who only by moving can balance

One (1) duplicate letter from the DWP, which I had actually requested, because the council is apparently incapable of giving me the concessionary rate on the basis of disability without me providing one letter per year from the DWP telling them I'm still disabled, despite the fact that for anything that is not the allotment rent they can work this out from all the other information available to them without needing me to have Special Executive function;

three (3) rolls of washi tape from Sweden, one of which I have been Tempted By for probably actual years at this point and the other two of which are relevant for this year's notebook set-up and I was sad and wanted a treat;

and one (1) book, Citrus: A History, because it was £4.56, on a topic I have previously been interested in, and Interest Has Been Expressed in me yelling about it. (When will I get to it? Unclear, because once I've finished reading The Rose Field I should probably do some more pain reading, but. Eventually.)

(And why have I been sad? I genuinely do not know; my brain has just been having a Sustained Patch of Uncooperative. I would like it to stop. In addition to post, today's efforts in that direction have included a batch of pineapple upside-down banana bread, this time with some of the flour replaced with almond meal.)

And then today's cookbook browsing introduced me to the concept of allorino! But the internet can't agree on whether it should be made with bay leaves, bay flowers, or bay berries. So clearly the correct solution here is Some Of Each, right.

(I am also contemplating whether I want to add finely chopped fresh bay to the quince buckwheat upside-down cake that is high on my priority list for things to cook over the next few days, given how much I love the Ottolenghi lemon & bay cake...)

Meanwhile, my other recreational reading today introduced me to the concept of the "Brompton Cocktail".

( End-of-life care circa the 1980s, with specific reference to terminal cancer. )

Koalas have fingerprints; hairy-nose wombats do not.

Skin on fingers and toes wrinkle in water not because cells get saturated but as an autonomic nervous system function, which we have apparently known since at least 1935. An initial 2013 study found that people with wrinkled fingertips could pick up and move more wet marbles in a set time frame than people with dry skin; a 2014 study failed to replicate this, but there's more at the BBC including a 2020 replication. (The 2013 reference at least is buried in the BBC article.)

Holding a hot drink inclines us to view people as "emotionally warmer"; a heavier clipboard inclines us to believe the person whose CV it's displaying takes their work more seriously. Many other related fun facts over here.

(Book of the moment: Touch, David J. Linden.)

Arancini. The small balls of risotto coated in breadcrumbs and then deep fried.

*Little oranges*.

This is not in any way an obscure or difficult to look up etymology, and yet somehow it was not until yesterday, on the tube, that I suddenly needed to look up from the book I was reading and *stare*.

(Earlier this week -- no, wait, late last week -- I was indexing a cookbook that included arancini. This week I am reading *The Land Where Lemons Grow*, because it's mostly a history of citrus cultivation in Italy with occasional recipes, so I wanted to read it Properly before indexing it and getting rid of it again. Apparently what it took for me to Have A Realisation was the combination in temporal proximity...)

Bridget Collins, The Betrayals: I loved the structure and the internal resonance and so on and so forth to the extent that I didn't even mind that That's Not How Diaries Work.

(You do not get more detail because it is BEDTIME good grief, but -- okay I lied a bit -- queers! cocreation! complicity! choices! delighted.)

This morning I finished reading Tales From Out There: The Barkley Marathons, The World's Toughest Trail Race, by Frozen Ed Furtaw. This recounts the history of, well, the Barkley Marathons, from its inception up to prep for the 2010 race, from the perspective of the first person to complete the course, in the third year it was held. (Whereupon Gary Cantrell/lazarus lake made it harder, as he subsequently has every time someone actually manages to demonstrate that the current instantiation isn't actually impossible.) Last year's race got a fair bit of news coverage, especially in the UK, because Jasmin Paris was the first woman to complete all five loops of the post-1995ish course. There was also coverage here on Dreamwidth, courtesy of rydra_wong, who has been attempting to lure people into this particular extreme sports fandom since well before March 2024, but this time round I actually had the brain to engage! ... only to discover that at that point, for some reason, Furtaw's book (which I turned to once I'd watched documentaries etc, was Rather More Expensive Than Usual on the second-hand market), so I resigned myself to Getting It Later.

Which I duly did! And then on Friday last week I finally finished the non-fiction I'd been slogging through and turned, with glee, to Reading More About The Barkley. I am not sure this is a document that I would recommend unless you are either Interested In The Barkley or interested in a very particular style of Nerd Storytelling? But I enjoyed myself a lot.

Next on my list was the new Craft Wars book by Max Gladstone, Wicked Problems. (I think I have not talked about the Craft Sequence much recently, but after bouncing hard off the first chapter of Three Parts Dead on my first attempt, I wound up loving it enough that I worked out a plausible volcano-associated rock for An Important Piece Of Jewelry featured in Full Fathom Five and then scouring Etsy for an appropriately shaped bead.) I had not even (despite having bought it more or less the week it came out, as I recall) managed to get as far as putting it onto my ereader, so that was step one, and while I was at it I merrily transferred several of the other books that have been lurking in my calibre library but hadn't actually made it across to The Device, and then I settled in to read.

... and was confused and somewhat apprehensive to find that it opened thus (not actually spoilers for Wicked Problems):

The room she ushers him into smells of stale cigarettes and air freshener. The decor is ’80s mil-spec Holiday Inn. Dark-green carpet, striped armchairs, a smoked-glass table, a print of two F-15s trailing vapour set high in a gilded frame. The scream of their engines outside has been softened in here to a dark, low-frequency roar.

While it is not set in our world, I think I can safely say without particular spoilers that one of the technically-I-suppose geographical features of the Craft universe is a Rift In Reality. So it was not... totally out of the question? that Gladstone might have chosen to have do this unsettling and alarming dislocation? Like, it's a hell of a first paragraph to find oneself in media res, but it's Extremely Evocative and for all that I was mildly alarmed and thinking, approximately, but I don't WANT a cat I want a CHEESECAKE, I love the Craft Sequence enough to keep going and see what the fuck he was doing with this.

By the end of chapter three I was a bit "... ooooookay this is... not... structured the way I would anticipate him structuring doing this kind of thing" and yet (rydra_wong, vass, I hope you at least started cackling several paragraphs ago) it was not until partway through CHAPTER SEVEN that I FINALLY went "no, seriously, WHAT GIVES" and actually double-checked the title.

... so anyway that's how I realised that I had gone from The Barkley (lured by rydra_wong) into Prophet, also VERY MUCH rydra's fault, courtesy of tapping on a different title to the one I'd intended, because I'd just added a bunch of new books to the ereader and eink still doesn't refresh all that fast.

(My reading plans have been thoroughly derailed. I am now committed. I might shriek in comments as I go along.)

Otherlands, Thomas Halliday, through which I am trudging extremely slowly and with some resentment despite the occasional excellent paragraphs about specific species: I have been grumbling that it feels like it wants to grow up to be a podcast.

I was wrong.

It wants to be a David Attenborough documentary. And it's relying on its readers supplying the images to go with the voiceover! And I'm aphantasic! But that's the source of the cadence and the pacing and the zooming in and out on ecosystems -- all of it Wants To Be A David Attenborough Documentary, and I'm aphantasic.

Thanks to this revelation I am feeling much better about it not quite landing with me!

Didn't manage to talk myself into getting a Traveler's Notebook set-up from the Galen seconds sale before the colour & size I was interested in had sold out. Did pine about this somewhat.

... jumped on being second in line when a Moterm in deep teal came up on the FountainPensUK buy/sell/trade group over on Facebook last week. And it arrived today!

So far I have fondled it happily and peered at its workings and contemplated the notebooks it came with (blank/lined/grid); blank can be for poetry (maybe), grid is extremely multi-purpose I just need to decide on a purpose (given that I've got lots of potentials), and I am not thrilled about lined because I mostly eschew lined paper but idk I'll come up with something. (These days I am dot-grid all the way.)

So obviously I happily added the new notebook to the list of notebooks I've bought in the notebook where I track that (this notebook is discbound, and also includes keeping a vague record of how fast I go through the ludicrously expensive conditioner, how many pens exactly it is that I own, Irish irregular verb tables, and Notes On Computer Games). Which all starts to feel a bit recursive, so then I went and bought some cookbooks.

(This is an unhelpful summary. In fact I blithely quoted Molesworth at somebody, realised I didn't know if they recognised a Molesworth and clarified that it was Molesworth, they were one of today's lucky 10,000, and now I've got two copies of the compendium en route to me for really not much money, one for them and one for lending. In the process of noodling around eBay for cheap books I somehow wound up putting in a second order with a different vendor for a different 20% off offer, and now en route to me are Short and Sweet so I can add the recipe in there I definitely care about to the EYB account; the unrevised The Perfect Scoop, because the library doesn't have it and I'd forgotten a revised and updated version exists; and Leiths How to cook... Desserts, which was the only one of that set of four I still didn't have. Booksss.)

... and leads with an explanation of "opponency" that I did not quite manage to follow, for reasons that have more to do with typesetting of the ebook than anything else, but which problem I addressed by Visiting Wikipedia.

The wikipedia page on opponent process begins

The opponent process is a color theory...

... and indeed when my eyebrows raised and my eyes flicked over to the table of contents, I was unsurprised to see a section titled "Criticism".

All of which led inexorably on to impossible colors and, delightfully, the line of purples.

Yong has not thus far (I am a little under halfway through the chapter) even gestured vaguely in the direction of the immediately-obvious-to-me-from-the-opening-sentence-on-wikipedia Controversy about opponency, which means that I (i) have no idea and (ii) am poorly equipped to judge how this particular Controversy compares with The Controversy About Mantle Plumes wherein the small number of people who think thermal convective upwellings Aren't What's Going On for a long time were also the only people who cared about the wikipedia page on mantle plumes, which has at some point in the last decade been extensively edited to reflect actual current scientific consensus. Which in turn means that I am unsure how large a grain of salt to take with everything else Yong says!

Meanwhile,

Our [human] lenses typically block out UV, but people who have lost their lenses to surgeries or accidents can perceive UV as whitish blue. This happened to the painter Claude Monet, who lost his left lens at the age of 82. He began seeing the UV light that reflects off water lilies, and started painting them as whitish blue instead of white.

Island dwarfism, one half of the general rule that island animals tend towards a medium size, was first noted in a Cretaceous fossil site in Haţeg, Romania. At the time the limestone of the Gargano caves was being laid down beneath the European seas, Haţeg was a largish island, and housed dwarfed dinosaurs. Their small size was thought to come from the lower resources of islands, with enormous creatures unable to survive on the limited nutrients available. This is not limited to creatures as big as dinosaurs. Over time, in the absence of ordinary predators, many large animals whose size would otherwise offer protection against predation -- such as deer, and, on other islands, hippopotamuses and elephants -- become smaller as food is scarcer. Small animals, which cannot store energy or water as easily, become larger, aiding the survival of the population through periods of scarce resources. [...]

On different Mediterranean mountains, the niche of small mammalian herbivore has been filled by supersized or shrunken versions of whatever happens to have colonized the island upon isolation. On Gargano, there are the herds of Hoplitomeryx. On Mallorca, a minute goat with a disconcerting forward-facing stare prunes the box shrubs. Box is notoriously toxic, containing large amounts of alkaloid compounds that normally deter predators. Myotragus has a behavioural solution to this toxicity, however: it eats small quantities of clay from the riverbed, which neutralizes the toxic alkaloids in the leaves. This abrasive mud antidote wears down their teeth, so they have evolved rodent-like ever-growing incisors, and molars with very high crowns, which explains the meaning of their name, 'mouse antelope'. The pressures of island life often produce such unusual responses. Physiologically, Myotragus is even rather unlike most mammals. To avoid problems with fluctuating nutrient supplies, the dwarf goat can vary its metabolic rate. They grow slowly, speeding up only when times are good, exactly as ectotherms, or 'cold-blooded' creatures do. On Menorca, the role of medium-sized herbivore is filled by a giant rabbit, Nuralagus, wombat-like in its hapless, hopless, rollicking gait and tumbleweed figure.

(Chapter 3, Deluge, ~5.33 million years ago; Wikipedia links my own, because I don't love you enough to type up the actual book's actual list of sources; more generally, see allopatric speciation)