David Walbert: Unhewn Stones

The city laid a sidewalk between a broad clear street and a park where once there was a grassy shoulder: of all the places to lay a sidewalk, the least disturbing of existing patterns and the least improving to the lives of pedestrians.

Perennial grains in the news!

When I rise up let me rise up joyful like a bird.

James Rebanks: On one level, clearly, a drought is just bad luck, the savage will of the gods.

Repainted what is essentially my studio bathroom, formerly my daughter’s bathroom, which I had permitted her to paint bright salmon pink.

View from my driveway after the wettest July since the 1930s

Speaking of buying things: The very last straw for me with SquareSpace was discovering that without my choice or even knowledge it was now possible to buy, via my website, a $30 spreader in four easy payments of $7.50.

Why is it that there are more items for sale on the internet than protons in the sun but I cannot find the thing I actually want

Challenge: Create a two hour setlist of cover songs appropriate for a farmers market busker that does not contain any songs you have ever heard sung or played at a farmers market.

This one is titled “To Me the Converging Objects of the Universe Perpetually Flow,” which is what happens when you fill the time between customers at the craft market reading your pocket edition of Walt Whitman and doodling.

This is, I don’t know what.

Recently there have been several major mathematical breakthroughs enabled entirely by AI: both proofs and counterexamples to long-held conjectures.

At Roy Underhill’s window-making class, 2022… At the end of the first day he went around the room sweeping the entire class’s shavings to each bench and took these faked photos.

Facing the usual early-July glut of cherry tomatoes I made confit: basil leaves in a baking dish, a layer of whole cherry tomatoes, a few crushed cloves of garlic, a liberal sprinkle of salt and enough olive oil to come about halfway up the tomatoes.

“It is any thing but agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one’s intellect is dwindling away; or exhaling, without your consciousness, like ether out of a phial; so that, at every glance, you find a smaller and less volatile residuum.”

New woodworking website is live.

When I finished Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers last month I wanted to post something here more than the “finished reading” flag that feels like awarding myself a medal; but I didn’t get around to it.

Ran across this fascinating toy that lets you see the night sky from any point on earth at any time in history.

Hey folks, I need to ask a favor if anyone has a few minutes.

Proposition: Video replay should be used, if it is used at all, only to correct on-field, real-time calls that may by objective standards have been incorrect: was the ball fair or foul, was the runner safe or out, was the receiver’s foot in or out of boun…

Stories of European tourists being pleasantly surprised that we’re not all ogres over here have me thinking of Frances Trollope and remembering that I should be glad Americans don’t spit as much as we used to.

Granted I chose my angles carefully, but the native perennials have managed this well so far without any city water, only what’s fallen from the sky.

“May Song II.”

Rain barrel installed, after two additional (unforeseen but unsurprising) trips to Lowe’s.

Two inches of rain in the past week has Crabtree Creek rushing by at a normal height, but the wetland area by Raleigh Road tells the full story.