out to work

The Blitz here manages to qualify as Britain's Darkest Hour, thus triggering the return of Arthur from the Realm Avalon.

He does not speak a lick of modern English. He speaks an unholy mishmash of Brittonic and Late Classical Latin.

(Honestly I can see the latter becoming a plot point if they manage to get their hands on a Roman Catholic priest to act as a translator. It wouldn't be a perfect arrangement, but probably better than anything else.)

Truthfully he probably gets mistaken for a madman.

Somehow manages to steal a Spitfire out from under the RAF's nose, proceeds to use it to bring down like half an enemy squadron on his own, then lands in a field in the middle of nowhere.

The 1881 portrait of two little girls rendered in pink and blue silk by Pierre-Auguste Renoir is, at face value, a society portrait of the daughters of French aristocracy. But the story behind the painting – and what became of the Jewish girls it depicts – is much darker.

Alice and Elisabeth Cahen d’Anvers, the subjects of the Impressionist painter’s famous portrait Pink and Blue and the younger daughters of a French banking dynasty, were immortalised as youthful members of the “haute Juiverie”: glamorous, upper-class Jews of Europe at the height of the Belle Époque. Their older sister Irène was also the subject of a famous Renoir painting several years earlier, depicted with a ribbon in her flowing red hair against a lush green backdrop.

Nothing in the portraits of the young sisters gives any indication that, 60 years later, Alice would be hiding from German bombers in a ditch in Normandy and Elisabeth, the blonde child with a blue sash in Pink and Blue, would be boarding a one-way train to Auschwitz.

The Renoir Girls traces the path of the three Cahen d’Anvers sisters from their shimmering days in Belle Époque  Paris – yachting on the Côte d’Azur, trips to the opera, salons, summer retreats, and dancing the night away at opulent balls – to their little-known struggle to survive in Nazi-occupied France.

Ostler, former editor of Tatler magazine, first heard of the three Jewish sisters from Edmund de Waal’s memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes, which explores the once gilded lives of de Waal’s own Parisian Jewish banking family during the 19th and 20th centuries. His relative Charles Ephrussi, a Jewish art patron who had an affair with matriarch Louise Cahen d’Anvers - and who was rumoured to be the actual father of Alice – persuaded Louise to have her daughters painted by Renoir.

“Impressionism rises up after the Franco-Prussian War, and there's a whole new way of looking at art. There’s a lot of stuff to buy and a lot of stuff to commission and a market for it and the result is an incredibly creative period,” says Ostler, adding that Louise was an “extraordinary” art collector herself with “a hold over all the French writers and artists of the day.”

One line in de Waal’s book came as a punch to the stomach: Elisabeth was murdered at Auschwitz.

Despite the Cahen d’Anvers family’s abiding love for France, their generous artistic patronage and sacrifices during the First World War – the sons fought for France, the women were nurses, with Alice winning the Croix de guerre for bravery at the front – they were of course not spared the growing antisemitism of France that culminated in the Vichy regime. As their family friend Marcel Proust wrote at the time, the “social kaleidoscope was in the act of turning… the Dreyfus case was shortly to relegate the Jews to the lowest rung of the social ladder.”

Elisabeth, in what may have been a bid for self-preservation, converted to Catholicism in 1895 and remained a practising Catholic for the rest of her life.  In 1944 at the age of 70, just months from the Allied liberation of Paris, she was betrayed by a local mayor and Vichy collaborator “who insisted on reminding everybody that she was actually Jewish, even though she converted to Catholicism before she was 20 and had been married twice, both times to Catholic men,” Ostler says.

France's attitude to its Jews in this the era is illustrated by the Nazis’ seizure of the Cahen d’Anvers’ Paris townhouse which they used as a place to hold and torture Jews awaiting deportation.

“Antisemitism is one of those things that I've always been aware of, but it is a shapeshifter,” said Ostler, who is not Jewish herself. “It's this monstrosity, and I partly feel there is an enormous amount of ignorance about it. It overlaps with so many conspiracy theories and the darkest urges of human nature.”

She hopes The Renoir Girls will be received by British Jews as a book of support, a reminder of the immense contributions Jews have made to their societies over the past centuries.

"The Jewish community is incredibly important to this country,” Ostler said. “It's written out of respect to their strengths and creativity and generosity and the whole beauty of the culture that Jewish community can create and encourage.”

First: THIS RECALL IS NOT STATE SPECIFIC. IT IS NATIONWIDE.

here are the specific products and dates:

FDA page on this:

People are roasting this person for asking a dumb question. But I think this is a valid query and the answer is actually pretty cool.

Unfortunately, you usually get a response like this.

This is accurate. But not very explanatory. "It's how light works" just feels a bit condescending.

We need to Bill Nye this shit.

The first thing you need to know is that light competes with light. And the brightest light is always the victor.

And this phenomenon is not specific to cameras. Our eyeballs also play in the light vs light competition.

Every person with a mobile phone has already seen this effect. What happens when you look at your phone on a really sunny day?

You can't see shit.

The sun is so overwhelmingly bright that it is reflecting light off the screen that is much brighter than the light being emitted from the phone.

However, newer phones are starting to have screens that are extremely bright. Up to 3000 nits in some cases. They are able to emit light brighter than the sun's reflection.

What happens to our eyes when we go outside on a sunny day?

Our pupils get as small as they possibly can. Smaller pupils let in a lot less light. And when they are that contracted, we can only register really really bright things.

But if we are in the dark, our pupils get super big. They allow in a bunch more light. And after we adjust to the dark, we can see really really dim things.

If our pupils stayed contracted and we looked at a starry sky, it would be as blank as the phone screen on a sunny day. You can even test this with an eye patch. Go into a very bright room and keep one eye covered for about 20 minutes. Then go outside and look at the sky with each eye. One eye will see stars and the other will not.

And this should give you a clue as to how light pollution works. Light bounces off stuff in the atmosphere. And when a city shoots a bunch of light upward, that light reflects back down and is much brighter than the stars.

The brightest light always wins.

Most stars are just incredibly dim. You need to be in a very dark environment in order to see them shine. You need them bigass pupils fully activated. And cameras need either a very large aperture (lens pupils), or a very long time interval to see them.

The sun is so so soooo bright. Many thousands of times brighter than distant stars. And the moon is also very bright. Especially if you are on or near the surface. The properties of moon dust, the regolith, are a near perfect diffuse reflector. Which is why astronauts struggled to see and photograph stars during their moon excursions.

If they opened up their camera apertures and did a long exposure, they'd just get a blank white frame.

There are dozens of photos in which that exact thing happened.

This is exactly what happens if you accidentally shine a flashlight directly into your eyes.

But it is a really cool ancient myth from one of Aristotle's essays written 2400 years ago.

And I think it is kind of neat that intellectuals from back then were trying to understand and figure out how light works. And it is impressive that a myth has lasted this long.

The problem is that the sky is a giant light source. A pretty bright one, in fact. People often forget that the sky is a giant hemisphere of scattered light because the sun is so overwhelming in comparison. It's just so much dimmer than the sun, it gets outshone on sunny days.

But you can see the sky being a light source on snowy days. If you look at photos of snow, you'll notice all the shadows are tinted blue.

That's the sky getting into the nooks and crannies where the sun don't shine.

So if you were deep in a well, you'd just see the blue sky.

HOWEVER, if you were to create a deep hole on the moon during lunar daytime, you could totally see stars. You'd be in a dark environment, your pupils would open up, there is no atmosphere to scatter light from the sun, and the glare of the surface wouldn't compete with the starlight.

into the nooks and crannies

where the sun don’t shine.

everyone knows about this meme, right?

but does anyone else know the woman who made the food? no? time to educate!

This is “Mother Mary”, the owner of Blackberry’s mother.

She made all the cakes for the restaurant while it was open. Chef Gordon Ramsay tried her red velvet cake, and spoke this meme-able line:

He then called Mary over, complimented her food, and gave her a peck on the cheek.

Look how happy she was to hear that!!!

✨Adventures in Gauffering✨

As requested (albeit several months late) I have finally put together a video on my gauffering process!

Irena lived in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, and dedicated her life to rescuing Jewish children from the Ghetto, and her story is complicated in a lot of ways but - well, this story isn’t actually about Irena, per se.

It’s about a bus driver.

It’s about a day when she’s traveling across town by bus with a very young Jewish child, and partway to their destination the child looks up and asks a question - in Yiddish. and the whole bus goes quiet, because everyone knows what that means. And Irena thinks, okay, we’re going to die here today.

And she’s running through her options - all of them bad - and suddenly the bus stops, and the bus driver announces that there’s been a mechanical failure and the bus needs to return to the depot immediately. Everyone off, please.

And she stands and goes to get off the bus and the driver says - not you two. Sit down. So she sits down as everyone else leaves, because, well, what else is she going to do? the options are all still bad, at this point.

and when the bus is empty the bus driver says,

“Where do you need to go?”

And then he drives them as close to their destination as he can, and lets them off, and drives away. And Irena lives, and the kid lives, and they never cross paths again.

So a janitor got three people killed, and a bus driver saved two lives - not to mention all the other lives indirectly saved because Irena was able to continue her work.

I think about that almost every day now, to be honest.

We can’t all be Irena. I couldn’t be Irena. She was in a unique place with very specific skills and connections that let her do what she did. I am just one mentally ill librarian. I can’t be her. But - I can be the bus driver. Or I could be the janitor. Because it doesn’t matter what your job is. It doesn’t matter who you are. In a world like this, every single one of us has the opportunity to do massive harm or massive good. We can save lives or end them.

And that’s scary. but it’s also very comforting? at least for me. Because at the end of the day it means this: no matter of how small and helpless and unimportant you feel, you’re never powerless in the face of great evil.

Download: Flare (Cascade)

I have recut and remastered my track Flare, as it was presented to you in the Cascade flash (rather than the calmed-down album version). I get asked a lot for this, so I decided to give it some extra love and attention.

I have attempted a number of times to put together a mix of Flare that utilized the distinctive crescendo that is recognizable from Cascade, but it never seems to work well without the cinematic context. The buildup sort of leads to nothing, and then the track either ends awkwardly or fades out, and I have something personal against fade-outs. Maybe I’ll talk about that someday. But not now.

I gave it another go, this time trying a decrescendo to bring the song back down from all the energy it riles up, then ending it on kind of a creepy note. I had more success here than I ever have in past attempts to cut the song together in this way.

Flare was a pretty big hit in its own right, so there’s always the pressure coming from the responsibility to handle this properly. I hope you enjoy it!

The artwork is the track illustration for Flare’s release on Vol. 8, and it is drawn by the startlingly talented Richard Gung.

Wife: GETMO? Husband: (after a moment, with a sigh) Yeah, GETMO. Me: GETMO? Wife and husband, in perfect unison: Good Enough To Move On