Yes, rabbits literally shit where they eat. They’re little poop production lines.
Status:
Grumpy Pete has left the building for now. Having a rest day to be sure. Did laundry, finished off setting up the online shopping, had a nap.
A lot of the links I post here are about the rising fascist threat and what we can do to protect ourselves from it (see Lifepod below, for example) so it would be churlish not to mention today’s by-election victory by the Greens, bloodying the nose of Reform and giving Labour a much needed reality check. The Greens are not perfect by any stretch but they’re clearly on the right side of the fight.
Overnight listening:
- In Our Time: The Columbian Exchange - Being the exchange of foodstuffs and germs when Europeans and Americans first met. Quickly reframed as “less an exchange, more a massacre” and has some interesting stuff about climate change from population loss and the changes in European diets fuelling the Industrial Revolution. Reminded me of a bit in The Dawn Of Everything that Rousseau’s enlightenment ideas were influenced by indigenous practices encountered by settlers, specifically the Wendat chief Kondiaronk, which was sadly not mentioned.
Reading:
- Weird Pride in a hostile world. - It seems Weird Pride Day is 4th March. This is a manifesto which I can pretty much get behind.
- ‘A gift that falls from the sky’: why farmers are using Etna’s ash as fertiliser. - Funny that this is framed as a recent discovery as I remember learning as a child that the land around volcanos is highly fertile, although I get that excess ash is probably a short term problem.
- First ice cream van of the year 2026.
- Scholar, seductress, alchemist: who was the real Cleopatra? - Author wants to write about Cleopatra, realises she’ll never know anything accurate about Cleopatra so writes about herself in her place. Which, of course, is how history is written, crafting narratives from available facts that tell us stories about ourselves in the here and now.
- Ador Oh No! - On leaning into contradictory music.
Subscribing:
- Lifepod - Adam Greenfield has extended his Lifehouse book (which I very much enjoyed last year) into an ongoing podcast. He introduces it here. Will be checking it out tonight.
- Here’s a big list of indie media for you - Garbage Day collects a bunch of sites, blogs and newsletters which are attempting to fill the gap left by the evisceration of news media. A lot I recognise, many I don’t and will check out as I’ve been wanting to diversify my inputs of late. (Also, this sort of thing reminds of how every year or so the underground cartoonists du jour would put together an anthology of their work, maybe through Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly, which meant they were no longer underground and it was time to start hunting out the next bunch of hungry kids doing zines. So who’s out there?)
Watching:
Telly:
- English Teacher - Catching up on the second season. I’d forgotten how mad this is. It’s like the teaching staff from Glee on meth.
- Paradise - Really not sure if this is bobbins or not. It’s definitely setting off my bobbins alarms.