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daily_otter_feed Sep. 18th, 2025 11:15 am)
daily_otter_feed Sep. 18th, 2025 11:15 am)
Via uso_otter
- 1. Ukraine is hitting Russia where it hurts - and it's working
- (tags:ukraine russia war economy )
- 2. 'Erosion emergency' at Edinburgh's Calton Hill after grass cut too short
- (tags:edinburgh nature )
- 3. 'Forgotten' royal castle uncovered on Herbidean Scottish island
- (tags:scotland castle )
- 4. What's changing for trials in Scotland?
- (tags:scotland law )
- 5. Renewables do unambiguously reduce wholesale power prices
- (tags:renewables electricity economics )
- 6. There Are Too Many Video Games (and songs and books and TV shows)
- (tags:media economics society )
(naomikritzer_feed Sep. 18th, 2025 01:10 am)
naomikritzer_feed Sep. 18th, 2025 01:10 am)There are fifteen people running for Minneapolis mayor. You only have to worry about four of them, and this post will talk about those four. If you want to know more about all the others, that is in a separate post.
The four candidates who might actually win in November:
Jacob Frey (incumbent)
Omar Fateh
Jazz Hampton
DeWayne Davis
The tl;dr is that my current ranking is (1) DeWayne Davis; (2) Omar Fateh; (3) Jazz Hampton. What I would really strongly encourage people to do if they don’t want Jacob but aren’t sure how they feel about the precise order of the challengers is to pick a favorite as soon as possible and donate and doorknock. Four years ago, I got my post up really late, and I was indecisive, and I think I was probably not the only person who got caught up in analysis paralysis. Analysis paralysis that keeps you from donating and volunteering will get you four more years of Jacob Frey! I am here RIGHT NOW, TODAY with information to help you make a decision (which can totally be different from the one I’m making! Get out there and doorknock for Omar Fateh or Jazz Hampton if one of them is your first choice!) Frey is extremely unpopular; the biggest hill to climb for his opponents is name recognition.
I made an effort this month to meet DeWayne Davis, Omar Fateh, and Jazz Hampton in person. I went to a DeWayne Davis meet-and-greet at a park, an Omar Fateh fundraiser, and a Jazz Hampton meet-and-greet at a playground. I asked each of them if they could identify a problem that they thought they could solve as mayor — Minneapolis is facing plenty of problems, some very complicated and some more straightforward, was there any particular problem that they looked at and thought, “make me mayor, and I could fix this one.” I didn’t try to find Jacob to ask this question because he’s been mayor for eight years; he’s had his chance.
Something I found worthwhile was the Mayoral Candidate Q&A from the city DFL convention. There are some challenging and interesting questions. (You can skip 5 seconds at a time with arrow keys if there are candidates you don’t want to hear from.) One caveat is that the video was taken from over to the side and you can’t always tell who’s talking; you have to be able to recognize the candidate’s voices (which mostly I can, but mileage may vary here.)
Cut because the analysis is going to get long!
Jacob Frey (incumbent)
Jacob Frey is a deeply performative empty suit who literally runs away from hard questions. He’s also genuinely terrible at working with the City Council, terrible at collective problem solving, and terrible at overseeing the Minneapolis police.
To give him the credit I think is due: back in 2017 I remember someone who was ranking him second because they thought he’d build a lot of housing, and Minneapolis has added a lot of housing in the last eight years, both affordable and market rate, and the result is that while no one here feels like housing is particularly affordable, we’re doing better than most blue-state cities. I don’t know that Frey deserves a ton of credit for this but he has at least avoided screwing it up.
Two of the biggest ongoing issues in the city are homelessness and policing, and on both he has been consistently performative, ineffective, and cowardly in the sense of being unwilling to tackle hard questions.
- The biggest crisis Frey has faced while mayor was the murder of George Floyd and the civil unrest that followed. Outgoing mayor Betsy Hodges had actually written up a handbook on how to handle something like this, which Frey ignored. The after-action review is scathing: “Interviewees stated minimal direction came from the Mayor’s Office, OEM and other city departments during the unrest. Specifically, some felt that the Mayor’s Office showed no leadership and was ‘rudderless.’ Some indicated that the Mayor, Governor and MPD Chief were notably absent when people felt they should have been present. Many mentioned that the Mayor seemed unprepared but that he was ‘doing his best.'”
- Frey has routinely lied about the number of unsheltered people in Minneapolis and the availability of shelter beds. He will insist that shelter beds are available when this is absolutely not true.
- Frey claimed in 2021 to have banned no-knock warrants. In 2022, Amir Locke was killed ten seconds into a police raid made with a no-knock warrant (for no good reason). If you want your blood pressure to go up you can read this interview Frey did with MPR where he talks about how “the communication around this, it condensed.” (He means his own communication. He condensed it.)
- After the killing of Amir Locke, Frey did a press conference with interim chief Amelia Huffman. It’s an infuriating thing to watch because he starts out performative, and then a few minutes after saying how transparent he wants to be and how he wants to answer all the questions, he and Huffman just walk out because people continue to ask why Amir Locke was referred to as a “suspect” in the official police press release.
- But if he is not able to keep the police from murdering citizens sleeping in their homes, is he at least able to get them to do their job? Hell no.
He’s been bad at supporting transit, he’s been bad at keeping property taxes in check, he’s just bad at his job. Don’t rank Frey.
DeWayne Davis spent several years as the Lead Minister at Plymouth Congregational Church, but prior to going to divinity school he worked in Washington, DC as a congressional aide. When I went to his event he talked some about this: he arrived in Washington just as the Democrats lost their congressional majority, and he thought he wouldn’t have a lot to do, but he turned out to be completely incorrect. The Republicans of that era, he noted, did still at least believe in governance, and they were able to come up with a lot of useful bills he was able to get them to cooperate on.
More recently, he co-chaired the Minneapolis Community Safety Working Group, and he talked some about that, too, how it was a large, diverse group that needed to reach consensus on the recommendations, and did, only to have the mayor ignore most of what they came up with. He clearly believes in the value of working groups like the one he served on and talked about an approach to problems that involved gathering stakeholders and getting them invested in solutions they now see as their idea. He’s extremely clear-eyed about his goals, extremely flexible in what path he’d take to get there — he clearly has plenty of ideas about good paths, but one of his biggest frustrations with Frey is his my-way-or-the-highway thinking.
The thing that particularly struck me when I met him in person: he is an extremely good listener. There are a lot of people (me included) who spend a lot of time waiting for their turn to talk; he is someone who listens, and listens with deep empathy.
I asked him if he could identify a problem in Minneapolis that he thought he could solve as mayor. He said he thought he could maybe not solve but make a significant impact on homelessness and encampments; he wants to “depopulate” the encampments rather than clearing them, by giving the service organizations enough resources to give the people in encampments better options of places to go. (Here’s his response at the DFL City Convention Q&A to a question about encampments.)
I really liked him. I think he’d be extremely effective as mayor, and would do really good stuff. He’d be my #1 pick.
Omar Fateh was elected to the State Legislature (SD 62) in 2020, defeating incumbent Jeff Hayden. Link is to my post from that year; one of the things that struck me was the comment from someone who was a delegate that year who said, “Omar Fateh must have called me personally at least a half a dozen times prior to the voting. I think I got one phone call from Jeff Hayden.” Omar Fateh’s organizing ability is honestly kind of unparalleled, at least locally, and he’s the one who probably has the best chance of defeating Frey.
He was born in the DC area to parents who had immigrated from Somalia, grew up in Virginia, and moved to Minnesota in 2015. He has worked in voter services and for MNDOT. As a legislator, his major accomplishments include the statewide minimum wage for rideshare drivers, and the North Star Promise scholarships.
I’ve seen a lot of scaremongering about him, so let me go through the stuff I’ve heard and whether I think it has any basis in reality.
- I got an e-mail from someone who had heard that Fateh was homophobic. I don’t know where this came from (assumptions about his religion and background, is my guess) but this has zero basis in fact. He is endorsed by Outfront Minnesota Action (as their second choice after DeWayne Davis) and has spoken out against homophobia and transphobia and about the responsibility of Minneapolis to protect trans people who live here.
- Various people have suggested he was involved in the Feeding Our Future fraud. He was not. Some of the fraudsters sent him campaign donations; he returned the money. In the spring of 2021, when the Minnesota Department of Education put a hold on payments to Feeding Our Future, fraud mastermind Aimee Bock called up all her political connections, and both Omar Fateh and Jacob Frey called MDE to intervene. (Genuinely they were not the only ones duped. I remember a super sympathetic TV puff piece on a local news station about one of the food sites that was later revealed to be committing fraud, about how many kids were going to go hungry if the money being held wasn’t released soon.) Intervening to remove bureaucratic obstacles is a normal constituent service and I don’t think either Omar Fateh or Jacob Frey did anything wrong there. Worth noting, Jacob Frey’s staff and appointees included three people who committed fraud, all of whom wound up taking plea deals. (None of them continued working in the roles Frey had appointed them to after being charged.)
- Back in 2022, there were allegations of vote fraud from Omar Fateh’s 2020 primary campaign. (That’s a link to my post from the time.) I took this fairly seriously at the time, but a Republican in the legislature said, “There was a lot of smoke, but no fire.” There were no further developments after 2022. Also in 2022 there was a minor scandal over some ads that Fateh paid for out of the wrong checking account, and a failure to report as a corporate donation some donated space for a campaign office. The legislative ethics committee ordered him to take remedial campaign finance training, which he did. If he’d had any ethics problems since then, I am sure I’d be hearing about them from the Frey campaign’s proxies; I’m not worried about any of this at this point.
- He won DFL endorsement, then had it stripped by the State committee. He got that endorsement fair and square; no shenanigans were involved unless by “shenanigans” you mean “he out-organized Frey by a country mile.” (The endorsement was stripped on the grounds that DeWayne Davis was incorrectly dropped after the first ballot. Which was the result of human error, and which delegates knew about at the time; the convention voted to move forward with a Omar Fateh vs. Jacob Frey ballot anyway. Frey’s supporters then walked out in an attempt to break quorum, which they failed to do. If you walk out to break quorum and fail to do it, you’ve just conceded the field to your opponent and should take the L, at that point.)
- Part of why there’s so much negative stuff swirling out there is that the Frey campaign thinks he’s the biggest threat and has deliberately tried to gin up negative coverage. You can see an example of that here (headline: “Omar Fateh’s mayoral campaign probably broke state law, judge says.” What they’re actually talking about: Fateh’s campaign may have used some of their “DFL endorsed” lit in the days after the DFL endorsement got pulled, and he did not immediately update his website. (I cannot even begin to tell you how many times I’ve seen centrist candidates not pull down their DFL Senior Caucus endorsement after the DFL as a whole endorsed someone else. Or how many times I’ve seen people leave “DFL Endorsed” on their website from the previous cycle when they didn’t get endorsed in the new race. Never seen Fox 9 report on it before, though!)
He is the left-most of the serious candidates and his list of goals includes rent control, along with a lot of urbanist stuff like 24/7 bus lanes. If you are looking for the most left-wing candidate in the race, he’s probably already your first choice, but if you’re a centrist whose first choice is Jazz Hampton, let me make a case for Omar Fateh as your third choice over Jacob Frey.
When I met him in person (at a Jews for Fateh fundraiser) I asked him the same question I asked DeWayne: is there a problem in Minneapolis that you look at and think, I can solve this. He asked if I wanted to hear about governance solution or a policy solution, and then said he’d give me one of each. For governance, he talked about his years in the legislature working mostly within divided governance to get things done. (And I will note that when the Minneapolis City Council passed the rideshare ordinance, and Lyft and Uber announced they were going to simply pull out, it was Fateh who came up with a compromise that softened the rules in the metro but applied statewide. He’s someone who will stake out a left wing position as a starting place so that when he meets people halfway, they’re meeting somewhere in the actual middle, and not way over on the right.)
The policy thing he said he thinks he could fix is an ambitious youth agenda — job programs, arts programs, a bunch of things that will get teenagers off the streets. He talked about a summer jobs program he was involved with, how he realized that it was being “promoted” only in the sense that there were flyers on a desk at the park building, and arranged for people to go door to door with information. (That’s another thing I really like about him: his skill at organizing isn’t just for getting him elected, he uses it in other ways.) At the end of the summer he talked to some of the teenagers and asked how they spent the money, expecting to hear about new gaming systems, and instead heard from multiple kids that they gave it to their mom to buy groceries and pay rent.
In order to pass rent control, he’ll need support from the City Council. This year’s City Council was progressive enough to pass a bunch of things that Frey vetoed: however, Katie Cashman is on the record as opposed to rent control, and Aurin Chowdhury is open to it but only with an exemption for new construction. Most of the leftyist leftist things that the city centrists are pearl-clutching over Omar Fateh potentially doing are things he would have to temper significantly to get through the City Council (and others are things he would have to first get through the State Legislature, he’s not even saying “we’re going to do this!” but “we’re going to advocate that the State Legislature pass a bill to let us consider doing this at some point in the future!”)
The thing that struck me the most about Omar Fateh was his ability to bring people together to work. I mean, when people say someone is an “amazing organizer” that’s kind of what they mean, and it was cool to see it in action. I will also note that when he delivered his speech at the gathering, he explicitly asked everyone to rank Jazz and DeWayne as well. I think he would be an excellent mayor and I would rank him #2.
Jazz Hampton is a lawyer and an entrepreneur; in 2020 he created an app (TurnSignl) that lets users get an instant video-chat lawyer on their phone if they’re pulled over while driving. (You can see a recorded call demonstrating it in use here.)
I went to a Jazz meet-and-greet called “Politics at the Playground.” He noted that it’s hard for parents to participate in politics (he is himself the father of two pretty young kids) and by setting up events at parks adjacent to play areas he hoped to make it a little easier for parents to show up and learn more about his campaign. Small children who wanted to ask questions were also encouraged to do so.
The thing that struck me the most about Jazz was his positive outlook. He’s friendly in a way that says he genuinely likes people. I asked him my question about what problem he thinks he could solve, and he said “economic revitalization” and talked about improving the climate for small businesses, calling out a restaurant that had opened nearby only to almost get killed off by road construction that was supposed to take six weeks, and instead took six months. He wants to streamline regulations and inspections (I was looking through stuff about 2013 yesterday and that was a big issue in 2013 and is still an issue).
(I will note that Omar Fateh and DeWayne Davis also want to make it a better city for small businesses. In terms of problems and solutions in general the policies all three of them want have a lot in common. They all want more community mental health workers for 911 calls where they’re more appropriate than police, they all want more interventions programs to prevent crime in the first place, they all want to do something about vacant buildings owned by land speculators, etc. But as the conversation rolled along at the meet-and-greet, Jazz came back to the problems of business owners more often than the other two did.)
I think he’d be a significant improvement over Jacob Frey, and I would rank him #3.
This has been a long post, but let me sum up with another pep talk.
Jacob Frey can be beaten! Another Frey term is not inevitable. However, you (we) need to not succumb to analysis paralysis, where fail to donate to or doorknock for anyone because we are undecided between DeWayne and Omar, or between DeWayne and Jazz. We need to pick a favorite and get out there. The strength of Instant Runoff is that people who like DeWayne the most but think Omar has a better shot at winning can list them 1/2. The weakness of Instant Runoff is that it gives us the opportunity to dither over that 1/2 ranking when considering who to donate to / doorknock for. And dithering when we should be doorknocking is a free donation to Jacob Frey.
Put up a sign for your favorite. Or your top two favorites. Or make a sign with your ranking. Talk to your neighbors about how you’re voting and why you’re not ranking Frey. Volunteer — if you can’t stand doorknocking, you can go table for people at Open Streets or go chat with people who come to the next meet-and-greet or help with a fundraiser.
Jazz Hampton events
DeWayne Davis events
Omar Fateh events
(All of those links lead to Mobilize and include doorknocking, fundraisers, house parties, meet-and-greets, and opportunities like “Table for [Team] at Open Streets!”)
I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)
I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)
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elisem Sep. 17th, 2025 08:46 pm)
elisem Sep. 17th, 2025 08:46 pm) In the course of dealing with silly body stuff with which I will not bore you, my sleep cycle got turned upside down again, so I am busy with various attempts at precessing back to a more manageable situation.
Somewhere in some book or other, a character said something about the phrase for having a hangover in a certain language was "my eyes are not opposite the holes." It's not a hangover, but when my sleep schedule is deeply out of synch and I'm trying to do stuff connected to the outside world's schedule, I kind of feel like my life is not opposite the holes.
How's your life matching your hours of access lately?
Somewhere in some book or other, a character said something about the phrase for having a hangover in a certain language was "my eyes are not opposite the holes." It's not a hangover, but when my sleep schedule is deeply out of synch and I'm trying to do stuff connected to the outside world's schedule, I kind of feel like my life is not opposite the holes.
How's your life matching your hours of access lately?
So a little while back, for. my birthday I got various tasty things to nibble. One of them was salmon skin and salted egg crisps, with curry leaves in the mix, and some spice. Extremely tasty. When I got down to the bottom of the bag, there were a lot of little shards and crumbs that were particularly spicy. A mental note was. made for possible future uses.
Today was a future use. There wasn't a fresh vegetable in the house, but I wanted something with both softness and crunch, and wanted it to be in something that had umami plus. The last of the bread gave me toast. There was some braunsweiger (liver paste, Nueske's in particular) which went onto the toast, cut pretty thinly. (I am from people who like thick slices of braunsweiger on toast or bread, and normally I do too, but this was a special application, part flavor and part structural adhesive.) Then I spooned out some of the fragments from the bottom of the bag of salted egg and salmon skin crisps, laying them on top of the liver paste and pressing them in with the back of the spoon, and had it open-faced.
Big win. Big tasty win. Especially the way the curry leaves went with the braunsweiger.
Must remember this and make it again.
Part of the idea for this one was looking at the braunsweiger and wishing I could magically make a banh mi from the place in Global Market appear. So some of the taste combo came from that. Lettuce or bok choy or other green or variously colored thinly sliced vegetables, with vinegar or not, would have been great, but there was no such suppy in the house, alas. Although hey, there is a little new kraut in the back of the fridge which should get eaten up. Hmmm. Although we are out of bread now. Hmm. I wonder how it would be on top of ramen noodles. Pity that the boiled eggs are all et up.
Do you have any tasty kludged-together food that you are fond of? What gave you the idea?
(My term for kludged-together food is "cream of refrigerator soup," which explains the tag. No actual soup was generated in this particular instance.)
Today was a future use. There wasn't a fresh vegetable in the house, but I wanted something with both softness and crunch, and wanted it to be in something that had umami plus. The last of the bread gave me toast. There was some braunsweiger (liver paste, Nueske's in particular) which went onto the toast, cut pretty thinly. (I am from people who like thick slices of braunsweiger on toast or bread, and normally I do too, but this was a special application, part flavor and part structural adhesive.) Then I spooned out some of the fragments from the bottom of the bag of salted egg and salmon skin crisps, laying them on top of the liver paste and pressing them in with the back of the spoon, and had it open-faced.
Big win. Big tasty win. Especially the way the curry leaves went with the braunsweiger.
Must remember this and make it again.
Part of the idea for this one was looking at the braunsweiger and wishing I could magically make a banh mi from the place in Global Market appear. So some of the taste combo came from that. Lettuce or bok choy or other green or variously colored thinly sliced vegetables, with vinegar or not, would have been great, but there was no such suppy in the house, alas. Although hey, there is a little new kraut in the back of the fridge which should get eaten up. Hmmm. Although we are out of bread now. Hmm. I wonder how it would be on top of ramen noodles. Pity that the boiled eggs are all et up.
Do you have any tasty kludged-together food that you are fond of? What gave you the idea?
(My term for kludged-together food is "cream of refrigerator soup," which explains the tag. No actual soup was generated in this particular instance.)
Tags:
Gauss, Titan of Science by G. Waldo Dunnington, with additional material by Jeremy Gray. I mentioned in last week's post that during recent air travel I watched a movie with a dubiously historical version of Gauss and was entertained but ultimately would accept no substitutes for actual historical Gauss.
This is the biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss that I picked up off a university library shelf when I was 15, and made me go all swoony over Gauss's letter proposing to his first wife (link is to the original German manuscript). Returning to it with less swooniness and a more mature ability to evaluate historical sources, and also reading a new edition with helpful front matter, it's clear the book is not 100% "actual historical Gauss": it starts off with a version of the famous 5050 story, which is based on an anecdote that Gauss reportedly told about his childhood, but probably didn't happen exactly that way.
Indeed, as I learned from the front matter, G. Waldo Dunnington was a professional Gauss stan; one of his elementary school teachers was a great-granddaughter of Gauss, and learning that there was no Victorian Great Man biography of Gauss, he spent his entire academic career (interrupted by WWII) remedying that lack. Since I'm also a Gauss stan, I found the book generally readable if sometimes a bit repetitive, and enjoyed various fun Gauss facts. (In the department of obscure historical figures who ought to be fictionalized, there is Friedrich Ludwig Wachter, Gauss's student who studied non-Euclidean geometry and vanished without a trace at age 25.)
I'll probably do more Gauss reading (though also I now have an unproofread scan of Teresa by Edith Ayrton Zangwill so I may read that first); I've started with the letters online, but may also seek out other biographies. I continue to be fascinated by Gauss's youngest daughter, whose story would make a good historical romance; and having done some Gauss reading I'm starting to think I can actually write this fic.
This is the biography of Carl Friedrich Gauss that I picked up off a university library shelf when I was 15, and made me go all swoony over Gauss's letter proposing to his first wife (link is to the original German manuscript). Returning to it with less swooniness and a more mature ability to evaluate historical sources, and also reading a new edition with helpful front matter, it's clear the book is not 100% "actual historical Gauss": it starts off with a version of the famous 5050 story, which is based on an anecdote that Gauss reportedly told about his childhood, but probably didn't happen exactly that way.
Indeed, as I learned from the front matter, G. Waldo Dunnington was a professional Gauss stan; one of his elementary school teachers was a great-granddaughter of Gauss, and learning that there was no Victorian Great Man biography of Gauss, he spent his entire academic career (interrupted by WWII) remedying that lack. Since I'm also a Gauss stan, I found the book generally readable if sometimes a bit repetitive, and enjoyed various fun Gauss facts. (In the department of obscure historical figures who ought to be fictionalized, there is Friedrich Ludwig Wachter, Gauss's student who studied non-Euclidean geometry and vanished without a trace at age 25.)
I'll probably do more Gauss reading (though also I now have an unproofread scan of Teresa by Edith Ayrton Zangwill so I may read that first); I've started with the letters online, but may also seek out other biographies. I continue to be fascinated by Gauss's youngest daughter, whose story would make a good historical romance; and having done some Gauss reading I'm starting to think I can actually write this fic.
Tags:
(naomikritzer_feed Sep. 18th, 2025 12:06 am)
naomikritzer_feed Sep. 18th, 2025 12:06 am)There are fifteen people running for Minneapolis mayor this cycle, and that’s enough that I’m going to break up my posts into two. This post will not cover DeWayne Davis, Omar Fateh, Jazz Hampton, or Jacob Frey; you can find them in a separate post. This is basically to satisfy everyone’s curiosity about all the fringe candidates. I think you should use your three picks on some order of Davis, Fateh, and Hampton, but I am not the boss of you and if you like two of those three and hate the other I would rather see you use up your third slot on a rando than rank Frey.
The also-rans on the mayoral ballot, along with their “political party or principle” (you can write down up to three words, but if you’re too close to an actual party they may make you pick again):
Kevin Dwire (Socialist Workers Party)
Charlie McCloud (Independent)
Xavier Pauke (Protecting Tomorrow’s Dreams)
Troy A. Peterson (Momunist)
Andrea Revel (For the People)
Alejandro Richardson (Independent)
Brenda Short (DFL)
Adam Terzich (Renaissance)
Laverne Turner (Independent)
Jeffrey Alan Wagner (Why Not Wagner)
Kevin Ward (Nobody’s Party)
tl;dr: don’t vote for any of these people.
I will go through them in order. Note: many of these candidates did show up at this massive forum sponsored by the League of Women Voters, and you can watch it. FYI, you can skip forward 5 seconds at a time by hitting the right-arrow key, which is handy if there are people you’re not interested in hearing from.
Kevin Dwire (Socialist Workers Party)
Like all Socialist Workers Party candidates, Kevin Dwire doesn’t have his own website and instead links to “The Militant,” where you can go over and read their claim that the Gaza genocide is a “slander” promoted by the “liberal bourgeois media.” The Militant also has a July article about Dwire specifically. Asked about homelessness, he apparently said that “the crisis is a product of the workings of capitalism. What’s needed, he explained, is for workers and our unions to break with the Democrats and Republicans and build a party of our own capable of leading the fight to take power out of the hands of the capitalist rulers.” He attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here.
Charlie McCloud (Independent)
Charlie McCloud listed charliemccloud.com as her website, but there is no site there. There are some Charlie McClouds on Facebook and LinkedIn but none that appeared to be from Minnesota. I sincerely do not know why people pay $500 to appear on the ballot when they cannot be bothered to so much as make a Facebook page saying “haha made you look!” She did come to the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch her opening statement here. Given her strong British accent I was a little surprised to hear her say that Minneapolis has always been home and that she was born in Illinois.
Xavier Pauke (Protecting Tomorrow’s Dreams)
Xavier Pauke is a security guard. He did a Reddit AMA where among other things he makes it clear he lacks background knowledge on some fundamental city workings like the existence of the Board of Estimate and Taxation. (Lots of people don’t know what the BET does, but if you’re running for mayor, you need to know what the BET does.) Because he started with a Reddit AMA and used his existing Reddit account, people checked his post history and discovered him humblebragging about his dick size. (That’s a link to a Bluesky post with a screen shot; I think he might have belatedly removed the Reddit post.)
Like a lot of people who run for office with a vague idea that they want to make a difference but a lack of specific knowledge of what the office they’re running for actually does, what Xavier probably ought to do is look for a Citizen Board for the city that he could join and do work on.
He attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here.
Troy A. Peterson (Momunist)
Troy Peterson’s website is frankly incoherent but makes it clear he hates Affirmative Action and wants people punished for a long list of things. Some of his resentments are directed towards the GOP but based on his Twitter I would describe his political orientation as a conspiracy-minded right-winger. He attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here. He’s possibly even more unhinged in person as on his website and Twitter.
Andrea Revel (For the People)
Andrea has a campaign website where she tells you that “her extensive experience and unwavering dedication make her the ideal candidate for mayor” but offers zero information about her extensive experience. I also could not find a LinkedIn. I found her campaign Instagram, which also tells you nothing about her experience (or anything, really, the videos I watched were pretty content-free). Her Facebook page has an image of a campaign flyer saying “Serving the people and preserving our values” but she doesn’t say what her values are. I get right-wing vibes from the fact that she shared something from Alpha News on her Facebook but the main reason I don’t think anyone should vote for her is that she tells you she has “extensive experience” that she describes literally nowhere in any form.
At the LWV mayoral forum she made it clear she’s an ICE supporter, so I think my right-wing vibes here were correct. You can watch her opening statement here.
Alejandro Richardson (Independent)
I maybe found a long-abandoned LinkedIn for him but nothing else. (There are lots of Alejandro Richardsons on Facebook but they don’t seem to be local.) He did show up for the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here if you want. His primary qualification is that he’s never lived anywhere else (literally he says this).
Brenda Short (DFL)
Brenda Short is probably the closest person to a real candidate running an actual campaign in this post. Probably the best moment of her campaign came at the DFL City Convention, where during the mayoral candidate Q&A someone asked a question about the fact that the officer who shot Amir Locke got a job training other officer in use of force. You can see the question and responses starting here. The first person to answer was Jacob Frey, who gave a BS answer and got booed. Brenda spoke last and delivered a fiery response about how she’d respond if someone who’d killed one of her children was given a promotion at her job, and challenged Jacob to consider how he’d feel if it was his kid. She attended the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch her opening statement here.
Back in January, Brenda fired her campaign manager via a newspaper interview. In the interview she says (after describing his mistake) “I cried about it yesterday, got up (today) and wrote his termination letter this morning and I hadn’t had time to talk to him. I was going to talk to him later on today. So I guess he’ll read it in the newspaper.” Except she did not talk to him later that day, or the next day. He continued coming to work as normal for two weeks after she gave that interview, finally hearing about it via Taylor Dahlin, who Tweeted about the article. She then filed an administrative complaint against the DSA, Omar Fateh, and Jake Ameca Luna (the fired campaign manager) claiming that he’d been sent to sabotage her campaign; the complaint was tossed in February. In March, at some mayoral forum, she went off on Jake again and claimed that he’d tried to sabotage her.
This is, in fact, a great example of being your own worst enemy. No one is going to waste resources on sabotaging Brenda.
Anyway, she has no endorsements that I could find (a page pops up if you search but it’s got placeholder stock photos, not actual endorsements) and no events.
Adam Terzich (Renaissance)
Adam Terzich works in health care IT, has no campaign website, and did not come to the LWV forum. And yet, he spent $500 to file for the office. There are so many ways I can think of that would be more enjoyable to spend $500! For example, someone could buy a dozen copies of Ada Palmer’s book Inventing the Renaissance (which I bet Adam Terzich should read) and form a book club to read it and discuss it. You could spend the leftover money on refreshments for your discussion.
Laverne Turner (Independent)
Laverne Turner is a Republican. Last time he said that up front. He described himself as an Independent this time but he’s still using Winred to process his donations. (Winred is like if ActBlue were both Republican, and several orders of magnitude more corrupt.) Last time around he wanted rent control (unusual for a Republican.) This time around he’s pretty much exclusively a law-and-order candidate. Like his website highlights three issues, in theory, but then the only one he talks about is public safety.
He came to the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here.
Jeffrey Alan Wagner (Why Not Wagner)
Jeffrey is the guy who ran the campaign back in 2013 where he climbed out of a lake and then screamed “WAKE UP MINNEAPOLIS.” His campaign link is to a YouTube channel where you can watch his new video. Apparently his major concerns are suburbanites dropping dildos in our lakes, and weirdos hassling people at bus stops. (I am not sure if he’s one of the weirdos in question.) He did not come to the LWV mayoral forum.
Kevin Ward (Nobody’s Party)
Kevin ran four years ago and has not gotten any less incoherent since then. He’s anti-MAGA and anti-ICE; I have no idea whether he has any positions on local issues because his campaign site is his Facebook, and his posts are all really long and rambling. (I feel like this one is a good sample, although it’s actually significantly more coherent than a lot of what he posts.)
Kevin went to the LWV mayoral forum and you can watch his opening statement here. He starts speaking without a microphone but someone hands it to him a few words in.
There is not a single candidate here that makes me think, “oh, if only this person were viable!” None of these people have any chance of winning, and also, none of them bring rudimentary qualifications or knowledge or demonstrate any capacity for doing the work.
I have a new book coming out next June! This one is not YA; it’s a near-future thriller about an obstetrician who gets kidnapped by a cult because they want someone on site to deliver babies. You can pre-order it right now if you want.
I do not have a Patreon or Ko-Fi but instead encourage people who want to reward all my hard work to donate to fundraisers. This year I’m fundraising for YouthLink. YouthLink is a Minneapolis nonprofit that helps youth (ages 16-24) who are homeless or at risk of homelessness. (Here’s their website.) I have seen some of the work they do and been really impressed. (An early donor to the fundraiser added a comment: “YouthLink was incredible instrumental in my assistance of a friend to escape a bad family situation in Florida with little more than a computer and a state ID. Thanks to YouthLink and their knowledge of resources my friend was able to get a mailing address (which was essential in getting a debit card and formal identification documents), healthcare, hot meals, an internship at a local company, and even furniture for their new apartment.” — That is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about!)
I set up a fundraiser with a specific goal mainly because seeing the money raised helps motivate me. (Having external motivation helps! This is a lot of work.)
(cosmolinguist Sep. 17th, 2025 09:41 pm)
cosmolinguist Sep. 17th, 2025 09:41 pm)Welp. Remember when you told me I shouldn't need to chair a work meeting while I'm on vacation?
The good news is, I'm not going to.
The bad news is, it's because I can't. The plan was that we'd be at our Airbnb by tonight and D and I would both work from there tomorrow while V started to recover from the journey.
And we're not at the Airbnb because our ferry to the island we're actually planning to visit, where V's son lives, was canceled. So last-minute that when we got to the port we saw vehicles driving off of it that had already boarded.
We couldn't stay anywhere in the small town where the ferry port is. It has hotels and B&Bs but not enough for an extra ferryload of people at short notice. Poor D had to drive forty minutes back the way we came just for us to get a room at all.
And our ferry crossing has been re-booked, for Saturday. No ferries until then. Allegedly; apparently this can change at short notice. But even if it does, it's hard to plan accommodation or anything else.
And in the meantime we're grateful just to have a roof over our heads (we're staying in the attic, so the slanted roof is only just over my head on this side of the room!). And we'll figure out what happens tomorrow.
But in the meantime, checkout is at 11, and so is this precious meeting. I already told my boss, when we didn't know where if anywhere we'd be tonight to explain, and he wrote back that he was sorry to hear this and to message him in the morning if he's needed to sit in. If! I'm not impressed that even I don't know where I'll sleep tonight and I won't have WiFi tomorrow lunchtime isn't enough to get him to understand that he has to chair this meeting.
Except for this massive snag and the possibility of V not being able to see their kid at all this year, which is a real "other than that Mrs. Lincoln how was the play," we've actually had a lovely day. We all were up and at 'em in good time to leave the nice place in Stirling where we broke the journey last night. We had time to visit the Highland Folk Museum on the way, which D picked up a brochure about when he was in a long queue to buy sandwiches for lunch at the café with the highland coo (Scottish for "cow") statue everyone gets their photo taken next to, including me now, and we were delighted at the serendipity. It was lovely to see an example of the blackhouses that I'd heard V talk about, and a loom shed for weaving the famous Harris tweed.
I am with my two humans and we are going to wait for more decision-making information and capacity after a night's sleep and maybe some updates from the much-cursed ferry operator.
Tags:
I sat down on the couch to do a little carving on the Skellefteåyxa mould while talking with Keldor durring his drive to work, and couldn't find a good focal distance through the magnifying lamp. Then I remembered that it works better with my computer glasses than my normal (progressive) lenses, and pushed the lamp up out of the way, so I could go get them and realised that Skaði had come to sit on the arm of the couch next to me. In such bright light the brown of her undercoat really shows!
Since I worked from home, I managed to wash the bedsheets, so sleeping tonight will be wonderful.
The vacuum cleaner I ordered arrived today. A Dyson V16 Piston Animal, which comes with a way to wall-mount it. Problem: no walls with enough space! I did several laps around the house, holding the vaccum, looking for a suitable location. It needed to be convenient to grab the vacuum when needed, but not in the way, with electricity near enough so that the battery will be charged.
Several more laps around the house later, I was hit with an inspiration that not only solved the where to put the vacuum problem, but also several other problems that have been bothering me at a low-level backgroundsort of way. Implementing the plan took several hours:
First I emptied my textbooks off of the narrow bookshelf that has lived in the entry area between the bedroom and the office/craft room. Those books are now in boxes, waiting in the van for a chance to take them to my office, where they will add some colour to the grey bookshelves there, and look nicer behind me in zoom calls than do empty shelves.
Then I took everything off the wall on the other side of the entry: mirror, sword, shields, axe, hat rack made of moose antlers. Everything. Well, save the halberd. That was close enough to the kitchen that it didn't need to move.
Then I slid the empty book shelf to the side, and moved the painted armour box to where it had sat, put the mirror on the wall between the doors above the box, the hat rack above that. It all looks much better stacked like that than it had spread out actosd the wider wall.
Then I emptied the wide bookshelf in the office and brought it out to the entry, placing by the living room door, where the painted box used to stand, and filled it with the hardcover fiction it had been holding before it moved. I even made an improvised bookend to hold the books on top.
I haf noticed while cleaning the shef after emptying it that there are two holes on the top of the shelf on each side. I believe that model comes with an optional extra small cabint or shelf and those holes are for pegs to keep it in place. We don't have those sorts of pegs (or, perhaps just don't know where they are), but those holes are exactly the right diameter for pencils, so I looked at what we had in the way of wood scrap, and came up with a cunning plan. I took the small thin board I had used for test painting when I did the ceiling project, which looks rather like a deliberate modern art thing, with its bold gold curve and diverse silver nebula like splotches on the midnight blue background, and screwed it through an appropriately sized spacer and to attach it to a wider bit of plywood. Together that stand reasonably stable on the top edge of the shelf, surrounding two pencils sticking up out of the holes to help keep them in place. I wouldn't trust those pencils not to break in an earthquake, but for normal use it should be fine.
Especially as the first two books adjacent to that improvised bookend wall are a couple of thick books (the Complete Chaucher and a Swedish Literature collection) that stand quitestablee on their own. Then filled the shelf with other books (we already had a metal bookend that clamps to the shelf for the other side.)
Once that bookhelf was full, I slid the chest of drawers that had been in the office corner beyond the wide bookshelf (but shallower than the narrow shelves) out enough to put the narrow book shelf between it and the corner. This solved the problem of easy access to those drawers.
Then I filled the narrow shelf with the last few books that don't fit on the wide shelves that are now in the entryway, and then put all the bags and baskets full of projects in progress and UFOs that have been over piled on top of the tredel sewing machine, the other chest of drawers, and even the floor. Thus solving another problem, the office looks much better, and it might be easierto find stuff!
Then I finally hung the vacuum on the wall next to the bookshelf and hung the round shield between the vacuum and the halberd and returned the awasto its hooks above the shield, feeling lucky that I didn't need to move them to balance the space.
Then I hung the sword over on the wall between the bedroom and bathroom, next to the axe that was already there, and put the other shield below them.
With that the project was done, I asked google for electricians in Lövånger, and the top hit was a national company that had an easy to use web form. I filled it in, explaining, in Swedish, that I need an outlet on the wall near the vacuum, and that there is already one on the other side of the wall. I attached a photo of each side of the wall, and hit send.
A very short time later (at 20:57!) my phone rang. It was someone from that company, calling from Stockholm, with an estimate on the cost and, when I said it was ok, gave me a promise to send someone next Thursday (I will be away for work Monday to Wednesday) to do the job.
I truly didn't expect anyone to see my initial message until tomorrow so I am delighted it went so quick.
Tags:
What I read
A little while ago Kobo had an edition of CS Lewis's 'Space Trilogy' on promotion, so I thought, aeons since I read that, why not? It turned out to have been not terribly well formatted for e-reader but I have encountered worse, it was bearable. Out of the Silent Planet, well, we do not go to CLS for cosmological realism, do we? But why aliens still so binary, hmmm? (okay, I think there is probably some theological point going on there, mmmhmm?) (though in That Hideous Strength there is a mention of 7 genders, okay Jack, could you expand that thought a little?) I remembered Perelandra as dull, at least for my taste - travelogue plus endless theological wafflery - and it pretty much matched the remembrance. However, while one still sees the problematic in That Hideous Strength (no, really, Jack, cheroot-chomping lesbian sadist? your id is very strange) he does do awfully well the horrible machinations of the nasty MEN in their masculine institutions, and boy, NICE is striking an unexpected resonance with its techbros and their transhuman agenda. Also - quite aside from BEARS!!! - actual female bonding.
Possibly it wasn't such a great idea to go on to Andrew Hickey, The Basilisk Murders (Sarah Turner Mysteries #1) (2017), set at a tech conference, which I think I saw someone recommend somewhere. Not sure it entirely works as a mystery (and I felt some aspects of the conference were a little implausible) - and what is this thing, that this thing is, of male authors doing the police in different voices writing first-person female narrative crime fiction? This is at least the second I have encountered within the space of a few weeks. We feel they have seen a market niche.... /cynicism
Apparently I already read this yonks ago and have a copy hanging around somewhere? I was actually looking for something else by Dame Rebecca and came across this, The Essential Rebecca West: Uncollected Prose (2010), which is more, some odd stray pieces it is nice to have (I laughed aloud at the one on Milton and Paradise Lost) but hardly essential among the rest of her oeuvre.
At the same time I picked up Carl Rollyson, Rebecca West and the God That Failed: Essays (2005), which apparently I have also read before. It's offcuts of stuff that didn't make it into his biography, mostly talks/articles on various aspects that he couldn't go into in as much detail as he would have liked.
On the go
Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier (1918), on account of we watched a DVD of the movie recently. Yes, I have a copy of the book but have no idea where it is. I was also looking for Harriet Hume, ditto.
Up next
Not sure.
I am happy to see that "should receive" the covid vaccine or booster includes infants; children and adolescents who haven't already been vaccinated; anyone with a medical condition that puts them at higher risk of severe covid; and all household contacts of anyone at higher risk.
Everyone aged 65 or older should receive two doses, six months apart.
All healthcare workers "should" receive the vaccine, as should anyone who is pregnant, contemplating pregnancy, or has recently been pregnant, and a few other groups.
Everyone else "may receive" it.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/massachusetts-2025-2026-respiratory-illness-season-covid-19-vaccine-recommendations/download
What I saw is Massachusetts-specific, but it says it is aligned with the recommendations of the new Northeast Public Health Collaborative, which includes New England except for New Hampshire, plus New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
Everyone aged 65 or older should receive two doses, six months apart.
All healthcare workers "should" receive the vaccine, as should anyone who is pregnant, contemplating pregnancy, or has recently been pregnant, and a few other groups.
Everyone else "may receive" it.
https://www.mass.gov/doc/massachusetts-2025-2026-respiratory-illness-season-covid-19-vaccine-recommendations/download
What I saw is Massachusetts-specific, but it says it is aligned with the recommendations of the new Northeast Public Health Collaborative, which includes New England except for New Hampshire, plus New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware.
This morning the tanks were half full, which is respectable for this time of year. However, the water at the house was still trickling out of the faucet indicating there was virtually no pressure. I opened the faucet at the base of Tank Hill, which is about 40 vertical feet below the tanks. The water ran out with a distinct lack of enthusiasm. Water flow was even more anemic at the faucet on the hillside. The faucet at the garden, which is lower than the one at the base of Tank Hill, ran reasonably freely, but not the way it should have. I got out the new hatchet and hammered open the valve for the 2 inch Fire Hose pipe. A LOT of water poured out. The flow from the garden faucet increased. After a minute or so I hammered closed the 2 inch valve, closed all the faucets, got a bale of hay from the Iris Barn and came back to the house. Low and behold water comes flowing easily out of the faucets. I'm still not entirely happy with the pressure, but further "blowing out" of the water pipes can wait till the tanks are full and the garden is watered. For now I can at least take a shower! My guess is that dirt has accumulated in the bottom of tank 1 and partially blocked the flow of water down the hill. This is a real problem because there is no effective AND safe way to clean the tanks. It is possible to climb into the tanks and bucket out dirt (dirty water) but doing that requires a supplied air source. No one installed a "cleanout" valve for the tanks so there isn't any way to drain them and clean them. On top of all of that there is no way to isolate one tank from the others so cleaning can be done without draining everything. If I drain everything there will be no water for a couple of days while the tanks refill. So it has been about 20 years since the tanks were cleaned last. Plenty of dirt and tiny stones get washed down from the springs despite my best efforts. As soon as I've finished paying for the new stove I'll hire someone to help re-plumb the tanks and fix this issue. Maybe next spring when the springs are running fast and the tanks aren't doubling as a source for water in case of a fire.
(landingtree Sep. 18th, 2025 05:40 am)
landingtree Sep. 18th, 2025 05:40 am)From Hell, by Alan Moore.
I wonder what this would’ve been like in black and white. This is a book about Jack the Ripper’s killings, and it was interesting to see when this edition’s colourist chose to use black instead of red for blood. I read it because a media podcast I listen to, Shelved by Genre, is doing a run of Alan Moore. I am more interested in the podcast than I was in this book. I want them to tell me about Jack the Ripper scholarship, and British comics takes on Jack the Ripper (supernatural elements thereof) and this book in its context. I think the book is good and I didn’t need to read it, I got to the end and went ‘okay, I could’ve stopped in the middle, but I guess I needed to read to the end to discover that.’
(Also, why would you call this book The Master Edition? Maybe I am too attuned by Le Guin’s thoughts about the word Mastery. Maybe they thought it through, maybe they thought it was apt for this book full of the deliberate symbolic weight of men doing violence against women and Man doing violence against Woman.)
Tripoint, by C J Cherryh.
Which is also among the kinds of violence this book involves. The first of them, anyway: actually the second not so much. I do not recommend this as a place to start Cherryh because the emotional dynamics of the start of it made me put it down and go read various other things I’ve just posted about. It makes me think that I found Merchanter’s Luck so palatable in contrast to other Cherryh because its main characters start out in positions of deep control and competence. Do they stay there? Are the places they start in healthy ones? Not necessarily! But there is a comfort to it. Which this book does not have at all, the protagonist has very little to hold onto in life except a bad relationship with his mother. Also, Cherryh does not miss the opportunity to invent a kind of hyperspace travel that involves physical discomfort and sedative-hazed dreams about incest that might drive you insane. There’s one Diana Wynne Jones story in which a writer uses the sensory experience of being tiredly slumped over a keyboard drinking coffee and trying to finish a draft novel to write umpteen heroic captains at the controls of spaceships battling through physical discomfort, and I want to reread it to see if I think Jones read Cherryh directly before writing it.
Anyway! Do the emotional dynamics of this book get less fucked-up by the end? …arguably they get more so, but in a more bearable-to-me-personally way.
I wonder what this would’ve been like in black and white. This is a book about Jack the Ripper’s killings, and it was interesting to see when this edition’s colourist chose to use black instead of red for blood. I read it because a media podcast I listen to, Shelved by Genre, is doing a run of Alan Moore. I am more interested in the podcast than I was in this book. I want them to tell me about Jack the Ripper scholarship, and British comics takes on Jack the Ripper (supernatural elements thereof) and this book in its context. I think the book is good and I didn’t need to read it, I got to the end and went ‘okay, I could’ve stopped in the middle, but I guess I needed to read to the end to discover that.’
(Also, why would you call this book The Master Edition? Maybe I am too attuned by Le Guin’s thoughts about the word Mastery. Maybe they thought it through, maybe they thought it was apt for this book full of the deliberate symbolic weight of men doing violence against women and Man doing violence against Woman.)
Tripoint, by C J Cherryh.
Which is also among the kinds of violence this book involves. The first of them, anyway: actually the second not so much. I do not recommend this as a place to start Cherryh because the emotional dynamics of the start of it made me put it down and go read various other things I’ve just posted about. It makes me think that I found Merchanter’s Luck so palatable in contrast to other Cherryh because its main characters start out in positions of deep control and competence. Do they stay there? Are the places they start in healthy ones? Not necessarily! But there is a comfort to it. Which this book does not have at all, the protagonist has very little to hold onto in life except a bad relationship with his mother. Also, Cherryh does not miss the opportunity to invent a kind of hyperspace travel that involves physical discomfort and sedative-hazed dreams about incest that might drive you insane. There’s one Diana Wynne Jones story in which a writer uses the sensory experience of being tiredly slumped over a keyboard drinking coffee and trying to finish a draft novel to write umpteen heroic captains at the controls of spaceships battling through physical discomfort, and I want to reread it to see if I think Jones read Cherryh directly before writing it.
Anyway! Do the emotional dynamics of this book get less fucked-up by the end? …arguably they get more so, but in a more bearable-to-me-personally way.
I hadn't seen any specific discussion of the Cabinet reshuffle two weeks ago in the UK, so I looked up the highlights. It was unusually incestuous. Three of the principal cabinet ministers simply exchanged places. The former foreign secretary is now the justice secretary. The former justice secretary is now the home secretary. And the former home secretary is now the foreign secretary.
And this after only 14 months in office! What will they do next? Oh, yeah, host Trump.
And this after only 14 months in office! What will they do next? Oh, yeah, host Trump.
I started with rereading A Song for Arbonne by Guy Gavriel Kay. I still like it! I fell off reading Kay at a certain point and am not planning to run to keep up with the stuff he’s written in the last ten years, but I do like going back. I had entirely forgotten the plot of this one, I enjoyed being swept up in it as though for the first time. Melodrama about the hinge-points of lives and kingdoms set in slightly-fantasy alt versions of bits of history: it’s Kay’s thing, he does it well. He gets more polish in later books but has the heart of what he’s doing here.
Notes: it is so easy to knock people unconscious with a sharp blow to the head and this never causes problems. Every named female character wants to sleep with the protagonist if the book considers them figures of desire (the two exceptions are, respectively, old and disabled.) The words ‘nuance,’ ‘implications,’ and ‘complexities,’ are used as often as they possibly can be, and it is funny to me that Kay loves the sense of subtlety so much he always waves at it with great sweeping gestures. This is a book that underlines everything in gold ink and then repeats it to be sure you noticed. That is a thing I enjoy about it, though I do have a dosage limit, I went in to reread one of the Sarantine books and two Kays in one month is too much for me. I finished it, but haven’t gone on to read the second half of the story.
But it does mean I have read two Byzantine books this month: I am awake at five am because of high billowing winds outside, so I just finally finished M.T. Anderson’s Nicked, a book about a Byzantine saint heist conducted by a monk who can’t tell a lie to save his life and a con artist who can never be pinned down on a truth. (They fuck.) I did not find this propulsive exactly, I put it down for a week here and a fortnight there even though it’s very short. But I do like it a great deal. It is funny, neat, precise in its blending of formal and informal language, vividly descriptive in few words, going off into flights of abstraction and poetry. I see why George Saunders is blurbing it. The opening invocation includes the line ‘Though I am an unbeliever, I pray for faith,’ and faith and holiness are things this book about stealing a saint’s bones for reasons mainly of tourism cares about and respects. Also, travellers’ tales from the period are true and there is actually a nation of people with the heads of dogs, we meet one in the first paragraph.
I am now listening to an audiobook of Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey, which I’ve not read before. One can guess from Arbonne that Guy Gavriel Kay is interested in bdsm because there’s a lot of power-play and erotic masked balls and people getting tied to beds by wicked seductress Italians. One can guess that Carey is into bdsm because the protagonist is the chosen one of the bdsm angel and receives training at the bdsm guild. This one is also set in fantasy-France (so I’ve gone France, Byzantium, France, Byzantium): there is scheming, mentorship, foreshadowed grief, sex, and people who despite living in a society consisting solely of incredibly beautiful people are even more beautiful than that. I am having a good time.
Notes: it is so easy to knock people unconscious with a sharp blow to the head and this never causes problems. Every named female character wants to sleep with the protagonist if the book considers them figures of desire (the two exceptions are, respectively, old and disabled.) The words ‘nuance,’ ‘implications,’ and ‘complexities,’ are used as often as they possibly can be, and it is funny to me that Kay loves the sense of subtlety so much he always waves at it with great sweeping gestures. This is a book that underlines everything in gold ink and then repeats it to be sure you noticed. That is a thing I enjoy about it, though I do have a dosage limit, I went in to reread one of the Sarantine books and two Kays in one month is too much for me. I finished it, but haven’t gone on to read the second half of the story.
But it does mean I have read two Byzantine books this month: I am awake at five am because of high billowing winds outside, so I just finally finished M.T. Anderson’s Nicked, a book about a Byzantine saint heist conducted by a monk who can’t tell a lie to save his life and a con artist who can never be pinned down on a truth. (They fuck.) I did not find this propulsive exactly, I put it down for a week here and a fortnight there even though it’s very short. But I do like it a great deal. It is funny, neat, precise in its blending of formal and informal language, vividly descriptive in few words, going off into flights of abstraction and poetry. I see why George Saunders is blurbing it. The opening invocation includes the line ‘Though I am an unbeliever, I pray for faith,’ and faith and holiness are things this book about stealing a saint’s bones for reasons mainly of tourism cares about and respects. Also, travellers’ tales from the period are true and there is actually a nation of people with the heads of dogs, we meet one in the first paragraph.
I am now listening to an audiobook of Kushiel’s Dart, by Jacqueline Carey, which I’ve not read before. One can guess from Arbonne that Guy Gavriel Kay is interested in bdsm because there’s a lot of power-play and erotic masked balls and people getting tied to beds by wicked seductress Italians. One can guess that Carey is into bdsm because the protagonist is the chosen one of the bdsm angel and receives training at the bdsm guild. This one is also set in fantasy-France (so I’ve gone France, Byzantium, France, Byzantium): there is scheming, mentorship, foreshadowed grief, sex, and people who despite living in a society consisting solely of incredibly beautiful people are even more beautiful than that. I am having a good time.
Ooh, I thought, that's a really cool t-shirt! And the price is only £24, that's actually pretty reasonable!
Except no, it's £24 plus £6 tax plus £7 shipping *that takes up to 6 weeks*.
And this for an item that's print on demand. Which means, theoretically, they could print it in the UK in the first place and not have to presumably ship it to me by alpaca from Kazakhstan!
Shame, really, it's a nice t-shirt. But not £37 nice.
Except no, it's £24 plus £6 tax plus £7 shipping *that takes up to 6 weeks*.
And this for an item that's print on demand. Which means, theoretically, they could print it in the UK in the first place and not have to presumably ship it to me by alpaca from Kazakhstan!
Shame, really, it's a nice t-shirt. But not £37 nice.
.