Journal

Mostly a rest day today. After posting last night I was overcome with brain fog, which hopefully explains any dullness in my prose and the fact that I didn’t correct typos til this afternoon. Visibility has a cost.

Wally was off his food today, hiding in the corners of the run like a sad little sack. As I’ve said many times before, we know not to panic at a change in behaviour but to monitor and be ready for an intervention if it continues. So we carried him out to the garden to force him to move and kept an eye on him. Eventually he had a nibble on some carrot leaves and by late afternoon he was back to normal. Probably just a bit of wind.

On the plus side I managed to get a great picture of him looking really sad and pathetic. Like all great photographs it’s a lie — he was actually making good progress recovering at this point and was in the middle of cleaning his face. Good job he doesn’t read my blog.

Linkity link

• Is this the site in the brain of ME/CFS? — Caution abound for a YouTube video about a mysterious medical condition, but this seems legit and is covered in caveats. In short, there’s a patch of the brain that, when stressed from an illness or stroke, sends out signals that match CFS symptoms. Treatment is tricky, but it’s interesting research, if only because a reliable biomarker for CFS has been elusive.
• Severe drought declared in six areas of England as reservoirs run low — I checked the Severn Trent reservoirs and they’ve been going down since August. The rain hasn’t made a difference yet. (And we get our water from the Welsh mountains where is really rains.)
• Friend of the Swastika — During my browsings I saw the phrase “you wouldn’t walk around with a swastika, would you”. As usual I immediately thought of ManWoman, this character I came across in the Modern Primitives book who spent his life trying to rehabilitate it as a symbol of peace to the point where he has over 200 swastikas tattooed on his body. This is a nice interview from 1999 (he died in 2012).
• Wealth Inequality in America drawn to scale — One of those “you have no idea how large a billion is” visualisers where you start on a page showing the vast majority of Americans and then scroll up and up and up until you reach Musk.
• Ask E. Jean — The documentary about E. Jean Carrol, who is so much more than that woman who sued Trump, is on iPlayer. Looking forward to this.
• Lego Star Wars — Found in my early 2000s blog archives, this is probably the original “retelling Star Wars with lego bricks”, made by Maestro S.Fujita through the 90s.