Category: Uncategorized

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Soap and memories

I have a favorite bath soap. It’s Pre de Provence sage soap. (And I only just discovered that I can buy it from Amazon! I have to go a bit out of my way to buy it.) I also like the verbena.

This week I was near a store in Cambridge that has small bars, and I went in to buy a few. (A few is all I can justify buying at a time; these babies are expensive!) As I perused the display, there were pink bars I didn’t remember seeing before. “Peony” they said. I love peonies. So I picked one up for a sniff, and it reminded me of
my Grandma Tracey. I love memories of my Grandma Tracey, so I bought one.

Big mistake. I used it yesterday morning for my shower, and it was fine. Nice moisturizing feel, but no icky film. Pleasant fragrance.

Until—until I came home, that is, and now my small apartment has unmistakable whiffs of eau de parfum du bordel. (It smells like a French whorehouse, as the saying goes.)

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Fishbowls in England

On Sunday, May 28, 1665, Samuel Pepys records in his diary “a fine rarity.”

Thence home and to see my Lady Pen, where my wife and I were shown a fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water, that will live so for ever; and finely marked they are, being foreign.

Goldfish had only recently been introduced to England.

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An intriguing standard

I’d never heard of Pecha Kucha before a couple days ago, but it apparently boils down to

20 slides, 20 seconds each. That’s 6 minutes and 40 seconds per presentation.

Originally invented for creatives, it’s being picked up by other communities. I found some great tips that apply to any public speaking. I’ll certainly be keeping it in mind as I prepare for the panel on “new media” I’m organizing for the UUA General Assembly in June.

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Practicing and imitating

Andrew Brown is both a jazz musician and a Unitarian and radical Christian minister. He has written No Image — No Passion or how practising rock and roll moves in the mirror taught me the value of imitation:

. . . merely desiring the fruits of a liberal religion without at the same time seriously seeking to follow a religious exemplar means you will never get a real grip on what you need to be doing in the life of the spirit. Everything will remain terribly unfocussed and unfulfilling. There will be no attainment and progression.

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Deeply weird

There’s a little graphic and such, but here’s the central, weird finding of a Pew study reported in The Climate Change Attitude Mystery | Wired Science from Wired.com

The confounding part: among college-educated poll respondents, 19 percent of Republicans believe that human activities are causing global warming, compared to 75 percent of Democrats. But take that college education away and Republican believers rise to 31 percent while Democrats drop to 52 percent.

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An amazing resource

The Old Bailey Online has not only “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913,” but also extensive background materials.

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court.

There are essays on “Community histories”:

  • Black Communities
  • Gypsies and Travellers
  • Homosexuality
  • Irish London
  • Jewish Communities
  • Huguenot and French London
  • Chinese Communities

“London and its hinterlands”:

  • 1674–1715
  • 1715–1760
  • 1760–1815
  • 1800–1913
  • A Population History
  • Material London
  • London’s Rural Hinterlands
  • Currency, Coinage, Cost of Living
  • Transport

As well as “Gender in the proceedings,” “Crime, Justice, and Punishment,” and “The Old Bailey Courthouse.”

(via The Cat’s Meat Shop.)

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Non-letter typography

Wonderful post on the terminology of numeral and punctuation typography:

In “Emoticons During Wartime,” a recent article in The New Yorker (December 10, 2007), Tom McNichol documents the usefulness of emoticons in communicating by visual innuendo. Emoticons can mean whatever the writer and reader want them to mean, until, of course the meaning is explicitly defined for all by The New Yorker. Two striking examples are:

“=|:-)= This e‑mail is being monitored by Uncle Sam for your protection,” and “:-x I’d rather not say in an e‑mail that’s being monitored for my protection.”

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Freedom and covenant

From a minister-blogger I’m reading more of these days, CAUTE: On cottages, decay, barns, fire, Mt. Olympus and the moon – or the future of the liberal church . . .:

So we are left with what feels to many the inconvenient truth that to be truly free as an individual to pursue truth we must ensure the freedom to do the same of an ever larger community and, to do that properly, we have to limit our personal freedom through the continuous process of covenanting. (It’s like marriage of course.)