Closing tabs

Have had a bit of a breather in Cayman for a few days, with some important pieces of work finished and much exercise, but am on another plane tomorrow to another country! Then home on Sunday. I am ready, really, for the semester to be over: five more weeks, but two of them only with Monday teaching rather than Monday-Wednesday...

Closing tabs:

Vanessa Veselka on a truck-stop killer and the life of teenage runaways.

Chickens have to live somewhere too!

Note-taking habits of prior ages.

9 political poems to read now that the election's over.

An alluring excerpt from Nancy Marie Brown's Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths.

Smallest man in the world dances with his cat.

Alos: my favorite local sports journalist Ron Shillingford profiles the Wednesday Night Run Club. (B.'s marathon relay team gets a mention!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jacqueline Carey's Dark Currents: Agent of Hel (not bad, but not up to the standard of her best - she's working in a genre that Seanan McGuire has more of a natural gift for!); Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot; Scott Jurek's Eat and Run.

The "incident" in Paris

A tale of cannibalism. (Via Nico.)

Taste, colour and set

It is perhaps not quite blog-worthy, there is nothing absolutely and wildly over-the-top about it, but I was mildly fascinated by this FT piece about Britain's recent marmalade revival (site registration required) and the Marmalade Awards website.

(There is also a prize for Marmalade Cat of the Year!)

My fridge is absolutely bare, I threw out almost everything in fridge and cupboards when leaving the place for subletters in May (I believe this should be done periodically in any case, otherwise aged things pervade!); I believe the purchase of new jams and marmalades is in order...

Entirely unrelated: a rather fantastic Wikipedia biography of British doctor and mass-murderer John Bodkin Adams. (He was convicted, among other things, of the wonderfully named offense "lying on cremation forms"!) This link arrived from my father, who is reading D. R. Thorpe's biography of Harold Macmillan and delighting in the way Macmillan's life seemed to intersect with all sorts of unexpected figures...

Saw an excellent play last night with G. at the Flea Theater, British group Pants on Fire's adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Altogether charming! I think my favorite bits were Io's story (amazing use of gas mask and tap shoes to transform Io into a cow, and a beautifully written and performed song after her transformation back into a girl) and the song about Theseus's black sails, but both the material and the production are excellent: particularly inventive use of puppetry and modest sets to do all sorts of amazing and unexpected things. Lovely stuff!

And then we had a beautiful dinner at Petrarca, which has somehow by stealth and excellence become one of my favorite restaurants, so it was the rare occasion when dinner and the play were both exceptional; we shared a bottle of verdicchio and the amazing piatto rustico, a generous platter of prosciutto and salami and parmesan and so forth, then G. had spaghetti and meatballs and I had seared sesame-crusted tuna with asparagus. Topped off, though I was already rather full, by the Amarena: vanilla gelato with amarena cherries. It was delicious.

In transit

Three flights, three novels by F. Paul Wilson: The Tomb, Gateways, The Select.

By the final leg (Philadelphia-Ottawa), I had moved on to a very good first novel (all of these are from the Cayman Humane Society, the stock having replenished itself through my long-enough absence): Yaba Badoe's True Murder. Some uneven patches in the writing, but I found it mesmerizing as well as enjoyable; I liked it more, I think, than the one I read next, Patricia Duncker's The Deadly Space Between.

20 kilograms

I do not know why I am having a meat obsession today, but here is a gruesomely apt story (with supplemental list of famous cannibal killers).