Journal

## ITEM! ## My number finally came up on the bowel cancer screening lottery and the vial with instructions appeared in the post this week. Pretty simple stuff, except I’ve can’t remember the last time I had to catch my poop before it hit the toilet water. A rather strange experience I’m not keen to repeat any time soon.

## ITEM! ## Speaking of butts, we’ve had sufficient rain over the last couple of weeks that the water butts I installed last month are over half full. I took the big ruler out today and measured the water levels to see if I’d got their relative heights right and it’s not too bad! Butt 1: 51cm, butt 2: 56cm, butt 3: 56cm, butt 4: 51cm. Given butts 1 and 4 are on opposite sides of the shed/rabbit run complex I’m particularly impressed at how I eyeballed that! The middle two were clearly too low but fatigue stopped me doing an accurate job. Now I know exactly how wrong they are I can make new bases for them to sit on in the spring. (Two realisations about water harvesting: they fill up fast and they’ll need to be emptied before the sub-zero temperatures.)

## ITEM! ## Work continues on the blog salvaging with the exciting news that I’ve located all the images from the first four or five years of my blogging. I’d thought these were lost but while searching for something else in an archive came across a folder with them in. As photos they’re nothing special, and in many case really bad, but you can see signs of my figuring out what I could do with these rudimentary digital cameras. Most pleasingly I now have the photos I took at my grandma’s 90th birthday which I’d thought long lost.

Annotated Linkage

• On the inside, looking outside, looking in: Joe Matt’s Peepshow — A long and critical look at the late autobiographical cartoonist’s collected work. “Having allowed his whole life to become story-fodder, he lived, it seems, according to a set of affectations and mannerisms largely untenable within society, thus ensuring that these stories are reliable."
• Isabella Weber: meet the economist ditching ideology for reality — Her basic premise is that if you want to stop fascism, make life’s necessities affordable. Of course this is assuming the people with the power actually want to stop fascism, but if they do this seems like a good start. (Also, everyone photographed in this article looks too young to my eyes. Sign the a new generation is taking over.)
• Sod’s law: what can two turf swaps 40 years apart tell us about Britain’s biodiversity crisis? — I love this piece of land-art, Sod Swap, made in 1983 that has been recreated as Reverse Sod Swap. Originally conceived as a grumpy response to a sculpture commission from the Serpentine gallery, David Nash transplanted turf from Wales in the gallery grounds and vice versa, bringing biodiversity to a London park and its opposite to Wales. The twist in the tale is the new version shows the opposite, a dramatic loss of rural diversity and the success of urban rewilding projects.
• The Olympic sprinter now bedbound for 22 hours a day — She has ME/CFS after back-to-back Covid and glandular fever infections in 2021-22 and is using her platform as an athlete to try and draw attention to the condition, because what fucker is going to accuse an Olympian of faking it. Her story sounds very familiar to me and God only knows what her crash after that interview was like. Sheesh.
• Norm: The tale of Norm Macdonald — Documentary about the great comedian from Judd Apatow comprising of crowdsourced video and no talking heads. Sounds great.

Franchise trailer time

Corporations continue culture-fracking the 20th century and feeding us the reconstituted ooze, and despite my better instincts I’ll be sucking it up.

• Blade Runner 2099 — Not holding too much hope for this given the prominence of Ridley Scott’s credit. I still contend that Denis Villeneuve made half of a really interesting and relevant film before Scott pulled rank and made it all about Deckard. Like the Alien franchise, it really needs to get from out of his shadow if it’s going to shine.
• Rings of Power - Season 3 — As someone with minimal interest in Tolkien but who likes a bit of fantasy nonsense I really enjoyed the first season just for Morfydd Clark kicking ass as a young Galadriel. Season 2 had less of that and too much lore so I clocked out and can’t remember if I even watched it all. Trailer for this has a bit of her doing some action so I’ll give it a go.
• The Magician’s Nephew — Now this looks great. Gerwig for the win!