- A hundred 3D animators put their own spin on the same basic scene. Awesome stuff⌠the human ability for creativity will never cease to amaze me.
- A digital museum of art depicting scenes from Danteâs Divine Comedy. A lot of it is in untranslated Italian, but hey, visual art is visual art.
- Keeping on the subject of digital museums: an extremely in-depth and extremely 2008 museum of toasters. Would that every website still looked as good and functioned as well as this!
- Artwork by eccentric artist Madge Gill (and Myrninerest?) has appeared around the Line, a sculpture trail in eastern London.
- The battle over the future of the U.S. Libertarian party. Low, low stakes hereâââeven our Green parties are more relevant than them...
Posts in EnglishPage 17
Highly disappointed in myself for liking that new Ed Sheeran song. Where did i go wrongâ˝
Bog trotters, heart attacks, and a paranoid Auntie
Via Hansard, the official record of British parliamentary business, thenâLabour MP Joe Ashton informs us of the sort of nonsense that went on when the government had a majority of minus seventeen:
We used to have a bog trotter. When the Division bell rang, we had a top and bottom bog trotter whose job it was to run around all the toilets to see if anyone was locked in. We had to look under the door for feet and, if seen, we looked over the top. If that person was one of theirs we left him, if it was one of ours, we got him outâââif necessary with a screwdriver to unlock the door from the outside. That was the sort of nonsense that occurred when the House divided.
I remember the famous case of Leslie Spriggs, the then Member for St. Helens. We had a tied vote and he was brought to the House in an ambulance having suffered a severe heart attack. The two Whips went out to look in the ambulance and there was Leslie Spriggs laid there as though he was dead. I believe that John Stradling Thomas said to Joe Harper, âHow do we know that he is alive?â So he leaned forward, turned the knob on the heart machine, the green light went around, and he said, âThere, you've lostâââit's 311.â That is an absolutely true story. It is the sort of nonsense that used to happen. No one believes it, but it is true.
[...]
When Parliament was first broadcast, for the first three days the BBC broadcast everything that came through the loudspeakers. It was libellous, it was unbelievably crude, but it was hilarious. The BBC panicked and said, âSomebody will sue us for libel. If it is in Hansard it is okay, but if it is not in Hansard we will be done for libel.â So the BBC stopped broadcasting everything; now, it jams the broadcast so all people hear is, âHear, hear, hear.â It is terrified of being sued for libel.
This stems from a 1997 debate on the modernisation of parliamentary procedure. More anecdotes from the same speech can be found on the other side of the link.
Me writing long run-on sentences for my blog in English: Haha fuck yeah!!! Yes!!
Me having to translate them into Dutch: Well this fucking sucks. What the fuck.
Notes from a walk through Newcastle
The gorgeous gorge that is the Tyne valley has no shortage of winsome views, but the most beautiful, in my opinion, is that which appears to one who goes down the Side.Îą In the Monumentâs shadow, after passing the classical columns of the Theatre Royal and descending Grey Street as it becomes Dean Street, finally taking a turn onto the Side at the bottom, the lucky traveller will find themself towered over by the behemoth that is the Tyne Bridge:


Iâm not sure any photograph can ever match what itâs like to be there under that bridge. One of the most remarkable things about this view, though, has nothing to do with the view itself, but rather what happens if one walks down the Quayside for a little while, reaches an empty brownfield plot, and clambers up a set of rotting wooden stairs to its right. Because, inexplicably, just a few metres from the most beautiful view in town, one can find the second most beautiful view in town, a glorious lookout on every bridge linking the two banks of the river.

We donât deserve this city.
I had initially neglected to bring a water bottle along with me; i had only intended a quick jaunt to the centre of town and back, and the foolhardy idea of walking all the way to Wallsend came to me spontaneously. This quickly proved a bad idea, and so i made a trek up to the corner shop, who thankfully had all the bottled water anyone could ever want or need.
After leaving fully rehydrated and ready to walk back, i noticed the most wonderful little thing. A parklet, this small opening of green space with some benches and inscriptions, tucked between a housing area and a construction site. I took some picturesâââi would have loved to show them to you, but alas, my phone got stolen in the intervening time between this trip and me writing this post, taking the photographs with it.
Nevertheless, if youâd like to visit (or live vicariously through Google street view), itâs that little park adjacent to 5 Belmont Street. (Google stubbornly refuses to give a proper address, but you canât miss it!)

An account of my thought process upon seeing the above building complex:
- That building looks exceedingly evil, but i canât quite place my finger on whyâŚ
- Iâm going to look the company up.
- Ah, a fossil fuel companyâââthey are evil!
Just a few yards ahead, crossing a foot-and-cycle bridge, i happened upon some strikingly relevant
graffiti, alongside some other pieces which really sum up the modern English psyche: an Extinction
Rebellion poster, a crossed out âEDLâ,β and a cock and
bollocks.

I carried a record from HMV (the Killersâ Hot Fuss, if you must know) the whole way, and let me tell you, my arms were positively aching by the end of it! At least i had a bagâŚÎł
To sign off, here are some photos whose stories werenât interesting enough to make the cut, as well as a map of the journey. Thank you for reading this disjoint mess.

Links for the 18th of June
- A profile of Chris Barrett, the âpizza pushaâ who sells pizza laced with cannabis on the grey market
- âField Notes: Miamiâ, a nice little profile of what makes the city of Miami special
- The Shortcut
- The man who jumped into Lake Michigan every day for a year (Certainly one way to spend your quarantineâŚ)
- Walking from Landâs End to John oâGroats to celebrate being rid of oneâs boring civil service job
- Influence: a fun little territory-capture game; each move not only captures a single space but a little bit of the spaces around it
- Guy makes airline food at home for some reason
- Rest in peace, Clive Murphy
I just got done watching that new Bo Burnham special everyone's so excited about. I loved it: i laughed, the songs are catchy, the beard looks good on him⌠but i canât believe i have to add a song called âWhite Womanâs Instagramâ to the list of songs that have made me cry!
Some bastardâs stolen my phone!
Links for the 9th of June
- Stanford Universityâs Orbis, like Google Maps for the Roman world
- Yan Tan Tethera
- Bo Burnhamâs âWelcome to the Internetââââa little bit of everything all of the time
- National Geographic have (gasp) finally recognised the Southern Ocean as a distinct ocean
- Latin: Sussus Amongus
- Old French: Sos Amonc
- Modern French: Soux-Among /su.zâżamÉĚ/
Links for the 4th of June
- Ofcom maintains a list of every swear word in the English language by severity. Taxpayer money at work!
- âThe Michelangelo of Middlesbroughâ: Man spends twenty-seven thousand hours on a scale model of the destroyed St. Hildaâs district
- Blue Abyss: Plans to build the worldâs deepest pool in Cornwall
- 50 Years of Text Games covers Silverwolf, one of many games made by St. Brideâs School, a *checks notes* lesbian Victorian schoolgirl cult
- New Chvrches song just dropped, featuring Robert Smith of the Cure
-
The Youtube rabbit hole:
- Blade Runner but Mr. Blobby is there [30 seconds]
- Incredible million to one train shot [1 minute]
- Can you really move the FrenchâBelgian border by accident with a tractor? The twist at the end opened my fourth eye [9 minutes]
May 2021 recap
So this is June and what have you done? Another month over a new one just begun
Films watched
- Guy Ritchieâs Snatch (2000) (A-)
- Barry Sonnenfeldâs Men in Black (1999): Ruthlessly efficient. Gets in and out in 90 minutes. (A-)
- Dreamworksâ Shrek (2001): Watched as it was meant to be seen, in the original Polish (C+)
-
Peter Weirâs The Truman Show (1998): While sailing across the internet, i happened
across a copy of
the original draft of the script. It is so much darker, and so much weirder.
- Itâs set in a constructed version of New York City instead of a small town in Florida
- He finds his own name in a dictionary
- Truman threatens to kill a baby and it is played completely straight
- Instead of ending when he disappears out the door it continues and he hijacks a tram and has a shoot-out on the roof of the studio????
- He hires a prostitute to recreate his encounter with the girl who told him it was all a TV show
- Anyway, the cut that got released is a very good film to show to your friends who havenât seen it before and watch their reactions. Itâs alsoâââfor me personallyâââone of those Back to the Future-type films, where itâs all so immaculately put together that you can watch it over and over and thereâs always something new to enjoy (A+)
Top 10 most viewed pages on the site this May
- Index page: 219 views
- Linkroll: 82 views
- The Garden (front page): 59 views
- Toaster shade generator: 46 views
- About the author: 35 views
- The log of changes: 26 views
- Music i like: 21 views
- Things i would like to add to my site: 20 views
- What i believe: 16 views
- Toaster: 15 views
The rest of the âprimaryâ pages on my site (that is, those which arenât part of any kind of regular series) are, in decreasing order of views, The foreĹżt of Ĺżhrines, My coat of arms, Discord funny moments, the Marijn van Hoorn style guide, my bucket list, âThere Are Two Continentsâ, the Gender Tetrahedron, interesting Wikipedia articles, yelling into the void, Heximal, the NEOcharts (RIP), Quotes and other assorted aphorisms, a calendrical table, My vinyl record collection, s â Ĺż, the log of dreams, my conlangs, noughts and crosses, âthisâll be on my videotapeâ, Kunstgalerie van Hoorn, A nicer ĆżaČ of Ćżriting EngliĹżh, the Compendium of Good Words, country counting, and songs i have cried my silly little heart out to. Zero views were received by copypastables and holocene history, which⌠you know, fair enough, theyâre both indescribably boring pages.
Top 5 most read entries on The Garden
- Welcome to the new Garden
- 7AM puzzles
- Site statistics for April 2021
- âTesting, testing⌠If this goes through, this should be my first successful blog post made from my phone.â
- Links for the 22nd of May
Top 10 countries where most people are reading from
- The United States
- The United Kingdom
- Canada
- France
- India
- New Zealand
- Sweden
- Germany
- Hong Kong
- Brazil
Fully vaccinated

Enough said.
Links for the 26th of May
- The Berglas Effect, the greatest and unexplainedest card trick of all timeâââthe comments speculate that he has 52 pre-shuffled decks with a card in each position; perhaps theyâre on to something
- The London Blossom Garden
- Uberduck.aiâââfinally, you can get a synthetic Jeremy Clarkson to cuss your friends out
- Topotijdreisâââcompare survey maps of the Netherlands from 1815 to the present day [NL]
- Similarly, the National Library of Scotland lets you compare satellite photos, modern-day maps, and old Ordnance Survey maps of Great Britain
- Down the Youtube rabbit hole: