Slnieckar

(Gifco, Travel Arrangements.)

A few months after the death of our teenage daughter, we left her -- as we thought -- safely buried in St Anne's churchyard, Barnes, and bought a house in Peckham.

M John Harrison winning the opening sentence.

Peregrine Falcon flying low with Teal and Wigeon on the water in the background

Amazing moment at RSPB Greylake yesterday when this stunning Peregrine Falcon shot low across the water! 😍😊
This is the fastest animal on earth!🐦
#BIrds 🪶

The Silver Thorn — Hugh Walpole
Bannmeilen — Anne Weber
The Sad Part Was — Prabda Yoon, tr. Mui Poopoksakul
Backwater — Dorothy M. Richardson
Elizabeth Finch — Julian Barnes
Die Geschichte des verlorenen Kindes — Elena Ferrante, tr. Karin Krieger

Cover of volume 1 of Dorothy Richardon's Pilgrimage

I finished 6 books this month, all of which fit more or less into my month's theme of favourite writers, four by women/POC, and two in German. Portuguese might restart in March.

chinese-poems.com/blog/?p=2994

That makes him 57, by my reckoning!

Labour Party is full of swotty boys using pantomimes of reaction to appease the unquiet ghosts of their semi imaginary blue collar granddads

I don't know what the opposite of nominative determinism is. But Matt Goodwin does.

Gorton and Denton by-election result:

GRN: 40.7% (+27.5)
REF: 28.7% (+14.7)
LAB: 25.4% (-25.3)
CON: 1.9% (-6.0)
LDEM: 1.8% (-2.1)

Green GAIN from Labour.

Learning a second language can be hard. Signing up for Pre-K and 3-K is easy.

Go to myschools.nyc to apply today. Deadline is tomorrow at midnight!

The rat experienced both these events. The rat is no longer alive (I agree it's not perfectly expressed in the comic, but that's clearly the meaning).

Keep going after you cross the International Date Line, and approach from the east.

Nur Pointed Roofs wurde übersetzt, von Clara Munk als Die Schatten der Giebel.

It's also Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (probably many others, but I suspect KSR is a likely influence).

Cheeringly for me, I've read other books by four of these (Bazyar, Énard, Genberg, Kehlmann); I need to try Ana Paula Maia's in the original!

Have you read the article?

Personally attacked by the gulls.

“Ornithological taxonomy is second nature to us birders, so it’s easy to forget that the average person probably only knows the scientific names of a handful of garden birds.” “And gulls, of course.” “Of course.” Even when they’re trying to compensate for it, experts in anything wildly overestimate the average person’s familiarity with their field.

This is fun. Generate your own xkcd2501.

marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-gen...

I did earlier today, so I feel retrospectively validated!

Okay, this is quite outstanding from Bedford Council.

a dolphin with a long nose is swimming against a blue sky Alt: An ichthyosaur with a long nose is swimming against a blue sky, from an animation in the gif library.

What I love about ichthyosaurs: they're marine REPTILES pretending to be fish pretending to be dolphins.

Like, if you unfocus your eyes here, it's a dolphin, right?

But I think we need to talk about Ichthyotitan: a marine reptile pretending to be a fish pretending to be a BLUE WHALE.

Ha!

He should ask Richard Tice how many people in Dubai don't speak passable Arabic.

This art features 100 bees of various colors and shapes. These bees are designed in a cartoonish style, based on real species. The common name or species is written below the animals. Some bees are moving leaves, scraping plant hair, or sticking out their tongues. Some male bees have hairy faces and unusually shaped legs. There are also baby bees that have just hatched from their petal nests. Cute and colorful atmosphere. There are over 20,000 species of bees, so I only depicted a very small fraction of them!

Bees 🐝

Unlike that other one, this is a nice short judgment, so if people are interested in why five clever people made such an apparently stupid decision: www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKS...

There is a specific exception for coconut milk (and cream sherry, etc.) .

Deutsche Ortsnamen ins Englische übertragen (morphologisch rekonstruiert aus historischen Formen)
© Terrible Maps

@schaltjahr.bsky.social zB wohnt in Livercross

“Don’t stop looking”: Julian Barnes’ Departure(s) “The melancholy of the antique world seems to me more profound than that of the moderns, all of whom more or less imply that beyond the dark void lies immortality. But for the ancients that “black …

New book review:

“Don’t stop looking” — on Julian Barnes’ last novel, Departure(s):

anenduringromantic.wordpress.com/2026/02/10/d...

I can only say that the one I've started reading, Prabda Yoon's stories, is excellent!