The Gospel for People battered by bad religion
Reflections on constrained preaching in a parish with many newcomers.
Bananas! A talk at the Independent School For the City
Reading Time: 2 minutesHere is a link to a talk I gave at the Independent School for the City about the Banana ... as a way to talk about the relationships between artificial environments, colonial…
How the Bessemer Process Gave Us Steel Windows
Run your thumbnail along the frame of a 1930s steel casement and you can feel it. The section is barely a quarter inch thick, yet it has held a pane of glass square for ninety years through…
Father Galaktion - Mount Athos
As contemplatives, there are no 'heroes' such as we might have in a football team. We are human though and may find that certain people help to inspire or ground us. Often these are saints or perhaps…
“The Real Radiologist Rejects the Role of Robot”
From “The Radiologist Faces Automation,” Dr. Laurence L. Robbins’ Holmes Lecture, presented at the annual meeting of the New England Roentgen Ray Society in Boston on May 18, 1956…
The Culbin Sands Disaster: The Devil’s Card Game and Moray’s Buried Village
The Culbin Estate disappeared, drowned under a sandstorm as its Laird played cards in the wee small hours of the Sabbath, according to local folklore. Kinnaird laughed off the warnings and declared…
Perdite romane nelle loro principali battaglie
Esito Battaglia & Anno Comandanti Romani Avversario Perdite Romane 🛡️ <td style="border: solid #C4C7C5 1.0pt; mso-border-alt: solid #C4C7C5 .75pt; padding: 6.0pt 9.0pt 6.0pt 9.
19/10/26 - On the Trail of...... Joseph Chamberlain
Hit The City To complete the Wyre Valley Line Railway Stations Walk, I need to plot a short walk between the Jewellery Quarter and Moor Street, via Snow Hill Station. A short city walk, with…
William McClure and Maggie Larimer, Married OTD 150 Years Ago
On October 19, 1876, wedding bells rang in Wabash county, Indiana, for William Madison McClure (1849-1887) and his bride, Margaret Jane Larimer (1859-1913). They were my husband's great-grandparents.…
Ghost Tantras: Michael McClure’s Beast Language Experiment
Michael McClure wrote Ghost Tantras largely in beast language, then read Tantra 49 to the lions at the San Francisco Zoo in 1964. The lions roared back at him.
The Ultimate Ultimatum: What Happens When We Refuse to 'Choose Life'?
🌱 The Ultimate Ultimatum: What Happens When We Refuse to “Choose Life”? 🔗 Every major philosophical and religious system eventually forces us to confront a fundamental fork in the road:…
Monday 19th October 2026
9718/21637I love a good mystery as much as anyone and the crazy straws that some mystery hunters grab at. Occasionally the crazy straws prove to be correct, like when Richard III was found buried in…
Naunton, Gloucestershire
Across the fields This is one of those buildings I’d seen for years across the fields, but hadn’t got round to a proper visit until comparatively recently. Maybe at the back of my mind was the fact…
St Willibrord
Last week-or-so, I mentioned that the Polish Ambassador to Ireland had been cutting a ribbon in Glenties Co Donegal. It was on account of a) the commemoree was born in what's now Poland b) for the…
The Lord Watches Over the Way of the Righteous
“The Lord doth require more from Friends than all other people, because he hath given more to them,” as George Fox wrote. The post The Lord Watches Over the Way of the Righteous appeared first on…
can you imagine what it was like to be at the first performance of spem in allium in 1570 people mus...
can you imagine what it was like to be at the first performance of spem in allium in 1570 people must have been absolutely losing their minds
Miscellaneous Word Alert
Welcome back to Word Alert, the series in which I look up definitions for unknown words encountered in recent reading. (I lapsed in my practice of writing these down for a few months, so most of…
Blessed are the peacemakers: Considering the job of the mediator, and the role of Christ
Peacemaking is an odd task: while everyone wants peace on the terms they imagine it, generally there is also some matter of justice or fairness behind a conflict. Who would accept peace at the price…
Cosmetologist or Astrologer?
Cosmetologist or Astrologer? All Their Kosmos Dear Magicians, A TV host once introduced me on air as “an experimental… I want to say cosmetologist.” He caught himself and fixed it. I told him…
A Visit to the American Antiquarian Society
Replica of “first thing ever printed in Worcester.” Replica of “first thing ever printed in Worcester.” Recently author Caroline Linden & I paid a visit to the American Antiquarian Society. I’m…
Au revoir to NOLA
The good guys (us) won the good war, teaches the New Orleans' World War II Museum.
[library] Books That Formed Me Theologically
A small historical library of my life.
Fate, Freedom, and Beauty
Before saying goodbye to José Ortega y Gasset's book What Is Philosophy?, I'd like to offer one more quote:...
Eudemian Ethics II.2
(Previous: Eudemian Ethics II.1.)...
Reverse Cowgirl
Reflections on McKenzie Wark’s Reverse Cowgirl
Monday 19 October, 2026
Darwiniana This plaque greets visitors to Christ’s, the Cambridge college where Charles Darwin was an undergraduate. Last Friday I’d been invited to lunch there by a friend who is a Fellow of the…
Picture of the Week #934
Entrance to Framlingham Castle. Photo May 2015. Continue reading
Lingthusiasm Episode 121: Vampires, ghosts, imposters and more linguistic monsters
lingthusiasm:Vampires, werewolves, witches, ghosts, zombies, imposters, and frankenstein have something in common: they’re all possessed by the spirit of linguistics! In this silly spooky…
The Twin Lighthouses of Northern Lake Champlain: Isle La Motte and Windmill Point
by William Alexander For nearly seventy years, two of Lake Champlain’s oldest lighthouses stood dark. Their lamps had been taken away. Their keepers were gone. Newer, cheaper steel towers had been…
質疑莊子
我總是找一個下雨天，在露天樓梯下，捧著一本《道德經》，陳鼓應的今註，看雨水滋養草木。露水會停在肥大的翠葉上打轉。雨的聲音永遠都不會終結。那也是一個永遠都不會終結的夏日傍晚，從三年前，一直到現在，直到多年之後。 人
Haunted Huntly Castle: The Sudden Death and Spectral Reckoning of the 5th Earl
Haunted Huntly Castle now stands in ruins stands in the fertile countryside of Aberdeenshire. Originally known as Strathbogie, this formidable stronghold served as the ancestral seat of the powerful…
Meeting Durga Ma on Two Continents
"She may be mythical to many but I have not yet learned to control the free flow of tears when I look at her killing the demon with the spear, in a trance -like environment created by the sound and…
Gertrude and Alice, rue de Fleurus,
Alice Meets Gertrude From the moment Alice B. Toklas met Gertrude Stein in Paris (Sunday 8 September 1907) she heard the sound of bells ringing inside her head and took this to be a sign of…
the input a poet wants
A homophone is a hash collision: different words, same sound. In a toolchain, that’s the bug. Lexer, parser, namespaces, type checker. Every stage is there to cut the readings of a program down…
The Bifurcation of Hiberno-English Words
Doublets are pairs of words in the same language which, despite often having different meanings, are derived from the same root (or etymon)1. As you might imagine, they are rather common in any given…
Trans-Siberian Railroad completed (1916)
Train service between St. Petersburg (then known as Petrograd) in the west and Vladivostok in the east began on this day in 1916 (October 18 in the Gregorian calendar, October 5 in the old Julian…
The lost porter tradition at Massey College
Massey College, at the University of Toronto, is an important example of Canadian efforts to emulate the ‘OxBridge’ educational and college system at Oxford and Cambridge. I was pleased…
What are your reasons for learning Mandarin? Here are mine!
Why are you learning Chinese, and is your answer the same today as when you started? Let’s explore what motivates us to learn Chinese and how those motivations change over time. I’ve…
London Trivia: Crippen’s trial
Weekly nuggets of triviality posted every Sunday each with a short essay relating to the day in question along with 10 other pieces of useless information, read weekly or dip in and out
Church Notes - 10/18 @ Faith Promise
The Chosen - Season 6, Episode 1 I’m wondering, why did Jesus not say to Peter, get behind me satan? Does he not say those very words in every account of...
Weekly Bible Study - October 19, 2026
Welcome to our weekly study! Each week, our reading plan will take us through three different parts of the Bible: a psalm, a passage from Proverbs, and a few chapters from another book as we journey…
Michael Perelman - The Invention of Capitalism
Near the opening of Chapter Twenty Six of Capital, Karl Marx writes about Primitive Accumulation thus:This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in…
Sunday October 18
American evangelicals never doubted that Christianity was the truth. They never doubted that Christian principles should illuminate every part of life. What they did do, however, in the years between…
Mother Wood Be Proud
Mother would have been 105 years old on her Oct 17, 2026, birthday. She literally kept the Steinhoff fires burning in the basement fireplace. She didn’t cut the wood, split it or stack it, but…
Pressure, Power, and Peace
Acts 1:8 promises power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. When I burned out, a pastor in Belgrade showed me what that power does to pressure.
On the Antiquity of Purgatory
I found a quote from the Jewish Encyclopedia which astonished me. Astonished, because it seems a clear contradiction, hard to refute, to accusations by heretics that the Catholic Church invented the…
getting back into rottk
last time I read it I had to stop when caocao brought up the ethical dilemma of "(when) is a preemptive strike for the sake of self-defense ethically justifiable in a situation that has evolved into…
"Forbidden Archaeology" Coauthor Michael Cremo Dead at 78
​Forbidden Archaeology co-author Michael Cremo died this past week at the age of 78, according to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON), of which Cremo was a longtime…
Timshel? God Forbid
Timshel, Desire, and the Divine Art of Divide and Rule in East of Eden
לפתח חטאת
על רוע, חופש, תשוקה, והאמנות האלוהית של הפרד ומשול ב"קדמת עדן"