Found the above on Facebook but lost the source.  Below is a thematically related screencap from the movie Interstellar in which Michael Caine's character is asked whether he is afraid of death.  He replies no, then adds this...

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A link for lovers of movies: The Criterion Closet

For much of my adult life I have been a fan of the Criterion Collection.  About fifteen years ago I did subscribe to the Criterion Channel in order to stream their movie collection on demand, but I found the interface clunky, especially for fast-forwarding, seeking etc.  I dropped that subscription after realizing that our local public library has over a thousand Criterion Channel movies available on DVD and Blu-ray.

There is a  physical (and a mobile) Criterion Closet containing all the movies.  This week I realized there is an app to access that closet.  At the link you can view and interact with that closet either in a mockup of the physical setting ("closet view") or in a list view (screencap embedded above).  From that app you can access all the movies via your subscription or purchase them.  But more importantly for the average reader here, you can access trailers for virtually all of those 1,327 movies.

Then I borrow the DVDs from the library.

Goat tower

If I had goats, I'd want to have a goat tower.  You can read about the (unexciting) history of such towers at Wikipedia.

A reflecting pool cocktail

There are a seemingly endless number of memes on the reflecting pool disaster.  Readers are welcome to provide links to their favorites in the Comments.  I thought this one posted by Sarah Dahlinger on Facebook was nicely done.

I've seen a lot of brilliantly made craft cocktails dedicated to the Reflecting Pool this past weekend, and I thought, something was missing. Something wasn't right. 

They didn't quite capture the level of class and sophistication that our Reflecting Pool currently has, so here's my version. 

To start, line your glass with a blue fruit roll up. Then you're going to need:

2 oz rum

4 oz juice that is kinda yellow (pineapple, mango, orange, lemonade, whatever you like)

1 oz blue curacao (you can adjust for color)

Garnish with lime zest

The yellow and blue liquids make a lovely shade of algae and the rum eventually melts the blue fruit roll up, which is, IMHO, the best part. 

Interesting library chair

Via Architecture Hub.

Two videos about techniques for filming movies

Via Kottke.

New technology for warfare: gyrocopters and paragliders

"They appear after midnight, slowly crossing Myanmar’s skies. The motorised paragliders are improvised aircraft, suspending small metal frames from brightly coloured sails. They drift over a patchwork of villages, farmland, forests and winding rivers.

Each “paramotor” has two or three soldiers strapped in – one piloting, the others holding the bombs. Their craft are powered through the sky by small, rattling engine propellers, heading towards the lowland villages. Finally, switching their engines off to glide low and near silently through the dark, the men throw their explosives.

The destruction is immediate and devastating. Attacks can last several minutes, with bombs weighing up to 16kg (35lb) each dropped in quick succession. Homes are torn apart, schools and religious buildings destroyed – and civilians killed or injured as they sleep. The villages descend into panic and confusion, with families fleeing into the darkness and emergency workers digging through debris for the wounded.

“People try to run to the bomb shelters. But there is usually not enough time,” says Lwan Thu, an activist in the Sagaing region, which has been heavily bombed by the paramotors. “There are scores of dead and injured after the strikes.”...

“We’re facing constant strikes by these new aircraft,” says Lwan Thu. “They are using them to attack everything – civilians, hospitals, religious ceremonies, residential homes.”...

Unlike military jets, these lightweight aircraft require little infrastructure, use small amounts of fuel, are cheap to buy and are hard to track, evading detection from early-warning systems. Soldiers can be trained to operate them in a matter of days, rather than the years needed to fly conventional aircraft.

Buying paragliders, which are widely available commercially, also allows the junta to evade international sanctions targeting the military’s access to arms...

One attack on a Buddhist festival at a primary school in October killed at least 24 people, including three children, and wounded 61. A witness told Fortify Rights, a human rights organisation: “[The paramotors] had no lights … I didn’t hear any engine sounds at all.

“We later found out that the paramotors turned off their engines when they approached the school compound and glided over with their parachutes.”

One woman told Agence France-Presse in the aftermath: “Children were completely torn apart.” The next day, she said, they were still “collecting body parts”.

Additional information at The Guardian.

A cure for anthropocentrism

If you have friends who believe that human beings are the center of everything and humans are the reason for the existence of the universe, suggest to them that they view this video timelapse of history, and note that the entire length and breadth of human existence is condensed into the final cel of the presentation...

Via Neatorama.

Italian word for the day: coglione

Here is the definition, from the Wikipedia entry on Italian profanity:

Lots of interesting material at that link.

Prefix of the day: "pene"

This rock was identified at the whatsthisrock subreddit as a "penecontemporaneous deformation structure."  It apparently is such a commonly-used term that it is shortened by users to "PCD."  There is excellent informed discussion at the link to explain that PCDs are formed when sedimentary material is deformed during deposition ("contemporaneously").  Lots of further details at Geological Digressions.

I thought the rock was cool, but what grabbed my attention was the fact that I am an English major almost 80 years of age and I'm seeing a prefix that is not in my wheelhouse.

Onward to the Wiktionary entry for "pene":

Almost the thing or quality expressed by the root, as peneplain (almost a plain), peninsula (almost an island), penultimate (almost the last), penumbra (almost in shadow).

Wow.  Three words I've used for essentially all my adult life without appreciating their common prefix.

You learn something every day.

The etymology of "soccer"

 This will be my only post relevant to this year's World Cup.

"... in its early days, football was a very "posh" sport.  "The people who founded the Football Association in England in 1863 were Oxford graduates who had attended elite public schools," he said.  The game played under Football Association rules became known as "association football", wrote John M Cunningham in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  The name also helped distinguish it from another popular sport: rugby...

Among wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang.  "So instead of saying 'breakfast,' they would say 'brekker'."  Applied to rugby, they would call it "rugger."..

It appears that these inventive students took "soc" from the middle of the word "association" and added "-er," producing "soccer".  "Obviously, no-one knows for certain, but what people are sure about is that it comes from Oxford. There are many documentary sources confirming that it was a word coined by students there."

More information at the source article at the BBC.

Postal history of the Telemark coast of Norway

The video is a full-length recording of an hour-long presentation at the Boston 2026 World Exposition of Philately.  The Telemark postal district is situated west of Oslo, and the coast extends from Skien on the north to Kragero on the southwest.  This presentation discusses postal history of this region up through the end of the 19th century.  The information will be of most interest to serious philatelists or to others interested in Scandinavian history.

One item will also be of interest to anyone who has a relative or friend whose last name is Odegaard.  When the Black Plague arrived in Norway in 1349, approximately 2/3 of the population died.  Some of those who survived moved to the abandoned farms.  "Odegaard" is Norwegian for "abandoned farm."  You learn something every day.

The dark side of Beatrix Potter

Beatrix Potter, despite the efforts of Graham Greene and many others, is still tarred with a certain National Trust tweeness, even though her tales of murder and separation are among the darkest if funniest books ever written. Those books would be nothing without their illustrations, and in her masterpiece, The Tale of Samuel Whiskers, she should have firmly established herself in a direct line of gothic illustrators stretching from Fuseli and Blake to Mervyn Peake. This picture, of Tom Kitten being turned into a roly-poly pudding, is among the funniest yet also most terrifying illustrations of the 20th century.[Martin Rowson]

Text and image from a gallery of writers' favourite classic book illustrations posted at The Guardian.  I was unaware of this supposed "dark side," but found two relevant commentaries, the first in a Guardian column in 2006:

The Tale of Tom Kitten does not teach adventurous disobedience; rather it tells us that disobedience is punished with violence. Or this, at least, is what I thought when I flung the book across the room in disgust (only, intrigued, to pick it up again soon after).

Tom Kitten and his siblings are smacked and sent to bed for their notional disgrace. Worse yet, when they continue romping in the bedroom, they disturb what Potter calls the "dignity and repose of the tea party". Can the reader who finishes the book rest easy that subversive Tom has triumphed? No: the fact is Tabitha Twitchit thrashes her children for losing their clothes. Imagine what grisly fate will befall them when she stomps upstairs from her ruined tea party! To her credit, Potter leaves the sadism of this neurotic to the imagination.

So far, my daughter and I have found Beatrix Potter to be a proselytiser for sadistic punishment, a sartorial fascist, a property-upholding reactionary, an obsessive-compulsive nutcase (or rather nut-kin) and, conceivably, a bystander in the face of an intolerable natural dystopia that, with her sick (though gifted) writer's mind, she culpably imagined. As an adult reader, I must say, I'm beginning to like her.

And this at Wig and Pen:

Use discretion when reading Beatrix Potter to your children. In almost every Potter tale, her main characters—everyone from Peter Rabbit to Jemima Puddle Duck—flirt with mortal danger...

The Silence of the Lambs has nothing on Potter’s description of the house and yard [in The Tale of Mr. Tod]:

The house was something between a cave, a prison, and a tumbledown pigsty. There was a strong door, which was shut and locked. [In the yard] there were many unpleasant things lying about that had much better have been buried: rabbit bones and skulls, and chickens’ legs and other horrors. It was a shocking place and very dark.

Peeking through a window, Benjamin and Peter discovered that Tommy Brock had retired for the night after stashing the brood—still alive and kicking--in an oven for safekeeping and for his next meal.

I have no personal insights to offer, not having read any of the canon.  Knowledgeable readers should feel free to offer comments.

Reposted from 2012 because I found it while trying to look up information on Beatrix Potter's use of cloche gardening on her farm.

Cloche hats

Here's the Wiki:

The cloche hat is a fitted, bell-shaped hat that was popular during the 1920s. (Cloche is the French word for bell.) Caroline Reboux is the creator of the cloche hat.

Cloche hats were usually made of felt so that they conformed to the head. The hat was typically designed to be worn low on the forehead, with the wearer's eyes only slightly below the brim. By 1928-1929, it became fashionable to turn the brims on cloche hats upwards. This style remained prevalent throughout the early 1930s until the cloche hat became obsolete around 1933-1934.

Often, different styles of ribbons affixed to the hats indicated different messages about the wearer. Several popular messages included: An arrow-like ribbon which indicated a girl was single but had already given her heart to someone, a firm knot which signaled marriage or a flamboyant bow which indicated the wearer was single and interested in mingling...

Photo via the wonderfully-named My Ear-Trumpet Has Been Struck by Lightning.  Too bad it has now gone inactive (but still browseable).

Reposted from 2010 (!!) after watching Agatha Christie's Seven Dials miniseries last night and seeing Mia McKenna Bruce in the starring role of a 1925 character:

Personally I would be happy to see this hat style come back into fashion.  It looks very comfy and reasonably sensible in a world concerned about solar skin damage.

Secretariat at the Belmont Stakes in 1973 - his "tremendous machine" performance

 

Everyone who watched the Belmont 40 years ago will never forget Secretariat's race that day.  He had already won the Kentucky Derby and the Preakness; this was his bid for the Triple Crown, and he was so good that few owners wanted to enter their horses against him in the Belmont - that's why there were so few racing that day.   The track didn't even take "show" bets, and it's an interesting (?unique) anomaly that Secretariat was so favored by bettors that he would have paid more to show ($2.40) than he did to win ($2.20).  

Over 5,000 winning tickets were never redeemed because the holders valued them more as souvenirs than for their cash value.

And to this day his speed for 1.5 miles has never been equaled.  Even if you have no interest in thoroughbred racing per se, you owe it to yourself to watch this 3-minute clip to see one of the iconic moments in the history of sport.

Reposted from 2013.

Addendum:  A tip of the blogging hat to reader demenace07, who offered this link with more information about the economics of uncashed winning tickets for a more recent race:

Some enterprising horse bettors are selling their tickets on eBay, where such tickets are selling for $20 to $30. Other sellers bought up many of the cheapest Belmont Stakes gambling tickets. One seller is selling a lot of 500 such tickets. Another is selling 150 tickets in a lot.

Tickets for the Triple Crown wins of Secretariat (1973) and Seattle Slew (1977) sold for big money on the collectors market.

Rovell said that the tickets are simply worth more to collectors than the cash-in price. He said, “Whether you want to keep it for your memory or resell it, it’s worth ten times more than if you cash it in. So people are making good bets.”

Reposted again in 2026 because I found it while looking for other stuff.  I don't follow or even enjoy watching horse racing, although I did see some dressage events during my years in Kentucky, but this race is so iconic that it's worth preserving here in the blog.