The Inside

The inside looked as if an art gallery and a tiara had a baby.

That's brilliant!  I guess that's a not uncommon sort of cliche, but even familiar cliche constructs can be better than the run of the mill!

Kay

Lent, Leant

I just saw an unexpected confusion in a story:

"Valentina lent over and pinched both their cheeks, earning squeals of pleased protests."

'Lent' is the wrong word.  The idea is that  Valentina was leaning towards the kids; the past tense of Leaning is Leant.  It isn't a very common word, but ... this mistake is sort of jarring.

Well, it is a sort of cute gangster- related rom-com, but I'm only a quarter of the way through it; I may abandon 'cute' by the end of it.  It's Dangerous Game by  ... somebody.  Oh, Bel Blackwood!  Of four books by her I've read, I liked three.

OK, boys and girls, we'll meet anon.

Kay

Cherry Turnovers

Today, I went with a friend to Wengerds, (a Mennonite grocery store / supermarket), where they have really amazing stuff for sale: meat,  bread, oil, juice, cold cuts, and pies, and of course, these Cherry Turnovers.  Many of you must be familiar with the triangular filled turnovers, made with sort of puff pastry.  I brought one to eat at home (eating them in the store is sort of depraved, IMO), and it was SOO GOOD!

I love puff pastry, anyway, and this pastry was just perfect: a touch of salt, and sugar on the outside; and I heated the thing up in this little toaster oven, and gave myself over to floating up to heaven!

A thousand blessings on these Mennonites; their store is just so nice; I'm going to shop there by myself, and have to try getting more of a variety of supplies than just pies.

(If the Republicans win, I wonder whether these markets will continue to exist...)

Kay

Interfering?

I'm getting posts from Instagram and Facebook, that touchscreen voting is not allowing voters to pick their choice of candidate.  These are just posts on those platforms, but I'm getting nervous. 

Stonehenge: Underground Secrets

I was just watching a YouTube post, about new investigations in the area surrounding the Stones. 

For years it has been known that the setting sun, or the rising sun, during Solstices, Summer and Winter, aligns perfectly with various stones at Stonehenge.  It was therefore assumed that the significance of the ancient monument was most likely calendric.  But then it was decided to aim Lidar at the ground.  (Lidar is a way of investigating the ground, to detect buried masses; using sound, and how the ground reflects or refracts it.  I don't know much about this phenomenon, but they have discovered lots of interesting buried things using this technique.)

Well.  It turns out that there is fascinating buried stuff in an enormous area surrounding the Standing Stones we have known so far.  I was listening to the commentary of a woman who was reading out the text of the post.  (It was a huge text, and she had to race along after a while, to get in all the material.  She comes across as sedate and measured, but also excited and interested.  (I wish I could narrate a text like that!)

She emphasized that many of the properties of the ancient installation were acoustical, that it was designed to amplify the voice of a speaker in a very special way, to impress, or even intimidate the audience.  This creates some troubling thoughts about the whole thing.  They know that many of the existing, visible stones were hauled from Wales.  But it appears that one of the most important stones was brought some 700 miles from the northern tip of Scotland.

I don't want to get into the story too deep, because I suspect that there are all sorts of horrible things involved, such as human sacrifice, and so on.  In fact I know this is the case; there is often a human sacrifice in the foundations of any fortification.  It was thought that this made the edifice somehow stronger. 

I seriously doubt that the spoken narration of the video was AI generated, but the information about the video seem to suggest that it is.  It is possible. 

Kay