intertext

Casn't seem to locate link to the article but apparently taking your dog to the movies is a thing these days? YOY? - and apparently one reason is so as not to have to get in a dogsitter for pooch while out at the pictures. What happened, we asked, to leaving one's faithful canine to guard the house during one's absence? O tempora, o mores, etc.

Presumably contra-indicated viewing would be Old Yeller....

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Also in modern-day weirdness, another thing that is apparently A Thing is doing Extreme Days Out, which involves jetting off at the crack of dawn to some touristic spot, doing The Sights (at presumably a brisk pace) and then jetting home again, no doubt to soak in a recuperative hot bath.

Aside from the horrid environmental impact going on with this, how far can anyone be enjoying Tourist Spot if they're going at high-speed clip to fit everything in? It sounds like hell. No time to stop and stare and appreciate. Point thahr, misst.

I was therefore delighted to come across this in Lucy Mangan's column:

[O]ver breakfast I read about the great sunflower fields at Westgate Farm near Walsingham, Norfolk, which for the two weeks that the mighty blooms are in mighty bloom across its 16 acres invites people to come and pick their own for a small fee. Have you ever heard of anything better? Desire – no, need – filled me.
I demanded my husband – the driver of the family, for Walsingham is a short car trip away – abandon his desk, crowbarred my son out of bed and by 10am we were looking out over acres of sunflowers under an azure sky, and do you know what? It was even better than I had imagined. It’s just sunflowers, you see. Sunflowers almost literally as far as the eye can see. All facing the same way, because they are – get this – flowers that follow the sun.
We followed the little dusty tracks that led through the fields and wind about so that eventually you are facing the flowers and they are facing you, and the effect is so joyful and uplifting that even your family hostages begin to break into smiles.
We picked our allowance of five each and were home by lunchtime. They are now in a massive vase I was once mocked for buying but which I must have known somewhere deep in my soul was meant for this, and life is good.

Had the news today that I have been awarded a Non-Stipendiary Fellowship at [Esteemed Research Institution in My Discipline]! For next academic year at least. Yay me!!!

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Dept of, gosh, some people have a very weird notion of Effix, wot: I can't link to this because it was all in screenshots on FB, but anyway -

Person posts in a romantasy forum that they reviewed book by A Well-Known Author asserting that it had been written by AI, on the grounds that it used a number of bog-standard cliche phrases that (we suspect) hurried and harried writers in a popular field in which you are expected to keep on churning out the product are wont to resort. (In fact I suspect that they crop up to a significant extent in your average romance novel and that many authors' fingers type them quite automatically.)

Well-Known Author intends to sue for libel.

Person who posted review, and claims to be an impoverished grad student (we ask ourselves in what possible field, seriously hoping not law, philosophy, or literature), is all wo wo wringing hands about this, and wonders if it is a plea in mitigation that they did not actually purchase work in question but obtained it 'by other means'.

I depose that if you are going to pirate a work and not pay the author, you are in no position to whinge that They Did Not Write It or indeed, complain at all. If you take a free book from a box that somebody has left on the wall outside their house for passersby to help themselves, you do not then go and knock on the door because somebody has scribbled on the pages and it is by no means a pristine copy.

(Actually this also sounds as though it's timetravelled from An Earlier Day and the improving literature thereof.)

‘They’re beautiful’: 13-year-olds lead audacious project to save harvest mice in Devon:

Best friends Eva Wishart and Emily Smith had become devoted to harvest mice, and were upset, a couple of years ago, to find out the species is threatened in England due to farming practices and habitat loss.
The two girls took matters into their own hands and decided to replenish local harvest mice stocks themselves. In the two years since, they have bred dozens of the tiny rodents in their garages and on Wednesday they released 250 of them into a nature reserve near Wishart’s home.

It totally has elements of heart-warming Britflick though -

Wishart and Smith, the two young naturalists, raised the mice in 27 tanks in their homes, with some sourced from a tip by Smith’s mother. Honeysuckle and hazel, plants the mice love to climb, were harvested from Wishart’s garden to place in the tanks.... The pair managed to finance the project, including buying the mice and commissioning the enclosure, with £4,000 crowdfunded from the public. They reached their goal after a boost from the well-known nature presenter Chris Packham, who shared it with his millions of nature-loving social media followers.

Wishart’s first foray into mice husbandry almost ended in disaster: “I was given four mice by ecologist Derek Gow, but we kept them in enclosures outside and the neighbour’s cat ate three of them. We saved the fourth, which was pregnant and had some pups.

What I read

Finished A World to Win, and decided not to go straight on to next.

Read Anthony Powell, The Soldier's Art (Dance to the Music of Time #8) (1966), which is a very different angle on WW2 as Nick Jenkins is stuck in a backwater with Widmerpool. A particularly grim episode in its much quieter register.

Started Elaine Castillo, Moderation (2025) which started out fairly strongly, then hit a saggy point, and then I discovered I'd been a bit misled over its genre position, and anyway didn't feel much like continuing.

Picked off the shelf Susan Kelly, And Soon I'll Come to Kill You (Liz Connors #5) (1991), from the period when I was reading a lot more crime novels like this. It's not bad - at least Our Heroine has a plausible reason for getting mixed up in criminal matters, as a journalist specialising in crime reporting, but she has the almost obigatory for period/genre cop boyfriend. This one was probably a bit atypical of the series as a whole as it involved someone with a grudge against her (there are several suspects for Reasons to do with past reporting etc) stalking her with malign intent.

Andrea Long Chu, Females (2025), because I'd found Authority interesting and read something about this but while I am all for rediscovery of the out-there voices of the 'second wave', riffing off V Solanas was just a bit niche.

Laurie R King, Knave of Diamonds (Mary Russell & Sherlock Holmes, #19) (2025) - Kobo deal at the weekend - seriously phoning it in - scraping the bottom of the barrel -

On the go

Val McDermid, A Darker Domain (Inspector Karen Pirie #2) (2008) for some reason Kobo were doing a serious promotional deal on the McDermid Pirie series at the weekend so I thought, why not?

Up next

New Slightly Foxed perhaps.

Woman on social media claiming that "Cancer is trying to heal, not kill.... A cancerous tumor is basically a bag the human body creates to collect toxins that are contaminating the bloodstream." (Apparently this goes back to 2021? still in circulation because I spotted it in the wild today.)

Apart from anything else here, I'm trying to think how this actually works - okay, it collects the toxins, but she was also saying you shouldn't have operations or get involved with, you know, that nasty actual medicine? In particular that biopsies are Really Really Bad and cause the tumour to explode and spread toxins throughout the body. (This notion derives from one book by a struck-off doc relating to his theories about needle biopsies in the specific case of prostate cancer.)

But what is the mechanism once it's collected the toxins? does it just sit there? does it detach and float away? really one has questions. Does one want a bag of toxins just hanging about on one's body? (Maybe a wartcharmer might be called for?)

I was reminded of the theory, current for centuries, that there was 'good' pus which aided in the healing of wounds, so surgeons were all 'yay laudable pus'.

I wonder if anyone, ever, had the theory re TB, that the consumptive coughing up blood was getting rid of 'bad blood'*, jolly good, restored health is on the way....

*I'm sure I've previously mention my paternal grandmother who was reassuring about my copious and not infrequent nosebleeds in childhood and adolescence on the grounds that it was getting rid of 'the bad blood'. Yes, historian of medicine wishes I'd done an oral history interview about these lingering remnants of humoural theory.