"The Hermit of Treig" - updated with the story of Simon

Yesterday evening I was looking for some distraction from doomscrolling the internet.  While wandering around I found the above movie on Amazon Prime (free with ads).  The sparse Wikipedia entry described it as a Scottish documentary portrait of an elderly man who has lived for 40 years "off the grid" in a log cabin in the Highlands.  The film has received multiple audience awards at festivals and was the Best Single Documentary at the 2022 British Academy Scotland Awards.

Worth a try I thought.  In a bad mood because of the obligatory introductory ads on Prime, I at first became frustrated with the film's slow progression and started to click the fast-forward a few times.  But then the story started to fill out with some historical context about the earlier life of this remarkable man wandering the Yukon.  Within half an hour I was totally absorbed, and by the end I deemed it to be worth recommending to others.

The film will not be for everyone.  If someone is Gen Z with a vibrant social and digital life, the appeal of this man's story will be severely muted or absent.  For me there was a very strong resonance since I am older than he is and have always treasured time spent in the woods (but I cringed every time I saw him carrying his firewood over irregular rocky ground without even a proper walking stick).  I am pleased to offer a "spoiler" by reporting that he is very much alive and well at the end of the film (and today).

My local library system did not have a DVD of this movie, but I did find that he has written a book (The way of the hermit : my incredible 40 years living in the wilderness, by Ken Smith).

Update August 2026:

The wait time for the book from the library was minimal.  I found it to be quite well-written and a pleasant, easy read.  I thought it might be similar to one of my favorite books, Edwin Way Teale's A Naturalist Buys and Old Farm, but it had quite a different focus.  Teale's book presents detailed descriptions of the natural world of a farm, while this book is more autobiographical with a detailed backstory about choosing a solitary lifestyle and then extensive discussion of how he went about living off the grid for decades.  He cogently explains that he is not antisocial and that his lifestyle choice was based on other considerations.  There are practical tips on safety and survival, fishing, hunting, and even details about the making of birch wine.  

The most delightful story about the natural world is the author's multi-year friendship with a hooded crow with a broken wing.  After he found it and gave it shelter during a winter blizzard he released it even though it was unable to fly. 

"The odds are stacked unfathomably high against a bird that cannot fly, even one as tenacious and intelligent as a hooded crow, but I knew I was doing the right thing as I released Simon from his cage early one summer's morning.  He'd rather die on his terms than die in a cage.  Me, of all people, had to understand that."

He spotted the crow three years later feeding on an animal carcass though still unable to fly.  Then about ten years after the bird's initial injury in the winter storm, the author was out deerstalking with friends when a hooded crow hopped out of the brush and limped forward to greet him.  It was Simon, who had evaded starvation and predation for ten years while unable to fly.  That story alone was worth browsing the book (pp 197-202).

Hammerhead shark embroidery - by Mary, Queen of Scots (~1570)

From the collections of the Victoria and Albert:

[A panel from] The Oxburgh Hangings. Hanging with applied panels of embroidery, formerly at Oxburgh Hall, Norfolk.

Inscriptions: A ZYDRACH ' 'ZYGAENA' hammer headed shark from C Gesner Icones Animalium Aquatilium Zurich 1560 p 150

Mary Queen of Scots' troubled reign in Scotland ended in 1568 when the Scottish Lords forced her to flee across the border into England. As Elizabeth's cousin Mary had long claimed the English throne, leading Elizabeth to see Mary as a threat and place her in the custody of the Earl of Shrewsbury. Mary was held captive in various English country houses for 19 years. She was finally executed in 1587.

Mary Queen of Scots (1542-1587) embroidered these panels with Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick) and ladies of the household, during her imprisonment. Mary may have intended the large central panel as a cushion for Philip Howard, Earl of Arundel (1557-1595), an English Catholic courtier imprisoned in London by Elizabeth I.

I was startled to learn that she was even aware of the existence of hammerhead sharks, much less that she would embroider one (reasonably accurately). 

Via A London Salmagundi. (Image cropped and brightened from original).  Reposted from 2012.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging cap to reader Temptoetiam, who provided a link to a JSTOR article which in turn cited the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes and provided this preview info:

I had no idea of the connection.  Thank you so much.

I felt bad for laughing at this...

Sparrowhawk vs. starling

I'll post one more bird photo, because I don't want to end the blogging day with a photo of J.D. Vance at the top of the blog column.  This image was one of the winners in the British Wildlife Photography Awards for 2026, from a gallery in The Atlantic.

Nemesis. Winner, Animal Behavior. Parker: “Because the sparrowhawk had never gone to ground before on previous visits to the garden, and not knowing how long it would stay, I just wanted to get an image to record the event before then concentrating on my settings. The story I think the image portrays is evident in the eye contact between the two subjects and the vicelike grip they have on each other, however, the eye contact and grip of the juvenile starling is out of pure fear while that of its nemesis is one of dominance and relief in finally catching a much-needed meal.”

Weaver bird nest in India

Photograph: Anuwar Hazarika/NurPhoto/Shutterstock.  Via The Guardian.

I will forever be in awe of how some birds can construct these nests without hands.

A review of J.D. Vance's book "Communion"

Excerpts from the London Review of Books:

Almost no politician​ writes his own books, and few people actually read them. J.D. Vance is different. Trump’s vice president was a writer before he was a politician, and brought a writer’s vices with him: a titanic but fragile ego, limitless self-interest and thirst for adulation, an unsleeping vigilance for any slight. Hillbilly Elegy, Vance’s first book, published in 2016, described his childhood poverty and rise out of it, and made him the liberal media’s favourite hick-whisperer. Communion (Collins, £20), its sequel, purports to be a memoir of Vance’s disillusionment with a series of creeds – evangelical fundamentalism, Randian libertarianism, chattering-class liberalism – and his subsequent conversion to Catholicism in 2019. It is an obvious, if nebulous, manifesto for a presidential run. His publishers assure us that he wrote it himself.

Communion is a bad book. It is sloppy, unfocused, stylistically uneven, ethically vacuous, intellectually tendentious and politically cynical. Hillbilly Elegy indicted an Appalachian culture degraded through addiction, indolence and despair. Communion mounts a much wider and more diffuse attack on the values and motivations of liberal and professional America, represented by Yale University and the media. That Vance’s critique proceeds by caricature and supposition does not make it worthless, though he is hardly the first person to discover that members of the elite are inward-looking or self-congratulatory...

Political lying degrades both individual and system. Perhaps this accounts for Communion’s acreage of strawmen. During the 2024 campaign Vance peddled the racist lie that Haitian migrants were stealing and eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. Confronted, he admitted to ‘creating stories’ to advance his cause. He also likes a conspiracy theory, claiming that a 2024 aid package for Ukraine contained ‘a hidden impeachment clause’ against Trump. In January this year, after an ICE agent shot the protester Renée Good in her car in Minneapolis, Vance called her ‘brainwashed’, a ‘deranged leftist’ complicit in ‘a tragedy of her own making’. When ICE agents shot the ICU nurse Alex Pretti in the same city later that month, Vance claimed it was the result of ‘engineered chaos’ in local authorities compromised by the far left...

The chief emotion of Communion, however, is fear. Vance fears he will jeopardise his relationship with his wife, Usha (whom he met at Yale), because his parents’ relationship imploded. When his first son was born, he writes, ‘I felt one emotion above all others: fear.’ His fear is both personal, that he will fail as a father, and social, that his country will fail his son. Vance is not alone in this feeling. Fear – of pollution, invasion, the enemy within, modernity – is endemic in the ultra-traditionalist wing of the Catholic Church and across a swathe of the US, bristling and vigilant behind its guns. Both desire their institutions to become punitive monocultures, bulwarks against the outside world...

Why would anyone buy this? Vance has been a willing participant in a squalid government sunk in graft which has gutted the agencies that might restrain or regulate private avarice. The labour share of income is at a historic low. The most obvious question is not whether Vance believes what he claims to believe, but why, if he believes it, he acts as he does. Halfway through Communion he quotes, without irony, a recovering addict who passed on some homely advice: show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future. Perhaps Vance has forgotten who he’s been hanging out with...

Communion’s characteristic error is clearest when Vance dismisses criticisms that mass deportations are ‘too tough’, but thanks the Church for forcing a consideration of the ‘moral trade-offs’. Abstract strictness of policy is not the issue here, but wanton cruelty: the families fed maggot-infested food, the cells flooded with sewage, those beaten or asphyxiated by guards, or handed off to foreign torturers. Vance may desire ‘a more Christian economy’, but it is one ringed with razor wire...

The iconic green bathrobe is made from dried lamb's ear

I was surprised today when I checked TYWKIWDBI for previous posts about seed art and couldn't find any.  Time to correct that.  Embedded above is a Facebook entry about one of the artworks being submitted to the "seed art" competition at this autumn's Minnesota State Fair.  The subject matter of the art is particularly apt for Minnesota, but seed art in general deserves greater appreciation.

Here's the original photograph (credit Leila Navidi, Minnesota Star Tribune) on which this art is based:

"This image captures a scene in St. Paul, Minnesota last week during an incident involving ICE. The central figure in the light-green bathrobe and slippers is Sam Stroozas, a producer for Minnesota Public Radio. Stroozas, who lives only blocks away, rushed to the scene of the car crash that involved federal agents without changing clothes to record the results of their high-speed chase of an immigrant, who was later hospitalized."

Seed art or crop art has been a standard feature at many American state fairs since the 19th century.  When I was young, my family made annual visits to the state fair.  My favorite destination was not the rides but the crafts building.  I don't have the time or requisite skills to create seed art, but I do appreciate the time and effort involved.  I'll look to find other entries to this year's competition after the fair opens and hope to append some of them below later on.

Native mask decorated with lethal seeds

A ceremonial mask from the Benue River Valley region of Nigeria, from the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The black and red sprinkles are apparently abrus seeds - which is interesting in an of itself, because a quick search reveals that the seeds are more toxic than ricin:

The toxin abrin is a dimer consisting of two protein subunits, termed A and B. The B chain facilitates abrin's entry into a cell by bonding to certain transport proteins on cell membranes, which then transport the toxin into the cell. Once inside the cell, the A chain prevents protein synthesis by inactivating the 26S subunit of the ribosome. One molecule of abrin will inactivate up to 1,500 ribosomes per second. Symptoms are identical to those of ricin, except abrin is more toxic by almost two orders of magnitude; the fatal dose of abrin is approximately 75 times smaller than the fatal dose of ricin...

The seeds of Abrus precatorius are much valued in native jewelry for their bright coloration. Most beans are black and red, suggesting a ladybug, though other colors are available. Jewelry-making with jequirity seeds is dangerous, and there have been cases of death by a finger-prick while boring the seeds for beadwork.

Photo via A London Salmagundi.

Reposted from 2011 (!!) to accompany a new post about seed art at a state fair.

"Starry, Starry Night" explained

I was going to introduce this music video by saying "I was today years old when I learned..." but I've recently realized that idiom is not understood or well received by readers here, so instead I'll just say...

Today in 2026 I learned that the lyrics of this old (1971) song refer to the life and works of Vincent Van Gogh.  How did I go 50+ years without knowing this??  I can only surmise that it's because by 1970 I had stopped buying records and albums and instead started copying from broadcast sources, so I never had the opportunity to browse an album cover/sleeve or (later) even a commercial CD insert.  Perhaps that's why so many of my 365 posts in the video-music category have background and explanatory material harvested from Wikipedia.  The joy of finding out.

Anyway, here it is.  Found it while searching for something else, was stunned by the Van Gogh paintings. and then saw the true title of the piece was "Vincent."  So, I learn something today; maybe a couple readers here will as well.

Plus, now for the first time (for me) some of the odd lyrics start to make sense.

I also found this cover by the MonaLisa Twins:

My personal bias is that most solo music can be improved by two voices in harmony. 

Video tour of a stamp collector's home

Those of us in the hobby (and in some other pastimes involving collectables) often joke that "there is a very fine line between a hobby and mental illness."  Some would consider this man to be a deranged hoarder; others will be envious of his massive accumulation of material.  Most of this material is probably philatelic "junk," but I would love to spend a weekend browsing through his holdings looking for hidden and unappreciated minor treasures.

Body cameras are for whose benefit ?

Officers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will be equipped with much-delayed body cameras by the end of next month, it was reported on Friday. But experts have questioned the transparency of a policy that allows the ICE director to restrict the public release of footage unless “it is in the best interests of the agency”...

Christopher Schneider, a sociology professor at Canada’s Brandon University, and co-author of Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform, said the ICE director would have discretion to release recordings that reflect well on the agency’s image while working to keep others secret.

“In some ways, ICE is saying the quiet part out loud,” he said. “Body-worn cameras are being used as contemporary image-work tools to present the police to the public in the most favorable way possible.”

The policy says ICE will promptly release video of shootings and other encounters in which its agents cause death or serious injury only after determining “it is in the best interests of the agency” to do so.

Perhaps the recorded images would still be available to judges and courtroom use?  More information at The Guardian.

I am lucky I'm not someone else

“It’s a troublesome world.  All the people who are in it

Are troubled with troubles almost every minute.

You ought to be thankful, a whole heaping lot,

For the places and people you’re lucky you’re not.”

Recently found this quotation about the "genetic lottery," so I've requested the book from the library.

Is this true ?

I screencapped the above claim months ago, intending to research the matter, but have not found time to do so, and have now decided it's easier to ask readers here.  

I have an Echo that reminds me to take out the garbage, but I assumed that any "listening" would be stored on servers in humming datacenters and admixed with others, not stored on some "app" in my home in retrievable fulltext.

So is this typical internet bullshit from Luddites?

Blogcation

Reposted from 2017 because I've been distracted from blogging for the past couple weeks.

Cartoon from the archives of The New Yorker.

The woodlouse as a "detritovore"

As an old English major, I've enjoyed accumulating a vocabulary of words ending in "vore."  Most people know carnivore, herbivore, and omnivore; my hobbies and side interests introduced me to granivore, piscivore, insectivore, and frugivore (plus tangentially-related "locavore") (and hypercarnivore).  Yesterday was my first encounter with "detritovore", which I encountered in The Guardian, where they presented the woodlouse as an entry in their annual "Invertebrate of the Year" competition.

Chucky pig. Slater. Monkey pea. Roly-poly. Boat-builder. Butchy boy. Cheeselog. Hobbling Andrew. Wood pig. If there were a prize for the range and joyfulness of a creature’s English-language names, the humble woodlouse would undoubtedly triumph over its million-plus invertebrate rivals.

Over centuries of easy cohabitation with humans, it has acquired more than 300 regional names in Britain alone, and many more in other languages (such as Gwrach y Coed, “witch of the wood”, in Welsh).

There are lovely words for woodlouse actions too: an animal rolling its body into a neat ball is known as conglobation, or volvation in zoology.

You can read more about the woodlouse at the link.  For now I'm just enjoying the new "vore" word [there are lots of others...], and now also "conglobation" and "volvation."