Writer at the Table

Agelaius phoeniceus, Red-winged blackbird

Antisemitism is in everything, and once you start looking for it you will never stop.

It is in Christianity -- the Catholic Church, yes, I feel like I don't really need to get into the antisemitic history of the group behind the Spanish Inquisition, but Martin Luther was one of the most influential antisemites in Europe, and a direct line of thought can be traced from his ideas to Hitler's.

It is in Islam -- which says that the day of judgment will come only when the Muslims kill the Jews (and also apparently one type of tree will hide us as the others are ratting us out because that type of tree is Jewish, which is weird).

Those two religions are followed by a majority of people in the world. In the West, most people grow up in a vague culturally Christian hegemony, even if they're not actively Christian.

But there's more!

The Corpus Juris Civilis has had massive consequences and underpins many legal systems today. It is foundational in so much Western law.

It also codified the principles that Jews weren't citizens, that we couldn't testify in court against Christians. It banned Hebrew prayer and conversion to Judaism.

So many famous people were deeply antisemitic. Ezra Pound was a Nazi, yeah, but it's just...everywhere. I've talked about Bram Stoker a lot, but it's also other people: Shakespeare, Voltaire, Jonathan Swift, Tolstoy, Gandhi, Cicero, Oscar Wilde, a random "humorous" book of joke definitions that I was only able to read through the AR's because it said Arson was derived from the Hebrew (see Insurance) or something which references the myth that Jews set fire to things for the insurance money. It is all over literature and cabals come from kabbalah and hip-hip is from the chant of the rioters in Germany and Denmark as they attacked Jews for daring to maybe want some rights and you try to go into botany and are confronted with the Wandering Jew plant and and and.

And to undo that would require serious, concerted, effort that would almost certainly make Christian and Muslim students uncomfortable, and that just didn't happen. There was some reckoning in Germany, imposed upon them.

Nowhere else. Antisemitism didn't go away, it just went underground, and we patted ourselves on the back and thought that this time we would be safe and this time we'd finally be able to settle down and it's starting to look like we were wrong.

See: droopy eyes are sneaky, "sallow" skin is a sign of dishonesty, pointed hats on witches come from sumptuary laws aimed at Jews.

ALSO:

I think it'd be really funny if Eric was actually a younger brother. So, like, maybe he's a duke, actually, but he still gets the title of Prince. Travels the sea a lot, unlike a more landlocked heir. Hanging out at this summer seaside palace while the rest of the family is elsewhere for some reason.

This is a given.

If the last digit is divisible by 2 (a.k.a. even), then so is the whole number.

If the sum of the digits is divisible by 3, then so is the whole number. The recursivity of this means that if the sum has multiple digits, you can add them up again until you get a single digit and see if it's 3, 6, or 9.

Like the rule for 2, but check if the last two digits are divisible by 4.

If it ends in 5 or 0.

If the rules for both 2 and 3 apply.

No shortcut. Alas.

Like the rules for 2 and 4, but check if the last three digits are divisible by 8. (Yes, this pattern keeps going for 16, 32, etc.)

Like the rule for 3, but the sum of the digits (or the sum of the sum of the digits, etc.) must be 9.

For example, 294

29 4

4×2=8

29-8=21

21 is divisible by 7

Second example, 1946

194 6

6×2=12

194-12=182

182 is still large, so let do it again

18 2

2×2=4

18-4=14

"I don't do full stops at stop signs lol" you are going to kill someone.

As a former music teacher, I can also say that "learn the fundamentals first" is the death knell for a vast percentage of beginners, especially adult learners.

I've run into this with drawing several times, where some well-meaning artist has lectured me on needing to study anatomy properly or not use shortcuts like CSP brushes. And oh, believe me, I know. I know exactly how to learn an artistic discipline in a structured way. I just...don't want to!

The thing is, I'm not aiming to be a professional artist. I want to draw my gay little anime guys. I would undoubtedly improve at art much faster if I approached every gay little anime guy drawing as a study exercise. But I would also have quit drawing a decade ago if I couldn't just let myself enjoy drawing imperfect fucked-up little guys with whatever shortcuts I needed to body myself across the finish line.

With my adult piano students, my approach was always "What's your goal?" If their goal was to learn exactly one Elton John songbook to play at parties, then...that's what we did. We'd put tape on the keys to label the notes, and just fuckin go for it. Learning exactly one Elton John songbook is a good and noble musical goal, full stop.

Some of my students needed and enjoyed a more structured approach to learning; if they wanted to be able to play classical music, then yes, scales were going to have to enter the equation at some point. And yet others would learn the Elton John songbook, catch their white whale, and realize they wanted to explore more of the ocean. The scales were still there for them to learn!

Often the choice isn't between "learn art well" and "learn art imperfectly" - the choice is between "learn art imperfectly" and "don't do art at all." To which I say, learn imperfectly! Or, what the hell, don't 'learn' art. Just do, and enjoy the doing of it.

I need to pull this out and bold it because you know what maybe you will decide crap, I wanna be a concert pianist!

Batman & Robin: Year One: Dynamic Duos #1 (2026)

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!