Cormorant to rock, gulls from the storm
Sep. 20th, 2025 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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The dark sleek heads are risen from the water
Sep. 19th, 2025 11:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
And the shrouds hum full of the gale of the grave and the keel goes out to the sea
Sep. 19th, 2025 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Some Days Just Call for the Laziest of Naps
Sep. 19th, 2025 11:30 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

Photo by keeper Julianna, via Cape May County Zoo
She was an excellent governess and a most respectable woman
Sep. 18th, 2025 11:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
wednesday book about a Great Man
Sep. 17th, 2025 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
This is the biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss that I picked up off a university library shelf when I was 15, and made me go all swoony over Gauss's letter proposing to his first wife (link is to the original German manuscript). Returning to it with less swooniness and a more mature ability to evaluate historical sources, and also reading a new edition with helpful front matter, it's clear the book is not 100% "actual historical Gauss": it starts off with a version of the famous 5050 story, which is based on an anecdote that Gauss reportedly told about his childhood, but probably didn't happen exactly that way.
Indeed, as I learned from the front matter, G. Waldo Dunnington was a professional Gauss stan; one of his elementary school teachers was a great-granddaughter of Gauss, and learning that there was no Victorian Great Man biography of Gauss, he spent his entire academic career (interrupted by WWII) remedying that lack. Since I'm also a Gauss stan, I found the book generally readable if sometimes a bit repetitive, and enjoyed various fun Gauss facts. (In the department of obscure historical figures who ought to be fictionalized, there is Friedrich Ludwig Wachter, Gauss's student who studied non-Euclidean geometry and vanished without a trace at age 25.)
I'll probably do more Gauss reading (though also I now have an unproofread scan of Teresa by Edith Ayrton Zangwill so I may read that first); I've started with the letters online, but may also seek out other biographies. I continue to be fascinated by Gauss's youngest daughter, whose story would make a good historical romance; and having done some Gauss reading I'm starting to think I can actually write this fic.
If I press button A, all my pennies will go
Sep. 17th, 2025 04:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I have no explanation for why I was singing the blessedly abridged setting of Kipling's "The Ladies" (1896) that I learned from the singing of John Clements in Ships with Wings (1941) except that it's been in my head ever since it displaced Cordelia's Dad's "Delia" (1992).
As a person who does think all the time about the Roman Empire, I am incapable of not associating Rosemary Sutcliff's "The Girl I Kissed at Clusium" (1954) with Sydney Carter's "Take Me Back to Byker" (1963)—as performed by Donald Swann, the only way I have ever heard it—even though Sutcliff was obviously drawing on Kipling's "On the Great Wall" (1906) with her long march and songs that run in and out of fashion with the Legions and the common ancestor of all of them anyway is almost certainly "The Girl I Left Behind Me" (17th-whatever).
Somehow I remain less over the fact that Donald Swann was the first person to record Carter's "Lord of the Dance" (1964) than the fact that he did a song cycle of Middle-Earth (1967) and an opera of Perelandra (1964).
Oh, shoot, Swann would have made a great Campion. You register the horn-rims and immediately tune out the face behind them.
Ignoring the appealingly transitive properties of Wimsey, Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter, I am not going to rewatch the episode of Granada Holmes starring Clive Francis, I am going to lie down before someone wakes me.
Afghanistan banana stand
Sep. 16th, 2025 10:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Hello! But Keep It Moving, Human.
Sep. 16th, 2025 11:45 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

Via Elakha Alliance, which writes:
New research alert! Sea otters, it turns out, aren’t fans of farm-fresh oysters in this study - no matter how fresh they are. In fact, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks found zero evidence of otters dining on oysters, even when these bivalves were grown in farms right in their foraging zones.
So what’s the takeaway? Otters are simply being their smart, energy-efficient selves. Diving dozens of feet to access caged oysters takes too much effort compared to other options - though they did go for the more accessible mussel ropes at one mixed farm.
🦪 As Elakha is conducting our own research study with oyster farmers here in Oregon, these findings help us clarify how otter activity can coexist with coastal economies and ecosystems.
On the edge and off the avenue
Sep. 13th, 2025 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
We just ended up clutching at the empty rituals like gamblers clutching long odds
Sep. 13th, 2025 04:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Also I had just been turned down by a housing situation that I had painfully wanted, but the classical stuff was all still bang on.
If one year's back on my shoulder
Sep. 12th, 2025 03:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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