image from NYT
This image is for Penguin Unearthed, who kindly included me in her list of bloggers who make her think a few weeks ago.
I’m choosing blogs that I often read but rarely comment on, because I don’t find time to compose comments everywhere I read, but that doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about what was written. These are also blogs that I don’t link to that often, because their work is not easily distillable for use as part of one’s own polemic, yet it still informs and persuades.
- Personal Political – one of the first ozbloggers to encourage my blogging. Thanks, susoz.
- Jon Swift – some people take a while to grok this.
- Orcinus – Dave Niewert and Sara Robinson deconstruct social conservatives.
- boynton – desultory delights
- Making Light – especially Teresa’s posts
Bonus: xkcd (geekery injokes alert)
Thank you all for stretching the grey matter.
While we’re talking about thoughtful stuff, here’s the NYT from 2006 on what science tells us about the power of kyewt.
The human cuteness detector is set at such a low bar, researchers said, that it sweeps in and deems cute practically anything remotely resembling a human baby or a part thereof, and so ends up including the young of virtually every mammalian species, fuzzy-headed birds like Japanese cranes, woolly bear caterpillars, a bobbing balloon, a big round rock stacked on a smaller rock, a colon, a hyphen and a close parenthesis typed in succession.
This isn’t cute but was very yummy: mr tog and I celebrated the arrival of the autumn cool recently as we do every year with Boeuf en Croute (aka Beef Wellington). I do individual cuts of fillet steak in puff pasty with strips of streaky bacon and a smear of foie gras. Here is the croute awaiting the piles of steamed veges to accompany it.
This weekend I’m breaking out the Fragrant Sour and Spicy Thai Soup.
Categories: arts & entertainment, fun & hobbies
Otterday! And Open Thread 
100 books by women in 2016 
Today was a singing day 
Hoyden About Town 
So what fun stuff has everybody been reading lately?
Mm, fun stuff. On paper, I’m reading Essence & Alchemy by Mandy Aftel, and loving it. It really needs little sealed scratch ‘n’ sniffs on each page, though.
On the web, and staying in the perfumery field, I found SmellyBlog not long ago. She’s just done a sweeping and in-depth series on vetiver, its origins, the different varieties, information about perfumes containing vetiver, and journalling her explorations of creating a vetiver-based perfume.
Others:
The Eggcorn Database: a participatory database of eggcorns everywhere, from all intensive purposes to wringing the changes.
BabyGadget: Bits and pieces of kid gear from all over. Mostly snarkable over-priced over-designed pointless junk, there is the occasional objet d’art that makes it worth reading.
Overheard in New York: because it’s OINY.
And I’ll cop to a secret penchant for trashy_eats. It’s a slow-motion hyperglycemic trainwreck of dayglo-salty goo.
Oh, not so much a fun post but a very powerful post on grief and our society’s avoidance of acknowledging it from The View From Elsewhere: Death Days.
Georgeous picture, tigtog, thanks!