Pulling on the threads
I was looking for something else in an old newspaper (1866, to be exact) when I came across a reference to a day of humiliation in response to the cattle plague. Intrigued, I did what any sensible person would do and asked the robot. The response.
The report says that the Bishop of the Diocese recommended Wednesday, 7 March, as a day of humiliation, and that circular letters were read in the parish church at both morning and evening services the previous Sunday. The Government had decided not to intervene, apparently leaving the arrangement to the Church.
The “cattle plague” was the contemporary name for rinderpest, a highly contagious and often fatal viral disease of cattle. Britain suffered a devastating outbreak in 1865–66, causing enormous losses to farmers and threatening the food supply. It was not the same disease as foot-and-mouth.
In this context, “humiliation” meant collective repentance and supplication: the community was being called upon to humble itself before God and pray for relief from the epidemic. It did not mean that cattle owners were to be publicly shamed, nor does this report say that the service involved any particular ritual beyond a special observance.
One intriguing detail is the wording that the Government was “declining to interfere with the matter”. That suggests there had been some question about whether the day should be officially proclaimed or left to the Church authorities.
Not the most interesting item in the world, but I have frittered away whole days taking screenshots of Victorian prose and feeding them into the robot.
October 27, 2026 — 6:23 pm
Comments: none
Listen to a few of these.
LLMs need an insane amount of text. Dessa learned language from hundreds of times fewer words (in fairness, LLMs also have to learn C++ and whatever the hell Angular is). And it had to learn far more than language. Accents, pauses, breathing, sarcasm, humor, inflection, emotion, when to cut in: every one changes what someone means.
Dessa is an AI experiment trained entirely on audio of human speech. They describe it as if it were pure research, but I’m sure there’s a commercial idea in the back of it somewhere.
The top waveform is the human, the bottom is Dessa (if you look at the closed captioning, it also identifies who is who). The company swears the conversations are unscripted. The AI interrupts, laughs, says things under its breath – all entirely appropriate.
At one point, it’s having a conversation about Christopher Nolan movies. If it isn’t accessing a database outside itself (and the copy says it isn’t), it must have heard a conversation along those lines in training. You’d think there’d be enormous blank areas.
Anyway, it’s worth reading the description and very worth listening to some of the audio samples.
October 26, 2026 — 5:05 pm
Comments: 3
We survived
Oddest storm I’ve seen. Yes, it moved in a spiral and steadily eastwards.
A chunk blew off the house and scared my chickens into the field next door. It was then I realized my rough weather gear is not up to snuff.
Lots of trees down and a piece of the old Brighton pier fell into the sea with a bang. But, on the whole, nothing too dramatic.
Have a good weekend!
October 23, 2026 — 5:34 pm
Comments: 2
Yikes! I haven’t posted
We got caught up doing the NY Times daily crossword, which we’ve taken to doing together on these cold autumn nights. We aren’t very good at it.
That’s not entirely accurate. The crosswords start easy and get progressively harder through the week. We sail through Monday, jog through Tuesday and then we start to struggle. By Sunday, we are made to feel thoroughly subnormal.
Today’s puzzle was one with some cute clues and we did abysmally badly. We gave up a quarter of the way through. Even when we revealed the puzzle and saw the answers, we didn’t understand some of them. Here, give it a try.
Major storm coming tonight. They’re warning us of power outages. I’ve got my power banks charged and ready to go. See you on the other side.
October 22, 2026 — 7:18 pm
Comments: 7
I’m a sucker for a fart joke
Seven of the Greatest Farts in Western Literature
A mildly amusing romp from a woman who spent her twenties writing Serious Literary Papers. I mostly enjoyed the exploration of euphemisms. Rump trumpet. Butt horn. Ass cornet. Bum bugle. Booty kazoo.
I also appreciated this snippit of Chaucer:
This Nicholas just then let fly a fart
As loud as it had been a thunder-clap,
And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap.
There, I have stolen the beating heart of her essay. Mostly, I just wanted an excuse to post this picture. That goat thing looks so guilty.
Uncle B will tell you, I’m helpless before a fart joke.
October 21, 2026 — 5:40 pm
Comments: 6
Bookmarked
This is just one of those ‘has my email address been compromised‘ sites. I’m not posting it because it’s interesting, I’m posting it so I can find it again later. My main email address for the last twenty years is compromised to hell and back and I never do anything about it, so I don’t know why I bother.
If you ever have a problem, by the way, Malwarebytes has pulled my ass out of the fire more than once. I don’t know if it’s still there, but they once had a forum full of unpaid geeks who lived to disentangle virus problems. I think they did it for the street cred.
Changing the subject, I did a thing this week. I joined an organisation called the U3A – the University of the Third Age. Lord, I thought my art club was elderly – hoo! Anyway, it’s kind of continuing education for oldies.
The seaside in general and this area in particular are places Londoners retire to, so I don’t know why I should be surprised that everyone’s so old. But all my life I’ve been the youngest person in my friend group and now that I have reached retirement age, that makes my friend group depressing.
October 20, 2026 — 5:32 pm
Comments: 3
So how do I illustrate this?
Gary Larson’s Far Side ran from 1980 to 1995. Then he thought his strips were getting repetitive and he retired. After that, he was aggressive about policing people reposting his cartoons on the internet. Some got through, of course, but he played whack-a-mole with his IP for years.
Hence the blowup of a small fragment of a strip. I hope I get away with it.
In light of that, I was surprised to see he has a website. Moreover, he’s starting to put out new stuff. He explains how that happened here.
Long story short: he bought a tablet and it inspired him to try digital art. I’m…not sure how I feel about the result.
October 19, 2026 — 6:21 pm
Comments: 4
Sorry for the low quality spam
Even the intriguing-looking foreign language ones are boring. I’ve gotten this one numerous times: شركة تنظيف عمائر بالرياض. Translation? Building cleaning company in Riyadh. Since nobody is coming to an obscure American blog to find a cleaner in Riyadh, I assume it’s one of those deals where having your site linked to from many different places makes it rise in some directory app somewhere.
Probably the same for this Korean message: 상품 판매와 방송 운영을 동시에 관리할 수 있는 서비스를 찾고 계신다면 문의해주세요 If you are looking for a service that allows you to manage product sales and broadcast operations simultaneously, please contact us.
I guess the Chinese must be free to explore porn: 最佳xxx网站 为成熟观众提供优质内容。探索 经过验证的成人网站 以确保质量和隐私。The best xxx websites offer high-quality content for a mature audience. Explore verified adult sites to ensure quality and privacy.
This Turkish suckup is different: Makaleniz açıklayıcı yararlı anlaşılır olmuş ellerinize sağlık means Your article is informative, useful, and easy to understand—well done! I get a lot of those in English and I assume the email address is the sting. I wonder if there are any bloggers so desperate for engagement they leave these in place?
Uncle Al has suggested I go into the comment form and change Name, Email and Website to something nonsensical so bots can’t figure out how to navigate them. It might be worth trying.
Incidentally, the fake Spam in the picture is a real product from Walmart. I pinched it from an article comparing it to the real thing. Spoiler: the author liked the Walmart fake better.
Good weekend!
October 16, 2026 — 3:24 pm
Comments: 8
Antidote to the Royal Academy
John Margolies spent forty years (1969-2008) driving around the American backroads and photographing roadside attractions. It started when he was a teenager and first got his driver’s license.
He would typically rent a car and stay in motels, driving out early in the morning before families arrived. He particularly like the morning sky and would skip a site if he didn’t like the light. He got a journalism and art history degree and supported himself writing books.
He bequeathed the lot to the Library of Congress, and you can browse them here. Though I didn’t find the interactive map very interactive.
I tried to do something similar. I bought my first SLR camera to document the freakshow posters at the state fair and – wouldn’t you know it? – that was the year they all got cold feet about the existence of freakshows.
October 15, 2026 — 5:12 pm
Comments: 3
As for Dadd…
Do make time to do an images search of Dadd. I think those were the most extraordinarily detailed watercolours I’ve ever seen. And delicate. In fact, many of them were faded to unrecognizability. The gallery they hung them in was kept very dark for that reason, but it didn’t help making out the teeny, tiny details.
In his youth, Dadd was recognized by the Academy as an up and coming artist. He spent some years touring the Middle East painting for an English patron. At the age of 26, his family realized the cheese had slid off his cracker and brought him home to ‘rest’. Shortly after, he decided his father was the devil, cut the man’s throat and fled abroad. He was quickly caught and brought home, to spend the rest of his life in asylums for the criminally insane. Where he had lots and lots of time to paint and play the violin.
He was probably a paranoid schizophrenic, but they didn’t have such a diagnosis in those days. He never repented of his father’s killing, but considered himself an agent of Osiris making a proper sacrifice.
In connection with this show, the Bethlem Museum of the Mind has put his medical records on display through November. Which is a little shocking to the modern sensibilities, but privacy laws don’t apply to the dead, particularly when they shuffled off 140 years ago.
October 14, 2026 — 6:02 pm
Comments: 4