Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.
Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!
Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!
Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.
I managed to clean out the main floor of our playhouse. The garden cart’s pieces, a tarp, and a plastic container are now in the screen house. I cut up the box the cart was shipped in. The rest of the items are currently in the raised planting box. I moved the play oven to underneath the rafter, if the Servpro staff need more room to put items from our basement, I’ll clean that out.
I think the screen house also has enough space for storage, but not our regular shed or garage.
Put a bunch of paperbacks with rather small font, Cliff Notes, and a coupon flyer for a supermarket we don’t shop into the neighborhood little library. Should put also that college flyer in there. Mentioned to person operating the Giving Tree that Ridwell is collecting textbooks this week. I donated a wooden basket and a can crusher. I doubt anyone still uses can crushers, but at least it’s no longer on our property. Hopefully she activates her Ridwell account in time.
Also ordered some twenty gallon trash bags, should also buy some 13 gallon ones.
The Sundial project had a bit of a setback when I forgot that tiny housemate really appreciates the mouthfeel of a particular yarn type. (Aside from what I think was an accidental snag of a paw, her depredations ignored half a dozen other yarns to focus upon her fave. When I found her, she'd tucked the messy part under her chin as a cushion, like, nothing to see here.... She's made off with that yarn previously, on a different project.) The setback has led me to rethink the color sequence, which I'll take as a bonus.
As a contrast to the no-shoulders side view of a striped sweater (linked recently for Powdermill, seen also in Tonnach), here's the back of Olga, a different drop-shoulder pullover modeled by a designer with a body shape similar to Davies'. In the third and fourth photos of the Olga pullover, it's possible to see stripe-highlighted shoulder shaping in how the upper back is constructed.
Incidentally, if one's knitting for a person with a 75-80 cm or ~30-31" circumference torso, Kate Davies and PetiteKnit are good designers to consider. Both scale up as well for what's currently considered size-inclusive amongst indie patterns, but they reliably include smaller-circ sizing, whereas some designers start around 85 cm.
Also incidentally, as individuals Davies and PetiteKnit are the type of petite that some folks have imagined me to be. None of my relatives, including the ones who genuinely benefit from petite sizing when clothes-shopping, would fit the proportions of Kate Davies' cardigans, and my shoulders are too large for those relatives' clothes. All sides of my family---I recall the "Ach, was" of confused surprise when my oma, who was wide, tanklike, and proud of it, tried handing down a cherished fur coat. I as a coltish not quite 11yo could not get both arms in at once. I had already failed, or I had already won, or it's how I learned early that arbitrary competition is stupid and bigger isn't better---one of those---though what I remember most sharply of my adolescent reaction is relief that we wouldn't need to rearrange our small bags (likely to ditch something) for a coat totally unsuited to Los Angeles weather.
Went to the Autumn London Pen Show! Got the Lamy 2000 EF nib ground down to a needlepoint by Thomas Ang! Did not properly notice until settling in to play with it properly that it's got this amazing slightly stubbish character to it! And he also tweaked my Platinum UEF nib to be slightly less Horrendously Dry (which had somehow not occurred to me as a solution), and... having now settled down for a bit more writing for the evening, I think I might actually really like having two UEF/needlepoint nibs to use different colours of ink in.
The idea was to reduce the number of pens in regular use by dint of retiring the Platinum, not increase it. Oh no.
Some other things! The Rudi Rother Pelikan is even prettier in person; I still do not get the appeal of Leonardos (though to be fair I think my sense of their general appeal is massively skewed by That One Very Active Person who thinks they're The Most Beautiful Pens In All The World); the Visconti Van Gogh series do not impress me any more in person than they do in photographs; next time I can justify buying another TN insert The Inked Paw are delightful and we had an excellent chat and Trying Each Other's Pens while I was in Thomas Ang's queue (and they slightly discombobulated me by asking me if I had an Instagram when I flipped through my notebook to show what I use the UEF for...)
... yeah no I am just absolutely delighted by this ridiculous pen, EXCELLENT outing + date activity, Ben's Cookies also successfully acquired, Very Happy.
Like every day lately, I wake up and check the results of the MLB postseason games I'm not allowed to watch.
I was delighted the Blue Jays eliminated the Yankees of course, and delighted at Vladdy Jr.'s expressions of his own delight.
I was really sad for the Phillies even before I learned about the Kerkering error that ended the season for them if not this peak of the competitive cycle for them -- they're gonna be a pretty different looking team next year.
But today I saw that the Tigers-Mariners game had gone to fifteen innings. And I saw the name Jorge Polanco, an old favorite of mine who spent most of his career as a Twin (and only had to leave because it would save a very small amount of money when the team's owners decided the way to follow up on the best season the Twins had had in 20+ years was to ensure that this kind of success would never be possible again). And then I saw "walk-off" next to his name which meant the Mariners won, which I was so excited about I nearly burst for the lack of someone to tell about it right that minute.
I know a weird number of Tigers fans, at least one of which will read this, and my heart truly goes out to them for the wild end to a wild season for them. But I am so goddam joyful over this news, and it isn't even my team, I'm feeling downright exuberant so I can't imagine how its actual fandom is coping. (I'm looking forward to hearing how Meg is doing on the next episode of Effectively Wild!)
Except I've heard a little bit about it, through one of my favorite mediums which is star players on teams that might go from one generation to the next without being in the playoffs respond in an emotionally savvy way to the intensity of their fandom's mood and mental state when they do achieve the kind of thing that New York or L.A. get to take for granted but most or the rest of us don't.
In the game recap I read, there was a great quote from Julio Rodriguez:
It’s been unbelievable, honestly. Just kind of hearing about it, friends that I got here in Seattle, how they talk about it, how I see the city’s moving. Even like when I was walking off the field, this girl that works over here, she was crying. I just know there is a lot of passion that they have for this team, and I’m just happy that we were able to play a good ballgame for them that they can enjoy...
(Meg talked too on the podcast the other day the other day about Mariners fans crying and all the folks that just aren't here now who were the last time this happened in 2001 or something, and it was really moving and lovely, she's so smart and so good at getting her points across, I want to transcribe it but that won't happen tonight.)
To: “frank” <frank@postsecret.com> Sent: Monday, September 22, 2025 Subject: Thank You
Hi Frank,
I saw this secret when I was in high school, and it changed my life. I want to thank you and the person who posted it.
I didn’t even know I was a lesbian back then, but right when I saw this, I knew it was the type of love I wanted: unconditional and childlike, someone I could tell anything to and never have to be afraid they’d leave. At the time, I was going through a friendship breakup with a girl I loved more than I thought I should. I’d look at this secret when I was lonely and tell myself that there was someone out there who would feel this way about me.
It stuck with me, and years later, during the 2020 lockdown, I started writing their story, at least what I imagined it to be. I wrote about childhood best friends who had this type of love, and when it turned romantic, it didn’t destroy them like it did for me. They were able to build a new, stronger type of love on top of what they already had.
After many revisions and rejections, last year, I got on a call with an editor at Penguin Random House, and she told me they wanted to publish the book. It will be out in April 2026.
And the best part is that I have finally found a love that feels like that secret. We’re getting married on June 20th.
Thank you, Frank, and the poster of this secret, for reminding me of the kind of love that’s out there. I am so glad I didn’t settle for anything less.
Love, Rebecca
P.S. At first, I imagined the girl whispering the words written on the postcard.
When I started coming out to people in college, I thought she might be telling a similar secret to mine, one she worried would change things between them, and the listening girl was urging her not to be afraid.
Now, I’m back to the more literal interpretation. I think asking someone to be completely honest with you and promising to never be disappointed in them is terrifying! We’re people, and we’re going to hurt each other, so to me, loving someone like I love Allie, and like my characters love each other, is a risk worthy of being the big secret. And the way the listening girl is smiling says it all!
We've removed Mouthwashing (Video Game) as that was approved in error. Sorry for getting your hopes up, nominator!
烏は主を選ばない | Karasu wa Aruji wo Erabanai | Yatagarasu: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master (Anime): It’s come to our attention that Nazukihiko and Wakamiya are the same person, so we’re merging those characters.
Nominator of Luca (The History of Sound) - it looks like the Wikipedia page for this movie incorrectly listed Luca as the name of Lionel's lover in Rome; according to IMDB and the original stories this movie is based on, it's Vincent (who was also nominated), so we're deleting Luca.
Thank you for all the tag set issues you’ve let us know about so far! Please continue to check the tag set and let us know of further corrections we should make. Please tell us about these corrections before 9am UTC, Monday 13 October, so we can fix them before sign-ups.
Limited Do-Not-Match option
Most of the time, the person assigned to create for you in an AO3-based gift exchange, and the person assigned to receive a gift from you, are determined by the tags you select in the sign-up form.
Some exchange moderators also offer participants the option to say "Please do not match me up with [ExampleUserName] or [ExampleUserName2]. I don't want to receive a gift from them or create for them." This feature makes it easier, for example, to offer a fandom requested by six different people including someone you'd prefer to avoid, and have peace of mind that you can still avoid that person.
A Do-Not-Match option is difficult to offer flexibly in Yuletide because of the large number of participants and the large number of people who have only one possible creator or recipient. However, we see a Do-Not-Match option as a valuable tool to reduce friction and make everyone happier, so we intend to offer a limited version of this feature in Yuletide, on a trial basis. Please note that this is not an absolute guarantee you won’t receive a story from one of the people you list.
How it will work
When you sign up on AO3, the sign-up form will also link out to a Google form where you can list the AO3 names of up to 3 people you do not want to match to and can tell us if you want to avoid writing for a person, receiving an assigned gift from a person, or both. We will also ask for those people's AO3 ID numbers, which you can find on their AO3 profiles, and for the email associated with your AO3 name. We will not ask for the reason you wish to avoid a person.
After we run the matching process, we will check all matches against our master Do-Not-Match list. We will take the following actions:
If your assigned recipient or creator is someone you asked to avoid, we will attempt to match you to someone else.
If your only possible recipient is someone you asked to avoid, we will email you to recommend you expand your offers. However, we will leave the match in place if you do not respond in the first 24 hours following the close of sign-ups.
If your only possible creator is someone you asked to avoid, we will send out your requests with initial pinch hits.
If you are the only possible recipient for a creator you asked to avoid, we will leave the match in place, but will prioritize your requests for double-assignment to two creators. [Because of how matching works, there will always be Yuletide participants who start out with two assigned creators; generally we try to choose them at random.]
We will not take the following actions:
We will not ask a creator to drop out or expand their offers if their only possible recipient is someone who would prefer to avoid them.
We will not inform a participant that someone else has asked not to match to them. [This information will be restricted only to the core Yuletide mods, Isis, Morbane, and pendrecarc, and will not be shared with the larger pool of Yuletide assistants.]
We will not review treats for unwanted matches. Putting someone on your Do-Not-Match list will not prevent them from creating a treat for you (but please see FAQs below for other tools to achieve this).
We will not prevent someone on your Do-Not-Match list from claiming you as a pinch hit. We will check our master Do-Not-Match list when assigning pinch hits, so if the first person to claim you is a person you prefer to avoid, we will leave a short amount of time to see if another claim comes in. But we will not hold your pinch hit indefinitely or tell the first creator they aren't allowed to claim you.
We will not ask you why you wish to avoid a particular match.
FAQs (foreseeable/anticipated questions)
Who am I allowed to put on my Do-Not-Match list? Any three AO3 accounts you would prefer to avoid matching to. This can be for any reason, serious or unserious. Do not tell us the reason, please. If the reason is harassment or similar, we recommend reaching out to the Policy & Abuse team separately. You may only give specific names, rather than a description like "anyone who mostly wants porn".
Can't I just block people I don't want to match to? No. Adding other users to your block list stops them from giving you a treat (see item AO3-6502 on this news post). It also stops them from being able to comment on your work. However, it does not affect challenge matching. A person you have blocked can be assigned to create for you, and you can be assigned to create for them.
Wait, am I allowed to block people in Yuletide? Yes. Feel free to use the blocking feature to improve your AO3 experience. However, blocking someone and also matching to them could lead to unhappiness for both of you - so please consider using all the tools at your disposal to avoid matching to people you have blocked. This could mean choosing not to offer a fandom if you suspect it has been requested by a person you wish to avoid, or it could mean using the Do-Not-Match option for people you have blocked.
What other AO3 tools exist to manage my gift experience? If you wish, you can choose to receive gifts only from assigned writers in a gift exchange or people who have claimed your prompts in a prompt meme. This is sometimes described as turning treats on and off. If you created your account after February 2022, please review this setting in your AO3 account preferences. If you select the setting "Allow anyone to gift me works", you can receive treats. If you do not select this setting, only an assigned author can give you a gift in Yuletide.
Will this be a feature of Yuletide going forward? Maybe, maybe not. It will depend on how well it works out this year!
in the downstairs front hall. Hasn't worked in over a decade. Flip the switch, nothing happens.
I happened to be lying on the floor today when I saw....
Me: Huh. Hey, Jenn? Does that hall light have a pull cord?
Jenn: What? No, I don't think so.
Me: I'm looking right at it. You just can't see it because there's less than an inch of it left, right up against the ceiling.
After I sourced the stepladder and a new light bulb it turns out - the whole time, the only reason it didn't work was because the pull cord was set to off.
I’m an H.I.V.-positive gay man who is distraught with where the country is headed, so I am actively participating in protests. I have a liberal friend who lives in an overwhelmingly Trump-supporting small town and is married to a Trump supporter. She messages me often about her fears of what is going on and seems equally distraught. I’ve shared with her how current politics could affect my life and how, although I’m very aware of my privilege, I’m concerned about people who aren’t as privileged and how they could be affected. But she doesn’t participate in protests and doesn’t like to actively show her views except on social media. There are protests in small towns close to her that could use her support. Once, there was a B.L.M. protest in her town, but she had ceiling fans being installed. She passed on another recent protest because she had a birthday party. She has never participated and I’m getting increasingly annoyed. I think it’s important to show up. I also know that everyone is different, so I’m trying to reconcile this. She comes off to me as someone who’s comfortable in her life and doesn’t want to shake anything up, which is the height of hypocrisy to me.
I feel like apathy is how we got here in the first place, and I’m really struggling with how and whether to keep people like this in my life. — Name Withheld
One of my friends left us in San Francisco, while the other one and I drove down to L.A. We passed a lot of nice sights during our crossing of the CA-152 West. Some were entertaining, such as all the garlic farms in Gilroy advertising things like garlic ice cream and garlic honey (also 10 avocados for $1!) Some were just pretty. One was the San Luis reservoir, which was huge.
Detectives from the vice squad with weary sadistic eyes spotting fairies. Degenerates, some folks say.
But God, Nature, or somebody made them that way.
Police lady or Lesbian over there? Where?
********
This poem is brought to you by the NYHS exhibit on The Gay Harlem Renaissance, which you should definitely see if you're in the city. They have pay-as-you-wish admission every Friday from 5 - 8.
Also, I'm incrementing my Robert Moses counter up but only a little, because it was a complaint embedded in an exhibit about somebody else, but it was at the NYHS, so it doesn't really count. So it has now been one day since the last Robert Moses mention, but only kinda.
scruloose and I have our covid/flu shots booked for next weekend! There were earlier slots available, but not in walking distance. It'll take us right to the little corner market, and next weekend is its final day for the season. Convenient! We finished season 1 of Silo a couple nights ago. (I've been intermittently earwormed with its OP theme music, which is fortunately a good piece, but I still would rather not have it [or anything else] stuck in my head.) That was a very solid season finale. Now to decide if we want to immediately go to season 2 or watch something else first/alongside. (Can anyone tell me, without spoilers, a] how much of the book[s] season 1 covers, and/or b] if the show is finished or if a third season is expected/hoped for?) I went along for the drive when scruloose ran a few errands this morning: a purchase return, two stops for local produce (blueberries, cranberries, broccoli, and a giant sweet potato; no luck getting baking apples), and picking up an order of Thanksgiving baked goods from Sully & Porter (née the Old Apothecary). We are now in possession of six adorably tiny tarts (half pumpkin, half lemon meringue) and six hefty cookies that I hope will freeze reasonably well so that they can be eked out. Tomorrow evening will probably be when we throw together a Thanksgiving dinner of ham*, cranberry sauce, and some mix of roasted veggies. I consulted How to Cook Everything on the matter of the ham, and it gives an oven temperature and an estimated cook time and basically says "heat until hot, then eat", and it doesn't get much simpler than that.
*The most token little ham! I'm not actually sure how much I'll like it, as ham was never my thing growing up, so we didn't want a huge one to swamp us with leftovers. We'll see! I know it's possible for me to enjoy ham, as we've been to a couple of group meals where I did. (I can think of one here and one in Toronto, so the hams in question were cooked by two very different friends.)
Doesn't appear to be online yet, but apparently, according to piece in Guardian Saturday, there is this horrid new trend for people to outsource chatting up to chatbots - I immediately thought CyberCyrano, because there were not a few instances when after meeting up with the silver-tongued smoothie who had been romancing them, what was discovered was a tongue-tied ditherer.
Like, I'm pretty sure there used to be guides to useful lines of chat, but this is taking it to a new level, where at points it seemed like you had chatbots pitching their woo to one another....
***
Also o tempora, though I wonder whether this is in fact a new pattern at all: report on crime in London - apparently crime central is actually Knightsbridge, at least for luxury watch, handbag and jewellery theft. Because that's where they are.
I have allowed the passage of years to distract me from my quest of watching every Oscar-winning film, and realised that with the 100th Academy Awards coming up, I had better get my list completed. So I found some time in September, mainly on Eurostar, to watch Oppenheimer, which won Best Picture in 2024; and then some more time, mainly in China, to read American Prometheus, the book that the film was based on.
As well as the Best Picture award, Oppenheimer won six other Oscars: Best Director (Christopher Nolan), Best Actor (Cillian Murphy in the title role), Best Supporting Actor (Robert Downey Jr. as Rear Admiral Lewis Strauss), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. The Hugo for that year went to Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves and the Ray Bradbury Award to Barbie.
The other films up for Best Picture were American Fiction, Anatomy of a Fall, Barbie, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Maestro, Past Lives,Poor Things and The Zone of Interest. I have seen Barbie and thought it was better; I started but could not be bothered to finish Poor Things. The only other 2023 film that I am sure that I have seen is Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. I certainly intended to see Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny but I cannot remember doing so. I was the Hugo administrator that year and things were busy – I still haven’t seen the Hugo winner, Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Amongst Thieves, though everyone tells me it is great. IMDB users rate Oppenheimertop film of 2023 on one scale and 4th on the other. So (spoiler) my negative take below is a minority report.
None of the cast seems ever to have been in Doctor Who. The many returnees from previous (and one future) award-winning films include the star himself, Cillian Murphy, who was in Inception as Robert Fischer, the chap whose dreams are infiltrated by Leonardo di Caprio and friends.
Matt Damon, the Nice Soldier General Groves here, was in Hugo/Bradbury winning The Martian as the protagonist, and was also the police mole in Oscar winner The Departed seventeen years earlier.
The gorgeous Florence Pugh is Oppenheimer’s lover Jean Tatlock here; the following year she was Princess Irulan in Dune Part 2.
David Krumholz is Oppie’s friend Isidore Rabi here, and was the hacker Mr Universe in Serenity.
David Dastmalchian is anti-Communist Lewis Borden here, and was very briefly Piter de Vries in Dune Part 1. I also know him as Gurathin in Murderbot.
At the end we have Christopher Denham, who is Klaus Fuchs here and (looking a bit older in a film made twelve years earlier) played fugitive American diplomat Mark Kijek in Argo.
Slightly cheating, as he does not speak in the earlier film, but Kenneth Branagh, impressive as Niels Bohr here, is in a crowd scene in Chariots of Fire.
And one more to note – Richard Feynman is played by Jack Quaid, better known (to me anyway) as Boimler in Star Trek: Lower Decks.
In case you somehow did not know, it is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who set up the scientific base in New Mexico where the first atomic bomb was developed in the 1940s; framed by the narrative of how he lost his security clearance in 1954 due to his pre-war associations with Communists (including his lover and his younger brother); itself framed by the 1959 Senate hearing in which Oppenheimer’s earlier persecutor, Lewis Strauss, was denied nomination as U.S. Secretary of Commerce. The punchline is that the supposedly little-known John F. Kennedy casts the crucial vote against Strauss.
So, all in all: I did not like this film. I thought it was dreadfully slow; the two different hearings were chopped up confusingly; I didn’t get why we were supposed to care about Lewis Strauss; I thought Cillian Murphy’s acting in the lead was one-note; and there was an awful lot of men talking to each other to explain what was going on, with occasional breasts. The music is intrusive and tells us what to think, because the acting generally doesn’t.
The writing hangs particularly heavily in the hearing scenes, where the script leans too much on the official transcripts. This rarely works. Writers should use creative freedom to depart from the historical record and come up with words that work for their actors and for their production team. The story of Oppenheimer’s security clearance is scandalous and dramatic, and the official record alone does not really do it justice.
There is a particularly silly moment early in the film where Oppenheimer stuns his American friends by giving a lecture in fluent Dutch. Except that the words spoken by Murphy are not Dutch at all; he may perhaps be making an effort to pronounce what someone wrote in his script, but it has only the most distant of resemblances to the real language. Half an hour with a voice coach could have sorted that out; I refuse to believe that no native Dutch speaker was available to the production team.
I will admit that the landscapes are wonderful, and I also thought that Kenneth Branagh as Niels Bohr, Tom Conti as Albert Einstein and the two lead women, Emily Blunt as Kitty Oppenheimer and Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock, lifted the scenes that they were in. But I was left baffled by the reverence that IMDB users, and Oscar voters, clearly had for this film. In my list of Oscar winners, I’m putting it in 82nd place out of 96, more than five sixths of the way down, immediately below A Beautiful Mind (a similarly disappointing biopic) and above No Country for Old Men (which shares a desert setting and unpleasant and unconvincing male characters).
Not for the first time, I found that the book the film is based on, American Prometheus: the Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, is much much more to my taste. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:
In mid-September 1925, he boarded a ship bound for England. He and Francis Fergusson had agreed that they would meet in the little village of Swanage in Dorsetshire, in southwest England. Fergusson had spent the entire summer traveling about Europe with his mother and was now eager for some male companionship. For ten days they walked along the coastal cliffs, confiding to each other their latest adventures. Though they had not seen each other for two years, they had kept in touch through correspondence and remained close.
This is an excellent top-to-toe biography, starting with Oppenheimer’s immigrant parents who moved to New York and became rich and finishing with his comfortable exile in Princeton, with refuge in the Caribbean, and the subsequent deaths of his wife and daughter. There were two particular points about his background that helped the whole story make sense for me. The fact that his family was rich meant that Oppenheimer never really had to worry about money, and that perhaps encouraged a lack of responsibility in some ways. But the philosophical foundation that he learned at an early age from his parents’ adherence to the Society for Ethical Culture pushed him in the opposite direction, to be aware of the moral consequences of his actions, especially when they affected the lives and even more so the deaths of many.
His fascination with the desert is brought out in the film, but less so his fascination with riding, which seems to have been an obsession from an early age. The ins and outs of his relationship, and Lewis Strauss’s, with the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton are also a very important element of the story, taking it beyond the question of national security to in-fighting in the academic world, where Oppenheimer usually defeated the less gifted Strauss – but not always.
The book also gives a much more rounded picture of Kitty Oppenheimer, who had been married three times before ending up with Robert, and was actually German by birth. She claimed to be related to the Belgian royal family, which sent me on a genealogical wild-goose-chase (in short: I don’t think she was). She was also a serious professional botanist in her own right; and an alcoholic. The film hints at some of this but the book reveals much more.
At 900 pages, it has the leisure to examine the accusations levelled against Oppenheimer in detail, and also to look at the motivations of his accusers from a distance of decades. One of the best lines in the book comes from, of all people, Albert Einstein, who when told of Oppenheimer’s security clearance problems said, “The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him—the United States government.”
It took me quite a while to get through – helped by two overnight flights to and from China last month, and two three-hour internal flights while I was there – but unlike with the film, I felt that my efforts were justified. You can get American Prometheus here. (I will also say that, judging by the front cover, Murphy does a great job of working up his physical resemblance to Oppenheimer.)
I had not realised it until earlier this year, but it is apparently conventional wisdom that Oppenheimer was the basis for Shevek, the protagonist of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed. He was a close friend of Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Ursula Le Guin’s parents, in Berkeley in the 1930s, and she must have observed his complex love life, emotional distance and scientific genius at close hand.
One more Oscar-winning film to go – this year’s Anora.
Last weekend I did small trips to two different chapels in the depths of Flanders. On Saturday afternoon, I biked the 7.8 km over to the Chapel of St Theresa on the provincial frontier between Bierbeek and Hamme Mille.
Photograph taken in April when the weather was better.
It was built in 1930 by the Van Der Elst family in gratitude for the miraculous healing of one of their children, and dedicated to St Thérèse of Lisieux. I’ve known about it for years. These days it mostly sits at the side of the road with cars zooming past, but last Saturday it was opened for Mass celebrated by the two priests of Bierbeek and Hamme Mille, with a congregation of about eight, plus two musicians playing the viola da gamba.
The point of the ceremony was to bring together people from both sides of the linguistic frontier, which runs just south of the chapel, and the priests alternated between Dutch and French in the ritual.
There’s a relatively new small sculpture by our local artist Ad Wouters above the door.
Inside I found tokens of gratitude to St Theresa, and a sleeping bat.
I used to be quite devout, but I would no longer describe myself as a practicing Catholic. However I think that sometimes if you want to celebrate connection between communities across geographical distance and time, the traditional ways can be a right way of doing that, and I enjoyed the symbolism of a communal mystic meal shared between the representatives of the different villages speaking different languages, organized by the foundation which now looks after the chapel.
The next day, I had promised F that we would go and take B out for a drive and a walk, and I found a new sight to see nearby (well, 25 minutes’ drive from B) in the village of Helshoven. Built in 2019, it is known as the floating chapel, “de zwevende kapel”, though as you first approach it, it’s not quite clear what’s going on. I had not told F in advance, so the look on his face, when he realized why it is called the “floating chapel”, was priceless.
B as usual took it in her stride.
Its official name is Helsh(ea)ven, a pun on the village name of Helshoven. It’s made with wood from the trunks of cherry trees, but of course the human eye interprets it as solid stone. The creator, Frits Jeuris, explains it in English on his own website; but it stands for itself really.
In case you want to explore for yourself, the St Theresa Chapel is at 50.8008 N, 4.7090 E (though you are unlikely to find it open) and Helsh(ea)ven is at 50.7915 N, 5.2667 E (and it is never closed).
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jazzyjj at 08:11pm on 11/10/2025 under just one thing
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okay
