entries all ready to go, as I do as a safety backup in case I can't post on a particular day, you can't see those all on one screen any longer.

So I'll grumble and bear it but, once again, it seems like change for change sake. It's supposedly necessary to accommodate future "service upgrades," but I suspect they're doing this to be able to sell ads that will be visible only to bloggers on their dashboard.

Until these allegedly wonderful future upgrades are actually available, why can't they allow us to use a legacy version? Whatever happened to "the customer is always right"?

penis history

I've mentioned BBC History magazine here a number of times in previous entries. I borrow them from the library here and pretty much read every issue from cover to cover. The most recent issue I've read has an article about the history of seven different body parts, one of which is the penis.

Given unmarried men in some previous eras were socially conditioned against masturbation as well as cavorting with "naughty" women, it's no wonder many of them were literally bursting at the seams. They couldn't stop thinking about sex but then socially conditioned to avoid doing anything about it.

I can understand why men were discouraged from easy sex. That could spread disease and bring about unwanted children who could be a burden on society, not to mention becoming a future generation of troublemakers.

The perfect solution for that, therefore, would be to encourage masturbation! Lots of it! Mother Nature already had the problem solved, but nooooo, the moralists had to put a stop to that. One wonders why.

Perhaps they were concerned that if men were busy wanking off, too many would lose interest in pursuing actual living women. That could lead to a decline in the birthrate and thus cause social harm.

Of it could just be that social arbiters were withered old men whose naughty bits were dried up and shriveled, thus leaving them envious of younger men bursting with testosterone.

the ogress

The current issue of Vanity Fair has a disturbing portrait of Ghislaine Maxwell, the accused procurer who allegedly worked in partnership with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

Maxwell is accused, in part, of luring and procuring underage girls for Epstein while she was in his employ as a sort of manager, a position for which she was paid lavishly.

Part of Maxwell purported strategy was to convince underage girls they could trust her and then, later, Epstein himself. He, in turn, was accused of sexual abuse on the underage victims, a crime for which he will never stand trial because of his death last year.

If true, and volumes of evidence suggest that is the case, Maxwell is nothing short of a monster. Arguably her purported crimes are as bad as Epstein's. Pedophiles typically work to break down a victim's resistance so that they feel they can trust the adult. If guilty, Maxwell provided that service for him, turning the victim's trust into psychological weapons.

The Vanity Fair article, perhaps inadvertently, also intimates a defense that Maxwell's attorneys might use at trial if she does not work out a plea bargain. I would not be at all surprised if her lawyers try to paint her as one of Epstein's victims because she was financially dependent on him.

She worked for him because she needed a job. Her father was extremely wealthy but, after his mysterious death, was revealed to have embezzled millions. That pulled the financial rug out from under his daughter, which necessitated her going to work.

But Epstein paid her lavishly, far more than she could have earned in any other job. So the only reason she was financially dependent on him was because she wanted to continue to live like a billionaire's daughter. She did not need Epstein in order to survive.

Thus, if her lawyers try to portray her as a victim, I certainly hope the prosecutors cut through that nonsense easily. They can portray her not as a victim but, instead, an equal partner in crime.

killing eve

The husband and I have been watching Killing Eve. We watch one episode every night, which is our version of "binge watching."

Needless to say, it's an absolutely excellent show which both of us are enjoying thoroughly. The program is a perfect mixture of nail-biting, edge-of-your-seat thriller with laugh-out-loud very dark comedy.

Although a much different type of show, it reminds me some of Breaking Bad in the way it perfectly blends a sometimes terrifying thriller with sometimes a deeply funny black comedy.

A good part of the reason why Killing Eve really clicks is the fantastic performance by lead actor Sandra Oh. She plays a sometimes-hapless, sometimes-brilliant MI6 investigator. Oh is just brilliant and the range she plays is stunning.

The show also really works because of the excellent, taut writing. Scenes are no longer than they need be, but sometimes, they play slowly simply to make them ever more terrifying.

If you've not yet watched the show and are looking for some very satisfying viewing, I don't think you can go wrong with Killing Eve.

ozymandias

I'm currently reading a novel where one character quotes a line from Shelley's great poem "Ozymandias." The work is referenced so much by many writers and the general public that it's in danger of becoming a cliche, a la "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood."

"Ozymandias" is short but says so much in just a few lines. It's creepy, elegant, and cryptic all at once as well as vividly descriptive. You get the sense Shelley worked on it until it was perfect with not a word too many or out of place.

If you've not read it — or not read it recently — it is available online.

the homicidal heiress

The current issue of Vanity Fair magazine has a really fascinating article about how billionaire tobacco heiress Doris Duke appears to have gotten away with murder in 1966. It's the sort of gossipy scandalous coverage about the rich and famous that has always been Vanity Fair's trademark.

What I found most telling about the piece was how quite a few "ordinary people" appear to have been bought off to protect Duke. I would love to have asked these people "how do you sleep at night?" While I am a notoriously frugal person, no amount of money would tempt me to help cover up a murder, particularly one so brutal and cruel as the article describes.

english language problem

Consider the following:

Your sons and daughters are your children.

Your grandsons and granddaughters are your grandchildren.

Your brothers and sisters are your siblings.

Your mothers and fathers are your parents.

Your grandmothers and grandfathers are your grandparents.

Your aunts and uncles are your — what? There is no collective noun for them.

Your nieces and nephews are your — huh? No collective noun for them, either.

And while you have a collective noun for your cousins, you have no gender-specific singular nouns for them.

There's no easy fix to this problem. Someone needs to develop these words and get them into wide circulation. But that's far, far easier said than done. Why did they not ever evolve before?

a spectacular time suck

Last year I put up a post with a video of a falling domino chain involving 128,000 pieces.

While not involving dominoes but, instead, small pieces of wood, this collapse is far more ambitious and complex. It certainly looks impressive.

But imagine the countless hours that went into putting that all together, then for it all to collapse within a few seconds. I guess this sort of thing might be helpful to engineering students, but the time/reward ratio seems pretty minimal.

Nonetheless, I can't help but watch it over and over again.