opusculus

Are they going to eat me alive?’: trail runners become prey in newest form of hunting:

Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? It’s a question often put to highlight the cruelty of hunting, because the answer would seem to be no. Or so you would think.
Yet increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.

Maybe this would have struck differently - jolly countryside japes? - if this had not been the same week in which there was

a) a review of the new remake of The Running Man:

Ben signs up for a top-rated reality TV show called The Running Man; he has to go on the run across the US, hunted by professional killers, and if he can survive for 30 days, he gets a billion dollars. But all too late, he realises that these shark-like fascist TV execs aren’t going to play fair.

b) this creep-making report: Italy investigates claims of tourists paying to shoot civilians in Bosnia in 1990s:

[J]ournalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who describes a "manhunt" by "very wealthy people" with a passion for weapons who "paid to be able to kill defenceless civilians" from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.
Different rates were charged to kill men, women or children, according to some reports.

Last week's bread actually held out pretty well, though was rather dry by the end, however, that meant there was enough left to make a frittata with pepperoni for Friday night supper.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, which for an experiment I tried making with Marriage's Golden Wholegrain, fairly pleasant but I think nicer with strong white.

Today's lunch: bozbash, with Romano peppers, aubergine, okra, baby courgettes, fresh coriander, crushed 5-pepper blend, dried basil, and finished with tayberry vinegar. Was going to serve couscous with this but I was not impressed by the way this turned out given the instructions on the packet. Not really necessary, anyway.

The Spanish government has granted citizenship to 170 descendants of volunteers in the International Brigades in recognition of their fight against fascism.

The daughter of a Manchester man who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War has reflected on his "incredible feat of solidarity" as her family is set to become Spanish citizens.

‘We don’t even know all of what we have.’ Howard fights to preserve Black newspapers.

“We don’t even know all of what we have,” Mr. Nightingale marvels.
The basement is a trove of artifacts, including old editions of Black-owned newspapers that tell the life of Black Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries. Articles cover slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. The archive project, which is part of the university’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is bringing to life the faces of yesterday by merging them with the digital world of today. This way, the hope is, they won’t be lost ever again.

Disentangling obscured women: One Artist – ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ – Dismembered To Create Two: or The Importance Of Biography:

Googling ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ led me to the ArtUK page for ‘Mary Katharine [sic] Constance Lloyd’, which included birth and death dates and a short biography[i]. It was then only the work of a moment to discover on Ancestry that the woman with the given dates was not a Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd but a Katharine Constance Lloyd. How peculiar, I thought, and looked again at the ArtUK page. It then seemed obvious that the paintings displayed were unlikely to all be by the same hand. Four, including the one described by Birrell in the chapter on ‘Mary’, might be classed as ‘impressionist’, while the others were formal portraits of worthy 20th-century gentlemen, attired in various robes of office.
A little more online research established that there was, indeed, another artist with a similar name, Mary Constance Lloyd, and that a succession of art reference works had carelessly blended their two lives together – to create ’Mary Katharine Constance Lloyd’. I suppose it is a measure of how little importance is attached to the lives of such women artists that in 50 years no author had bothered to research either subject ab initio – but, when compiling a new biographical dictionary or making a footnote reference, had merely copied the – incorrect – information.

***

We are always up for some toad-related phenomena around here: Newly identified species of Tanzanian tree toad leapfrog the tadpole stage and give birth to toadlets. How about that.

Noted as of interest a day or so ago, ‘I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did’: the intersex campaigners fighting to limit surgery on children - am a bit gloomed to think that this is Still An Issue because I look back and surely this was brought to wider attention, oh, at least twenty or years ago?

Ah. A little delving shows me that the person I remember as doing pioneering research on the subject, published around the late 90s, and also involved in intersex activism, has become A Figure of Controversy and I think we probably do not mention them.

But quite coincidentally this emerged today: who, according to work done by A Very Reputable Scientist sequencing DNA which does appear to be his, had a Disorder of Sexual Development (as intersex conditions are sometimes termed)? Did Hitler really have a ‘micropenis’? The dubious documentary analysing the dictator’s DNA.

Here is a thoughtful and nuanced piece by an actual scientist taking issue with some of the more tabloidy accounts A slightly different take on the news that Hitler’s DNA reveals some genetic anomalies. The most interesting thing to me is that history has a profound capability for irony.

That Hitler himself had a condition that was discovered and named by a Jewish man who also held some responsibility for the scientifically misguided murderous policies of the Nazis is at least a reflection that history is often imbued with a sense of complex and confusing irony.

I don't think I've ever posted this. I can't find the complete Lessons of War by Henry Reed online, but the most famous poem in the sequence, which I think was in school anthologies in my day, is:

Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And tomorrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But today,
Today we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens likecoral in all the neighboring gardens,
And today we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
For today we have the naming of parts.

This week's bread: Dove's Farm Organic Seedhouse Bread flour, nice.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown toasted pinenut with Marriage's Light Spelt - perhaps was a bit too sparing with the pinenuts after the excess of last time?

Today's lunch: pheasant breasts flattened a little and rubbed with coriander seeds and juniper berries crushed with salt and 5-pepper blend, panfried in butter and deglazed with madeira, perhaps slightly overdone; served with kasha, garlic-roasted purple sprouting tenderstem broccoli and 'baby' (adolescent) leeks halved and healthy grilled and dressed with a grain mustard vinaigrette.

I.e. after all the faff and fuss and distraction

I GOT THE REVIEW DONE!!!

And then spent a fair amount of time fiddling around with it and niggling at it and trimming it and so on -

- but then I managed to upload it to the journal site, via a link from the Reviews Editor which may not have required me to either remember a password I created in the dim mists of past time or create a new one, but still involved the inordinate amount of annoying these journal sites are.

And lo and behold, this very morning after, it has been accepted, no corrections, no revisions, now in the editing process, copyright form forthcoming.

Phew.

One last book to review on the pile, should I put myself forward to review v interesting work just out from old mate? Have other stuff to be thinking of....

As previously mentioned, also managed to get the downstairs backroom communicating with the world again. Though getting the unwanted TP-Link returned looks a bit more arduous.

Plus, have had a haircut.