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What's weirder is that muons turned out to be INCREDIBLY cute.

Keycloak 26.1.2 released

To download the release go to Keycloak downloads.

Upgrading

Before upgrading refer to the migration guide for a complete list of changes.

All resolved issues

Deprecated features

Enhancements

Bugs

Incoming Asteroid

The bottom ones are also potentially bad news for any other planets in our solar system that have been counting on Earth having a stable orbit.

IronMan

By [email protected] (RevK)

The IronMan project has been challenging...

Basically, we know someone that does IronMan for events and parties, along with others that do Spiderman, and so on.

But the suit he has is somewhat failing - the original electronics failed a long time ago, and the reworks (no idea who did) also failed.

So this is at least third, or more, refit for this, but we have taken it on with some serious dedication I think.

The helmet

The helmet has a servo, to lift the visor, and LEDs for the eyes. We actually replaced the electronics on this twice - initially a simple LED controller, and then a more custom board.

The eyes are now WS2812 LED strips. so way more flexible, even if normally just static cyan.

One of the challenges was the current spikes from the servo - it killed LEDs. Big capacitors is the main fix for this.

The suit

The suit was also a challenge, and really, the stuff in there was a mess. Again, two stages, firstly a simple LED controller for the "arc reactor", but now gutting it all and replacing with custom controller handling multiple LED strips, and speakers.

The previous electronics had several primary cells, a rechargeable battery, and speakers and LEDs. But the speakers never worked properly apparently.

The new build takes a lot less space, is rechargeable, and lasts all day.

The gloves

These were especially challenging. The helmet and suit could accommodate a decent USB battery pack. But the glove are too small, so needed a design that could handle a small LiPo, and charging.

The previous electronics were a simple LED torch fitting and 9V primary cell. This was bulky, and just "lit up".

The new design is a rechargeable LiPo, and 88 RGB LED rings with diffuser, button, and repulsor effect.

Overall

The end result is nothing short of as complete revamp.

Less space taken in helmet, gloves, and suit. Rechargeable batteries in all, all lasting 8 hours. BLE linking so sound effects link to repulsor in gloves and helmet sounds.

At this stage there is concern the LEDs for the arc reactor and gloves may be too bright, and the speakers too loud, both of which can easily be adjusted.

Speakers

One of my concerns was the speakers, and I found these were the best. I tried 5 different types.

From PiHut, and really good.

They are glued inside the suit but sound awesome.

My son should have a video on it all soon.

Weekly Update 438

By Troy Hunt

Presently sponsored by: 1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.

I think what's really scratching an itch for me with the home theatre thing is that it's this whole geeky world of stuff that I always knew was out there, but I'd just never really understood. For example, I mentioned waveforming in the video,

Tindie so far

By [email protected] (RevK)

Well, the Tindie store is set up, and I am adding stuff.

https://www.tindie.com/stores/revk/

The basics

It is simple to use and way way way less hassle the Amazon. Amazon are a pain to make any change to any listing, often even refusing to do so for no good reason. Tindie, is simple, just works, changes are easy and happen immediately.

I am shipping, which is less ideal, but RM click'n'drop works well. I may be able to do more with APIs to tie things up more seamlessly in due course. As this scales up this will no doubt transfer to the sales team in the office.

Options

One nice thing is I can add sales options - which works because I am shipping to order. I did this on the coaster. Which diffuser to use, and if shipped assembled or as a kit. This would not work with Amazon fulfilment, obviously.

The costs

Works out around 10% in payment and Tindie fees. Pretty typical.

Getting paid

Payment via PayPal was a concern, especially as it looked a lot like I could not get PayPal to send me money without open banking crap (giving them access to my account!). However, we sorted the business PayPal account, and that allowed simple fast payment to the business bank account and did not appear to involve any fees, and seemed sensible exchange rate (Tindie is all in dollars). Looks like it is monthly, which is simple enough.

Looks like I have to go in to PayPal and accept the payment and then tell PayPal to send the money, which is a nuisance but not to much so on a monthly basis.

Paperwork

We need to work out VAT and paperwork, but simple enough to convert all to GBP on the monthly payment and generate the right VAT invoice matching the money that arrives - should keep HMRC happy. Again, this is where I may API it all and make it simple and seamless.

API

This is probably next step - make more streamlined for orders and paperwork. I'll write that up in due course I expect.

Suspension Bridge

As a first step, they can put in a secondary deck, to help drivers try it out and find out how fun the jumps are. After a while no one will use the old flat deck and they can remove it.

Change to Portability Charges

By Peter Farmer

Over the years, Simwood has resisted making blanket CPI+x% price rises, instead focussing on ensuring that, where appropriate, our pricing reflects the underlying cost drivers from time to time. Number Portability is one area where we have recently introduced increasing…

The post Change to Portability Charges appeared first on Simwood.

Don't use UPS

By [email protected] (RevK)

I know I said before, but this is an update on the saga.

Executive summary

Postponed VAT Accounting (PVA)

I've explained PVA, but basically a VAT registered business getting overseas deliveries should get them without paying a fee if the sender includes the VAT/EORI when sending, that is HMRC advice to couriers. It gets declared on import and we (recipient) get paperwork from HMRC to ensure we account for it and the reclaimed VAT on next VAT return. Simple, easy, no admin fees, no delays.

What did they do wrong?

I did try a parcel via UPS and it all worked well, but the good value of the parcel was $2, one of JLCs super discounted bare PCBs. That arrived, no fees, no invoices. Surprising. That lulled me in to a false sense of security and 4 more orders were shipped using UPS. Big mistake.

First arrived and driver wants a fee paid, I said no. I actually include the VAT on the address as an address line as well as on the waybill so I pointed to the VAT number on the label and explained it should be PVA. He had no idea, and literally threw the parcel back in the van.

Of the 4 parcelled, one other was tried and my wife rejected it. On that occasion the driver was very used to such things saying loads of people reject parcels with fees - usually because they paid fees to sender to handle and UPS cocked up (slightly different to out case). This really says something of UPS's competence.

The tracking showed each of the 4 parcels having multiple refused deliveries, this was clearly a lie. Not their first.

They took weeks to send 3 of the parcels back to sender. I guess they can take as long as they like. But when only 3 arrived we asked questions. They told the sender the parcel was disposed of. This was a lie, what a surprise.

They told me it was abandoned. It took weeks to get the explanation that "the sender is not serviced by UPS". This is a lie, wow.

They sent an invoice for the abandoned parcel (VAT and disbursement fee), which is not valid, obviously. I checked the HMRC import records and they only recorded (and hence paid HMRC) for the other 3 parcels. They were charging me for VAT they apparently have not paid HMRC. That sounds really fraudulent to me.

They sent invoices for the other three, even though returned to sender.

They kept quoting their terms and conditions that they can basically lose or destroy a parcel and not be liable to anyone. Wow! I have repeatedly had to explain that I am not subject to their terms and conditions. I have not agreed them. I am not a customer. I have no contract with them.

I have explained that if they have appropriated my parcel, that is Theft, a criminal matter. If they have lied ("sender is not served by UPS") to do that, then that is Fraud, a criminal matter. I was getting nowhere.

Surprise!

To my utter shock, they sent back the missing parcel to China. It arrived there after many weeks. The UK UPS contact seems unaware of this?!

But then, I get an invoice for late payment penalties - even though I have no contract with them that could lead to such penalties. Even statutory late payments penalties are a statutory contract term and don't apply if no contract. This is verging on harassment.

TODO

I may update this.

Rotary Tool

It was great until my thumb slipped and I accidentally launched my telescope into the air at Mach 8.

Keycloak 26.1.1 released

To download the release go to Keycloak downloads.

Highlights

New option in X.509 authenticator to abort authentication if CRL is outdated

The X.509 authenticator has a new option x509-cert-auth-crl-abort-if-non-updated (CRL abort if non updated in the Admin Console) to abort the login if a CRL is configured to validate the certificate and the CRL is not updated in the time specified in the next update field. The new option defaults to true in the Admin Console. For more details about the CRL next update field, see RFC5280, Section-5.1.2.5.

The value false is maintained for compatibility with the previous behavior. Note that existing configurations will not have the new option and will act as if this option was set to false, but the Admin Console will add the default value true on edit.

New option in Send Reset Email to force a login after reset credentials

The reset-credential-email (Send Reset Email) is the authenticator used in the reset credentials flow (forgot password feature) for sending the email to the user with the reset credentials token link. This authenticator now has a new option force-login (Force login after reset). When this option is set to true, the authenticator terminates the session and forces a new login.

For more details about this new option, see Enable forgot password.

Upgrading

Before upgrading refer to the migration guide for a complete list of changes.

All resolved issues

Enhancements

Bugs

Stronger Than Ever: How We Turned a DDoS Attack Into a Lesson in Resilience

By Scott Helme

Operating an online service like Report URI, it comes with the territory. The ever present threat of attack is something we are fully aware of, and prepare for as best we can. Being the regular subject of attacks, mostly handled by our robust systems and automated defences, these attacks mostly

Weekly Update 437

By Troy Hunt

Presently sponsored by: 1Password Extended Access Management: Secure every sign-in for every app on every device.

It's IoT time! We're embarking on a very major home project (more detail of which is in the video), and some pretty big decisions need to be made about a very simple device: the light switch. I love having just about every light in our connected.

Bluetooth (BLE)

By [email protected] (RevK)

I have been working on some more educational R&D for the last week or so - exploring the possibilities with Bluetooth, specifically BLE.

The application involves four battery operated devices that need to link together.

  1. A helmet, with a servo to power a visor up and down, and LEDs for the eyes.
  2. A left glove with a disc of LEDs in the palm (I believe called a "repulser").
  3. A right glove, the same.
  4. A suit with speakers and a large ring of bright LEDs (I believe called an "arc reactor").

Why linked together?

Each works independently, and each has a button to trigger working. The repulser will quickly fade up to a bright light then go off. The helmet goes up or down.

The ideas is that when you activate the repulser, a synchronised sound effect of an increasing sound and a whoosh and crash happens at the same time. Similarly when the visor closes there is a synchronised clunk as it finished closing. A few other synchronised novelty effects have been added as well.

How to link them together?

The obvious, and low power, way to link would be cables, plugs and sockets. But this would be hugely inconvenient for the weather.

So - Bluetooth, specifically low energy BLE.

Daunting task

This was indeed a daunting task. I have done a little with BLE, just passively scanning advertisements to pick up and decode advertisements from temperature sensors. This would need a lot more.

But I went for it, and, well, it took a day!

Basic example code

I used the basic security gatt example - and to my amazement it worked. Minor bug and slight tweak, but very quickly I had a "heart rate monitor" server, and there clients connected. I then succeeded in having clients change the heart rate monitor location (text) which I used to tell the suit what sound to play.

Moving on

I tried to adjust the GATT fields, and failed. I need to read up more and understand how to do this, and add device information perhaps. Then consider making custom service codes - after all, calling an arc reactor a "heart monitor" is perhaps a stretch.

I need to properly understand the example code in the process, and prune it down.

I've also applied for a Bluetooth manufacturer code.

Carrier Services rate update (2025-02-05)

By Simon Woodhead

We will be updating our Managed A-Z Termination rates and codes on February 5th 2025. As usual, these changes are colour coded in our full rate files available through the portal as below. Where your account has custom rates, these are now…

The post Carrier Services rate update (2025-02-05) appeared first on Simwood.

Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead

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Magnetic field sorting of superconducting graphite particles with Tc>400K

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Better text rendering in Chromium-based browsers on Windows

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U.K. demand for a back door to Apple data threatens Americans, lawmakers say

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Are PhDs losing lustre? Why fewer students are enrolling in doctoral degrees

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Federal workers say they increasingly distrust platforms like Facebook

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Cheap blood test detects pancreatic cancer before it spreads

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Self hosted FLOSS fitness/workout tracker

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Why young parents should focus on building trust with their kids

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Tiny JITs for a Faster FFI

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The average CPU performance of PCs and notebooks fell for the first time

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Imapsync

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5G networks meet consumer needs as mobile data growth slows

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Record-breaking neutrino is most energetic ever detected

Comments

How Nissan and Honda's $60B merger talks collapsed

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Andrew Malkinson 'at risk of losing housing' over compensation

Andrew Malkinson's lawyer says an initial compensation payment could exempt him from social housing.

Buckingham Palace crash man told by judge he was 'lucky he wasn't shot'

Johnny Scott drove his VW Polo into the palace's South Centre Gate last March.

Questions raised over Rachel Reeves's CV and expenses

The BBC has established the Chancellor left the financial institution nine months earlier than she states in her LinkedIn profile.

Europe caught out by Trump's Russia move

After a frenetic 24 hours of US declarations, there is a tangible sense that Europe's leaders have been surprised.

'We owe PC killed in crash a debt of gratitude'

Hundreds of police officers line the route to York Minster for PC Rosie Prior's funeral.

NHS 'recovery plan' fails to deliver new dentists or more appointments

NHS leaders say the contract for dentists to carry out NHS work needs redrawing.

WordPress war latest: Ploy to trademark Hosted WordPress, Managed WordPress derailed

By Thomas Claburn

Objection from open source community heralded as 'great victory for the ecosystem'

The WordPress Foundation's effort to trademark the terms HOSTED WORDPRESS and MANAGED WORDPRESS has been thwarted, for now, following a petition from a dissenting member of the open source WordPress community.…

What happens now after Slot's red card?

What happens now after Arne Slot's red card at Everton?

Man shot by police was lawfully killed, inquest finds

A jury has reached a conclusion following a three-week inquest into Marius Ciolac's death.

SAP snared in revenue trap unless it extends legacy ERP support

By Lindsay Clark

User can still push for perpetual licenses despite vendor's craving for subscription deals

In the sizeable global ERP market, SAP's biggest threat is not some other software giant like Oracle. It is its own legacy software supported by other vendors.…

After Copilot trial, government staff rated Microsoft's AI less useful than expected

By Simon Sharwood

Not all bad news for Redmond as Australian agency also found strong ROI and some unexpected upsides

Australia’s Department of the Treasury has found that Microsoft’s Copilot can easily deliver return on investment, but staff exposed to the AI assistant came away from the experience less confident it will help them at work.…

Google Maps blocks Gulf of America reviews after rename criticism

It controversially updated the Gulf's name for US users after President Trump ordered it to be changed.

Injuries affected England's training time - McCullum

England "backed guys off a little" because of injuries during their tour of India, says coach Brendon McCullum amid criticism of the team's preparation.

Hamas says it will continue releasing Israeli hostages under Gaza deal

The statement comes as mediators Egypt and Qatar work hard to salvage the ceasefire with Israel.

English football to use semi-automated offsides for first time

Semi-automated offside technology will be used in English domestic football for the first time during the fifth round of the FA Cup.

BrewDog's James Watt launches 'Shadow Doge' to take on UK Government

By /u/Jaraxo

BrewDog's James Watt launches 'Shadow Doge' to take on UK Government submitted by /u/Jaraxo to r/Scotland
[link] [comments]

We need theories for ‘toilet bin guy’ at work

By /u/pegman89

We have break in our mess room which is on route to the toilet. There’s a chap who on occasion passes through collecting the mess room bin which is basically an open plastic crate with a bin liner. He collects the bin and goes into the toilet, he then returns the bin still empty once he’s finished and doesn’t mention it.

Our 2 theories are, he does the knee lift poop. Though we’re not sure about this as he doesn’t do this every time. Clearly goes in long enough for poops with and without the bin

The second theory is that he uses it to get access to the ceiling panels. But why would he take a plastic crate/bin when he could take a chair, he’s not hiding the fact he does this.

We’re a bit baffled. If you’re reading the Toilet Bin Guy. We’re on break now. Explain yourself

submitted by /u/pegman89 to r/CasualUK
[link] [comments]

My 17-year-old son insulted and slapped me (39F)

By /u/scaredandshocked

Gonna keep it short. My husband and I divorced a year ago due to his cheating, this is an important detail.

Yesterday evening I decide I want to do this recipe I saw and saved online on a whim, as I was sure both my son and I will like it a lot. There’s a store nearby our house and I start writing down the ingredients as I’ll send my son to get them; not much help to ask for. So I go to his room with the list to ask him. He’s on his PC. When I ask him, he randomly starts an angry rant: you couldn’t keep dad happy as to not have to cheat, now you can’t even go to the store to get some groceries by yourself, so useless. Obviously I’m like what did you just say? Then he doubles down. “That’s the truth. You couldn’t be a good wife to dad so he had to go and fuck other women. What you don’t get at home you seek somewhere else, it’s not rocket science. And acting all ohhh I can’t forgive him, when who knows how many men you also fucked and fuck now secretly - whore, but not with who matters apparently”.

I get close to him as at this point I’m shocked, angry and a bit scared. He gets up from his chair, looks at me and slaps me across my face hard. Then says save it, I don’t want to hear it. I just froze. Unless it actually happens you think you’ll do something, hit back, scream, cry, etc. but I just froze. I also became afraid. He’s only 17 but 186 cm tall vs me me 165. He’s my child but he’s also a man who works out often, plays sports; is strong. If he were to beat me since he’s angry, he’d hurt me a lot. That’s all I’m thinking. So I get up and leave. And starts bawling.

I know I should contact someone, police, family members, friends. But he’s still my kid, I love him and the thought of him getting in trouble breaks my heart. I’m honestly still frozen… mentally. I don’t know how to move on.

submitted by /u/scaredandshocked to r/TrueOffMyChest
[link] [comments]

University puts trigger warnings on 200 works of Shakespeare including 'extreme weather' and 'drunkenness'

By /u/nimobo

University puts trigger warnings on 200 works of Shakespeare including 'extreme weather' and 'drunkenness' submitted by /u/nimobo to r/unitedkingdom
[link] [comments]

US Department of State plans to spend $400m on Tesla armoured vehicles

By /u/analyticlyrics

submitted by /u/analyticlyrics to r/news
[link] [comments]

AITA for not allowing my son to go to his paternal grandparents anniversary BBQ because his father's stepchildren will be there?

By /u/Such-Analyst-4132

I (33F) have a 7 year old son with my ex (35M). Almost a year ago I was given full custody of our son and my ex was awarded supervised visitation. The reason for this was the abuse our son was suffering at the hands of his father's stepchildren (12 and 13).

This was a very difficult battle to win. It started 3 years ago when my son came home from his father's house and my ex announced he'd gotten remarried over the weekend and he wanted me to pay half toward the clothes he bought our son for the wedding because they got ruined. Of course I didn't pay half but I did ask why he expected me to pay and why the clothes were ruined. He said he felt like we should split the cost of big items like that. Then he refused to answer how they got ruined. Later that evening when I was bathing my son I noticed some bruises on him and it made me suspicious. He mentioned his arms hurt and that the big kids had done it.

A few weeks later my ex called me and asked me to come and calm our son down. He said our son was hysterical and he had been unable to calm him. When I got to his house our son was still crying and wanted to come home with me. My ex's wife said one of her kids had accidentally stepped in my son's foot and my son got scared. But I could hear one of her kids in the background calling my son names and saying they wanted to shut him up.

Over time things got worse. There were more bruises and more days where my son would get very upset at his dad's house. I spoke to my ex who said his stepkids were taking it bad that their mom had remarried and that they had lost their dad only 4 years prior and it was difficult for them. He said he and our son weren't their favorite people. But he said it wasn't a big deal. I decided to document these incidents and injuries anyway because it appeared to me my ex was not concerned and our son could be at risk in his home.

As my son got bigger he'd verbalize more and more about what was going on. The stepkids treated him like shit and were not embarrassed or ashamed to be rough with him. He'd get pushed and grabbed and a lot of these "accidents" were happening. I put in a few calls to CPS and they started to offer resources. It pissed off my ex but I was worried for my son. The verbal incidents weren't on CPSs radar really but the physical stuff they also documented and some of my ex's family had witnessed things and a few even sent me run downs about what happened.

The incident that brought us to me getting full custody was my ex and his wife leaving the three kids home alone for hours together and the stepkids dragged my son out of the house and locked him in the garage on his own where all the dangerous tools were held.

My ex tried to fight for his right to retain custody but CPS and the judge agreed it was not safe for our son. The reason he only gets supervised visits is his stepkids are not allowed around my son.

My ex's parents are celebrating their wedding anniversary next month and they want my son there. But my ex and his family are invited and will be attending. I told them I could let them do something with him another time but if the stepkids are there my son won't be. They, along with my ex's oldest brother, feel like I'm being unfair and too strict and not trusting them to keep my son safe. But he wasn't in the past. I know that for a fact.

AITA?

submitted by /u/Such-Analyst-4132 to r/AITAH
[link] [comments]

Is my manager allowed to assign me homework?

By /u/tryingtolearnespanol

I'm new to the CS and my manager is giving me weird vibes. He's never explicitly said anything wrong but he seems like an 'alpha' male. He is on a carnivore diet and won't stop talking about how he invests in crypto.

Now he has told me that I need to toughen up a bit because I'm too shy and has asked me to write him a 5 page report on 3 books that he wants me to read, one per month, (the art of war, thus spoke Zarathustra, and the prince by Machiavelli). Can I just tell him no?

submitted by /u/tryingtolearnespanol to r/TheCivilService
[link] [comments]

£244 universal credit for a month, how do people survive?

By /u/Miserable-Salad12

I’ve just seen my first UC payment in a single person, currently homeless but staying at a hostel so I don’t have housing costs as it’s not my permanent address. I just don’t understand how £244 is supposed to even cover basic necessities and transport. If I am to be getting a job I’ll need to travel to interviews, so for transport, food and basics like toiletries how could this last a month. And my work coach is terrible they just lack basic empathy and understanding I had to explain my situation a hundred times.

UPDATE: besides advance deductions turns out an old employer of mine in which I was on a 0 hour contract last year March has not removed me from payroll and has been claiming they have been paying me. Currently reported this to UC and waiting for a response and have contacted HMRC to report the company. They claimed they paid me £91 which ofcourse took a lot from my amount I was to receive. I doubt he’ll sort out before my payment but atleast now I know

submitted by /u/Miserable-Salad12 to r/AskUK
[link] [comments]

Welsh Squad Updates

By /u/Crappie95

Welsh Squad Updates submitted by /u/Crappie95 to r/rugbyunion
[link] [comments]

Putin has waited for this moment for 3 years, as Zelensky is left in the cold

By /u/JackRogers3

Putin has waited for this moment for 3 years, as Zelensky is left in the cold submitted by /u/JackRogers3 to r/europe
[link] [comments]

Been having a rough time and tried distracting myself with an old Gameboy, but the battery on the cartridge was dead. A kind Redditor offered to replace it and for the first time in 24 years I’m playing Pokémon Crystal again! Brought some light to my day

By /u/ParadingMySerenading

Been having a rough time and tried distracting myself with an old Gameboy, but the battery on the cartridge was dead. A kind Redditor offered to replace it and for the first time in 24 years I’m playing Pokémon Crystal again! Brought some light to my day submitted by /u/ParadingMySerenading to r/MadeMeSmile
[link] [comments]

Two brothers plead not guilty to assaulting police officers in Manchester Airport brawl that sparked nationwide protests

By /u/ParkedUpWithCoffee

Two brothers plead not guilty to assaulting police officers in Manchester Airport brawl that sparked nationwide protests submitted by /u/ParkedUpWithCoffee to r/unitedkingdom
[link] [comments]

"Liverpool head coach Arne Slot was dismissed at the end of the Merseyside derby for using offensive, insulting, or abusive language."

By /u/stu1616

"Liverpool head coach Arne Slot was dismissed at the end of the Merseyside derby for using offensive, insulting, or abusive language." submitted by /u/stu1616 to r/LiverpoolFC
[link] [comments]

‘The rules of the game have changed’: Europe fears an unreliable US ally

By /u/sweatycat

submitted by /u/sweatycat to r/worldnews
[link] [comments]

Lewis Hamilton speaking italian in front of the team at Ferrari's factory

By /u/steferrari

Lewis Hamilton speaking italian in front of the team at Ferrari's factory submitted by /u/steferrari to r/formula1
[link] [comments]

python-build-standalone now has Python 3.14.0a5

python-build-standalone now has Python 3.14.0a5

Exciting news from Charlie Marsh:

We just shipped the latest Python 3.14 alpha (3.14.0a5) to uv and python-build-standalone. This is the first release that includes the tail-calling interpreter.

Our initial benchmarks show a ~20-30% performance improvement across CPython.

This is an optimization that was first discussed in faster-cpython in January 2024, then landed earlier this month by Ken Jin and included in the 3.14a05 release. The alpha release notes say:

A new type of interpreter based on tail calls has been added to CPython. For certain newer compilers, this interpreter provides significantly better performance. Preliminary numbers on our machines suggest anywhere from -3% to 30% faster Python code, and a geometric mean of 9-15% faster on pyperformance depending on platform and architecture. The baseline is Python 3.14 built with Clang 19 without this new interpreter.

This interpreter currently only works with Clang 19 and newer on x86-64 and AArch64 architectures. However, we expect that a future release of GCC will support this as well.

Including this in python-build-standalone means it's now trivial to try out via uv. I upgraded to the latest uv like this:

pip install -U uv

Then ran uv python list to see the available versions:

cpython-3.14.0a5+freethreaded-macos-aarch64-none    <download available>
cpython-3.14.0a5-macos-aarch64-none                 <download available>
cpython-3.13.2+freethreaded-macos-aarch64-none      <download available>
cpython-3.13.2-macos-aarch64-none                   <download available>
cpython-3.13.1-macos-aarch64-none                   /opt/homebrew/opt/[email protected]/bin/python3.13 -> ../Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.13/bin/python3.13

I downloaded the new alpha like this:

uv python install cpython-3.14.0a5

And tried it out like so:

uv run --python 3.14.0a5 python

The Astral team have been using Ken's bm_pystones.py benchmarks script. I grabbed a copy like this:

wget 'https://gist.githubusercontent.com/Fidget-Spinner/e7bf204bf605680b0fc1540fe3777acf/raw/fa85c0f3464021a683245f075505860db5e8ba6b/bm_pystones.py'

And ran it with uv:

uv run --python 3.14.0a5 bm_pystones.py

Giving:

Pystone(1.1) time for 50000 passes = 0.0511138
This machine benchmarks at 978209 pystones/second

Inspired by Charlie's example I decided to try the hyperfine benchmarking tool, which can run multiple commands to statistically compare their performance. I came up with this recipe:

brew install hyperfine
hyperfine \                            
  "uv run --python 3.14.0a5 bm_pystones.py" \
  "uv run --python 3.13 bm_pystones.py" \
  -n tail-calling \
  -n baseline \
  --warmup 10

Running that command produced: Benchmark 1: tail-calling   Time (mean ± σ):      71.5 ms ±   0.9 ms    [User: 65.3 ms, System: 5.0 ms]   Range (min … max):    69.7 ms …  73.1 ms    40 runs   Benchmark 2: baseline   Time (mean ± σ):      79.7 ms ±   0.9 ms    [User: 73.9 ms, System: 4.5 ms]   Range (min … max):    78.5 ms …  82.3 ms    36 runs   Summary   tail-calling ran     1.12 ± 0.02 times faster than baseline

So 3.14.0a5 scored 1.12 times faster than 3.13 on the benchmark (on my extremely overloaded M2 MacBook Pro).

Tags: uv, astral, benchmarks, python

URL-addressable Pyodide Python environments

This evening I spotted an obscure bug in Datasette, using Datasette Lite. I figure it's a good opportunity to highlight how useful it is to have a URL-addressable Python environment, powered by Pyodide and WebAssembly.

Here's the page that helped me discover the bug:

https://lite.datasette.io/?install=datasette-visible-internal-db&ref=1.0a17#/_internal/catalog_columns?_facet=database_name

To explain what's going on here, let's first review the individual components.

Datasette Lite

Datasette Lite is a version of Datasette that runs entirely in your browser. It runs on Pyodide, which I think is still the most underappreciated project in the Python ecosystem.

I built Datasette Lite almost three years ago as a weekend hack project to try and see if I could get Datasette - a server-side Python web application - to run entirely in the browser.

I've added a bunch of features since then, described in the README - most significantly the ability to load SQLite databases, CSV files, JSON files or Parquet files by passing a URL to a query string parameter.

I built Datasette Lite almost as a joke, thinking nobody would want to wait for a full Python interpreter to download to their browser each time they wanted to explore some data. It turns out internet connections are fast these days and having a version of Datasette that needs a browser, GitHub Pages and nothing else is actually extremely useful.

Just the other day I saw Logan Williams of Bellingcat using it to share a better version of this Excel sheet:

The NSF grants that Ted Cruz has singled out for advancing "neo-Marxist class warfare propaganda," in Datasette-Lite: lite.datasette.io?url=https://...

Let's look at that URL in full:

https://lite.datasette.io/?url=https://data-house-lake.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/cruz_nhs.db#/cruz_nhs/grants

The ?url= parameter there poins to a SQLite database file, hosted on DigitalOcean Spaces and served with the all-important access-control-allow-origin: * header which allows Datasette Lite to load it across domains.

The #/cruz_nhs/grants part of the URL tells Datasette Lite which page to load when you visit the link.

Anything after the # in Datasette Lite is a URL that gets passed on to the WebAssembly-hosted Datasette instance. Any query string items before that can be used to affect the initial state of the Datasette instance, to import data or even to install additional plugins.

The Datasette 1.0 alphas

I've shipped a lot of Datasette alphas - the most recent is Datasette 1.0a17. Those alphas get published to PyPI, which means they can be installed using pip install datasette==1.0a17.

A while back I added the same ability to Datasette Lite itself. You can now pass &ref=1.0a17 to the Datasette Lite URL to load that specific version of Datasette.

This works thanks to the magic of Pyodide's micropip mechanism. Every time you load Datasette Lite in your browser it's actually using micropip to install the packages it needs directly from PyPI. The code looks something like this:

await pyodide.loadPackage('micropip', {messageCallback: log});
let datasetteToInstall = 'datasette';
let pre = 'False';
if (settings.ref) {
  if (settings.ref == 'pre') {
    pre = 'True';
  } else {
    datasetteToInstall = `datasette==${settings.ref}`;
  }
}
await self.pyodide.runPythonAsync(`
import micropip
await micropip.install("${datasetteToInstall}", pre=${pre})
`);

Full code here.

That settings object has been passed to the Web Worker that loads Datasette, incorporating various query string parameters.

This all means I can pass ?ref=1.0a17 to Datasette Lite to load a specific version, or ?ref=pre to get the most recently released pre-release version.

This works for plugins, too

Since loading extra packages from PyPI via micropip is so easy, I went a step further and added plugin support.

The ?install= parameter can be passed multiple times, each time specifying a Datasette plugin from PyPI that should be installed into the browser.

The README includes a bunch of examples of this mechanism in action. Here's a fun one that loads datasette-mp3-audio to provide inline MP3 playing widgets, originally created for my ScotRail audio announcements project.

This only works for some plugins. They need to be pure Python wheels - getting plugins with compiled binary dependencies to work in Pyodide WebAssembly requires a whole set of steps that I haven't quite figured out.

Frustratingly, it doesn't work for plugins that run their own JavaScript yet! I may need to rearchitect significant chunks of both Datasette and Datasette Lite to make that work.

It's also worth noting that this is a remote code execution security hole. I don't think that's a problem here, because lite.datasette.io is deliberately hosted on the subdomain of a domain that I never intend to use cookies on. It's possible to vandalize the visual display of lite.datasette.io but it shouldn't be possible to steal any private data or do any lasting damage.

datasette-visible-internal-db

This evening's debugging exercise used a plugin called datasette-visible-internal-db.

Datasette's internal database is an invisible SQLite database that sits at the heart of Datasette, tracking things like loaded metadata and the schemas of the currently attached tables.

Being invisible means we can use it for features that shouldn't be visible to users - plugins that record API secrets or permissions or track comments or data import progress, for example.

In Python code it's accessed like this:

internal_db = datasette.get_internal_database()

As opposed to Datasette's other databases which are accessed like so:

db = datasette.get_database("my-database")

Sometimes, when hacking on Datasette, it's useful to be able to browse the internal database using the default Datasette UI.

That's what datasette-visible-internal-db does. The plugin implementation is just five lines of code:

import datasette

@datasette.hookimpl
def startup(datasette):
    db = datasette.get_internal_database()
    datasette.add_database(db, name="_internal", route="_internal")

On startup the plugin grabs a reference to that internal database and then registers it using Datasette's add_database() method. That's all it takes to have it show up as a visible database on the /_internal path within Datasette.

Spotting the bug

I was poking around with this today out of pure curiosity - I hadn't tried ?install=datasette-visible-internal-db with Datasette Lite before and I wanted to see if it worked.

Here's that URL from earlier, this time with commentary:

https://lite.datasette.io/ // Datasette Lite
  ?install=datasette-visible-internal-db // Install the visible internal DB plugin
  &ref=1.0a17 // Load the 1.0a17 alpha release
  #/_internal/catalog_columns // Navigate to the /_internal/catalog_columns table page
  &_facet=database_name // Facet by database_name for good measure

And this is what I saw:

Screenshot of Datasette Lite. catalog_columns table has 382 rows. database_name facet shows content 237, fixtures 97, _internal 48. A table shows columns for Link, database_name, table_name, cid and name - a red arrow points to a hyperlinked _internal in the database_name column.

This all looked good... until I clicked on that _internal link in the database_name column... and it took me to this /_internal/databases/_internal 404 page.

Why was that a 404? Datasette introspects the SQLite table schema to identify foreign key relationships, then turns those into hyperlinks. The SQL schema for that catalog_columns table (displayed at the bottom of the table page) looked like this:

CREATE TABLE catalog_columns (
    database_name TEXT,
    table_name TEXT,
    cid INTEGER,
    name TEXT,
    type TEXT,
    "notnull" INTEGER,
    default_value TEXT, -- renamed from dflt_value
    is_pk INTEGER, -- renamed from pk
    hidden INTEGER,
    PRIMARY KEY (database_name, table_name, name),
    FOREIGN KEY (database_name) REFERENCES databases(database_name),
    FOREIGN KEY (database_name, table_name) REFERENCES tables(database_name, table_name)
);

Those foreign key references are a bug! I renamed the internal tables from databases and tables to catalog_databases and catalog_tables quite a while ago, but apparently forgot to update the references - and SQLite let me get away with it.

Fixing the bug

I fixed the bug in this commit. As is often the case the most interesting part of the fix is the accompanying test. I decided to use the introspection helpers in sqlite-utils to guard against every making another mistake like this again in the future:

@pytest.mark.asyncio
async def test_internal_foreign_key_references(ds_client):
    internal_db = await ensure_internal(ds_client)
    def inner(conn):
        db = sqlite_utils.Database(conn)
        table_names = db.table_names()
        for table in db.tables:
            for fk in table.foreign_keys:
                other_table = fk.other_table
                other_column = fk.other_column
                message = 'Column "{}.{}" references other column "{}.{}" which does not exist'.format(
                    table.name, fk.column, other_table, other_column
                )
                assert other_table in table_names, message + " (bad table)"
                assert other_column in db[other_table].columns_dict, (
                    message + " (bad column)"
                )
    await internal_db.execute_fn(inner)

This uses Datasette's await db.execute_fn() method, which lets you run Python code that accesses SQLite in a thread. That code can then use the blocking sqlite-utils introspection methods - here I'm looping through every table in that internal database, looping through each tables .foreign_keys and confirming that the .other_table and .other_column values reference a table and column that genuinely exist.

I ran this test, watched it fail, then applied the fix and it passed.

URL-addressable Steps To Reproduce

The idea I most wanted to highlight here is the enormous value provided by URL-addressable Steps To Reproduce.

Having good Steps To Reproduce is crucial for productively fixing bugs. Something you can click on to see the bug is the most effective form of STR there is.

Ideally, these URLs will continue to work long into the future.

The great thing about a system like Datasette Lite is that everything is statically hosted files. The application itself is hosted on GitHub Pages, and it works by loading additional files from various different CDNs. The only dynamic aspect is cached lookups against the PyPI API, which I expect to stay stable for a long time to come.

As a stable component of the Web platform for almost 8 years WebAssembly is clearly here to stay. I expect we'll be able to execute today's WASM code in browsers 20+ years from now.

I'm confident that the patterns I've been exploring in Datasette Lite over the past few years could be just as valuable for other projects. Imagine demonstrating bugs in a Django application using a static WebAssembly build, archived forever as part of an issue tracking system.

I think WebAssembly and Pyodide still have a great deal of untapped potential for the wider Python world.

Tags: python, urls, datasette, webassembly, pyodide, datasette-lite

Quoting Sam Altman

We want AI to “just work” for you; we realize how complicated our model and product offerings have gotten.

We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence.

We will next ship GPT-4.5, the model we called Orion internally, as our last non-chain-of-thought model.

After that, a top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks.

In both ChatGPT and our API, we will release GPT-5 as a system that integrates a lot of our technology, including o3. We will no longer ship o3 as a standalone model.

[When asked about release dates for GPT 4.5 / GPT 5:] weeks / months

Sam Altman

Tags: generative-ai, openai, o3, chatgpt, ai, llms, sam-altman

Nomic Embed Text V2: An Open Source, Multilingual, Mixture-of-Experts Embedding Model

Nomic Embed Text V2: An Open Source, Multilingual, Mixture-of-Experts Embedding Model

Nomic continue to release the most interesting and powerful embedding models. Their latest is Embed Text V2, an Apache 2.0 licensed multi-lingual 1.9GB model (here it is on Hugging Face) trained on "1.6 billion high-quality data pairs", which is the first embedding model I've seen to use a Mixture of Experts architecture:

In our experiments, we found that alternating MoE layers with 8 experts and top-2 routing provides the optimal balance between performance and efficiency. This results in 475M total parameters in the model, but only 305M active during training and inference.

I first tried it out using uv run like this:

uv run \
  --with einops \
  --with sentence-transformers \
  --python 3.13 python

Then:

from sentence_transformers import SentenceTransformer
model = SentenceTransformer("nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe", trust_remote_code=True)
sentences = ["Hello!", "¡Hola!"]
embeddings = model.encode(sentences, prompt_name="passage")
print(embeddings)

Then I got it working on my laptop using the llm-sentence-tranformers plugin like this:

llm install llm-sentence-transformers
llm install einops # additional necessary package
llm sentence-transformers register nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe --trust-remote-code

llm embed -m sentence-transformers/nomic-ai/nomic-embed-text-v2-moe -c 'string to embed'

This outputs a 768 item JSON array of floating point numbers to the terminal. These are Matryoshka embeddings which means you can truncate that down to just the first 256 items and get similarity calculations that still work albeit slightly less well.

To use this for RAG you'll need to conform to Nomic's custom prompt format. For documents to be searched:

search_document: text of document goes here

And for search queries:

search_query: term to search for

I landed a new --prepend option for the llm embed-multi command to help with that, but it's not out in a full release just yet.

I also released llm-sentence-transformers 0.3 with some minor improvements to make running this model more smooth.

Via @nomic_ai

Tags: embeddings, llm, nomic, ai, rag, uv, python

Building a SNAP LLM eval: part 1

Building a SNAP LLM eval: part 1

Dave Guarino (previously) has been exploring using LLM-driven systems to help people apply for SNAP, the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka food stamps).

This is a domain which existing models know some things about, but which is full of critical details around things like eligibility criteria where accuracy really matters.

Domain-specific evals like this are still pretty rare. As Dave puts it:

There is also not a lot of public, easily digestible writing out there on building evals in specific domains. So one of our hopes in sharing this is that it helps others build evals for domains they know deeply.

Having robust evals addresses multiple challenges. The first is establishing how good the raw models are for a particular domain. A more important one is to help in developing additional systems on top of these models, where an eval is crucial for understanding if RAG or prompt engineering tricks are paying off.

Step 1 doesn't involve writing any code at all:

Meaningful, real problem spaces inevitably have a lot of nuance. So in working on our SNAP eval, the first step has just been using lots of models — a lot. [...]

Just using the models and taking notes on the nuanced “good”, “meh”, “bad!” is a much faster way to get to a useful starting eval set than writing or automating evals in code.

I've been complaining for a while that there isn't nearly enough guidance about evals out there. This piece is an excellent step towards filling that gap.

Tags: evals, llms, ai, generative-ai

llm-sort

llm-sort

Delightful LLM plugin by Evangelos Lamprou which adds the ability to perform "semantic search" - allowing you to sort the contents of a file based on using a prompt against an LLM to determine sort order.

Best illustrated by these examples from the README:

llm sort --query "Which names is more suitable for a pet monkey?" names.txt

cat titles.txt | llm sort --query "Which book should I read to cook better?"

It works using this pairwise prompt, which is executed multiple times using Python's sorted(documents, key=functools.cmp_to_key(compare_callback)) mechanism:

Given the query:
{query}

Compare the following two lines:

Line A:
{docA}

Line B:
{docB}

Which line is more relevant to the query? Please answer with "Line A" or "Line B".

From the lobste.rs comments, Cole Kurashige:

I'm not saying I'm prescient, but in The Before Times I did something similar with Mechanical Turk

This made me realize that so many of the patterns we were using against Mechanical Turk a decade+ ago can provide hints about potential ways to apply LLMs.

Via lobste.rs

Tags: llm, plugins, generative-ai, ai, llms, python, mechanical-turk

Cerebras brings instant inference to Mistral Le Chat

Cerebras brings instant inference to Mistral Le Chat

Mistral announced a major upgrade to their Le Chat web UI (their version of ChatGPT) a few days ago, and one of the signature features was performance.

It turns out that performance boost comes from hosting their model on Cerebras:

We are excited to bring our technology to Mistral – specifically the flagship 123B parameter Mistral Large 2 model. Using our Wafer Scale Engine technology, we achieve over 1,100 tokens per second on text queries.

Given Cerebras's so far unrivaled inference performance I'm surprised that no other AI lab has formed a partnership like this already.

Tags: mistral, generative-ai, cerebras, ai, llms

Quoting Sam Altman

The cost to use a given level of AI falls about 10x every 12 months, and lower prices lead to much more use. You can see this in the token cost from GPT-4 in early 2023 to GPT-4o in mid-2024, where the price per token dropped about 150x in that time period. Moore’s law changed the world at 2x every 18 months; this is unbelievably stronger.

Sam Altman, Three Observations

Tags: generative-ai, openai, llm-pricing, ai, llms, sam-altman

Quoting Salvatore Sanfilippo

[...] We are destroying software with complex build systems.

We are destroying software with an absurd chain of dependencies, making everything bloated and fragile.

We are destroying software telling new programmers: “Don’t reinvent the wheel!”. But, reinventing the wheel is how you learn how things work, and is the first step to make new, different wheels. [...]

Salvatore Sanfilippo, We are destroying software

Tags: salvatore-sanfilippo, programming, software-engineering

Use RSS to read newsletters

By sil

Everyone's got a newsletter these days (like everyone's got a podcast). In general, I think this is OK: instead of going through a middleman publisher, have a direct connection from you to the people who want to read what you say, so that that audience can't be taken away from you.

On the other hand, I don't actually like newsletters. I don't really like giving my email address to random people1, and frankly an email app is not a great way to read long-form text! There are many apps which are a lot better at this.

There is a solution to this and the solution is called RSS. Andy Bell explains RSS and this is exactly how I read newsletters. If I want to read someone's newsletter and it's on Substack, or ghost.io, or buttondown.email, what I actually do is subscribe to their newsletter but what I'm actually subscribing to is their RSS feed. This sections off newsletter stuff into a completely separate app that I can catch up on when I've got the time, it means that the newsletter owner (or the site they're using) can't decide to "upsell" me on other stuff they do that I'm not interested in, and it's a better, nicer reading experience than my mail app.2

I use NetNewsWire on my iOS phone, but there are a bunch of other newsreader apps for every platform and you should choose whichever one you want. Andy lists a bunch, above.

The question, of course, then becomes: how do you find the RSS feed for a thing you want to read?3 Well, it turns out... you don't have to.

When you want to subscribe to a newsletter, you literally just put the web address of the newsletter itself into your RSS reader, and that reader will take care of finding the feed and subscribing to it, for you. It's magic. Hooray! I've tested this with substack, with ghost.io, with buttondown.email, and it works with all of them. You don't need to do anything.

If that doesn't work, then there is one neat alternative you can try, though. Kill The Newsletter will give you an email address for any site you name, and provide the incoming emails to that as an RSS feed. So, if you've found a newsletter which doesn't exist on the web (boo hiss!) and doesn't provide an RSS feed, then you go to KTN, it gives you some randomly-generated email address, you subscribe to the intransigent newsletter with that email address, and then you can subscribe to the resultant feed in your RSS reader. It's dead handy.

If you run a newsletter and it doesn't have an RSS feed and you want it to have, then have a look at whatever newsletter software you use; it will almost certainly provide a way to create one, and you might have to tick a box. (You might also want to complain to the software creators that that box wasn't ticked by default.) If you've got an RSS feed for the newsletter that you write, but putting your site's address into an RSS reader doesn't find that RSS feed, then what you need is RSS autodiscovery, which is the "magic" alluded to above; you add a line to your site's HTML in the <head> section which reads <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="https://URL/of/your/feed"> and then it'll work.

I like this. Read newsletters at my pace, in my choice of app, on my terms. More of that sort of thing.

  1. despite how it's my business to do so and it's right there on the front page of the website, I know, I know
  2. Is all of this doable in my mail client? Sure. I could set up filters, put newsletters into their own folders/labels, etc. But that's working around a problem rather than solving it
  3. I suggested to Andy that he ought to write this post explaining how to do this and then realised that I should do it myself and stop being such a lazy snipe, so here it is

Quoting Jared Palmer

Confession: we've been hiding parts of v0's responses from users since September. Since the launch of DeepSeek's web experience and its positive reception, we realize now that was a mistake. From now on, we're also showing v0's full output in every response. This is a much better UX because it feels faster and it teaches end users how to prompt more effectively.

Jared Palmer, VP of AI at Vercel

Tags: ux, prompt-engineering, vercel, deepseek, generative-ai, ai, llms

Using pip to install a Large Language Model that's under 100MB

I just released llm-smollm2, a new plugin for LLM that bundles a quantized copy of the SmolLM2-135M-Instruct LLM inside of the Python package.

This means you can now pip install a full LLM!

If you're already using LLM you can install it like this:

llm install llm-smollm2

Then run prompts like this:

llm -m SmolLM2 'Are dogs real?'

(New favourite test prompt for tiny models, courtesy of Tim Duffy. Here's the result).

If you don't have LLM yet first follow these installation instructions, or brew install llm or pipx install llm or uv tool install llm depending on your preferred way of getting your Python tools.

If you have uv setup you don't need to install anything at all! The following command will spin up an ephemeral environment, install the necessary packages and start a chat session with the model all in one go:

uvx --with llm-smollm2 llm chat -m SmolLM2

$ uvx --with llm-smollm2 llm chat -m SmolLM2
Chatting with SmolLM2
Type 'exit' or 'quit' to exit
Type '!multi' to enter multiple lines, then '!end' to finish
> tell me a long story about a dog
The story of a dog is a tale of love, loss, and the unspoken rules of the universe. It begins with a small, timid, and timid dog named Max. Max was born into a loving family, but his life was forever changed by a cruel and cruel owner. He was left to fend for himself, and he was left to fend for himself.

Max's owner, a kind and gentle soul named Elena, was a cruel and cruel one. She had no patience, no love, and she would do anything to keep Max away from her. Max was left to fend for himself, and he was left to fend for himself.

Max's owner, Elena, was determined to make Max happy. She took Max to a beautiful and beautiful place, where Max was allowed to roam freely. Max was allowed to roam freely, and Max was allowed to roam freely. [Then repeats that sentence many times]

Finding a tiny model

The fact that the model is almost exactly 100MB is no coincidence: that's the default size limit for a Python package that can be uploaded to the Python Package Index (PyPI).

I asked on Bluesky if anyone had seen a just-about-usable GGUF model that was under 100MB, and Artisan Loaf pointed me to SmolLM2-135M-Instruct.

I ended up using this quantization by QuantFactory just because it was the first sub-100MB model I tried that worked.

Trick for finding quantized models: Hugging Face has a neat "model tree" feature in the side panel of their model pages, which includes links to relevant quantized models. I find most of my GGUFs using that feature.

Model tree for HuggingFaceTB/SmolLM2-135M-Instruct. 60 Quantizations, 6 adapters, 80 finetunes, 1 merge.

Building the plugin

I first tried the model out using Python and the llama-cpp-python library like this:

uv run --with llama-cpp-python python

Then:

from llama_cpp import Llama
from pprint import pprint
llm = Llama(model_path="SmolLM2-135M-Instruct.Q4_1.gguf")
output = llm.create_chat_completion(messages=[
    {"role": "user", "content": "Hi"}
])
pprint(output)

This gave me the output I was expecting:

{'choices': [{'finish_reason': 'stop',
              'index': 0,
              'logprobs': None,
              'message': {'content': 'Hello! How can I assist you today?',
                          'role': 'assistant'}}],
 'created': 1738903256,
 'id': 'chatcmpl-76ea1733-cc2f-46d4-9939-90efa2a05e7c',
 'model': 'SmolLM2-135M-Instruct.Q4_1.gguf',
 'object': 'chat.completion',
 'usage': {'completion_tokens': 9, 'prompt_tokens': 31, 'total_tokens': 40}}

But it also spammed my terminal with a huge volume of debugging output - which started like this:

llama_model_load_from_file_impl: using device Metal (Apple M2 Max) - 49151 MiB free
llama_model_loader: loaded meta data with 33 key-value pairs and 272 tensors from SmolLM2-135M-Instruct.Q4_1.gguf (version GGUF V3 (latest))
llama_model_loader: Dumping metadata keys/values. Note: KV overrides do not apply in this output.
llama_model_loader: - kv   0:                       general.architecture str              = llama

And then continued for more than 500 lines!

I've had this problem with llama-cpp-python and llama.cpp in the past, and was sad to find that the documentation still doesn't have a great answer for how to avoid this.

So I turned to the just released Gemini 2.0 Pro (Experimental), because I know it's a strong model with a long input limit.

I ran the entire llama-cpp-python codebase through it like this:

cd /tmp
git clone https://github.com/abetlen/llama-cpp-python
cd llama-cpp-python
files-to-prompt -e py . -c | llm -m gemini-2.0-pro-exp-02-05 \
  'How can I prevent this library from logging any information at all while it is running - no stderr or anything like that'

Here's the answer I got back. It recommended setting the logger to logging.CRITICAL, passing verbose=False to the constructor and, most importantly, using the following context manager to suppress all output:

from contextlib import contextmanager, redirect_stderr, redirect_stdout

@contextmanager
def suppress_output():
    """
    Suppresses all stdout and stderr output within the context.
    """
    with open(os.devnull, "w") as devnull:
        with redirect_stdout(devnull), redirect_stderr(devnull):
            yield

This worked! It turned out most of the output came from initializing the LLM class, so I wrapped that like so:

with suppress_output():
    model = Llama(model_path=self.model_path, verbose=False)

Proof of concept in hand I set about writing the plugin. I started with my simonw/llm-plugin cookiecutter template:

uvx cookiecutter gh:simonw/llm-plugin
  [1/6] plugin_name (): smollm2
  [2/6] description (): SmolLM2-135M-Instruct.Q4_1 for LLM
  [3/6] hyphenated (smollm2): 
  [4/6] underscored (smollm2): 
  [5/6] github_username (): simonw
  [6/6] author_name (): Simon Willison

The rest of the plugin was mostly borrowed from my existing llm-gguf plugin, updated based on the latest README for the llama-cpp-python project.

There's more information on building plugins in the tutorial on writing a plugin.

Packaging the plugin

Once I had that working the last step was to figure out how to package it for PyPI. I'm never quite sure of the best way to bundle a binary file in a Python package, especially one that uses a pyproject.toml file... so I dumped a copy of my existing pyproject.toml file into o3-mini-high and prompted:

Modify this to bundle a SmolLM2-135M-Instruct.Q4_1.gguf file inside the package. I don't want to use hatch or a manifest or anything, I just want to use setuptools.

Here's the shared transcript - it gave me exactly what I wanted. I bundled it by adding this to the end of the toml file:

[tool.setuptools.package-data]
llm_smollm2 = ["SmolLM2-135M-Instruct.Q4_1.gguf"]

Then dropping that .gguf file into the llm_smollm2/ directory and putting my plugin code in llm_smollm2/__init__.py.

I tested it locally by running this:

python -m pip install build
python -m build

I fired up a fresh virtual environment and ran pip install ../path/to/llm-smollm2/dist/llm_smollm2-0.1-py3-none-any.whl to confirm that the package worked as expected.

Publishing to PyPI

My cookiecutter template comes with a GitHub Actions workflow that publishes the package to PyPI when a new release is created using the GitHub web interface. Here's the relevant YAML:

  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    needs: [test]
    environment: release
    permissions:
      id-token: write
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v4
    - name: Set up Python
      uses: actions/setup-python@v5
      with:
        python-version: "3.13"
        cache: pip
        cache-dependency-path: pyproject.toml
    - name: Install dependencies
      run: |
        pip install setuptools wheel build
    - name: Build
      run: |
        python -m build
    - name: Publish
      uses: pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish@release/v1

This runs after the test job has passed. It uses the pypa/gh-action-pypi-publish Action to publish to PyPI - I wrote more about how that works in this TIL.

Is the model any good?

This one really isn't! It's not really surprising but it turns out 94MB really isn't enough space for a model that can do anything useful.

It's super fun to play with, and I continue to maintain that small, weak models are a great way to help build a mental model of how this technology actually works.

That's not to say SmolLM2 isn't a fantastic model family. I'm running the smallest, most restricted version here. SmolLM - blazingly fast and remarkably powerful describes the full model family - which comes in 135M, 360M, and 1.7B sizes. The larger versions are a whole lot more capable.

If anyone can figure out something genuinely useful to do with the 94MB version I'd love to hear about it.

Tags: pip, plugins, projects, pypi, python, ai, github-actions, generative-ai, edge-llms, llms, ai-assisted-programming, llm, gemini, uv, smollm, o3, llama-cpp

sqlite-s3vfs

sqlite-s3vfs

Neat open source project on the GitHub organisation for the UK government's Department for Business and Trade: a "Python virtual filesystem for SQLite to read from and write to S3."

I tried out their usage example by running it in a Python REPL with all of the dependencies

uv run --python 3.13 --with apsw --with sqlite-s3vfs --with boto3 python

It worked as advertised. When I listed my S3 bucket I found it had created two files - one called demo.sqlite/0000000000 and another called demo.sqlite/0000000001, both 4096 bytes because each one represented a SQLite page.

The implementation is just 200 lines of Python, implementing a new SQLite Virtual Filesystem on top of apsw.VFS.

The README includes this warning:

No locking is performed, so client code must ensure that writes do not overlap with other writes or reads. If multiple writes happen at the same time, the database will probably become corrupt and data be lost.

I wonder if the conditional writes feature added to S3 back in November could be used to protect against that happening. Tricky as there are multiple files involved, but maybe it (or a trick like this one) could be used to implement some kind of exclusive lock between multiple processes?

Via Hacker News comment

Tags: apsw, sqlite, python, uv, s3

APSW SQLite query explainer

APSW SQLite query explainer

Today I found out about APSW's (Another Python SQLite Wrapper, in constant development since 2004) apsw.ext.query_info() function, which takes a SQL query and returns a very detailed set of information about that query - all without executing it.

It actually solves a bunch of problems I've wanted to address in Datasette - like taking an arbitrary query and figuring out how many parameters (?) it takes and which tables and columns are represented in the result.

I tried it out in my console (uv run --with apsw python) and it seemed to work really well. Then I remembered that the Pyodide project includes WebAssembly builds of a number of Python C extensions and was delighted to find apsw on that list.

... so I got Claude to build me a web interface for trying out the function, using Pyodide to run a user's query in Python in their browser via WebAssembly.

Claude didn't quite get it in one shot - I had to feed it the URL to a more recent Pyodide and it got stuck in a bug loop which I fixed by pasting the code into a fresh session.

Screenshot of the tool. APSW SQLite query explainer. Query is select * from sqlite_master where tbl_name = ? and a parameter box below is set to example. Below is JSON with the query and a bunch of details about it.

Tags: pyodide, sqlite, claude, ai, llms, claude-artifacts, webassembly, ai-assisted-programming, python, generative-ai, apsw

Datasette 1.0a17

Datasette 1.0a17

New Datasette alpha, with a bunch of small changes and bug fixes accumulated over the past few months. Some (minor) highlights:

  • The register_magic_parameters(datasette) plugin hook can now register async functions. (#2441)
  • Breadcrumbs on database and table pages now include a consistent self-link for resetting query string parameters. (#2454)
  • New internal methods datasette.set_actor_cookie() and datasette.delete_actor_cookie(), described here. (#1690)
  • /-/permissions page now shows a list of all permissions registered by plugins. (#1943)
  • If a table has a single unique text column Datasette now detects that as the foreign key label for that table. (#2458)
  • The /-/permissions page now includes options for filtering or exclude permission checks recorded against the current user. (#2460)

I was incentivized to push this release by an issue I ran into in my new datasette-load plugin, which resulted in this fix:

  • Fixed a bug where replacing a database with a new one with the same name did not pick up the new database correctly. (#2465)

Tags: projects, annotated-release-notes, datasette

An Electromagnetic Force

I've just returned from a fourteen-day trip spent building, running and tearing down EMF, and as I sit on the plane writing this, as well as physical exhaustion, I am experiencing a whole host of emotions - happiness, wonder, determination, and also a strange sense of loss.

It is impossible to describe EMF to anyone who has not attended; while initially you might want to compare it to a normal festival, or something like Burning Man, it is fundamentally unlike almost any other event on Earth. The Dutch and German camps maybe come close, but even those have their own somewhat different vibe.

Over the course of my time heading up the logistics team over the last two weeks, I have done and seen such a wild variety of things that I'm never quite sure what was real. Among others, I watched a man play the US National Anthem on a tesla coil using a theremin; climbed up into a DJ booth in a solarpunk-themed Null Sector and pressed the "!! FIRE !!" button to light up the night sky with pillars of burning alcohol; exited the shower to hear HACK THE PLANET echo out over the field from the stage a quarter of a mile away; saw an inflatable t-rex driving a miniature Jurassic Park jeep, played games on a hillside using lasers, and refilled the duck flume several times (shortly after exclaiming "We have a duck flume?").

...

The Cloud Is Just My Basement's Computers

I've had many different development platforms over the years - from Notepad++ on library computers in my youth, to Gentoo and then Ubuntu installed on a series of carefully-chosen laptops with working drivers, and then for the last five years or so on Surface devices via the rather wonderful Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

Of course, in the WSL era I am still just running Ubuntu, but inside the pseudo-VM that is the WSL subsystem of the Windows kernel. It's honestly pretty great, and I regularly joke that I'm using Windows as the GUI layer to develop on Linux.

Between the Steam Deck and WSL both being ascendant, maybe we finally got the Year Of Linux On The Desktop, just not as we expected.

...

Life-Critical Side Projects

TLDR: I am looking for new developers and maintainers for Takahē who want to help in exchange for my mentorship, or I'll have to sunset the project.

I find it important to have hobbies that aren't the same as what I do for work, which is why an increasing number of them don't involve computers at all - I'm very happy building new things on my camper van, making weird geographic art, or hiking around bits of the Rockies.

However, I still love programming and systems work, and I'll always have at least one project going on the side that involves it - nothing beats the size and complexity of what you can create in just a few hours of coding. That said, I have two basic rules for my programming side projects:

...

I am, approximately, here

There are many questionable things about American car culture, but the road trip is not one of them. In a country as large and geographically varied as the USA, road travel is not just a necessity, but it can also be the attraction itself.

When I first moved to the USA, I had vague plans of doing some driving around and enjoying the sheer alien-ness of tiny towns in the middle of nowhere, or motels where you are somehow the only guest. Nine years in, I've done a decent amount of that, but these days my attention is more focused around the camper van that I spent half a year building.

I like to try and share a bit of the experience with those who want to see it, and as well as posting pictures and videos, I've always liked the idea of having a live map of where I am - even if it's just for friends and relatives who are interested in my progress.

...

A Takahē refactor, as a treat

I had taken two months off from developing Takahē in the run up to PyCon US; both due to pressures at work (and then, more recently, half the company being laid off around me), as well as not quite being sure what I wanted to build, exactly.

When I started the project, my main goal was to show that multi-domain support for a single ActivityPub server was possible; once I had achieved that relatively early on, I sort of fell down the default path of implementing a lightweight clone of Mastodon/Twitter.

While this was good in terms of developing out the features we needed, it always felt a bit like overhead I didn't really want; after all, if you're implementing the Mastodon API like we do, all the dedicated apps for viewing timelines and posting are always going to be better than what you ship with a server.

...

Takahē 0.7

Today is the 0.7 release of Takahē, and things are really humming along now; this release marks the point where we've built enough moderation and community features to make me happy that I can open up takahe.social to registrations, albeit with a user number cap.

We've also launched a Patreon for Takahē, in a quest to make development and operation of Takahē more sustainable - and work towards start paying some people to help out with the less exciting work like triaging tickets, user support, and moderation of takahe.social. If you want to volunteer directly, that's covered in our Contributing docs.

There's some interesting technical topics I want to dig into today, though - it's been a little while since my last blog post and ActivityPub and friends continue to surprise.

...

Understanding A Protocol

Yesterday I pushed out the 0.5.0 release of Takahē, and while there's plenty left to do, this release is somewhat of a milestone in its own right, as it essentially marks the point where I've implemented enough of ActivityPub to shift focus.

With the implementation of image posting in this release, there are now only a few things left at a protocol level that I know I'm missing:

Custom emoji (these are custom per-server and a mapping of name-to-image comes with each post)

...

Takahē 0.3.0

So, after a few weeks of development, I'm happy enough with the state of Takahē to issue its first official release - which I've chosen to number 0.3.0, because version numbers are made up and I can start where I want.

We're only releasing Docker images right now in order to try and keep the support burden down (it removes having to worry about people's OS versions and library environments), so you can find it on Docker Hub.

A screenshot of Takahē

...

Twitter, ActivityPub and The Future

Twitter is - was - such a unique place. Somewhere where you can have the President of the United States coexist with teenagers writing fan fiction; where celebrities give personal insights into their lives while government departments post memes about public safety; the place that gave us @Horse_ebooks and @dril.

The "Fediverse", with Mastodon at its helm, is not this. It doesn't seem to want to be, and I honestly think that's fine - as many thinkpieces have recently said, the age of global social media might just be over. And given the effect it's had on the world, maybe that's alright after all.

But there is still a void to fill, and as someone who enjoyed Twitter most at its "medium" size, I think the ActivityPub ecosystem is well-placed to grow into such a space. But first, I think there's some important things we have to discuss about it.

...

Takahē: A New ActivityPub Server

When I decided to properly start using the Fediverse via my own Mastodon server, I knew it was probably inevitable that I would end up writing my own server - and, well, here we are!

My new server is called Takahē, and it's built in Django and also specifically with Python's async library ecosystem - I'll explain more about why that matters later.

A screenshot of Takahe

...

Stay Gold, America

By Jeff Atwood

We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream.

The Great Filter Comes For Us All

By Jeff Atwood

With a 13 billion year head start on evolution, why haven’t any other forms of life in the universe contacted us by now?

alt
Teaching the aliens how to exit Vim

(Arrival is a fantastic movie. Watch it, but don’t stop there – read the Story of

I Fight For The Users

By Jeff Atwood

If you haven’t been able to keep up with my blistering pace of one blog post per year, I don’t blame you. There’s a lot going on right now. It’s a busy time. But let’s pause and take a moment

The 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet

By Jeff Atwood

It’s my honor to announce that John Carmack and I have initiated a friendly bet of $10,000* to the 501(c)(3) charity of the winner’s choice:

By January 1st, 2030, completely autonomous self-driving cars meeting SAE J3016 level 5 will be commercially available for

Updating The Single Most Influential Book of the BASIC Era

By Jeff Atwood

In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career.

alt

With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command

Building a PC, Part IX: Downsizing

By Jeff Atwood

Hard to believe that I’ve had the same PC case since 2011, and my last serious upgrade was in 2015. I guess that’s yet another sign that the PC is over, because PC upgrades have gotten really boring. It took 5 years for me to muster

The Rise of the Electric Scooter

By Jeff Atwood

In an electric car, the (enormous) battery is a major part of the price. If electric car prices are decreasing, battery costs must be decreasing, because it’s not like the cost of fabricating rubber, aluminum, glass, and steel into car shapes can decline that much,

Electric Geek Transportation Systems

By Jeff Atwood

I’ve never thought of myself as a “car person.” The last new car I bought (and in fact, now that I think about it, the first new car I ever bought) was the quirky 1998 Ford Contour SVT. Since then, we bought a

An Exercise Program for the Fat Web

By Jeff Atwood

When I wrote about App-pocalypse Now in 2014, I implied the future still belonged to the web. And it does. But it’s also true that the web has changed a lot in the last 10 years, much less the last 20 or 30.

fat city

Websites have gotten

The Cloud Is Just Someone Else’s Computer

By Jeff Atwood

When we started Discourse in 2013, our server requirements were high:

I’m not talking about a cheapo shared cpanel server, either, I mean a dedicated virtual private server with those specifications.

We

What does Stack Overflow want to be when it grows up?

By Jeff Atwood

I sometimes get asked by regular people in the actual real world what it is that I do for a living, and here’s my 15 second answer:

We built a sort of Wikipedia website for computer programmers to post questions and answers. It’s called Stack

There is no longer any such thing as Computer Security

By Jeff Atwood

Remember “cybersecurity”?

its-cybersecurity-yay

Mysterious hooded computer guys doing mysterious hooded computer guy... things! Who knows what kind of naughty digital mischief they might be up to?

Unfortunately, we now live in a world where this kind of digital mischief is literally rewriting the world’s history. For proof

To Serve Man, with Software

By Jeff Atwood

I didn’t choose to be a programmer. Somehow, it seemed, the computers chose me. For a long time, that was fine, that was enough; that was all I needed. But along the way I never felt that being a programmer was this unambiguously great-for-everyone career

The Existential Terror of Battle Royale

By Jeff Atwood

It’s been a while since I wrote a blog post, I guess in general, but also a blog post about video games. Video games are probably the single thing most attributable to my career as a programmer, and everything else I’ve done professionally after that.

Hacker, Hack Thyself

By Jeff Atwood

We’ve read so many sad stories about communities that were fatally compromised or destroyed due to security exploits. We took that lesson to heart when we founded the Discourse project; we endeavor to build open source software that is secure and safe for communities by default,

Long goodbyes

By [email protected] (Jon North)



As I write we have just enjoyed a brief visit from our son and daughter-in-law from the UK - they have busy lives and we are very pleased when they can spare the time to visit us.  Now we are planning a family get-together in Normandy at Easter, and looking forward to a visit from Judi from the USA in the summer.

We are often reminded of our advancing age and infirmities, and of course we try to remain positive.  In any case we realise how much better off we still are than many friends and family members with illnesses and helath problems.  And we have lost valued friends here this year, including Clive Almond who was HM Ambassador to the Congo in the 80s and 90s.  Clive was the latest of our friends here whom we through the conversation group which has existed in various guises since we joine it in 2007.  An inevitable conseqence of aging is that many good friends now live on only in memory.

Our reading in French recently has been about French history, much of it around the German occupation in the second world war (we have just finished the book  La vie des français sous l'occupation by Henri Amouroux), so our minds have often been on the old soldier Philippe Pétain.  He had acquired the status of national hero in the first world war, and then set up the Nazi-tolerated national government in France, based in the spa town on Vichy in North-west France.  We have a lovely set of clay figures (santons) given to us by our Die twinning partners, a crib scene we set our every year (to which, as you can see some spurious extras have been added) and reading Neil Acherson's account of Pétain's trial (he was convicted of treason after the war but reprieved by de Gaulle) I was intrigued to read that in one village  at least "families at Christmas decorate their crib with santons – figurines of the Holy Family, the three kings, the shepherds, an angel. But the old man was holding out an extra santon. It was a tiny statuette of Marshal Pétain. He is leaning on a stick, wearing his immaculate marshal’s uniform with the Verdun medal. His eyes are a childish blue, his hair and moustache snowy white: a perfect grandfather for the ‘enfant Jésus’ and perhaps for a certain French generation. Had he not promised them in 1940, in their hour of bewilderment, ‘the gift of my person’?

Quite a few families in the village added a little marshal to their crib, that first Christmas after France’s surrender to Nazi Germany. It had always been a conservative place: royalist against the Republic, deeply Catholic, defensive of its Provençal language and customs, patriotic to the last drop of blood (and today it votes pretty solidly for Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National). But by 1943, things looked very different. Hitler was losing the war. The Germans had occupied Vichy France as well as the north, and Pétain, its head of state, had done nothing to stop them. The Resistance (once dismissed as feckless Red troublemakers) was growing much stronger, and the hunting down of ‘collaborators’ seemed just round the corner. That Christmas, the last before the Liberation, the Holy Family had no little china marshals to protect them."

as Epiphany approaches the wise me join the others around the manger - theatre in miniature







Our conversation groups continue - twice a week now, in members' homes.  We have made good friends in this way over many years.  We were delighted that Sophie and Brayton, now back home in Chicago, have finally overcome bureaucracy and taken the next step towards French residency.  They have a lovely old home in Uzès.

Understanding the earlier history around the French Revolution is a more complex business. Not just one revolution but several with gaps of monarchy etc. in between  Hilary Mantel has written a long and excellent book A place of greater safety, a novel set in the  revolutionary Paris of the late 18th century, which I have not yet finished, but this passage struck me "ALL DAY, and far into the night, traffic rumbled through narrow and insufficient streets. Carriages flattened him against walls. The escutcheons and achievements of their owners glowed in coarse heraldic tints; velvet-nosed horses set their feet daintily into the city filth. Inside, their owners leaned back with distant eyes. On the bridges and at the intersections coaches and drays and vegetable carts jostled and locked their wheels. Footmen in livery hung from the backs of carriages to exchange insults with coalmen and out-of-town bakers. The problems raised by accidents were solved rapidly, in cash, according to the accepted tariff for arms, legs and fatalities, and under the indifferent eyes of the police. On the Pont-Neuf the public letter-writers had their booths, and traders set out their goods on the ground and on ramshackle stalls. He sorted through some baskets of books, secondhand: a sentimental romance, some Ariosto, a crisp and unread book published in Edinburgh, The Chains of Slavery by Jean-Paul Marat... Dogs ran in packs, scavenging around the market. Every second person he met, it seemed, was a builder’s labourer, covered in plaster dust. The city was tearing itself up by the roots. In some districts they were levelling whole streets and starting again. Small crowds gathered to watch the more tricky and spectacular operations. The labourers were seasonal workers, and poor. There was a bonus if they finished ahead of schedule, and so they worked at a dangerous pace, the air heavy with their curses and the sweat rolling down their scrawny backs."She was a fine writer.

My other recent reading has included, for the 3rd time, the vast panoply of Dorothy Dunnett's Niccolo books.  She had a boundless eye for historical detail, and her characters are wrapped in a swathe of historical detail across all of Surope and parts of Africa and Asia too.  I always end up realising how narrow our British view of history is, and that includes a very English focus excluding the Scottish perspective she excels in.  I need to start hunting out other series to follow on with.

On top of the Trump re-election, British politics and legal processes are in the eye of a reactionary storm which cannot be teased away from American populism, prompted by Musk and Trump. The silly ‘oh yes it is, oh no it isn’t’ dialogue distracts from serious thought and concerns. Three things are on my mind - the ongoing scandal of the Pelicot story in France, the growing uncertainty over Lucy Letby’s guilt, and this old and well-dealt with history of child abuse which has little to do with racial stereotypes and a lot to do with male perversion. A Pelicot cartoon


A couple of recent Private Eye cartoons

I have become a great fan of photographer Andy Rouse whose photos of my favourite animal, the tiger are here

Another Andy Rouse photo (reminds you of the Tiger one in the gallery)

One of Mary's favourite animals is the kingfisher (which she says she keep just missing while others spot them) - here is a video which is beautiful and amazing

We have just paid 9€ for delivery of a late Christmas card enclosing some photocopied crosswords!!  Life is full of surprises...  And final thoughts for this post:





Christmas at home

By [email protected] (Jon North)


Happy new year to all our family & friends 


We were not quite sure, but I think this was the first Christmas Mary and I had spent on our own.  It has been quiet but enjoyable despite missing the family - we shall see them in the spring. But including the unexpected too - I toppled from my exercise bike on Christmas morning, no harm done, but I spent the  morning in the local A&E being checked for vertigo.  We are so lucky to have the little local hospital which was being built when we arrived in Lunel in the mid-2000s.  Those hearing the news at a distance were a bit alarmed, but I realise thinking back that I have toppled a few times over the years (broken arm about 5 years ago, and several slow-motion tumbles from my road bike when I had one.  Despite often-reported sicatic and joint pain the main concern for me is stability, since I'm a bit top-heavy and tend to move without thinking!  My new year's resolution is to think on and avoid falling, to which end our spelndid factotum M. Beaumann has started to fit a number of rails and grab handles in the showers and on steps.

Christmas flowers from family

I was home in time for a late afternoon roast lunch set off by a wonderful Jacob Savigny Vergelesses.  You cannot begrudge Jean-Michel and Christine their retirement, but I am very grateful that we stocked up with a number of their excellent wines before the label entered the history books.  And back groove by today (28 December) when I had a frosty early-morning trip to the town for greengroceries.  The winter sunshine is glorious.  Here are some photos just after sunrise today.




I am not a great games player, unlike some of our offspring and their broods, but Mary and I have set ourselves the undemanding task of a game of Scrabble an evening over the new year, and yesterday's inaugural game was OK (combined score 565) but we play for enjoyment not competition.

We have enjoyed Christmas music as always, with the Radio 3 offerings including plenty of good carols, augmented by our stack of favourite CDs though we shall give the Vienna new year concert a miss.  Radio 3 presenters are m=like marmite, nice if yuou like them.  Mary is more critical  than I am of some of the newer arrivals, but we did enjoy Sean Rafferty (just retired with a great farewell evening on 7 December with some of our favourite musicians including Ailish Tynan and Sarah Connolly.  I have come across people who could not stand him (the marmite factor again) but the warmth and affection of artists we admire confirms our view of him as Someone we will Miss.


We have a new favourite gastronimic restauruant in Lunel, Maison Soubeiran (I am amused by the coincidnece of the family name from the books and films of Manon des sources which we rewatched with great pleasure a month or so ago) - elegant food from a self-taught woman chef.  You eat surrounded by pictures of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg.  


We have jsut passed our 18th year here in Lunel and in the house.  Of course, by now and with no more chambres d'hôte the house is too big, but it will take us time to plan any move especially given the beautiful garden space we enjoy.


We have another couple of weeks before regular activities resume - we have a lot of friends in the area who are part of our regular French/English conversation groups, and we'll look forward to getting back with them during January.





... and it's goodbye from him too



Bright sparks in a tough old world

By [email protected] (Jon North)

Our lemon tree has been even more active than usual this year  Most of the lemons have now been turned into limoncello!!


My attention has been taken these past few weeks by two stories all over the press.  In France, but well reported by the Guardian too, the horrifying story of Gisèle Pelicot, drugged and raped without her knowledge by over 70 men - her home was in a village not 100 km from here.   She is our age and had thought she was in a contented family life.  Meanwhhile the abusive activities of the British police continue to fill the news columns as stories of undercover policemen getting into long-term relationships with women on the flimsy pretext of monitoring their political activism.  The psychological trauma they experienced and experience still is related in a gripping and disturbing book Deep deception by 5 of the women who were entrapped and traumatised by the men's lies, sanctioned by the state.  I first read of this in the 1990s and it is still rumbling on, with officiamdom squirming to get off the hook


It has been hard to keep a light tone in the face of  gloomy things like these and the Trump election.


We have enjoyed re-watching the BBC production of Jane Austen's Persuasion and then continuing to re-read and re-watch other Jane Austen, notably our umpteenth return to Pride & Prejudice - have read every work of the book for the first time , and noted how film lakers transform the statey 18th crentury prose into modern tv; and I have been trying to read Hilary Mantel's fictional take  on the French Revolution.  She is a marvellous writer  but iin the face of a horrendously confusing history she can only really convey confusion - slow work.  

Some bark from a tree we recently had cut down - wonderful patterns from creatures  inside

As I write Notre Dame is opening its doors.  We watched a splendid documentary on French tv about the restoration and the 2,000 odd craftspeople who made it happen, and I think we might be tempted to go and see in the coming year - almost unheard of that a whole restoration project should reveal a huge 'new' building all at once.  We still have to look at the recording of the opening ceremony and there is a, early music show on BBC Radio 3 today too.


I've also read Polly Toynbee's good family memoir An uneasy inheritance, a book of two halves - the family beginning is quite engrossing, the modern take on her life and  concerns now, also  interesting but the two parts hang rather uneasily together.  However, I will finish with a paragraph from that part, which echos my experience during my working life of a high point in the early years of the current century.  She writes:

"Toynbee Hall these days has thrown off these upper class do-gooding connotations. In my own time, I was at Toynbee Hall on the morning of Tony Blair’s extraordinary visit, when he addressed the packed lecture hall to make the seminal social policy speech of his prime ministership, on 18 March 1999. To listen to his remarkable Beveridge lecture, he had summoned a hall full of poverty experts, economists and academics, along with social affairs journalists such as myself, to astound us with an unexpected commitment to abolish all child poverty by 2020. Abolish it! Jaws dropped, everyone in the room was amazed and partly disbelieving: did he understand what that would take, the enormous heavy lifting in redistribution and the colossal long term social programmes? 

He did, as did Gordon Brown, and they have never had enough credit for how far they reached their goal before being ousted. By Labour’s departure in 2010 they had reached a third of that target, not only taking a million children out of poverty, with many more lifted up closer to the poverty line, but they had also set up a network of 3,500 Sure Start children’s centres, and a host of good anti-poverty programmes drawn up by eighteen different social exclusion task forces defining every cause and remedy. But all that they achieved was swept away within a month with David Cameron and George Osborne’s first austerity budget in 2010. Had Labour stayed in power, that 2020 pledge might, just, have been realized. There could have been no better memorial to Toynbee Hall’s history or to my great-great-uncle Arnold, after whose social reforming endeavour Toynbee Hall was founded."

Sadly UK children's policy and support for children have gone backwards since 2010.  My resolution for 2025 is to find out more about French policy and practice.



A very happy Christmas and new year to everyone.

Remembering old friends

By [email protected] (Jon North)



This month we said goodbye to Edmond, probably our last dog.  I made this album Our dogs of all our canine companions over the last 45 years - Polly, Ziggy and Ruff, Trudy and Evie, Camel, Arlo, and the twins Elvire and Edmond.  The house seems quiet now, and daily routines have been simplified.

The past month has been busy, with two family groups overlapping so  we had 9 to eat one Friday.  A great pleasure to see Katherine & Ian en route back from a Mediterranean cruise, and the Cassidy family visiting  from England for cousin Chris's 300th birthday treat.  Time flies, and we feel increasingly fortunate to be relatively well and healthy despite the advancing age which so often restricts people including many of our dearest friends.


After the hi-jinks of last months' birthday season we are now into an autumn of French conversation and other regular activities.  I thought it would be interesting to sketch a typical week in our lives.  Monday (when as Flanders & Swann remind us the gasman came to call) is Mary's busy day for cello in termtime.  I have a catch-up day at home and make lunch for us when she pops back beetween lessaons and group sessions.  Tuesday mornings are conversation times almost every week, either here or at someone's house - often somewhere in the Vaunage valley north-west of Nîmes.  The network now called SEVE (never mind what the acronym stands for) which used to be called the Réseau d'Echanges Réciproques des Savoirs or RERS has a membership mainly in the western Gard, on the other side of the river Vidourle.  That river, which is notorious for floods from water rushing down from the Cevennes hills to the north, forms a kind of boundary between the Gard département  and ours, the Hérault which stretches way further west beyond Béziers.  


Our Tuesday language group has run weekly more or less continuously since we arrived here in 2006, and used to focus on anglophones learning French, but more recenly there has been a steady corner of French people wanting to improve their English.  Now we also have a smaller group working on our French, meeting on Friday mornings.  Both usually run from 10-12 followed by a shared lunch, to which people bring delicious food and wine.   Various ways of working on language have been tried over the years, but nowadays for French we tend to have a book which we take turns to read, then translate out loud.





Wednesdays and Thursdays are usually blank days, and the weekends vary a lot.  Gardening and housework happen of course regularly - in the garden Mary is a bit more flexible than me ans so does most weeding, and I mow and prune when needed although we now rely on our splendid factotum M. Beaumann for much of the heavier pruning as well as major repairs around hte house and on the roof!  My floor cleaning days are Mondays or Fridays, at times when Mary is out. 

The murier platane just given its winter trim

On the whole we have a quiet life, and no longer do B&B as we did often in our first years here, but visitors sometimes come in clumps and this month we have welcomed 7 people - my niece and her husband on their way back from their holiday, and my cousin Mary with her family, so we sat down 9 people for one meal last week

We also welcomed son Sam for a few days - a really nice visit, with a couple of meals out  including one at the new Lunel restaurant Maison Soubeiran, a family concern aith a woman chef/proprietor, full of interest and quite classy.  Meanwhile we have enjoyed visting winemakers (large and smaller-scale) and tasting with another group which has met regularly since soon after our arrival here.  




We look forward to a fairly tranquil November and December before the festive season.  Probably another post in the new year.






Roundup

By [email protected] (Jon North)

Birthday time, and we have celebrated jointly with a  160th party (82+78, I am the baby) with friends locally, a very informal wine tasting from our varied collecton.  A few photos...





It has rained (a rare event) so things are looking a bit greener but this is a dry corner of the Languedoc - only 35 mm on 5 September when the local average all around was nearer 50 - and another 37 yesterday.  I do spend a lot of my time watering, recycling the copious condensation from our wine store cooling system.  I shalll need to get the mower out soon...

After an anxious few days Edmond has rallied and is eating the posher kind of dog food that now tempts him.   His heart is not strong, and the vet (who is kind and thoughtful) is on standby to pay us a visit when needed, but for the moment the dog is in good spirits.

Followign the outstanding success of the Paris Olympics, the Paralympics have come and gone.  We made a determined effort to watch: The simple evidence of determination and overcoming difficulties is inspiring, and sports have been adapted, or invented, to facilitate people with disabilities of every kind to take their chance.  Now we are obliged to watch French tv, but we also have podcasts in English.   There is a splendid podcast - well worth listening to - which conveys the excellence of these athletes.  Mary and I both spent a good part of our working lives with disabled people in the voluntery sector, so this inteterests us a lot.  It seems to us that France has begun to catch up with the UK in social integration of disability


I have long been interested in road safety, and the consistently higher mortality here as compared th the UK.  I have just read that the number of people killed or injured on Welsh roads has dropped significantly since most 30mph speed limits were reduced to 20mph. There were 377 casualties on 20mph and 30mph roads in the first quarter of 2024, down from 510 in the same period last year. The number of deaths dropped from 11 to five.



I have just come across this map of transatlantic cables which shows, along with the huge power-guzzling data centres all over the place, how very un-cloudlike the cloud is  I read this in an article by Gillian Tett in the Guardian -  "When we think of the internet, we tend to picture a disembodied thing out in the air somewhere. In reality, it’s rooted in physical infrastructure: 99% of global internet traffic travels through 1.4 million kilometres of undersea cables, and that includes “the $10trn in daily financial transactions … which drive global markets”. Any damage to these cables thus poses a major threat to Western economies. And the bad news is that the risks of such damage are escalating. The main threat used to be natural disasters or accidents with ship anchors: now, increasingly, it’s acts of sabotage by hostile states, such as Russia. The prime target used to be pipelines – in 2022, the Baltic Nord Stream gas pipeline was sabotaged – today it’s undersea data cables. Sweden reported such an attack last year; Estonia has accused China of cutting two of its cables. Western leaders are reluctant to spend billions on back-up cables, as internet engineers urge them to do, because, apart from the cost, they’ll likely face resistance from companies such as Google, which invest heavily in such cables. But if we fail to ready ourselves for the era of seabed warfare, the West’s financial architecture will be left in jeopardy.

We keep looking for the good news, but some of it has been really awful lately, what with riots in the UK, horrible stories of sexual violence everywhere, fake news,  and political sleaze in the UK which seems not to have diseappeared with the change of government.  The Olympics were dragged in: "Prosecutors are investigating death threats made against the artistic director of the Paris Olympic Games opening ceremony, Thomas Jolly. The ceremony, staged on monuments and boats along the River Seine, was deplored by some religious leaders and conservative politicians for one section in particular – a bacchanalian scene featuring drag artists, which they mistook for a parody of Leonardo’s The Last Supper. Jolly, a well-known theatre director, says he has been sent hate messages, some in the form of death threats, reviling his sexuality (he is openly gay) and his “wrongly assumed Israeli origins”. Several threats sent to Jolly quoted a verse from the Koran and threatened “Allah’s punishment”. 

The Fête des Associations, an annual event in most French towns.  The voluntary sector is central to public affairs at every level.



Those who know me also know I have a particular feeling of sympathy with refugees.  I've written before about the book Bloody foreigners by Robert Winder, which is a classic view of l'étranger in Britain, something I return to read often.  He has just written in the Guardian: 

...there is a pattern stretching back to the 12th century....  Like everyone else, I gaped in dismay as rioting tore across the country... but as the reflexive search for the “root” or “underlying” cause gathered pace, I couldn’t help recalling the parable of the good sociologist.  In this parody of the Bible, when the traveller on the road to Jericho is assaulted, the first sociologist crosses the road and passes by on the other side. The second does the same. But the good sociologist rushes to the scene, cradles the victim’s head and weeps: “Boy, the person who did this needs help.”   The violence was the opposite of a laughing matter, but I groaned to see how swiftly it was taken to be symptomatic of a credible point of view.   Almost everyone was calling the stone-throwers “far-right protesters” or “Islamophobic” – as though name-calling might be enough make them come to their senses.  Surely this was giving them too much credit. It allowed them to style themselves as warriors for a cause instead of thugs. Worse, it walked into the Faragian trap of insisting that though the violence, yes, might be over the top, the grievances were understandable, and the conversation we really needed to have was about … immigration.

It wasn’t. The subject here was violence.This is not to say that immigration is trivial or a simple matter. It is neither. The Channel is being crossed by overcrowded boats. The government is having to spend up to £5bn a year on asylum seekers. That is inspiring enough culture-war friction to keep the thinktanks occupied for years. There are major policy discussions to be had in all these areas.  But it pained me to see what was obviously a criminal uproar so swiftly becoming a “debate”. Surely, if there is one thing we could agree on, it was the fact that it is wrong for someone halfway through a six-pack to be setting fire to someone’s car, in a town (not their own) where children have just been murdered, because someone on the internet has said something angry about someone else whose name they couldn’t remember.

Part of my twinge was selfish, down to the fact that some years ago I wrote a book that presented the age-old saga of migration to Britain (since the ice melted) not as a sociopolitical nightmare but as a natural part of human life – which happened to have enriched Britain greatly. I was mindful of Tolstoy’s observation that in all literature there were really only two stories: someone leaves home, or a stranger arrives in town.  But given that one of my hopes had been to pour oil on troubled waters, it looked as though I now had to admit – as flames lit up the night sky in Southport and Plymouth – that I had written the most unsuccessful book in the history of books.Except, perhaps, in one respect, because one of the main things I learned writing it was that angry summer uprisings against perceived outsiders are nothing new. Far from being a heated response to a modern problem, they are as entrenched a part of the English social scene as Ascot, Henley and the Lord’s Test.

Along with Robert Winder I have been reminded today of another favourite author, Lea Ypi, now a professor at the LSE but born in a dysfunctional Albania.  

One cold, late evening in the winter of 1999, I was waiting for a train at Termini station in Rome when I noticed an old lady struggling with her suitcases and offered to help. “Signorina,” her voice trembled ever so slightly. “Fortunately there are still youngsters like you. I was very worried. This station is full of Albanian muggers. It’s an invasion.”

Back then I had no courage to tell her I was Albanian. One of the lucky ones – a student on a scholarship, unlike my fellow citizens who worked as cleaners, builders, carers and sex workers. ...taken literally, the only invasion in the history of the two nations went the other way round. It happened in 1939, when Mussolini’s troops ...annexed the Albanian kingdom to the kingdom of Italy.

Keir Starmer has reportedly declared that the UK government is interested in a migration pact like the Albanian one. ...all that Britain needs for an equivalent deal is a former colony with a government whose memory is sharp enough to remember the roads and buildings its master constructed in the past century but not the human beings it exploited in the past few decades.... When the argument that we must “be pragmatic” is the first to be put on the table, principles – memory, responsibility, care for vulnerable people, you name it – have already been suspended.

How to oppose it, then? Perhaps by plain logic.  Migration deals such as the one Labour is apparently studying are premised on various assumptions: that migration itself is a problem, that irregular migration is best fought with draconian border restrictions, that extraterritorial detention can act as a deterrent. There is ample research showing each premise to be dubious. But even assuming they are valid, there are three further issues any “pragmatic” politician ought to confront.

Politically, the Albania model is presented as a novelty in the management of migratory flows because it involves cooperation between an EU candidate and an EU member state. ... [but this] leaves to bilateral negotiations what ought to come about as a result of an EU-wide process.... it creates a dangerous precedent in which individual countries pursue their own deals to address their own migration “problem”, heading off chances of a truly coordinated process acrossEurope.

Second, the principle of non-refoulment enshrined in the 1951 UN convention relating to the status of refugees, prohibits the expulsion or return of people to countries deemed unsafe. Meloni insists Albania is safe, citing its EU candidate status. But if that is the case, why are pregnant women, children and other vulnerable categories exempted from the deal?

Third, there is the economic question. To comply with international law, deported migrants must remain Italy’s responsibility. According to the agreement between Italy and Albania, Italy is responsible for all the costs of construction and management of the two centres...An irregular migrant in Albania costs Italy the same or more than they would if they were processed in their own territory. The only benefit is that migrants become invisible – lontano dagli occhi, lontano dal cuore, as the Italian saying goes.

We are told that Starmer’s government is pragmatic and interested in what works. But how can a “solution” that makes no logical sense from a political, legal and economic point of view still be considered “pragmatic”?

Perhaps there is only one plausible answer: propaganda. Labour clearly thinks it can send a message to the most right-leaning voters in its coalition that it too is tough on migrants. In doing this, it takes its liberal and leftwing supporters for granted. They may suspend their principles and forgive the rhetoric for a time. But the political, legal and economic contradictions will remain.




A quiet summer

By [email protected] (Jon North)

 

After the total immersion of the  Tour de France here in our household (bear in mind we were brushing up on our French comprehension as we watched with 100% French commentary for the first time, straining to hear snatches of English behind the interpreters' rapid translations of interview clips).  On reflection one of our highlights was the overall success of small nations  - Slovenia, Ecuador, Eritrea, Belgium on various podiums as well as the endless beauty of thr French (and initially Italian) countryside.  I didn't think the Olympics would have the same fascination for us, but we have enjoyed some amazing moments, and continue to improve our comprehension of spoken French from the tv coverage.  Simone Biles has been a revelation, recovering from disorientation 4 years ago to take triumphant gold medals.  They keep evoking the days of Korbut and Comaneci, but the fitness and tranining have gone along with higher ages - the 27 year old Biles would apparently have been called granny by other gymnasts a generation ago.

The Olympic cycling road races took place at the weekend - Evenepoel was a worthy winner of the men's race, and the women's race past the same splendid Paris lanscape was a really tight affair where once again favourites were a bit too busy looking at one another and the American Kristen Faulkner simply rode away from them to win nicely.  Elsewhere we learn more of the strange arts of hammer throwing and ping pong, and the always disappointing flops of the high jump, but celebrated the excellent win of Novak Djokovic, the last survivor of the old guard against the inevitable rise of the new generation in tennis - a first Thinese women champion and the impressive Alcaraz as the men's runner-up.  In the Olympics we have enjoyed some good moments including a world record pole vault and an uexcpected Botswanan spring victory - the end of the track eveents this weekend will be followed by the Women's cycle Tour - we still have not worked out how to follow the Vuelta on tv.


Meanwhile in the real world I read: 'now should be the 'silly season', that goofy time of year when the news is usually filled with trivial stories because everyone's on vacation and there's not much serious stuff happening.  But this year's silly season is insisting on being taken seriously, with a global market crash and the Middle East on the brink of war. In the UK, it's even grimmer, as racist attacks against asylum-seeker facilities have spread across cities, fuelled by online disinformation. "The worst wave of far-right violence in the UK post-war," wrote anti-extremism organisation HOPE not to hate.'  We find ourselves in a quiet if hot corner of the south of France, but the turmoil is never far away.


This blog began years ago with bulletins on my health, starting with a knee replacement which seems to be holding up.  The random pains I now have include arthritis (a bit in the othe rknee but I'll not have a further operation) tendinitis (which also bugs Mary at times) in one shoulder, muscular aches which the French oddly call courbature, otherwise raideur, and a bit of gout in foot joints, evident to my doctor who spots uric acid in the blood tests and counsels mildly against drinking too much.  All this is more or less tolerable wiht regular paracetamol plus some codeine and occasional ibuprofen which has to be prescribed here but is freely available over pharmacy counters in the UK so brought by visitors when needed.  All in all, with my daily exercise bike I cope well enough.  I am often reminded of the Sackler scandal and the widespread dependence on opoids 

As I write, I have just been to the dermatologist.  A small spot on the top of one ear turned out to  be pre-cancerous and is now being analysed - for the moment I have a dressing and stitches, and much less discomfort - I'll be able to sleep facing either way now.  Dermato appointments here are like hen's teeth, and I had to write a letter in my best French to get an appointment before November, but it is done.  Lab results in September when the holidays are over.  Of course sod's law says that medical difficulties usually happen at weekends or during the summer holidays.

in Marc & Flo's garden in Congénies

Summer heat here.  We keep daily temperature records, and are surprised to find that this year has been hotter than the last 2.  It has also been humid - here we have a seesaw between drier, (slightly) cooler northerly winds - Mistral and Tramontane - and the entrées maritimes, southerly winds usually laden with moisture and sometimes with Sahara sand!  Humidity obviously make it feel even more hotter, and our daytime maxima have been in the mid-30s since the middle of July while recent night temps have not been below 20°  Our house is relatively cool and we stay indoors a lot.  But the fires in the countryside have increased again, and sadly they are often caused by cigarette ends thrown from car windows

We have come to  like the French postal services.  Deliveries to the gate and its post box, not to the door, which avoids the dog bites post people in the UK suffer (not that we have biting dogs...).  But as in the UK (years ago someone found sacks of undelivered letters to Jim'll Fixit in a bin in Hampstead, grim memories of J Savile but lots of disappointed kids hoping for replies to their dreams) a recent story tells of a French postman who took 13,000 letters home at the end of his shifts.  The accused is set to appear in court in Vienne in January 2025, after the ‘mountain’ of undelivered post was discovered in his garage. The man now faces a fine of up to €45,000, and three years in jail.the accused had previously been a delivery driver for the Services-Courrier-Colis (parcel delivery) branch in the town of Bourgoin-Jallieu,  Ironically this crime toook place not far from the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval, a 19th century postman who buuilt a fantastic palace from stones he collected on his rounds - it is one of our favourite places to visit, in the north of the Drôme département.





As previously noted, our dear dog Edmond is nearing the end of his long life - 15 now, which is good going for a small dog.  He has been anaesthetised previously for removal of fluid because of  oedoema caused umtimately by a weakening heart, but that makes further interventions unadvisable and we keep him cheerful with titbits fed by hand - we are in constant touch with the escellent vets here.  The hot weather certainly does not help.  But he finds cool spots on the front doorstep and still seems alert when he is not sleeping!  As long as he is in good spirits and will eat something we shall continue to enjoy his company.


The 2 tortoises however are inn good health and eating lots of lettuce!  Mary says the older one senses her arrival by vibrations in the ground and races over to get his latest meal!

just out of hibernation (a year or two ago)






Heat, family and the Tour

By [email protected] (Jon North)



The Tour de France is in its 3rd and final week - this year exceptionally (because of the Olympics) not finishing in Paris.  We have followed the cyclists for years, and although we miss the British commentators we are enjoying the French ones - it is after all a French event.  We are getting used to Tadej Pogacar outpacing his rivals up steep mountains - his current nearest rival, the Dane Jonas Vingegaard, is never far behind, but this year I don't thing he will get in front.

The scenery in these broadcasts is always magnificent - helicopters and now, I guess, drones, provide views of landscape which we'd never have seen in earlier days, and the broadcasters take pride in interspersing shots of countryside and buildings among the pictures of the race.  Tuesday's stage from Gruissan to Nîmes was particularly enjoyable for us, including as it did shots of the Pic Saint Loup north of Montpellier and then the countryside from Montpellier through the Vaunage, all of which we knnow quite well.  This website has many excellent photos of the Pic Saint Loup by Régis Domergue, a local photographer we admire.


Yesterday too the Tour back into the Alps,with magnificent landscapes and a very confused field of breakaway groups.  These grand tour races can be confusing since overall winners are calculated by cumulative time, and those who are already well ahead as the race unfolds can ride in halfway down the day's arrivals but still be in the lead.  Yesterday there were a number of group battles ahead of the leaders, and the day's stage was well won by the Ecuadorean Richard Carapaz, who has had a long career in the peleton and was with Geraint Thomas in his heyday a few years ago.


Today's stage

A good friend wondered recently why we chosse such a hot place to live.  I think, despite sometimes high temperatures, what I really love is the light, and the skies.  Since I'm often awake early I can experience light without too much heat.  This summer, to be fair, is not nearly as hot as the past 2, though they say there will be afternoons in the mid-30s this week.  We are fortunate in any case to have a house that keeps relatively cool even on hot days without the need to air conditioning, and the nights are pleasantly warm, not often stifling.  The only really cool place in the house is the wine store, whose cooling is highly efficient (and produces quantities of mineral-free water excellent for plants and for the ironing!

We have just enjoyed a short visit from our son Ed, his partner Karen, our granddaughter Isla and her boyfriend Ben who coped splendidly with new people (he'd just met Ed and Karen for the first time as they travelled over).  They were all pllunged in at the deep end with a wine tasting meal in Luc's lovely garden near Aigues Mortes, and a good time was had by all I think





Agapanthus in our garden

Voting and things

By [email protected] (Jon North)


This is election time - double whammy for us since we are still in a whirl from Thursday, and this weekend is the tense second round in the French partliamentary elections.

But I must start today by saying that I've just heard that my friend and ex-boss David Lawtey died this month.  With no exaggeration, he was oneof the most important influences in my life, in my work in  the Notts voluntary sector above all.  He was one of the fairly few people in my life who was a confirmed Conservative - goodness knows what he made of the recent chaos in British political life - and he also helped me to understand the positive qualities of a political allegiance I mostly find it hard to sympathise with.  His decency and uprightness were a huge support to me, especially at difficult moments at the end  of my career.

The personal things I take away from the British election results include some astonishing results - Henley-on-Thames which I'd got to know as a teenager switching from Conservative for the first time since 1906! (my old home area of Chesham & Amersham had already caused a big ripple in a by-election);  Rushcliffe (Kenneth Clarke's old constituency) in Notts, where I spent nearly 25 years at work falling to Labour.  The horrible muddle in Ashfield (Lee Anderson changed parties 4 times I think, Labour via tory to the far right) caused Mary and I who had worked there to raise a lot of eyebrows.  Nationally the early reports of ministerial appointments and cabinet strategy are encouraging - Rwanda is instantly abandoned the new PM is well-equipped to understand the crisis in the prison service.  Above all I hope that the changes now will bring principle back into politics, and as an ardent champion of social justice and fairness I have hopes that the new regime will uphold these in redistributing resources to those who need them most.  Early signs are encouraging.

The French situation is much less certain, though tactical withdrawals of candidates in triangular contests reduced the risks.  As I write a heated discussion is happening on the tv following the announcement of the results, no clear majority for anyone but a 3-way split.  Time will tell how this will play out but the right has been edged away from a parliamentary majority.  We have no vote here, and the President will have to work with a parliament which is equally far from his position on left and right.  I feel relief and a sense that the 2-round system and hastily formed alliances seem to have done their job.  The best stimate of the final result is below.




Domestically things are fairly quiet for us.  Edmond the dog is not very well, rather wheezy despite medication against fluid on the lungs and slow to show interest in food this weekend, but at 15 he is often  lively and walks OK, snoozing a lot in between whiles.  The weather is finally getting really warm but still not approaching the heatwaves of the last couple of years.

We have long been avid followers of the Tour de France, which is just entering its second week.  Tadej Pogacar has shown his class in pushing to the top of the  leader board and of the first serious mountain, and Mark Cavendish also shone with his record 35th stage win.  The scenery in Italy (where the Tour began) was wonderful, and since then we have seen part of France we've got to know quite well around the Savoie area and in Burgundy. This Sunday has stretches of gravel along the route, complicating things for the leaders as well as everyone else.  A black Eritrean cyclist, Biniam Girmay, is leading the points (sprint) competition by a distance, excellent for black sport.


Our French language groups continue to be important weekly markers in our lives, enhanced in summer by meeting outside in people's gardens.

Like other cars we have had our current Dacia Lodgy is rather dented from a collision with a long lorry on a roundabout - happily no serious damage.

As I started to write this Kiri te Kanawa, who is 80, was the guest on Tom Service's Saturday morning programme on Radio 3.  Her Countess in Figaro was an all-time classic role - wonderful. To finish a few photos of Marc & Flo's garden and one of some musical fishknoves - they actually work for 4-part harmony!












Midsummer

By [email protected] (Jon North)

   
 Poor Edmond has had a rough time lately, and the other day the vet drained a litre of fluid from his chest - his liver has long been struggling.  We'll  keep going with and for him as long as we can, but he is not always interested in  eating despite Mary's tempting food.  He has had a good run, and at 15 has survived well, but we shall see if the aftermath of this latest operation works out.  It seems possible that he will be our last dog - I would struggle with ayounger, more active animal though we never say never - and we are keen to make his life as comfortable as possible.

The glow of midsummer twilight, looking north from our house
   

These past few weeks have also been eventful in our garden, and in France with the continuing drift to the right across much of Europe and national elections here now imminent.  An anxious wait to see if the French electoral system is shock-proof.

 
          
We have just lost another tree - a dead pine.  Above is the garden a few years ago (Evie, our Norwich terrier, in shot), below M. Beaumann gradually demolishing the tree.

After the event - piles of wood neatly stacked up with more logs to follow when the trunks is split and sawn in a week or two.  Plenty of light but lots of trees and bamboo still around for shade and interest, especially when the bamboo sways in the wind.

 We have also had the pleasure of , a long weekend visit from Jeff and Fi - others of the family will follow over the summer.



 

The two  tortoises seem to be in good shape and get through a lot of lettuce!




Early June

By [email protected] (Jon North)


As summer warmth arrives, we look forward to family visits, and continue to read and listen to podcasts.

My love of reading goes way back - Just William and Arthur Ransome when young, phases of Victorian classics more recently, often linked to television adaptations.  As time passes I often gravitate to stories linked to real events, for example Snow falling on cedars  by David Guterson.  Its background is the exclusion of  Japanese Americans from the US in the fevered atmosphere following Pearl Harbour.  Listening to a fascinating podcast series  History's secret heroes on BBC Radio 4 brought this vividly back - the direct experience of families suffering such devastating treatment - displacement and internment in awful camps - was only partly mitigated by the later compensation and apologies of American administrations (a bit of a contrast, all the same, to the recent frequent and reluctant acknowledgement of maladministration and mistreatment of people in the UK).

On the similar theme, paraoia leading to unjust treatment of racial minorities in wartime, I've recently discovered Eva Ibbotson, whose novels (with admittedly romantic themes) strike chords for me with music, Austrian and Jewish threads.  The last I read, twice now, is A song for summer in which among other things a man, an eminent musician called Marek,  with Czech origins, ends up interned on the Isle of Man as some of my good friends were .  An extraordinary collection of human beings - members of the Amadeus Quartet were among those rumoured to have met there, and the internment camps also featured on a podcast we've just listened to - so I think it's worth quoting at length from this well-written account:

The poor British, waiting for invasion, standing alone against Hitler, succumbed not to panic, for that was not in their nature, but to paranoia. Nazis disguised as parachuting nuns were reported daily; old ladies with a chink in their blackout curtains were taken away for questioning – and now, in an act of madness, they began to round up and imprison just those ‘enemy aliens’ who had the most to fear from Hitler and Mussolini, and who had been engaged in the fight against Fascism while high-ranking British diplomats were still taking tea with the Führer and admiring the fact that the trains ran on time. Austrian and German professors were hauled out of lecture rooms, doctors out of hospitals, students out of libraries, told they could pack one suitcase and taken away by the police. Italian shopkeepers, German bakers who had spent years in Britain, disappeared within an hour, weeping and bewildered. Spy mania was everywhere; even one traitor among the thousands of innocent refugees could not be tolerated. The camps they were taken to were not in fact concentration camps, the Tommies who guarded them were no Storm Troopers, but the bewilderment and anguish, particularly among older refugees, was appalling. Leon [another character in Ibbotson's book] happened to be at home when two policemen came for his father. He lied about his age... and was taken to an internment camp consisting of a large number of seaside boarding houses on the Isle of Man.

The views of the landladies evicted from their villas – from Bay View and Sunnydene and Resthaven – are not recorded. Forced to leave behind their garden gnomes, their monkey puzzles and brass plates offering Bed and Breakfast, they were replaced by rolls of barbed wire, observation towers and iron gates. Facing the sea but unable to reach it, cut off from all news of the outside world, the inmates wandered about, guarded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, trying to understand the nightmare that had enveloped them. Housed in villas stripped of everything except camp beds and a few cooking utensils, the men assembled each morning for roll call and the rations which they had no idea how to cook. And each day more confused ‘enemy aliens’ arrived – Nobel Laureates, old men with diabetes, social democrats who had been tortured in the prisons of the Reich and had come to Britain as to Mecca or Shangri La.

Although it was obvious to even the thickest British Tommy that Hitler, if he had been relying on these men for spies, would have little hope of winning the war, the net which produced such a strange catch did just occasionally dredge up a genuine Nazi. When this happened, the results were unfortunate. Immolated in boarding houses with at least a dozen Jews whose suffering at the hands of the Nazis had been unspeakable, a man polishing his boots and saying that Hitler would soon overrun Britain did not have a happy life. He was refused his rations, ostracised, the blankets stolen from his bed. Most of them capitulated and learnt to hold their tongues, but one of them, a handsome blond young man called Erich Unterhausen, continued each morning to polish his boots, give the Nazi salute and say, ‘Heil Hitler!’ At least he did until a rainy morning in late July when he flew suddenly out of the first-floor window of Mon Repos, bounced off a privet bush, and landed on a flower bed planted with crimson salvias and purple aubretia. He was not hurt, only bruised, which was a pity, but the news, spreading quickly through the camp, was regarded by the inmates as the first glimmer of light since the fall of France. Needless to say, the perpetrator of this brutality was immediately marched off to the camp commandant in his office, where he admitted his guilt and was entirely unrepentant. ‘If you don’t get rid of people like Unterhausen you’ll have a murder on your hands,' he said, confusing the commandant with his flawless English. ‘Rounding up accredited Nazis with these people is madness. You know perfectly well who the real Nazis are in this camp – I’ve only been here a day but I can tell you: Schweger in Sunnydene, Pischinger in that place with the blue pottery cat – and the chap I threw out of the window. He’s the only one who could possibly be a spy, and the sooner he’s in a proper prison the better – anyone worth their salt could signal from here. As for Schweger, he’s in with some hotheads from the Jewish Freedom Movement and they’re starving him to death.’

Thank you for telling me my business,’ said the commandant, and was disconcerted by an entirely friendly smile from the tall, broad-shouldered man with the scar on his forehead. He looked down at the papers that had come with the prisoner. ‘You say you’re a Czech.’ ‘I don’t say I am; I am,’ said the prisoner unruffledly. ‘So what are you doing here? The Czechs are our allies.’ Marek was silent. The Czechs might be allies now, but before, at Munich, they had been betrayed. ‘Your name is German.’ ‘Yes. I came over in a fishing boat; we were strafed and capsized outside Dover. I got concussion. Apparently I spoke German to the dogs.’ ‘The dogs?’ ‘There was a whole compound of stray dogs which the Tommies had smuggled out of France when they were taken off at Dunkirk – you’ve never heard such a racket. They put my stretcher down beside a big black and tan pointer. My father’s hunting dogs were always trained in German and when I came round –’ He shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter about me; they’ll sort it out. I’m quite glad to be out of the way till the Czechoslovak Air Force reassembles. But Unterhausen must go, and the other Nazis – and old Professor Cohen must go to hospital – the one who stands by the barbed wire and gets his beard caught. He’s very eminent and very ill – if he dies there’ll be questions asked. They’re being asked already in Parliament and elsewhere.’

Is there anything else you’d like to tell us?’ sneered the second in command, a brash young lieutenant, but the commandant frowned him down. A humane man, he knew full well that he was caught up in one of those administrative muddles that happens in war and can claim lives. It was to him that Marek spoke. ‘Most of the people in here understand what has happened – that there was bound to be confusion after the French surrendered, that we’ve got mixed up with the parachuting nuns and that it won’t go on for ever. But not all of them. There have been two suicides in one of the other camps, as you no doubt know. This whole business – interning the people who have most of all to fear from Hitler – is going to be a pretty discreditable episode in retrospect. What’s more, if Hitler does invade, you’ve made it nice and easy for him, corralling all the Jews and the anti-Nazis together so he doesn’t have to go looking.’ ‘... the internees (from whom all news of the outside world was forbidden) ... [saved] the newspapers that came wrapped round their ration of kippers... [to] keep in touch with the stock exchange.

Other familiar faces now appeared in the throng: the erstwhile flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic; a copying clerk from the office of Universal Editions; Marek’s old tailor from the Kärntnerstrasse . . . and all the time more people appeared, overjoyed by the news of Unterhausen’s fate. But Marek did not intend to waste too much time on swapping stories – . ‘There’s a piano locked in the basement of the Palm Court Hotel,’ he said. ‘We can have it. It’ll have to be moved into some kind of hall or shed – anything. We’re going to give a concert.’ ‘Of what?'‘There’s only one answer to that, don’t you think?’ ‘Johann Sebastian Bach,’ said the flautist. Marek nodded. ‘Exactly so.’ For a moment he raised his eyes to heaven, seeking guidance not so much from God (whose musicality was not well documented) as from his erstwhile representative on earth, the Kapellmeister of Leipzig.


I have been musing why my sympathy and emotions are so strongly stirred by such injustice - after all, I have had a comfortable life in entirely British surroundings give or take a splash of Quakerism and some marvellous friends as role models, but that is how it is and I shall continue to be drawn by underdog tales.

This has turned out to be  a single subject blog, but the accompanyjng pictures are the usual mixture from daily life!





A roundup

By [email protected] (Jon North)


 Sometimes there are carpets of poppies everywhere, this year fewer but this field right next to our car servicing garage kept catching my eye and I caught it just in time while Mary booked the car in for its service.  This post will be a bit of a roundup of things I have posted on Facebook.

A while back I wrote about the plight of migrants and someone thought I might have been referring to our situation.  Of course not - we are incrdibly lucky to have landed on our feet after Brexit thanks to a very fair-minded French government and bureaucracy.  But I am ever more angry and concerned about people who have gone through unimaginable hardships to reach France and the UK, and then find in the UK at least that they are vilified and stranded.  I have been reading the various writings of Sathnam  Sanghera whose disssection of Britains imperial past is trenchant.

His autobiographical The boy with the topknot is among other things a powerful reflection on mental illness in his family; our own experienceshave echos here, and among other things his description of the slow realisation that things are wrong, attempting to rationalise the painful, is something we have known.  I have been fascinated also to see a bit from the inside the experiences of Sikh immigrants to Britain and their cultural context, including marriage exepctations and the complex place of women in his stories.  His novel Marriage material is an excellent read.

Before I pass on to lighter topics, the ongoing inhumaanity of the various refugee themes in the news is not the only awful and distressing thing we hear of and read about daily - the plight of British subpost-people wrongly prosecuted by the Post Office because of long-denied computer problems, the infected blood scandal or the plight of carers forced to pay back benefit overpayments (this links closely to my lontime work with carers through Crossroads) and the ongoing inhumanity around post-war immigrants (from the Windrush etc.) are only somr examples of things which should havce been sorted out long ago but have been swept under bureauratic carpets again and again.  I have often said that Dickens and his Circumlocution Office (in Little Dorrit) seem still  alive and well.  Apart from deliberate inhumanity, there are plenty of ways of mistreating people through shoulder-shrugging neglect - Dickens' "nobody knew" is classic now as then.

Our houshold chugs on, looking forward to a family visit here in a fortnight.  We are daily grateful for Edmond's liveliness at the age of 15!  After a thorough overhaulof the roof, more complex than we had expected, our friendly factotum M.Beaumann has continued his care of our premises with a splendid cleanup of yard and terrace and is now starting on a new front fence.  IN the caourse of this he has discovered some very ancient (well, as old as the house, around 50 years) mains electrical wiring which is still all too live.  A better casing and leaving well alone are the answers.  And our lawnmower is finally going to be cordless!

Lots of my Facebook posts are links to photos published daily in the Guardian, plus th odd cartoon that takes my fancy.  Also photos from French places we know well - the area around the Pic Saint Loup, other parts of our local Languedoc, and the Drôme where our old twin town Die is located, for example.

A night shot of the Pic Saint Loup with boar passing by
by an excellent local photographer, Régis Domergue

Although we have limited opportunity to watch sport on tv (Mary andn I are both gravitating more to radio and podcasts these days - for her it makes knitting easier!) we follow football and cycling keenly at least by results and reports, and I am fascinated to see that Liverpool have appointed another monosyllabic manager, Mr Slot (Arne), to replace the excellent Klopp (Jürgen).

Our language groups (reading and speaking in French with some French people trying their English) continue twice a week, with often excellent shared lunches thrown in - as the weather warms up we can start to  eat outside.

             

We read a lot - among authors we both enjoy are Eva Ibbotson, whose romantic novels with strong links to her Austrian background are beautifully written and full of well-observed characters; and an old favourite, Sara Paretsky whose V.I.Warshawski novels set in Chicago and around.  Sara Paretsky is an avid campaigner for women, and her fearless public profile is simply admirable.

To end, a cartoon and another poppy




Sagas all round

By [email protected] (Jon North)


Sagas have been on my mind in several ways since Easter.  But first, exciting times in the tortoise world.  We were given a new (to us) young one a few weeks ago, and he had been living in a cage inside until the weather warmed.  It has now done so and today the larger tortoise emerged from its hibernation in the enclosure in the garden.  I thought its was a lump of mud at first bat, as you can see, it has scrubbed up nicely and the younger one has joined it in the paddock!




The first saga has been of the literary kind, the Forsytes which have occupied our dvd viewing and my re-reading for the first part of the year.  My name, Jon, was chosen by my dad (who was emotionally attached to the books) because of the young man Jon, the youngest Jolyon of the family.  I think my father was rather muddled because he also professed an admiration for the 'man of property' epitomised by Soames who was on the 'other side' of the family.  Never mind, the story was worth reading again, and the two tv productions  are both good in theier different ways.   But the third part of the 9 volumes, going up almost to Galsworthy's death in the early 1930s, were never dramatised as far as I know and I like them even better than the Victorian and Edwardian ones - a much more nuanced examination of love and marriage, with a dramatic view of mental illness thrown in.


Two less welcome 'sagas' lately have been to do with roof and health, both happily resolved.  You'll recall perhaps that the roof was repaired last year by a firm which promised excellence and, as we thought, delivered it.  It turned out that what they did not do was the issue - first neglecting to tell us of very old insulation which we've now had replaced, and secondly failing to fix any but the end tile in a whole ridge.  Of course we could have no idea that there were problems - in the second case the rattling of tiles in the wind (after a long period of fairly calm weather) told us sometehing was amiss; and luckily our regular house and garden person Monsieur Beaumann was able to sort both.  It turns out that he has long been a roof specialist - if only we had known...

Our conversation groups still active, with new arrivals from Chicago




The health saga is not, for once, my various aches and pains but the long-running one of Mary's heart and blood (since a minor stroke in 2010), very well surveyed but needing careful supervision.  Not for the first time we have been glad of the very local A&E hospital, all built since we came here.  In the past week the care has involved feeet up and suppport stockings which are too hot for comfort when the weather warms up.

The warm srping is a lovely time for flowers, so here are a few more from our garden.






And finally a word of praise for one of the few bits of the British administration that actually seems to work.  With luck and a following wind my new passport should arrive soon, and like Mary's it was efficiently and quickly dealt with despite Brexit horror stories elsewhere.






 

Springtime with rain

By [email protected] (Jon North)

I have written before about the dry conditions here.  But when it rains it really does.  Last week we had 60 mm in a few hours, and another 40 at the weekend, but this morning we are back to bright sunshine and blue skies.  The photo above was taken a few days ago, a pink evening sky which we see quite often.


We have been a bit concerned about Edmond, 14 years old and with dodgy kidneys.  But we've just returned from the vet, and all seems to be fairly well after a blood test and with a bit more diuretic - desmite occasional wheezes, he is lively and has put on a bit of weight.  We hope he will be with us for a little whhile yet.

After our trips to the UK we have mostly stayed home and slotted back into our regular activities.  These photos of our regular Tuesday French conversation group were taken by someone elsse for once, so I'm in one or two!

After a good excursion on DVD into the works of Mrs Gaskell we have passed onto John Galsworthy, not just through 2 tv series of the Forsyte Saga but, for me, rereading the books.  I started on the paper versions but have passed over to the Kindle (lighter to hold in bed).  The Forsytes have a particular association for me because I was called after Jon, son of young Jolyon F.  My father pretended to admire the 'Man of Propeerty' characterised by Soames but much about Dad seems to me to have been nearer the softer, more emotional other side of the family, the Jolyons and their ilk.  Rereading for the 4th or 5th time I find much in the detail of the written version which can only be hinted at in a tv adaptation, and in the end it is the characters of Soames and his daughter Fleur which dominate the first 6 of the 9 books in the saga.  Of the final 3, which are far less well-known, I may write more anon.

Since we returned from the UK for the second time this year, we had one very enjoyable outing to see our friend Barry who lives in these rural surroundings in the area called the Laurargais south-east of Toulouse.  Barry is South African in origin but had long re-acclimatised to England where I met him in the Canonbury Chamber Choir in the 1970s.  He and his partner Peter (now sadly no longer alive) moved to France with their interest in antiques, and the house is a living reminder of those interests.  

A few garden pittures to end with.  Spring is with us, and the clocks go forward this weekend.





Home and more or less in good shape

By [email protected] (Jon North)

 

The light greeting our return

It is lovely to be back in the bright, light Languedoc.  Don't get me wrong, we had a very good trip (apart from the first few hours when the motorways here were closed by prefectoral decree, because of farmers' protests - 5 hours to get near Lyon then a speeding fine for going 8 km/hr too fast in our relief at escaping the jams).  We spent excellent days with our family, saw interesting things and ate and drank well.  Our return trip, despite threats of farmers' blockages) was calm and trouble-free.  We have established a simple, untiring driving routine, turn and turn about at the wheel with short breaks for fuel and snacks, and the hotels we used were convenient and reasonably comfortable.  

But on return our  wifi was (literally) on the blink, and we waited 3 days for the engineer to arrive.  The new world of telephones, internet, tv and radio has changed everyting.  Like most people, a few years ago we had a fixed telephone line through which an adequate internet connection could be made.  Then fibre arrived, and everything became much faster.  Above all, the internet require more and more capacity to keeep up with graphics and so on.  Now, everything comes in theory through the fibre-optic cable, much faster - if it works.  If not, there is no longer a fixed phone line, no internet and only the old tv signals via the aerial (if they work at all - I have not checked).  The tv satellite dish no longer works for British tv.  I am a sad old geezer who has not taken on board the brave new world of mobile phones which our children and theirs swear by.  For one thing the screens are too small - I love my iPad and computer whhich my old eyes can read.  And of course, we pay for the service we are not getting.

Goodbye to Jeff and Fi at the end of a marvellous week together

Since I started to write this a very helpful man arrived, fixed up our internet and left before we had a chance to make sure our phone line was working.  It was not and is not.  So now we decide whether to abandon our 'landline' phones and tell everyone to call on our mobiles, or try to get things straight  for the time being it's the mobiles or nowt.  Watch this space, as they say.  Above all,  do not phone 04 67 85 52 12 - you may leave a message which is never heard.

Until we arrived home, the only shock of our return trip was seeing the appalling mess strewn across the roundabout as we left the A9 here  for the main N113 road.  At the risk of being a serial moaner, I was shocked by the piles of rubbish left behind by the protestors.  I think we have always been in favour of fair prices for farmers - we enjoy good food and have the privilege to be able to pay for it.  So I support the agriculteurs in their demands for better conditions, and for proper rewards for local produce rather than cheap imports.  we love our local greengrocer who knows his local growers personally and guarantees freshness.  I just cannot understand why protestors should not clear up their mess.  We saw the final traces being bulldozed and shovelled away as we drove around yeterday, presumably a week or more since the first demos.  A lot of work for people not at all involved in the original  protests.



Anyway, this blog was among other things a way of sharing the odd notes I post on Facebook most days with you who do not use that dodgy medium.  Here are a few recent ones.   Letter to the Guardian: “I am grateful to His Maj for his encouragement to men to have the check (King Charles ‘doing well’ after prostate treatment, 26 January). I visited my GP and was examined, blood-tested and referred to my local NHS hospital in March 2022. I have now waited 22 months for an appointment. And waited etc. Of what exactly is he an example? (John Dinning, Cardiff)”

Another letter to the Guardian: ”Your article on a reproduction of the Bayeux tapestry (29 January) should have mentioned the copy in Reading Museum, sewn by 35 women from Leek in the 19th century. It’s beautifully exhibited in the lovely town hall, with free entry. (Plus older Londoners can travel there on their Freedom Pass on the Elizabeth line.) A great day out. (Rosie Boughton, London)”

And part of yet another letter to the Guardian, which rings strong bells: “…the huge issue for me, and many other drivers according to recent RAC research, is the dangerous dazzling effect of higher, brighter LED lights. I am an older driver, and acknowledge this is likely to impact on my night driving, but my optician has assured me that it’s not me, it’s the cars. I find night-time driving, if there is a lot of oncoming traffic, utterly terrifying, and feel trapped at home on winter evenings. It’s time for a close analysis of accidents attributed to dazzle, and legislation to ensure the safest possible headlight design and position. (Sheila Hutchins,Tregony, Cornwall)”


This on my mind very often: the face of local decline and fall. “Many councils are barely able to carry out their statutory and growing responsibilities in adult and child social care, let alone engage in the kind of “discretionary” spending that enhances the life of their communities. Last week, facing a rebellion by Conservative MPs fearful of further cuts in an election year, Mr Gove made an extra £600m available to local authorities. Useful but nowhere near enough.” The sign of timid, scared central government is to keep ever tighter central control over local spending.

Then, Jurgen Klopp is retiring as Liverpool manager - what a loss, but we all get older - he certainly deserves the rest of his life.  And Nottingham is among many local councils nearing bankruptcy - how can this be alowed to happen?



Photos from our travels

By [email protected] (Jon North)

More from our UK trip this week, at the Yorkshire Sculpture Parrk and in Uttoxeter


















on neuschwanstein castle (part 1)

This is an essay in two parts.

Neuschwanstein Concept Drawing by the stage designer (!!) Christian Jank (1869).

There exist in architecture clear precedents to the McMansion that have nothing to do with suburban real estate. This is because “McMansionry” (let’s say) has many transferable properties. Among them can be included: 1) a diabolical amount of wealth that must be communicated architecturally in the most frivolous way possible, 2) a penchant for historical LARPing primarily informed by media (e.g. the American “Tuscan kitchen”) and 3) the execution of historical styles using contemporary building materials resulting in an aesthetic affect that can be described as uncanny or cheap-looking. By these metrics, we can absolutely call Neuschwanstein Castle, built by the architect Eduard Riedel for King Ludwig II of Bavaria, a McMansion.

Constructed from 1869 through 1886 – the year of Ludwig’s alleged suicide after having been ousted and declared insane – the castle cost the coffers of the Bavarian state and Ludwig himself no fewer than 6.2 million German gold marks. (That’s an estimated 47 million euros today.) The castle’s story is rife with well-known scandal. I’m sure any passing Swan Enthusiast is already familiar with Ludwig’s financial capriciousness, his called-off marriage and repressed homosexuality, his parasocial obsession with Richard Wagner, his complete and total inability to run his country, and his alleged “madness,” as they used to call it. All of these combine to make Neuschwanstein inescapable from the man who commissioned it – and the artist who inspired it. Say what you like about Ludwig and his building projects, but he is definitely remembered because of them, which is what most monarchs want. Be careful what you wish for.

Neuschwanstein gatehouse.

How should one describe Neuschwanstein architecturally? You’d need an additional blog. Its interiors alone (the subject of the next essay) range from Neo-Baroque to Neo-Byzantine to Neo-Gothic. There are many terms that can loosely define the palace’s overall style: eclecticism, medieval revivalism, historicism, chateauesque, sclerotic monarchycore, etc. However, the the most specific would be what was called “castle Romanticism” (Burgenromantik). The Germans are nothing if not literal. Whatever word you want to use, Neuschwanstein is such a Sistine Chapel of pure sentimentality and sugary kitsch that theme park architecture – most famously, Disney’s Cinderella’s castle itself – owes many of its medieval iterations to the palace’s towering silhouette.

There is some truth to the term Burgenromantik. Neuschwanstein’s exterior is a completely fabricated 19th century storybook fantasy of the Middle Ages whose precedents lie more truthfully in art for the stage. As a castle without fortification and a palace with no space for governance, Neuschwanstein’s own program is indecisive about what it should be, which makes it a pretty good reflection of Ludwig II himself. To me, however, it is the last gasp of a monarchy whose power will be totally extinguished by that same industrial modernity responsible for the materials and techniques of Neuschwanstein’s own, ironic construction.

In order to understand Neuschwanstein, however, we must go into two subjects that are equally a great time for me: 19th century medievalism - the subject of this essay - and the opera Lohengrin by Richard Wagner, the subject of the next. (1)

Part I: Medievalisms Progressive and Reactionary

The Middle Ages were inescapable in 19th century Europe. Design, music, visual art, theater, literature, and yes, architecture were all besotted with the stuff of knights and castles, old sagas, and courtly literature. From arch-conservative nationalism to pro-labor socialism, medievalism’s popularity spanned the entire political spectrum. This is because it owes its existence to a number of developments that affected the whole of society.

In Ludwig’s time, the world was changing in profound, almost inconceivable ways. The first and second industrial revolutions with their socioeconomic upheavals and new technologies of transport, manufacturing, and mass communication, all completely unmade and remade how people lived and worked. This was as true of the average person as it was of the princes and nobles who were beginning to be undermined by something called “the petit bourgeoisie.”

Sustenance farming dwindled and wage labor eclipsed all other forms of working. Millions of people no longer able to make a living on piecemeal and agricultural work flocked to the cities and into the great Molochs of factories, mills, stockyards, and mines. Families and other kinship bonds were eroded or severed by the acceleration of capitalist production, large wars, and new means of transportation, especially the railroad. People became not only alienated from each other and from their labor in the classical Marxist sense but also from the results of that labor, too. No longer were chairs made by craftsmen or clothes by the single tailor – unless you could afford the bespoke. Everything from shirtwaists to wrought iron lamps was increasingly mass produced - under wretched conditions, too. Things – including buildings – that were once built to last a lifetime became cheap, disposable, and subject to the whimsy of fashion, sold via this new thing called “the catalog.”

William Morris’ painting Le Belle Iseult (1868).

Unsurprisingly, this new way of living and working caused not a little discontent. This was the climate in which Karl Marx wrote Capital and Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol. More specific to our interests, however, is a different dissenter and one of the most interesting practitioners of medievalism, the English polymath William Morris.

A lover of Arthurian legend and an admirer of the architect and design reformer John Ruskin, Morris was first trained in the office of architect G. E. Street, himself a die-hard Gothic Revivalist. From the very beginning, the Middle Ages can be found everywhere in Morris’ work, from the rough-hewn qualities of the furniture he helped design to the floral elements and compositions of the art nouveau textiles and graphics he’s most famous for – which, it should be said, are reminiscent of 15th century English tapestries. In addition to his design endeavors, Morris was also a gifted writer and poet. His was a profound love for medieval literature, especially Norse sagas from Iceland. Some of these he even translated including the Volsunga Saga – also a preoccupation of Wagner’s. Few among us earn the title of polymath, but Morris’ claim to it is undeniable. Aside from music, there really wasn’t any area of creative life he didn’t touch.

However, Morris’ predilection for the medieval was not just a personal and aesthetic fascination. It was also an expression of his political rejection of the capitalist mode of production. As one of the founders of the English Arts & Crafts Movement, Morris called for a rejection of piecemeal machine labor, a return to handicraft, and overall to things made well and made with dignity. While this was and remains a largely middle class argument, one that usually leads down the road of ethical consumption, Morris was right that capitalism’s failing of design and architecture did not just lie with the depreciated quality of goods, but the depreciated quality of life. His was the utopian call to respect both the object and the laborer who produced it. To quote from his 1888 essay called “The Revival of Architecture,” Morris dreamed of a society that “will produce to live and not live to produce, as we do.” Indeed, in our current era of AI Slop, there remains much to like about the Factory Slop-era call to take back time from the foreman’s clock and once more make labor an act of enjoyable and unalienated creativity. Only now it’s about things like writing an essay.

I bother to describe Morris at length here for a number of reasons. The first is to reiterate that medievalism’s popularity was largely a response to socioeconomic changes. Additionally, since traditionalism - in Ludwig’s time and in ours - still gets weaponized by right-wing losers, it’s worth pointing out that not all practitioners of medievalism were politically reactionary in nature. However – and I will return to this later – medievalism, reactionary or not, remains inescapably nostalgic. Morris is no exception. While a total rejection of mass produced goods may seem quixotic to us now, when Morris was working, the era before mass industrialization remained at the fringes of living memory. Hence the nostalgia is perhaps to be expected. Unfortunately for him and for us, the only way out of capitalism is through it.

To return again to the big picture: whether one liked it or not, the old feudal world was done. Only its necrotic leftovers, namely a hereditary nobility whose power would run out of road in WWI, remained. For Ludwig purposes, it was a fraught political time in Bavaria as well. Bavaria, weird duck that it was, remained relatively autonomous within the new German Reich. Despite the title of king, Ludwig, much to his chagrin - hence the pathetic Middle Ages fantasizing - did not rule absolutely. His was a constitutional monarchy, and an embattled one at that. During the building of Neuschwanstein, the king found himself wedged between the Franco-Prussian War and the political coup masterminded by Otto von Bismarck that would put Europe on the fast track to a global conflict many saw as the atavistic culmination of all that already violent modernity. No wonder he wanted to hide with his Schwans up in the hills of Schwangau.

The very notion of a unified German Reich (or an independent Kingdom of Bavaria) was itself indicative of another development. Regardless if one was liberal or conservative, a king, an artist or a shoe peddler, the 19th century was plagued by the rise of modern nationalism. Bolstered by new ideas in “medical” “science,” this was also a racialized nationalism. A lot of emotional, political, and artistic investment was put into the idea that there existed a fundamentally German volk, a German soil, a German soul. This, however, was a universalizing statement in need of a citation, with lots of political power on the line. Hence, in order to add historical credence to these new conceptions of one’s heritage, people turned to the old sources.

Within the hallowed halls of Europe’s universities, newly minted historians and philologists scoured medieval texts for traces of a people united by a common geography and ethnicity as well as the foundations for a historically continuous state. We now know that this is a problematic and incorrect way of looking at the medieval world, a world that was so very different from our own. A great deal of subsequent medieval scholarship still devotes itself to correcting for these errors. But back then, such scholarly ethics were not to be found and people did what they liked with the sources. A lot of assumptions were made in order to make whatever point one wanted, often about one’s superiority over another. Hell, anyone who’s been on Trad Guy Deus Vult Twitter knows that a lot of assumptions are still made, and for the same purposes.(2)

Meanwhile, outside of the academy, mass print media meant more people were exposed to medieval content than ever before. Translations of chivalric romances such as Wolfgang von Eschenbach’s Parzival and sagas like the Poetic Edda inspired a century’s worth of artists to incorporate these characters and themes into their work. This work was often but of course not always nationalistic in character. Such adaptations for political purposes could get very granular in nature. We all like to point to the greats like William Morris or Richard Wagner (who was really a master of a larger syncretism.) But there were many lesser attempts made by weaker artists that today have an unfortunate bootlicking je nais se quoi to them.

I love a minor tangent related to my interests, so here’s one: a good example of this nationalist granularity comes from Franz Grillparzer’s 1823 pro-Hapsburg play König Ottokars Glück und Ende, which took for its source a deep cut 14th century manuscript called the Styrian Rhyming Chronicle, written by Ottokar Aus Der Gaul. The play concerns the political intrigue around King Ottokar II of Bohemia and his subsequent 1278 defeat at the hands of Grillparzer’s very swagged out Rudolf of Habsburg. Present are some truly fascinating but extremely obscure characters from 13th Holy Roman Empire lore including a long-time personal obsession of mine, the Styrian ministerial and three-time traitor of the Great Interregnum, Frederick V of Pettau. But I’m getting off-topic here. Let’s get back to the castle.

The Throne Room at Neuschwanstein

For architecture, perhaps the most important development in spreading medievalism was this new institution called the “big public museum.” Through a professionalizing field of archaeology and the sickness that was colonialist expansion, bits and bobs of buildings were stolen from places like North Africa, Egypt, the Middle East, and Byzantium, all of which had an enormous impact on latter 19th century architecture. (They were also picked up by early 20th century American architects from H. H. Richardson to Louis Sullivan.) These orientalized fragments were further disseminated through new books, monographs, and later photography.

Meanwhile, developments in fabrication (standardized building materials), construction (namely iron, then steel) and mass production sped things up and reduced costs considerably. Soon, castles and churches in the image of those that once took decades if not a century to build were erected on countless hillsides or in little town squares across the continent. These changes in the material production of architecture are key for understanding “why Neuschwanstein castle looks so weird.”


Part of what gives medieval architecture its character is the sheer embodiment of labor embedded in all those heavy stones, stones that were chiseled, hauled, and set by hand. The Gothic cathedral was a precarious endeavor whose appearance of lightness was not earned easily, which is why, when writing about their sublimity, Edmund Burke invoked not only the play of light and shadow, but the sheer slowness and human toil involved.

This is, of course, not true of our present estate. Neuschwanstein not only eschews the role of a castle as a “fortress to be used in war” (an inherently stereotomic program) but was erected using contemporary materials and techniques that are simply not imbued with the same age or gravitas. Built via a typical brick construction but clad in more impressive sandstone, it’s all far too clean. Neuschwanstein’s proportions seem not only chaotic - towers and windows are strewn about seemingly on a whim - they are also totally irreconcilable with the castle’s alleged typology, in part because we know what a genuine medieval castle looks like.

Ludwig’s palace was a technological marvel of the industrial revolution. Not only did Neuschwanstein have indoor plumbing and central heat, it also used the largest glass windows then in manufacture. It’s not even an Iron Age building. The throne room, seen earlier in this post, required the use of structural steel. None of this is to say that 19th century construction labor was easy. It wasn’t and many people still died, including 30 at Neuschwanstein. It was, however, simply different in character than medieval labor. For all the waxing poetic about handiwork, I’m sure medieval stonemasons would have loved the use of a steam crane.

It’s true that architectural eclecticism (the use of many styles at once) has a knack for undermining the presumed authenticity or fidelity of each style employed. But this somewhat misunderstands the crime. The thing about Neuschwanstein is that its goal was not to be historically authentic at all. Its target realm was that of fantasy. Not only that, a fantasy informed primarily by a contemporary media source. In this, it could be said to be more architecturally successful.

The fantasy of medievalism is very different than the truth of the Middle Ages. As I hinted at before, more than anything else, medievalism was an inherently nostalgic movement, and not only because it was a bedrock of so much children’s literature. People loved it because it promised a bygone past that never existed. The visual and written languages of feudalism, despite it being a terrible socioeconomic system, came into vogue in part because it wasn’t capitalism. We must remember that the 19th century saw industrial capitalism at its newest and rawest. Unregulated, it destroyed every natural resource in sight and subjected people, including children, to horrific labor conditions. It still does, and will probably get worse, but the difference is, we’re somewhat used to it by now. The shock’s worn off.

All that upheaval I talked about earlier made people long for a simplicity they felt was missing. This took many different forms. The rapid advances of secular society and the incursion of science into belief made many crave a greater religiosity. At a time when the effects of wage labor on the family had made womanhood a contested territory, many appeals were made to a divine and innocent feminine a la Lady Guinevere. Urbanization made many wish for a quieter world with less hustle and bustle and better air. These sentiments are not without their reasons. Technological and socioeconomic changes still make us feel alienated and destabilized, hence why there are so many medieval revivals even in our own time. (Chappell Roan of Arc anyone?) Hell, our own rich people aren’t so different from Ludwig either. Mark Zuckerburg owns a Hawaiian island and basically controls the fates of the people who live there lord-in-the-castle-style.

Given all this, it’s not surprising that of the products of the Middle Ages, perhaps chivalric romance was and remains the most popular. While never a real depiction of medieval life (no, all those knights were not dying on the behalf of pretty ladies), such stories of good men and women and their grand adventures still capture the imaginations of children and adults alike. (You will find no greater fan of Parzival than yours truly.) It’s also no wonder the nature of the romance, with its paternalistic patriarchy, its Christianity, its sentimentality around courtly love, and most of all its depiction of the ruling class as noble and benevolent – appealed to someone like Ludwig, both as a quirked-up individual and a member of his class.

It follows, then, that any artist capable of synthesizing all these elements, fears, and desires into an aesthetically transcendent package would’ve had a great effect on such a man. One did, of course. His name was Richard Wagner.

In our next essay, we will witness one of the most astonishing cases of kitsch imitating art. But before there could be Neuschwanstein Castle, there had to be this pretty little opera called Lohengrin.

(1) If you want to get a head start on the Wagner stuff, I’ve been writing about the Ring cycle lately on my Substack: https://www.late-review.com/p/essays-on-wagners-ring-part-1-believing

(2) My favorite insane nationalist claim comes from the 1960s, when the Slovene-American historian Joseph Felicijan claimed that the US’s democracy was based off the 13th century ritual of enthronement practiced by the Dukes of Carinthia because Thomas Jefferson owned a copy of Jean Bodin’s Les six livres de la Republique (1576) in which the rite was mentioned. For more information, see Peter Štih’s book The Middle Ages Between the Alps and the Northern Adriatic (p. 56 for the curious.)

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New on Patreon: New Jersey Bonus Post (5 additional, “wonderful” rooms!“

New on Patreon: New Jersey Bonus Post (5 additional, “wonderful” rooms!“

new jersey “19th century” “eclecticism”

It’s always funny to me when new wealth tries to imitate old wealth, but in a very specific way: by trying to reproduce old ways of building that are no longer viable via mass produced building materials and contractors who are better than average but still not quite in the legion of the bespoke. It’s rarely the case that houses are fully “custom” these days – the amalgamation of all the different parts in a new formation is the “customization” at work. As we can see in this example, this is a truth that is often covered up by excessive decorating.

This 5 bedroom, 6.5 bathroom house, built in 1997 (shocker) will run you an extremely reasonable $3.5 million big ones, but I say extremely reasonable because it wants to be a $10 million house but doesn’t quite get there - after all, it’s made with drywall. The architectural style is not really anything in particular – though the front entrance would like to recall the Tudors. Really it is trying to emulate an existing pastiche style, namely the eclecticism of the 19th century. It also doesn’t do this well.

No stately manor is complete without dueling staircases. Also, I don’t know how to explain it, but every room in this house longs to be a bathroom. Or a powder room. A really big one. It’s probably the floor, and the wallpaper. This is just the appetizer for the main attraction:

Jules Verne larping is so rare in McMansion Hell that you have to commend them for trying. I’m kind of obsessed.

This room is so important to me. It’s like if an Olin Mills (dating myself here) set was an entire room. A sense of watching someone in one’s own house, performing “dinner.” Also I would slay as the swan knight, I have to say, so I get it.

What happened to baskets hanging from the ceiling and powder blue walls and porcelain lined up on the picture rail?

I have seen columns terminating into soffits that would make Scamozzi cry.

In Big America bathing and lavishing is a spectator sport.

Ok, again, the palette of this house is basically The Polar Express mixed with a very bizarre hotel lobby.

The chimney hole is sending me because that does appear to be a working chimney. Like, can you see the smoke come out? Who knows!

Anyway, happy Thanksgiving to everyone, and I’m especially thankful to the folks who sponsor me on Patreon! If you want to see more scenes from this house, that’s the place to do it!

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2007-core nostalgia extravaganza

Quick PSA: someone on Facebook is apparently impersonating me using an account called “McMansion Hell 2.0” – If you see it, please report! Thanks!

Howdy folks! I hope if you were born between 1995 and 2001 you’re ready for some indelible pre-recession vibes because I think this entire house, including the photos have not been touched since that time.

This Wake County, NC house, built in 2007, currently boasts a price tag of 1.7 million smackaroos. Its buxom 4 bedrooms and 4.5 baths brings the total size to a completely reasonable and not at all housing-bubble-spurred 5,000 square feet.

I know everyone (at least on TikTok) thinks 2007 and goes immediately to the Tuscan theming trend that was super popular at the time (along with lots of other pseudo-euro looks, e.g. “french country” “tudor” etc). In reality, a lot of decor wasn’t particularly themed at all but more “transitional” which is to say, neither contemporary nor super traditional. This can be pulled off (in fact, it’s where the old-school Joanna Gaines excelled) but it’s usually, well, bland. Overwhelmingly neutral. Still, these interiors stir up fond memories of the last few months before mommy was on the phone with the bank crying.

I think I’ve seen these red/navy/beige rugs in literally every mid-2000s time capsule house. I want to know where they came from first and how they came to be everywhere. My mom got one from Kirkland’s Home back in the day. I guess the 2010s equivalent would be those fake distressed overdyed rugs.

I hate the kitchen bench trend. Literally the most uncomfortable seating imaginable for the house’s most sociable room. You are not at a 19th century soda fountain!!! You are a salesforce employee in Ohio!!!

You could take every window treatment in this house and create a sampler. A field guide to dust traps.

Before I demanded privacy, my parents had a completely beige spare bedroom. Truly random stuff on the walls. An oversized Monet poster they should have kept tbh. Also putting the rug on the beige carpet here is diabolical.

FYI the term “Global Village Coffeehouse” originates with the design historian Evan Collins whose work with the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute!!!!

This photo smells like a Yankee Candle.

Ok, now onto the last usable photo in the set:

No but WHY is the house a different COLOR??????? WHAT?????

Alright, I hope you enjoyed this special trip down memory lane! Happy (American) Labor Day Weekend! (Don’t forget that labor is entitled to all it creates!)

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namesake mcmansion

Howdy folks! Today’s McMansion is very special because a) we’re returning to Maryland after a long time and b) because the street this McMansion is on is the same as my name. (It was not named after me.) Hence, it is my personal McMansion, which I guess is somewhat like when people used to by the name rights to stars even though it was pretty much a scam. (Shout out btw to my patron Andros who submitted this house to be roasted live on the McMansion Hell Patreon Livestream)

As far as namesake McMansions go, this one is pretty good in the sense that it is high up there on the ol’ McMansion scale. Built in 2011, this psuedo-Georgian bad boy boasts 6 bedrooms and 9.5 baths, all totaling around 12,000 square feet. It’ll run you 2.5 million which, safe to say, is exponentially larger than its namesake’s net worth.

Now, 2011 was an anonymous year for home design, lingering in the dead period between the 2008 black hole and 2013 when the market started to actually, finally, steadily recover. As a result a lot of houses from this time basically look like 2000s McMansions but slightly less outrageous in order to quell recession-era shame.

I’m going to be so serious here and say that the crown molding in this room is a crime against architecture, a crime against what humankind is able to accomplish with mass produced millwork, and also a general affront to common sense. I hate it so much that the more I look at it the more angry I become and that’s really not healthy for me so, moving on.

Actually, aside from the fake 2010s distressed polyester rug the rest of this room is literally, basically Windows 98 themed.

I feel like the era of massive, hefty sets of coordinated furniture are over. However, we’re the one’s actually missing out by not wanting this stuff because we will never see furniture made with real wood instead of various shades of MDF or particleboard ever again.

This is a top 10 on the scale of “least logical kitchen I’ve ever seen.” It’s as though the designers engineered this kitchen so that whoever’s cooking has to take the most steps humanly possible.

Do you ever see a window configuration so obviously made up by window companies in the 1980s that you almost have to hand it to them? You’re literally letting all that warmth from the fire just disappear. But whatever I guess it’s fine since we basically just LARP fire now.

Feminism win because women’s spaces are prioritized in a shared area or feminism loss because this is basically the bathroom vanity version of women be shopping? (It’s the latter.)

I couldn’t get to all of this house because there were literally over a hundred photos in the listing but there are so many spaces in here that are basically just half-empty voids, and if not that then actually, literally unfinished. It’s giving recession. Anyway, now for the best part:

Not only is this the NBA Backrooms but it’s also just a nonsensical basketball court. Tile floors? No lines? Just free balling in the void?

Oh, well I bet the rear exterior is totally normal.

Not to be all sincere about it but much like yours truly who has waited until the literal last second to post this McMansion, this house really is the epitome of hubris all around. Except the house’s hubris is specific to this moment in time, a time when gas was like $2/gallon. It’s climate hubris. It’s a testimony to just how much energy the top 1% of income earners make compared to the rest of us. I have a single window unit. This house has four air conditioning condensers. That’s before we get to the monoculture, pesticide-dependent lawn or the three car garage or the asphalt driveway or the roof that’ll cost almost as much as the house to replace. We really did think it would all be endless. Oops.

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the motel room, or: on datedness

I.

Often I find myself nostalgic for things that haven’t disappeared yet. This feeling is enhanced by the strange conviction that once I stop looking at these things, I will never see them again, that I am living in the last moment of looking. This is sense is strongest for me in the interiors of buildings perhaps because, like items of clothing, they are of a fashionable nature, in other words, more impermanent than they probably should be.

As I get older, to stumble on something truly dated, once a drag, is now a gift. After over a decade of real estate aggregation and the havoc it’s wreaked on how we as a society perceive and decorate houses, if you’re going to Zillow to search for the dated (which used to be like shooting fish in a barrel), you’ll be searching aimlessly, for hours, to increasingly no avail, even with all the filters engaged. (The only way to get around this is locational knowledge of datedness gleaned from the real world.) If you try to find images of the dated elsewhere on the internet, you will find that the search is not intuitive. In this day and age, you cannot simply Google “80s hotel room” anymore, what with the disintegration of the search engine ecosystem and the AI generated nonsense and the algorithmic preference for something popular (the same specific images collected over and over again on social media), recent, and usually a derivative of the original search query (in this case, finding material along the lines of r/nostalgia or the Backrooms.)

To find what one is looking for online, one must game the search engine with filters that only show content predating 2021, or, even better, use existing resources (or those previously discovered) both online and in print. In the physical world of interiors, to find what one is looking for one must also now lurk around obscure places, and often outside the realm of the domestic which is so beholden to and cursed by the churn of fashion and the logic of speculation. Our open world is rapidly closing, while, paradoxically, remaining ostensibly open. It’s true, I can open Zillow. I can still search. In the curated, aggregated realm, it is becoming harder and harder to find, and ultimately, to look.

But what if, despite all these changes, datedness was never really searchable? This is a strange symmetry, one could say an obscurity, between interiors and online. It is perhaps unintentional, and it lurks in the places where searching doesn’t work, one because no one is searching there, or two, because an aesthetic, for all our cataloguing, curation, aggregation, hoarding, is not inherently indexable and even if it was, there are vasts swaths of the internet and the world that are not categorized via certain - or any - parameters. The internet curator’s job is to find them and aggregate them, but it becomes harder and harder to do. They can only be stumbled upon or known in an outside, offline, historical or situational way. If to index, to aggregate, is, or at least was for the last 30 years, to profit (whether monetarily or in likes), then to be dated, in many respects, is the aesthetic manifestation of barely breaking even. Of not starting, preserving, or reinventing but just doing a job.

We see this online as well. While the old-web Geocities look and later Blingee MySpace-era swag have become aestheticized and fetishized, a kind of naive art for a naive time, a great many old websites have not received the same treatment. These are no less naive but they are harder to repackage or commodify because they are simple and boring. They are not “core” enough.

As with interiors, web datedness can be found in part or as a whole. For example, sites like Imgur or Reddit are not in and of themselves dated but they are full of remnants, of 15-year old posts and their “you, sir, have won the internet” vernacular that certainly are. Other websites are dated because they were made a long time ago by and for a clientele that doesn’t have a need or the skill to update (we see this often with Web 2.0 e-commerce sites that figured out how to do a basic mobile page and reckoned it was enough). The next language of datedness, like the all-white landlord-special interior, is the default, clean Squarespace restaurant page, a landing space that’s the digital equivalent of a flyer, rarely gleaned unless someone needs a menu, has a food allergy or if information about the place is not available immediately from Google Maps. I say this only to maintain that there is a continuity in practices between the on- and off-line world beyond what we would immediately assume, and that we cannot blame everything on algorithms.

But now you may ask, what is, exactly, datedness? Having spent two days in a distinctly dated hotel room, I’ve decided to sit in utter boredom with the numinous past and try and pin it down.

II.

I am in an obscure place. I am in Saint-Georges, Quebec, Canada, on assignment. I am staying at a specific motel, the Voyageur. By my estimation the hotel was originally built in the late seventies and I’d be shocked if it was older than 1989. The hotel exterior was remodeled sometime in the 2000s with EIFS cladding and beige paint. Above is a picture of my room, which, forgive me, is in the process of being inhabited. American (and to a lesser extent Canadian) hotel rooms are some of the most churned through, renovated spaces in the world, and it’s pretty rare, unless you’re staying in either very small towns or are forced by economic necessity to stay at real holes in the wall, to find ones from this era. The last real hitter for me was a 90s Day’s Inn in the meme-famous Breezewood, PA during the pandemic.

At first my reaction to seeing the room was cautionary. It was the last room in town, and certainly compared to other options, probably not the world’s first choice. However, after staying in real, genuine European shitholes covering professional cycling I’ve become a class-A connoisseur of bad rooms. This one was definitively three stars. A mutter of “okay time to do a quick look through.” But upon further inspection (post-bedbug paranoia) I came to the realization that maybe the always-new brainrot I’d been so critical of had seeped a teeny bit into my own subconscious and here I was snubbing my nose at a blessing in disguise. The room is not a bad room, nor is it unclean. It’s just old. It’s dated. We are sentimental about interiors like this now because they are disappearing, but they are for my parents what 2005 beige-core is for me and what 2010s greige will become for the generation after. When I’m writing about datedness, I’m writing in general using a previous era’s examples because datedness, by its very nature, is a transitional status. Its end state is the mixed emotion of seeing things for what they are yet still appreciating them, expressed here.

Datedness is the period between vintage and contemporary. It is the sentiment between quotidian and subpar. It is uncurated and preserved only by way of inertia, not initiative. It gives us a specific feeling we don’t necessarily like, one that is deliberately evoked in the media subcultures surrounding so-called “liminal” spaces: the fuguelike feeling of being spatially trapped in a time while our real time is passing. Datedness in the real world is not a curated experience, it is only what was. It is different from nostalgia because it is not deliberately remembered, yearned for or attached to sweetness. Instead, it is somehow annoying. It is like stumbling into the world of adults as a child, but now you’re the adult and the child in you is disappointed. (The real child-you forgot a dull hotel room the moment something more interesting came along.) An image of my father puts his car keys on the table, looks around and says, “It’ll do.” We have an intolerance for datedness because it is the realization of what sufficed. Sufficiency in many ways implies lack.

However, for all its datedness, many, if not all, of the things in this room will never be seen again if the room is renovated. They will become unpurchaseable and extinct. Things like the bizarrely-patterned linoleum tile in the shower, the hose connecting to the specific faucet of the once-luxurious (or at least middling) jacuzzi tub whose jets haven’t been exercised since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The wide berth of the tank on the toilet. There is nothing, really, worth saving about these things. Even the most sentimental among us wouldn’t dare argue that the items and finishes in this room are particularly important from a design or historical standpoint. Not everything old has a patina. They’re too cheaply made to salvage. Plastic tile. Bowed plywood. The image-artifacts of these rooms, gussied up for Booking dot com, will also, inevitably disappear, relegated to the dustheap of web caches and comments that say “it was ok kinda expensive but close to twon (sic).” You wouldn’t be able to find them anyway unless you were looking for a room.

One does, of course, recognize a little bit of design in what’s here. Signifiers of an era. The wood-veneer of the late 70s giving way to the pastel overtones of the 80s. Perhaps even a slow 90s. The all-in-one vanity floating above the floor, a modernist basement bathroom hallmark. White walls as a sign of cleanliness. Gestures, in the curved lines of the nightstands, towards postmodernity. Metallic lamp bases with wide-brimmed shades, a whisper of glamor. A kind of scalloped aura to the club chairs. The color teal mediated through hundreds if not thousands of shoes. Yellowing plastic, including the strips of “molding” that visually tie floor to wall. These are remnants (or are they intuitions?) of so many movements and micromovements, none of them definite enough to point to the influence of a single designer, hell, even of a single decade, just strands of past-ness accumulated into one thread, which is cheapness. Continuity exists in the materials only because everything was purchased as a set from a wholesale catalog.

In some way a hotel is supposed to be placeless. Anonymous. Everything tries to be that way now, even houses. Perhaps because we don’t like the way we spy on ourselves and lease our images out to the world so we crave the specificity of hotel anonymity, of someplace we move through on our way to bigger, better or at least different things. The hotel was designed to be frictionless but because it is in a little town, it sees little use and because it sees little use, there are elements that can last far longer than they were intended and which inadvertently cause friction. (The janky door unlocks with a key. The shower hose keeps coming out of the faucet. It’s deeply annoying.)

Lack of wear and lack of funds only keep them that way. Not even the paper goods of the eighties have been exhausted yet. Datedness is not a choice but an inevitability. Because it is not a choice, it is not advertised except in a utilitarian sense. It is kept subtle on the hotel websites, out of shame. Because it does not subscribe to an advertiser’s economy of the now, of the curated type rather than the “here is my service” type, it disappears into the folds of the earth and cannot be searched for in the way “design” can. It can only be discovered by accident.

When I look at all of these objects and things, I do so knowing I will never see them again, at least not all here together like this, as a cohesive whole assembled for a specific purpose. I don’t think I’ll ever have reason to come back to this town or this place, which has given me an unexpected experience of being peevish in my father’s time. Whenever I end up in a place like this, where all is as it was, I get the sense that it will take a very long time for others to experience this sensation again with the things my generation has made. The machinations of fashion work rapaciously to make sure that nothing is ever old, not people, not rooms, not items, not furniture, not fabrics, not even design, that old matron who loves to wax poetic about futurity and timelessness. The plastic-veneered particleboard used here is now the bedrock of countless landfills. Eventually it will become the chemical-laced soil upon which we build our condos. It is possible that we are standing now at the very last frontier of our prior datedness. The next one has not yet elided. It’s a special place. Spend a night. Take pictures.

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texas gothic revival

Sometimes I just want to get on my hobbyhorse, which for about a year now has been the middle ages but surely will soon be something else. (Please hyperfixation gods, make it financial literacy.) Anyway, I meandered around the nation (online) in search of another opportunity to play another round of America Does Medieval. It took me a while for fortune to reward me but it finally did in the long-running McMansion Hell of Denton County, Texas.

2007 McMansions are pretty rare and it’s even rarer for them to have the original interiors. This one, clocking in at 5 beds, 6 baths, and almost 7200 square feet will set you back a reasonable $2.3 million. We complain a lot about the hegemony of gray these days, but this is hindsight bias. Longtime readers will recall that the color beige walked so gray could run, and this house is emblematic of that fact.

It’s…uncommon to see ordinary contractors try their hands at gothic arches and for all intents and purposes, I think this one did a pretty good job rendering the ineffable in common drywall. Credit where credit is due. Unfortunately the Catholic in me can’t help but feel that this is the house equivalent of those ultra trad converts on Reddit who have Templar avatars and spend their days complaining about Vatican II.

Sometimes I still get the ever-dwindling pleasure of seeing the type of room that has never before existed in human history and definitely won’t ever exist again. Certain material conditions (oil, lots of it, a media ecosystem in which historical literacy is set primarily by cartoons, adjustable rate mortgages) brought this space into the world in a way that cannot be recreated organically. Let us marvel.

Christ might need to be invoked should I choose to make a sweet potato casserole.

You can tell that ornament is fabricated because they made precisely TWO of them that are IDENTICAL. You could have fooled us into thinking a craftsman did this by hand from local Texas marble (or whatever), but alas greed got in the way of guile.

As someone who writes fiction on the weekends, I often feel the acute pain of having an imagination greater than my talent and an artistic vision detached from being able to effectively execute it. In this respect, this room speaks to me.

RIP Trump btw. Don’t know if y'all saw the news yet.

I know a lot about medieval bathing for completely normal reasons (writing fiction, winning online arguments, stoned youtube binges)

I feel like most of my forms of social adaptation as a person on the spectrum comprise of sneaking in my holy autistic interest du jour into conversations as subtly as I can manage. I’m doing it right now.

Okay, so, there were no rear exterior photos of this house because, having used every square inch of lot, the whole thing is smashed up against a fence and there is simply no way of getting that desired perspective without trespassing and that’s a mortal risk in the state of Texas. So I’ll leave you with this final room, the completely medieval in-home theater.

That’s all for now, folks. Stay tuned for next month, where we will be going down a cult compound rabbit hole in the Great Plains.

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ode to a faux grecian urn

Howdy everyone,

Today’s house, built in 2001, comes to you from, you guessed it, the Chicago suburbs. The house is a testimony to traditional craftsmanship and traditional values (having lots of money.) The cost of painting this house greige is approximately the GDP of Slovenia so the owners have decided to keep it period perfect (beige.) Anyway.

This 5 bedroom, 7.5 bathroom house clocks in at a completely reasonable 12,700 square feet. If you like hulking masses and all-tile interiors, it could be all yours for the reasonable price of $2.65 million.

The problem with having a house that is 12,700 square feet is that they have to go somewhere. At least 500 of them were devoted to this foyer. Despite the size, I consider this a rather cold and lackluster welcome. Cold feet anyone?

The theme of this house is, vaguely, “old stuff.” Kind of like if Chuck E Cheese did the sets for Spartacus. Why the dining room is on a platform is a good question. The answer: the American mind desires clearly demarcated space, which, sadly, is verboten in our culture.

The other problem with a 12,700 square foot house is that even huge furniture looks tiny in it.

Entering cheat codes in “Kitchen Building Sim 2000” because I spent my entire $70,000 budget on the island.

Of course, a second sitting room (without television) is warranted. Personally, speaking, I’m team Prince.

I wonder why rich people do this. Surely they must know it’s tacky right? That it’s giving Liberace? (Ask your parents, kids.) That it’s giving Art.com 75% off sale if you enter the code ROMANEMPIRE.

Something about the bathroom really just says “You know what, I give up. Who cares?” But this is not even the worst part of the bathroom…

Not gonna lie, this activates my flight or fight response.

If you remember Raggedy Ann you should probably schedule your first colonoscopy.

Anyways, that does it for the interior. Let’s take a nice peek at what’s out back.

I love mowing in a line. I love monomaniacal tasks that are lethal to gophers.

Alright, that does it for this edition of McMansion Hell. Back to the book mines for me. Bonus posts up on Patreon soon.

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Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!

Hello everyone! The word is out – I am writing a book!

If you ever wanted to read a book about McMansions, 5-over-1s, the ignoble toil of architects, ridiculous baubles for rich people, hostile architecture, private equity, shopping (rip), offices (rip), loud restaurants, and starchitects who behave like tech founders, this is the book for you!

Thank you all for your support throughout the years – without you this would not be possible. And don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging throughout it all, so stay tuned for this month’s post.

we’ve found it folks: mcmansion heaven

Hello everyone. It is my pleasure to bring you the greatest house I have ever seen. The house of a true visionary. A real ad-hocist. A genuine pioneer of fenestration. This house is in Alabama. It was built in 1980 and costs around $5 million. It is worth every penny. Perhaps more.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Kate, that’s a little kooky, but certainly it’s not McMansion Heaven. This is very much a house in the earthly realm. Purgatory. McMansion Purgatory.” Well, let me now play Beatrice to your Dante, young Pilgrim. Welcome. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

It is rare to find a house that has everything. A house that wills itself into Postmodernism yet remains unable to let go of the kookiest moments of the prior zeitgeist, the Bruce Goffs and Earthships, the commune houses built from car windshields, the seventies moments of psychedelic hippie fracture. It is everything. It has everything. It is theme park, it is High Tech. It is Renaissance (in the San Antonio Riverwalk sense of the word.) It is medieval. It is maybe the greatest pastiche to sucker itself to the side of a mountain, perilously overlooking a large body of water. Look at it. Just look.

The inside is white. This makes it dreamlike, almost benevolent. It is bright because this is McMansion Heaven and Gray is for McMansion Hell. There is an overbearing sheen of 80s optimism. In this house, the credit default swap has not yet been invented, but could be.

It takes a lot for me to drop the cocaine word because I think it’s a cheap joke. But there’s something about this example that makes it plausible, not in a derogatory way, but in a liberatory one, a sensuous one. Someone created this house to have a particular experience, a particular feeling. It possesses an element of true fantasy, the thematic. Its rooms are not meant to be one cohesive composition, but rather a series of scenes, of vastly different spatial moments, compressed, expanded, bright, close.

And then there’s this kitchen for some reason. Or so you think. Everything the interior design tries to hide, namely how unceasingly peculiar the house is, it is not entirely able to because the choices made here remain decadent, indulgent, albeit in a more familiar way.

Rare is it to discover an interior wherein one truly must wear sunglasses. The environment created in service to transparency has to somewhat prevent the elements from penetrating too deep while retaining their desirable qualities. I don’t think an architect designed this house. An architect would have had access to specifically engineered products for this purpose. Whoever built this house had certain access to architectural catalogues but not those used in the highest end or most structurally complex projects. The customization here lies in the assemblage of materials and in doing so stretches them to the height of their imaginative capacity. To borrow from Charles Jencks, ad-hoc is a perfect description. It is an architecture of availability and of adventure.

A small interlude. We are outside. There is no rear exterior view of this house because it would be impossible to get one from the scrawny lawn that lies at its depths. This space is intended to serve the same purpose, which is to look upon the house itself as much as gaze from the house to the world beyond.

Living in a city, I often think about exhibitionism. Living in a city is inherently exhibitionist. A house is a permeable visible surface; it is entirely possible that someone will catch a glimpse of me they’re not supposed to when I rush to the living room in only a t-shirt to turn out the light before bed. But this is a space that is only exhibitionist in the sense that it is an architecture of exposure, and yet this exposure would not be possible without the protection of the site, of the distance from every other pair of eyes. In this respect, a double freedom is secured. The window intimates the potential of seeing. But no one sees.

At the heart of this house lies a strange mix of concepts. Postmodern classicist columns of the Disney World set. The unpolished edge of the vernacular. There is also an organicist bent to the whole thing, something more Goff than Gaudí, and here we see some of the house’s most organic forms, the monolith- or shell-like vanity mixed with the luminous artifice of mirrors and white. A backlit cave, primitive and performative at the same time, which is, in essence, the dialectic of the luxury bathroom.

And yet our McMansion Heaven is still a McMansion. It is still an accumulation of deliberate signifiers of wealth, very much a construction with the secondary purpose of invoking envy, a palatial residence designed without much cohesion. The presence of golf, of wood, of masculine and patriarchal symbolism with an undercurrent of luxury drives that point home. The McMansion can aspire to an art form, but there are still many levels to ascend before one gets to where God’s sitting.

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pre-recession, post-taste

Hello, everyone. I hope this blog can bring some well-needed laughs in really trying times. That’s why I’ve gone back into the archives of that precipitous year 2007, a year where the McMansion was sleepwalking into being a symbol of the financial calamity to follow. We return to the Chicago suburbs once more because they remain the highest concentration of houses in their original conditions. Thanks to our flipping predilection, these houses become rarer and rarer and I have to admit even I have developed a fondness for them as a result.

Our present house is ostensibly “French Provincial” in style, which is McMansion for “Chateaux designed by Carmela Soprano”. It boasts 7 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms, and comes in at a completely reasonable 15,000 square feet. It can be yours for an equally reasonable $1.5 million.

Every 2007 McMansion needed two things: a plethora of sitting rooms and those dark wood floors. This house actually has around five or six sitting rooms (depending if you count the tiled sunroom) but for brevity’s sake, I’ll only provide two of them.

With regards to the second sitting room, I’m really not one to talk statuary here because beside me there is a bust of Dante where the sculptor made him look simultaneously sickly and lowkey hot.

Technically, if we are devising a dichotomy between sitting and not sitting (yes, I know about the song), the dining room also counts as a sitting room. The more chairs in your McMansion dining room, the more people allegedly like you enough to travel 2.5 hours in traffic to see you twice a year.

Here’s the thing about nostalgia: the world as we knew it then is never coming back. In some ways this is sad (kitchens are entirely white now and marble countertops will look terrible in about 3 years) but in other ways this is very good (guys in manhattan have switched to private equity instead of betting the farm on credit default swaps made from junk mortgages proffered to America’s most vulnerable and exploited populations.) Progress!

Okay I really don’t understand the 50 bed pillows thing. Every night my parents tossed their gazillion decorative pillows on the floor just to put them back on the bed the next morning. Like, for WHAT? Who was going in there? The Pope?

Here’s a fun one for your liminal spaces moodboards. (Speaking for myself.)

Yes, I know about skibidi toilet. And sticking out your gyatt for the rizzler. I wish I didn’t. I wish I couldn’t read. Literacy is like a mirror in which I only see the aging contours of my face.

When your kids move out every room becomes a guest room.

Anyway, let’s see what the rear of this house has to offer.

The migratory birds will not forgive them for their crimes. But also seriously, not even a garden?

Anyway, that does it for this round of McMansion Hell. Happy Halloween!

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Bonus McMansion Hell: Ye Olde Barrington

In which I am in my castle era.

mojo dojo casa house

Howdy folks! Sorry for the delay, I was, uhhhh covering the Tour de France. Anyway, I’m back in Chicago which means this blog has returned to the Chicago suburbs. I’m sure you’ve all seen Barbie at this point so this 2019 not-so-dream house will come as a pleasant (?) surprise.

Yeah. So this $2.4 million, 7 bed, 8.5+ bath house is over 15,000 square feet and let me be frank: that square footage is not allocated in any kind of efficient or rational manner. It’s just kind of there, like a suburban Ramada Inn banquet hall. You think that by reading this you are prepared for this, but no, you are not.

Scale (especially the human one) is unfathomable to the people who built this house. They must have some kind of rare spatial reasoning problem where they perceive themselves to be the size of at least a sedan, maybe a small aircraft. Also as you can see they only know of the existence of a single color.

Ok, but if you were eating a single bowl of cereal alone where would you sit? Personally I am a head of the table type person but I understand that others might be more discreet.

It is undeniable that they put the “great” in great room. You could race bicycles in here. Do roller derby. If you gave this space to three anarchists you would have a functioning bookshop and small press in about a week.

The island bit is so funny. It’s literally so far away it’s hard to get them in the same image. It is the most functionally useless space ever. You need to walk half a mile to get from the island to the sink or stove.

Of course, every McMansion has a room just for television (if not more than one room) and yet this house fails even to execute that in a way that matters. Honestly impressive.

The rug placement here is physical comedy. Like, they know they messed up.

Bling had a weird second incarnation in the 2010s HomeGoods scene. Few talk about this.

Honestly I think they should have scrapped all of this and built a bowling alley or maybe a hockey rink. Basketball court. A space this grand is wasted on sports of the table variety.

You would also think that seeing the rear exterior of this house would help to rationalize how it’s planned but:

Not really.

Anyways, thanks for coming along for another edition of McMansion Hell. I’ll be back to regular posting schedule now that the summer is over so keep your eyes peeled for more of the greatest houses to ever exist. Be sure to check the Patreon for today’s bonus posts.

Also P.S. - I’m the architecture critic for The Nation now, so check that out, too!

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

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BONUS MCMANSION HELL: liminal edition

BONUS MCMANSION HELL: liminal edition

dome sweet dome

As some of you may know, I have been going to language school for the last few months in order to learn the world’s most widely spoken and useful language: Slovenian. At this point, my Slovenian is about as coherent as, well, a McMansion. In order to feel better about myself, I have sought out a McMansion that is worse than my cases and word-order. This house (in Naperville, IL, of course) does, in fact, make me feel better, but will probably make you feel worse:

This Cheescake Factory house, built in 2005, boasts 5 bedrooms, 8.5 bathrooms and can be yours for the entirely reasonable sum of $3.5 million dollars. Also for some reason all the photos look like they are retouched with 2012-era Instagram filters.

First of all, trying to visualize the floor plan of this house is like trying to rotate seven cubes individually in my mind’s eye. Second, if you stand right beneath the hole in the ceiling you can get the approximate sensation of being a cartoon character who has just instantaneously fallen in love.

Even if this was a relatively mundane McMansion it still would have made it into the rotation because of the creepy life-sized butler and maid. Would not want to run into them in the middle of the night.

The mural is giving 1986 Laura Ashley or perhaps maybe the background they use for Cabbage Patch Kids packaging but the floor? The floor is giving Runescape texture.

Have you ever seen so many real plants in your life? A veritable Eden.

The overwhelming desire to push one of the chairs into the haunted jacuzzi…but in reality they probably put those chairs there to keep from accidentally falling into the tub at night.

(elevator music starts playing)

This is one of the all time [adjective] rooms of McMansion Hell. I personally am in love with it, though I don’t think I understand it. Perhaps it is not meant to be understood…..,

Continuing with the baseball theme, the guy in the painting looks how I feel after it’s been raining in Ljubljana for two straight weeks. (Not ideal!!)

And finally:

We love a house that has four unused balconies and also a sporting grounds that is large enough to build a whole second McMansion on top of. Everyone should so value their health.

Thank you for tuning into another edition of McMansion Hell. Be sure to check out the Patreon for the two bonus posts (a McMansion and the Good House) which both also go out today!

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams.

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