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Monthly Archives: March 2024

Russia’s strategy

Saturday, March 30, 2024

The Kremlin. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Heather Cox Richardson is an American historian. Her daily newsletters are a must-read every day, in my opinion. But today’s newsletter is a must-must-must read. Its subject is Russian disinformation, to which we are far more exposed than we usually realize. Richardson writes: “This means that the strategy that matters […]

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The post-truth era indeed

Tuesday, March 26, 2024

AI image by DALL-E 3 Google for the term “post-truth era” and you’ll find a great many hits, many of them in the most august of publications. For example, just a couple of weeks ago, The Atlantic ran a piece with the headline “We’re already living in the post-truth era.” This morning, in a review […]

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Feðgar á ferð

Monday, March 25, 2024

Click here for high resolution version. The Old Man and His Sons. (In the Faroese edition, the title is Feðgar á ferð.) By Heðin Brú. Published in Faroese, 1940. English translation by John F. West, 1970. I got from this book just what I hoped to get — an impression of life in the Faroe […]

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3 Body Problem

Friday, March 22, 2024

Last night I watched the first episode of Netflix’s new “3 Body Problem.” It looks very promising. It’s smart and complicated, and it focuses on dialogue and drama rather than action. The series is based on a book by the Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin. The Netflix project was done by David Benioff and […]

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But tonight, frost

Monday, March 18, 2024

Click here for high resolution version. My deciduous magnolias are stunning this year. But tonight we’re expecting frost, and they can’t take much of that. All the other early blooms should be fine. But the deciduous magnolias hate frost.

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Neither here nor now, please

Sunday, March 17, 2024

Faroe Islands sheep. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high resolution version. I was on jury duty all of last week. It was educational, but it also was suffocating. There were more than a hundred people in the jury pool, and sometimes we were obliged to sit in a too-small holding room for more than […]

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A snapshot of Scottish cooking, 1925-1946

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Newly rebound in cloth, with the old cover used as a label I hope I am wrong, but I am reluctantly inclined to conclude that traditional Scottish cooking is almost completely lost, just as my native cuisine, Southern American cooking, also is almost completely lost. Though there are older people who remember it (both here […]

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Falling for Figaro

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Would it be possible to go wrong with a smart and sweet romantic comedy set mostly in the Scottish Highlands with an operatic soundtrack? Not to my taste! Some of the critics didn’t like it as much as I did. For example, the Wikipedia entry quotes someone at RogerEbert.com: “The performances are what make Falling […]

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