Blog Post

Random Numbers, Persian Code: A Mysterious Signal Transfixes Radio Sleuths -- And Intelligence Experts - I am fascinated by numbers stations!
The Met Introduces High-Definition 3D Scans of Dozens of Art Historical Objects - The Met now has 3D renderings of 140 of its objects. A mere fraction of their total collection but a cool idea, nonetheless.
An Internet of Checkpoints - I found this last week and posted it on the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse so if you know me from there this might seem familiar. I love this piece of internet history! The idea of people gathering and sharing thoughts at an oasis of sorts is just so lovely! The original site has been taken down but it's been archived and other people have created their own checkpoint channels. It's nice to see that this idea is being kept alive! (Archived checkpoint)

Short-haired black cat with green eyes is laying on a couch which is covered with a light blue sheet. He's reclining on top of a sofa pillow which is light brown and has geometric designs in shades of darker browns. To the left is a maroon backrest, on top of which is a rectangular sage green sofa pillow. Behind him, on the arm of the couch, is a dark brown fleece blanket with light brown words on it. The wall behind him is painted in a light greenish color. The living room carpet is maroon. His head is slightly tilted and he's not quite looking at the photographer.

Ceelo has decided he's a pillow cat! We're still having a good time. I'm enjoying his company so much! There are reasons why I feel I can't get a cat of my own at the moment so it's nice that his mama is sharing him with me. I thought he might be going back to his real home tomorrow but for now he's still staying here. Yay!!

Speaking of cats! One of my favorite pages on my site is the Government Cats and Riot Dogs page. It was so fun to put together! Larry and Gladstone have a presence on Bluesky. Last month Gladstone posted that Palmerston had passed away, so I updated his info card. That got me to wondering about Evie and Ossie. I couldn't find any recent news stories and they don't appear to have a social media presence. So, I emailed the Cabinet Office and asked if they were still employed. And less than a week later I got a reply! I received both a letter and 3 new photos. I used one of the photos to update their info card and I have a link to the letter. It's just a form letter but I'm just tickled I got a response!

Picture of a cross stitch work in progress. The fabric is a pearly gray and there is a form of a cat standing on its hind legs worked in 2 different shades of gray. There is a cross stitch needle placed about midway on the figure.

Man, it doesn't matter how careful I try to be with stitching - I always make a mistake! This was a doozy. First off, let me say that I hate multi page patterns. I would really prefer the pattern be all on one page instead of having to match up sections. This is a large pattern that covers 5 or 6 pages. I was doing fine with the upper half of the cat. Then I had to move to another page to continue the lower part. And I didn't notice until I had done all that (waves hand at entire lower half of figure) that I had accidentally stitched 2 rows TWICE - the overlap rows where the 2 pages met. From where the needle is all the way down has to be unstitched. ARRGH! I know my fellow stitchers are feeling my pain!

So, last week I had a birthday. And it was kind of weird. Usually I use my birthday as an excuse for buying stuff or doing things I normally wouldn't (mainly, though, buying stuff!) and my birthday purchases usually span January through April. What can I say, I'm ridiculous, I know! But this year, I just wasn't feeling it. That's so unlike me. I was talking to Best Son about it and that child of my heart, light of my life said, "Well, you know mom, you've had SO MANY at this point!" 😒 (OK, gotta confess, Best Son both was kidding and also comes by his snarkiness naturally.)

Anyway, I did at least bestir myself to go get a treat. If I couldn't bring myself to buy something then surely I could at least get a little tasty something to commemorate the day! There is a sweet shop practially around the corner from where I live that specializes in marshmallows. Man, you do not know what you're missing until you've had an artisinal marshmallow! I've been to this place before. I try to avoid it. It's dangerous. But - birthday! And this is what I ended up getting:

Side by side photos of sweet treats. On the left is a clear cup holding a shake that is pink and white swirls topped with a huge mound of marshmallow fluff and colored sprinkles. On the right is a cupcake in a brown liner topped with a huge mound of buttercream frosting covered with sprinkles.

On the left is the Birthday Cake Shake made with cake batter ice cream, buttercream frosting, marshmallow fluff and colored sprinkles. I've had this before (although it's been years because, remember, this place is dangerous!) and it was just as I remembered - devastatingly delicious. Also, I was in an immediate sugar coma after finishing this but it was so worth it! I just adore cake batter ice cream - I don't know what it is about the flavor but it's so good!

Funny story - sometimes I buy a pint of Baskin-Robbins Cake Batter Ice Cream at one of the local grocery stores. One day when I went through the check-out lane, the cashier, who has been there forever, picked it up to scan, looked at it, harrumphed and scoffed, "Cake batter flavor? It's just vanilla!" And people, no, it's more than that. I tried to tell her that but she was having none of it. After that day I would make an effort to pick her lane whenever I bought it, knowing that she would have a huffy "It's just vanilla!" moment all over again. It's the little things that make your day sometimes!

Anyway, I digress. The marshmallow place also makes all sorts of cupcakes. Now, I'm a frosting person. The cake is just a frosting delivery vehicle and I don't have much interest in it. I am very much a buttercream frosting fan, none of that whipped topping garbage. I love buttercream frosting SO MUCH. How much? I would rob a bank for you if you paid me off with enough buttercream frosting. It's so good! And when I saw that little cupcake there with that huge mound of buttercream frosting? I had to have it. I had to eat it another day, though. I think both it and the shake together would have killed me. But it was delicious and so worth it! The cake part was even really good, too. It was funfetti-flavored!

Another story - hey, apparently I'm ancient now and so I'm allowed to maunder on. My love of buttercream got me into trouble once. I was at a former job and it was someone's birthday. The department got this person an absolutely lovely cake, full of frosting roses. Frosting! swoon I mentioned how much I loved frosting so the person cutting the cake gave me a piece with a huge rose on it! Joy! And then I ate it and it turned out to be that nasty whipped topping instead of buttercream. It also tasted weird and slightly bitter from the coloring agent that was used. But what could I do? I had already louldly proclaimed my frosting love! The person serving the cake went to the extra effort of making sure I got a prime piece of cake (and this was someone else's birthday cake, mind you!). I felt all I could do was choke the damn thing down and say how lovely it was. Anyway, before I had finished what was clearly my punishment frosting rose, someone else came up to me and said they saved me the rose from their piece of cake since I loved frosting so much! Gah! NO! They didn't care for so much frosting so were just going to throw it out but now I could have it! That one at least I could take back with me and "save for later." Now I'm careful about making proclamations that I might have to eat later.

Listening

Some podcasts I listened to this week:

I also listend to an entire season of a really great audiodrama, Mission Failed: Tales from the Darkside. Most of the episodes were really short, usually under 10 minutes although there was one that was almost 15. Here's the description:

When the AEF Dreadnaught research vessel went dark, no one knew why. Now, fragments of the crew’s final transmissions have surfaced - revealing a failed experiment, an unknown organism, and the desperate struggle of those trapped inside the dying ship.

Reading

Last week I had started Seeing a Large Cat, the 9th Amelia Peabody series written by Elizabeth Peters. I will probably be finishing that up tonight but I have no idea what my next book will be. I have so many books tagged on my Libby app that I was interested in when I tagged them but I just don't want to read them right now, you know?

Watching

I have finished this last season of Call the Midwife and I'm watching episodes of the new Matlock as they come out. There are a couple of other shows that are playing right now but I think I'll wait until their season has finished before starting them, in case I want to binge something. Those shows are Dark Winds and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

Some of the YouTube channels I watch I guess could be called "slice of life." They are my comfy, cozy channels!

Chani Japan - all about an Australian woman in her 50s who lives full time in Japan as an English teacher. She has a beautiful fluffy Siamese cat, Millie, who she takes camping and out for walks in a stroller!
Imamu Room - Japanese ex-pat living in Canada with her husband and daughter. Kind of a cooking channel but she also goes on trips to the store and farmers markets, on outings with her family or she sometimes tackles house projects.
Real Vintage Doll's House - Hannah lives the 1940s life in the current day. She's gone over 1940s things like exercise and beauty routines and recipes. She talks about how she and her mum have been able to afford their 1940s lifestyle on a budget (charity shops and frugality!), she raises pigeons, which you get to meet. Just a lovely, sweet isle of calmness.
Bong Bong Camping - This is one of my favorite channels. The creator is Korean. There are no voice-overs in the videos, just subtitles. Her videos feature her camping at various sites around South Korea in her Jeep. She spends a lot of time setting up her vehicle and camping space with all kinds of cozy items - soft lights, little knickknacks - and we spend the trip watching her cook, crochet or knit, just chill and relax, sometimes explore the campsite and she almost always finds some camp cats to feed. At the end of the videos we get to visit with her own cats back at her home. She has four Persians which I think she said at one point were rescues, and it's as fun watching the cat epilogues as it is the rest of the camping videos! Bong Bong is her black persian and she jokes that the black car "looks" like him so hence the name, Bong Bong Camping.

Link Lagniappe

Saving the Venus Flytrap: How One Woman Rallied a Town Around Its Weirdest Attraction - Despite their outsize hold on popular imagination, Venus flytraps are native to a tiny corner of the globe: the Coastal Plain of the Carolinas. As development threatens, one town—spurred on by one tireless botanist—has taken up the shovel to save the world’s most fascinating plant.
The dawn of the post-literate society - What happens when deep reading and sustained attention give way to short-form content and screen time all the time? "If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history," writes the author of this piece.
The New Science of Aeroecology Reveals So Much About the Amazing Creatures That Populate the Skies and How Humans Can Ensure Their Survival - The sky above us is a complex ecosystem, just like the land and sea. A new field of research is bringing a fresh understanding of the birds, bugs and other species that live there
The original Mozilla "Dinosaur" logo artwork - Blog post from one of the founders of Netscape and Mozilla.org where he provides us not only with the original Mozilla dinsosaur logo vector images but also some really cool Mozilla banners.
7,000-year-old underwater wall raises questions about ancient engineering — and lost-city legends - Scientists found a massive underwater wall off the coast of France that might help explain the origin of the legend of Ys.
Marvelous Mold and Fabulous Fungus - Artistic moldscapes.
Dissected Greenland shark eyeballs could help humans see forever - Not sure if this is a trigger warning or an enticement but the article does discuss eyeball parasites. Studying how the shark has kept its vision could lead to advances in treating human vision problems.
Digital Florentine Codex - The Digital Florentine Codex gives access to a singular manuscript created by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and a group of Nahua elders, authors, and artists. Written in parallel columns of Nahuatl and Spanish texts and hand painted with nearly 2,500 images, the encyclopedic codex is widely regarded as the most reliable source of information about Mexica culture, the Aztec Empire, and the conquest of Mexico. Upon completion in 1577 at the Imperial Colegio de la Santa Cruz in Tlatelolco (today Mexico City), the manuscript was sent to Europe where it entered the Medici family’s library in Florence—thus, the Florentine Codex. This digital edition unlocks the manuscript’s content by making the texts and images searchable.
World's biggest spiderweb discovered inside 'Sulfur Cave' with 111,000 arachnids living in pitch black - 2 different species of spiders live cooperatively in a cave and have created the world's largest spider web.
Spurious Correlations - Correlation is not causation, as Tyler Vigen illustrates on his site that has endless data sets that match, but aren't related. It's a fun exercise but also a caution that not every association has meaning.

OK, that's it for this week. I'll probably be back mid-week with another tiara post!

When I first started using Zonelets I had Disqus set up as a commenting system but it looked obnoxiously ugly and I ditched it. Some people are happy to not have blog interaction but I'd love to hear from you if you have any thoughts you want to share! You can respond through my guestbook or email. If you found this link on Discord or the 32-Bit Cafe Discourse, you can message me there or leave a message on my Neocities profile page.