I always See The Glass Half Full... Of Poison.

I've gone. Not one for goodbyes, I thought it best to slip out quietly. Love to you all, Giles.

British actor Anthony Head, best known for his roles in TV shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ted Lasso, Merlin and Little Britain, has died at the age of 72. Head found international fame as Rupert Giles in hit supernatural teen show Buffy in the late 1990s. He went on to have a recurring role in sketch show Little Britain, play king Uther Pendragon in the BBC's Merlin, and appear as former football club owner Rupert Mannion in Ted Lasso. "He passed away peacefully of complications due to pneumonia, surrounded by his family," his daughters Emily and Daisy said. His daughters' statement said "it is with heavy hearts that we announce the death of our extraordinary father". They added: "It has been, and forever will be, an honour and a privilege to be his daughters, and to have witnessed firsthand the impact both he and his work have had on so many." They also said they knew "how dearly he will be missed by friends, colleagues and fans of the show he was in", adding that he "loved his job very much" and "always considered himself incredibly lucky". His family acknowledged that "his legacy will live on" and said they considered themselves "lucky" to have watched him doing what he loved throughout his career. Head's other credits included The Iron Lady, Persuasion, The Inbetweeners and Manchild.

Plenty of tiaras have been lost over the years but the tiaras below were stolen in dramatic and sometimes dangerous heists. Only one tiara on this list has been recovered to date.

Duchess of Northumberland's Strawberry Leaf Tiara - stolen from the duchess while she was traveling in her car to Buckingham Palace for a state banquet in 1963 - never recovered

Queen Maud of Norway's Pearl Tiara - made by Garrard in 1896 - stolen from Garrard in London where it was for maintenance in 1995 - never recovered

Queen Sophia of Sweden's Pink Topaz Tiara - made circa 1875 - stolen from Garrard in London where it was for maintenance in 1995 - never recovered

Diamond Tiara that allegedly belonged to Eva Peron - made circa 1988 - stolen from Sofía Monteagudo of Joyas de Valor in Valencia in 2009 - recovered in Milan in 2011

Duchess of Richmond's Diamond Tiara - made circa 1820 - stolen from Goodwood House in Westhampnett in 2016 - never recovered

Grand Duchess Hilda of Baden's Diamond Tiara - made by Schmidt-Staub circa 1907 - stolen from the Baden State Museum in Karlsruhe in 2017 - never recovered

Duchess of Portland's Diamond Tiara - made by Cartier in 1902 - stolen from the Portland Collection Gallery at the Welbeck Estate in Worksop - never recovered

Queen Hortense of Holland's Sapphire Tiara - made in the early 1800s - stolen from the Louvre Museum in 2025 - still holding out hope of recovery

Empress Eugenie of France's Pearl Tiara - made by Alexandre-Gabriel Lemonnier in 1853 - stolen from the Louvre Museum in 2025 - still holding out hope of recovery

linked tree (includes options to donate to Ghanaian projects)

Wednesday Addams being relatable! WEDNESDAY (2022- )

I posted this 1884 Victorian in Abbottstown, PA a long time ago. It hasn't sold, and has been on the market so long, it's now up for auction. 7bds, 4.5ba, 7,337sqft, bidding will start at $300k.

congrats! Now you have a motif! A recurring theme! A focus for your art! Something to haunt you!

Seventeen still lives of dandelions? Three hundred poems about grief? A sketchbook dedicated to your grandmother’s house? Two books trying to unravel the complexities of familial relationships?

An early exploration of the themes Hokusai would keep coming back to is Spring in Enoshima, done in 1793 when he was 33. The wave is small and there are no boats, but Mt Fuji is clear in the background, and Enoshima is in Kanagawa, so we are clearly beginning to work towards something here.

A second pass, eleven years later in 1803 when he was 44. The title of this one begins to get more familiar: The View of Honmoku Off Kanazawa. It has a towering wave over a smaller boat, but Mt Fuji is not present, and the boat is considerably larger and has a sail. But the feeling of danger in the wave and the smallness of the boat are here, and of course the general composition is definitely recognizable.

This is A View Of Express Delivery Boats, done in 1805, merely two years later at age 46. Here we find the wave and the boats almost exactly as we'll find them in The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, though Mt Fuji isn't present, and the location is uncertain. And it's a good picture! The wave is threatening, the boats are small -- but the feeling of "ocean" isn't really there yet, is it? It's unlikely this picture would have become a classic for the ages. But that's okay, there's still time.

And here we have it, a full 26 years later, done by Hokusai in 1831 at the age of 72. The Great Wave Off Kanagawa, one of the most recognizable pieces of art in the world. The boats are there, the mountain is there, the wave is there, and the FEELING is there. He did it! He reached the apex of his ongoing motif and theme!

Or did he? Because the whole point of a motif is not that you're striving to get to the perfect version of it, the one idealized image you carried in your head all along, and when it is done, you are also done. Hokusai is on record at the age of 73 saying he'd only just begun to feel like he was learning how to draw things properly, and that "if I keep up my efforts, I will have even a better understanding when I was 80 and by 90 will have penetrated to the heart of things. At 100, I may reach a level of divine understanding, and if I live decades beyond that, everything I paint — dot and line — will be alive." He had drawn The Great Wave, but he didn't believe he was finished -- he thought that he was still just beginning to get started.

And he wasn't finished with his ocean motif, either. Please check out his Mt Fuji At Sea, done in 1834 at the age of 75.

In the wild, researchers have found that most wolf packs are simply families, led by a breeding pair, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.

Pop up ads:

“It was a way to associate an ad with a user’s page without putting it directly on the page, which advertisers worried would imply an association between their brand and the page’s content. Specifically, we came up with it when a major car company freaked out that they’d bought a banner ad on a page that celebrated anal sex. I wrote the code to launch the window and run an ad in it. I’m sorry. Our intentions were good.”

And pop-up advertising was born. Zuckerman, who now works for the Centre for Civic Media at MIT, bemoans the current ad-supported state of the web. Believing that “advertising is the original sin of the web” and that “the fallen state of our Internet is a direct, if unintentional, consequence of choosing advertising as the default model to support online content and services.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jaymcgregor/2014/08/15/the-man-who-invented-pop-up-ads-says-im-sorry/

Labradoodles:

Mr. Conron, who has been credited with sparking a crossbreeding frenzy resulting in shih poos, puggles and more, said the labradoodle was originally intended as a guide dog, not a fashion accessory.

“I bred the labradoodle for a blind lady whose husband was allergic to dog hair,” Mr. Conron said, according to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

“Why people are breeding them today, I haven’t got a clue,” he added.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/25/us/labradoodle-creator-regret.html

Jaws:

“That’s one of the things I still fear—not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975,” Spielberg tells BBC Radio 4’s Lauren Laverne. “I truly, and to this day, regret the decimation of the shark population because of the book and the film.”

Jaws spearheaded a “collective testosterone rush” among fishers in the East Coast of the United States, leading thousands to hunt sharks for sport, as George Burgess, former director of the Florida Program for Shark Research, told the BBC in 2015. In the years following the film’s release, the number of large sharks in the waters east of North America declined by about 50 percent.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/steven-spielberg-regrets-how-jaws-impacted-real-world-sharks-180981335/

Gender reveals:

It was maybe a year or so later that I started seeing people I didn’t know having parties kind of copying mine with gender reveal cakes. It was really weird to me. I kept thinking maybe someone did one before me but NPR did this whole exhaustive thing and got to the bottom of it.

When I first saw that a gender-reveal party had caused a forest fire I cried because I felt responsible. But here’s the thing – when planes crash no one goes after the Wright brothers. I think the parties probably would have happened anyway. I put form to it, but it’s not that crazy of an idea.

Now I think the whole thing is not great at all, though. The problem is they overemphasize one aspect of a person. I had two more kids after Bianca, but I never had another gender reveal party.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jun/29/jenna-karvunidis-i-started-gender-reveal-party-trend-regret

Shopping malls:

This radical vision was the work of Victor Gruen, a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938. He set his sights on bringing a dose of Viennese urbanity to what he saw as the car-dominated “avenues of horror” of American commercial strips. He imagined Southdale as the centre of a new high-density, mixed-use district, surrounded by housing and offices, as well as a school and a medical centre, with an artificial lake wrapped by curved streets, all forming a utopian “blight-proof neighbourhood”.

Dayton, the development company, had other ideas. The construction of the shopping centre massively raised land values in the surrounding area, so they decided to cash in, flogging their remaining plots to builders of single-family homes. The result has since become an all-too-familiar sight across the US: a mall marooned in a sea of car parking, ringed by multi-lane roads and suburban sprawl. It was far from an inclusive vision, either. By proposing an idealised alternative to downtown – removed from actual downtown, shielded from the elements, only accessible by car and designed solely for shopping – Gruen had created a mechanism to protect white, middle-class homeowners from those unlike themselves.

Grass is for Wings - Melanie Parke , 2025.

American, b.1966-