![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewducker
My brother Mike got me this for my birthday, and it just takes a
weight off my mind being able to say "bring the steam temperature up
to 95 degrees and hold it there"
(Control over oil temperature when frying eggs is also awesome.)
Original
is here on Pixelfed.scot.
oursinActually, I can't find that the article by Molly-Jong Fast in today's Guardian Saturday is currently online, alas - clearly she had a sad and distressing childhood, even if I was tempted, and probably not the only one to be so tempted, to murmur, apologies to P Larkin, 'they zipless fuck you up...', the abrupt dismissal of her nanny, her only secure attachment figure, when Erica J suddenly remarried (again) was particularly harsh, I thought. No wonder she had problems.
And really, even if she does make a point of how relatively privileged she was, that doesn't actually ameliorate how badly she was treated.
Only the other day there was an obituary of the psychoanalyst Joy Schaverien, who wrote Boarding School Syndrome: The Psychological Trauma of the “Privileged” Child.
***
Another rather traumatic parenting story, though this is down to the hospitals: BBC News is now aware of five cases of babies swapped by mistake in maternity wards from the late 1940s to the 1960s. Lawyers say they expect more people to come forward driven by the increase in cheap genetic testing.:
[V]ery gradually, more babies were delivered in hospital, where newborns were typically removed for periods to be cared for in nurseries.
"The baby would be taken away between feeds so that the mother could rest, and the baby could be watched by either a nursery nurse or midwife," says Terri Coates, a retired lecturer in midwifery, and former clinical adviser on BBC series Call The Midwife.
"It may sound paternalistic, but midwives believed they were looking after mums and babies incredibly well."
It was common for new mothers to be kept in hospital for between five and seven days, far longer than today.
To identify newborns in the nursery, a card would be tied to the end of the cot with the baby's name, mother's name, the date and time of birth, and the baby's weight.
"Where cots rather than babies were labelled, accidents could easily happen"
***
A different sort of misattribution: The furniture fraud who hoodwinked the Palace of Versailles:
[T]his assortment of royal chairs would become embroiled in a national scandal that would rock the French antiques world, bringing the trade into disrepute.
The reason? The chairs were in fact all fakes.
The scandal saw one of France's leading antiques experts, Georges "Bill" Pallot, and award-winning cabinetmaker, Bruno Desnoues, put on trial on charges of fraud and money laundering following a nine-year investigation.
....
Speaking in court in March, Mr Pallot said the scheme started as a "joke" with Mr Desnoues in 2007 to see if they could replicate an armchair they were already working on restoring, that once belonged to Madame du Barry.
Masters of their crafts, they managed the feat, convincing other experts that it was a chair from the period.
I am really given a little hope for an anti-Mybug tendency among the masculine persuasion: A Man writes in 'the issue is not whether men are being published, but whether they are reading – and being supported to develop emotional lives that fiction can help foster'
While Geoff Dyer in The Books of [His] Life goes in hard with Beatrix Potter as early memory, Elizabeth Taylor as late-life discovery, and Rosamond Lehmann's The Weather in the Streets as
One of those perennially bubbling-under modern classics – too good for the Championship, unable to sustain a place in the Premier league – which turns out to be way better than some of the canonical stalwarts permanently installed in the top flight.
cosmolinguistLast month I met someone whose visa has just been approved and who started T today.
What a good day.
I was excited to meet another trans immigrant... so much that I immediately behaved as if there was a kind of intimacy between us that does not in fact exist: I teased him about how he only had a few hours left until he started being stinky...and then as we were leaving he asked me "wait, so about that smell thing, was that serious, because I've been wondering...."
oh no!
But! It worked out okay: I saw him again a fortnight later, and he made a point of telling me I was right about the stinkiness. Which made me smile but also gave me a chance to apologize for saying something that could be so easily misconstrued. I tried to explain about the false sense of intimacy I immediately felt when
He said it was fine, it was funny. To be understood as I'd intended was a relief!
He told me that the person standing next to him, an acquaintance of mine, someone he had been draped over all evening, has been counting his facial hairs.
As of that day there were eight of them.
It was so heartwarming and delightful to see early transition so intimately documented like that. Especially for a masc person; the loving detail is something I'm so much more used to seeing from trans fems.
andrewduckercosmolinguistEvery afternoon this week, I reach a point in the afternoon where I stumble away from my work computer and end up in the kitchen, and there on the countertop I see a handful (or more!) of strawberries, which V has harvested and washed.
And I try to only eat half (which was easier today because they ended up telling me they'd already eaten half of what they'd picked, and they'd finished off the blueberries in the fridge along with it; basically that was their lunch), and it's just the thing I need to get through the rest of the day.
Strawberry season is the best season. And I'm so grateful that don't even have to pick them myself!
andrewduckeroursinAfter a few distinctly less than summery days, today has been quite sunny.
Okay, I think I've had some of these before.... maybe.
Summer Nights
The downside: Summertime Blues:
Not sure if Summer Wine is for drinking then, or made then, with sinister summer herbs:
Obligatory Lovin' Spoonful
Kinks chilling on a Lazy Sunny Afternoon:
Carole King another one wanting it to be over:
pauraque
andrewduckerandrewduckerdelphioursinI did a quick search over past posts and I see that bibliotherapy has been a thing that I have been posting the odd link about for A Long Time, though I see the School of Life's page thereon is now 404. In the way that things are constantly being suddenly NEW, I see I also had a link much more recently on the topic about which was cynical.
But I find this article really quite amusing if sometimes determined to use all the Propah Academyk Speek: Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity:
When reading is positioned as therapy, we argue, evaluative intentions intersect awkwardly with the cultural logics of literature, as practitioners and commissioners grapple with what it means to extract ‘wellbeing effects’ from a diffuse and everyday practice. As a result, what might look initially like another simple case of medicalisation turns out to have more uncertain effects. Indeed, as we will show, incorporating the ‘reading cure’ troubles biomedicine, foregrounding both the deficiencies of current public health responses to the perceived crisis of mental health, and the poverty of causal models of therapeutic effect in public health. There are, then, potentially de-medicalising as well as medicalising effects.
Larfed liek drayne:
In five experiments on how reading fiction impacts on measures of wellbeing, Carney and Robertson found no measurable effects from simply being exposed to fiction: the mechanism, they note, is not akin to a pharmaceutical that can prescribed.
cosmolinguistI didn't think I was going to get to see Sinners before it left theaters, but D has found like one showing an evening this week so he and I went today! Sadly V wasn't feeling up to coming along, but otherwise it was great.
I enjoyed the hell out of the movie, if not as much as I would have at like 16 when I was obsessed with that music.
All the performances were so good, and I loved the soundtrack and it was just a joy to watch.
I told V that if they were up to it I'd happily go see it again with them tomorrow. I so badly want to Check on some things. (Also I saw it with no audio description so I'm certain I missed a ton of what's actually on the screen.)
kitewithfishregshoepauraqueoursinWhat I read
KJ Charles, Copper Script (2025): somehow not among my top KJCs.
Finished Bitch in a Bonnet Vol 2, perhaps even better than vol 1.
Angela Thirkell, The Old Bank House (1949): not quite sure why this got to be picked as a Virago Modern Classic: WO WO Iron Heel of THEM i.e. the 1945 Labour Government, moan whinge, etc etc; also several rather repetitious passages of older generation maundering to themselves about the dire prospects that await the younger members.
Finished Dragon's Teeth, the last parts of which were quite the wild ride.
Latest Slightly Foxed, a bit underwhelmed, well, they can't always be talking about things that really interest/excite me or rouse fond memories I suppose.
On the go
Have started Upton Sinclair. Wide is the Gate (Lanny Budd, #4) (1943) simply because I had very strong 'what happens next? urges after the end of Dragon's Teeth, but that gets answered in the first few chapters, and I think that in this one we're already getting strong hints that Lanny is about to head southwards to Spain, just in time for things to start getting violent. I might take a break.
I have just started a romance by an author I have vaguely heard well of and was a Kobo deal but don't think it's for me.
Up next
Dunno: perhaps that Gail Godwin memoir.
***
*Even barely woken up I was not at all sure that this was not all one of those cunning scams that is in fact a fraudster telling you they are your bank/credit card co, but it turned out it was actually about somebody making fraudulent charges - in really odd small ways - on my card, when I got onto the website and found the number to ring - the number being called from with automated menu bearing no resemblance to the one on my card, ahem - went through all the procedures and card is being cancelled and new one sent. SIGH. This is second credit card hoohah in two days, yesterday got text re upcoming due payment for which bill has so far failed to arrive, for the one for which logging into website involves dangers untold and hardships unnumbered and having the mobile app. (Eventually all resolved.)
andrewduckerandrewducker - Photo cross-postoursin - Some of these are downers and others notcosmolinguist - intimaciesoursin - (no subject)andrewducker - Interesting Links for 07-06-2025cosmolinguist - Wonders never ceaseandrewducker - The Sickening Has Meoursin - Nostalgic Music Party!pauraque - Made in Korea by Jeremy Holt (2022)andrewducker - History Repeating Itself (Labour and ID cards edition)andrewducker - Interesting Links for 06-06-2025delphi - What's Making Me Happy Today: Cloudward, Ho! ep. 1oursin - I think this article is saying It's All More Complicated?andrewducker - Interesting Links for 05-06-2025cosmolinguist - Sinnerskitewithfish - Wednesday Reading Meme for June 4, 2025regshoe - More Pride and Prejudicepauraque - The Way Spring Arrives and Other Stories, ed. Yu Chen & Regina Kanyu Wang (2022) [part 5]oursin - Wednesday had text and phonecalls about credit card fraud BEFORE COFFEE*andrewducker - Interesting Links for 04-06-2025branchandroot