I had my camera with me yesterday, and the light was so irresistible as I walked home that I kept stopping to take pictures. There's a little cluster of milkweed growing near my shortcut off campus, and the seeds have started coming loose. Some of the trees are turning red. This one seems to be […]
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Amanda
I somehow missed Stephen Greenblatt’s guest appearance on The Colbert Report. But thanks to the magic of the internet, one can still watch it: I particularly like the Richard III moment at the end. (Via Riba Rambles.)
Because I just can't take any more anxiety about the state of the economy, I'm going to blog about fluffy animals today. Well, that and because I went to see some fluffy animals this afternoon. Specifically, alpacas. This weekend is National Alpaca Open House weekend, an event I'd never heard of until some of my […]
On the recommendation of Mike from vitia (hi, Mike!), I've been reading John Crowley's indescribable sort-of-fantasy, sort-of-alternate-history Aegypt Cycle. It's a series of novels about, among other things, a historian who becomes convinced that behind the tantalizing fragments of Renaissance mysticism that he keeps stumbling over, there lies "more than one history of the world." […]
I'm having one of those blogger's block weeks. It's probably due to the beginning-of-semester rush at work; my brain's been a bit fried lately. (In a good way—I had an absolute blast teaching a class today—but nonetheless in a way that leaves me disinclined to write long blog posts.) So in lieu of anything thinky, […]
Various people have noticed Clive Thompson's New York Times article on Twitter, Facebook, and the ambient social awareness that these kinds of tools promote. He points out a lot of things I find interesting about microblogging, particularly the way small bits of information add up into a new kind of sense of one's friends' lives, […]
Adamas shawl in progress Originally uploaded by amndw2 This is a shot of my in-progress Sci-Fi Shawl, which is finally starting to look like the pattern. It occurred to me, as I started it, that lacemaking ought to be a metaphor for something: you start off with no idea what you’re doing, it all looks […]
Thanks to a mixture of stubbornness, inertia, and a preference for living in places with viable public transit, I'm a lifelong non-car owner. When I moved to New London, people warned me that I'd need a car. I'm starting to see why: I live in a fairly walkable area, but getting to and from work […]
Most unexpected thing I learned today: that there are moose in these parts. Not right in the middle of town, of course, but in slightly more rural areas just a few miles from here. And not just moose, but coyotes. I didn't think there were any coyotes on the east coast,* and I didn't think […]
Waiting for New Year’s Day
By Amanda on October 1st, 2008
It's hard to describe how I've been feeling lately without using words like "apocalyptic," or at the very least "gloom" and "doom" in some combination. It's not just the economic meltdown, or the particular brand of craziness that the election brings to the mix. It's something more generalized. It was startling today, for instance, to […]