Water

Ask anyone who’s seen the wild ocean and they’ll tell you: the water you see in Boston and New York is not that. The ocean is blue, grey, foaming white, green, black, even purple sometimes, but never brown. I was never more than a few minutes away from the waves at home. I spent all summer in them.

It’s a strangely spiritual experience, bobbing in the waves. You can feel the power, the energy wash over you, through you, and there’s nothing you can do if it decides it wants to take you. I have never felt more alive than when I am in the ocean. At home, if I wanted to get away, I used to find the place on the shore where the waves crashed the loudest, find myself a comfortable place to sit, and lose myself in the endless patterns of foam and different shades of blue. I scared the hell out of the supervisors on our DofE trip because I had had enough of airheaded people talking nonstop about body lotion and wandered off to do this. I ended up sitting there for hours and to my surprise people had realized I had gone.

That, I think is the thing I miss most about home. I’m at university in Boston, and I walk down to the Charles River sometimes, but it’s not nearly the same. The water is dead; there’s barely a current and it’s this nasty muddy greenish colour. Sure, the walk by the river is pretty, and now that it’s getting sunnier I’m definitely going to be spending more time down there, but the water makes me kind of sad sometimes, because of how much crap this city has dumped in it. At one point it was blue and roaring and foaming and alive, and the city killed it.

Conclusion: I should not live anywhere permanently that doesn’t have any bodies of water that are alive.

How Far We Haven’t Come: All of the Terrible Ways the Media Treated Women in 2013 in One Video

Toads in Church

Very interesting.

texthistory

I have long had a sense that the ordinary folk of England have not taken Christianity too seriously since Henry made such a mess of it, and this applies especially to far flung villages. This is a real gem from W.H Hudson’s wonderful book ‘Afoot in England’. I think this is somewhere in Devon – Hudson can be infuriatingly vague at times. He writes of arriving in the loveliest village he had ever seen, which was utterly silent.

“I was wishing that I had come a little earlier on the scene to have had time to borrow the key of the church and get a sight of the interior, when all at once I heard a shrill voice and a boy appeared running across the wide green space of the churchyard. A second boy followed, then another, then still others, and I saw they were going into the church by…

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No Apologies

Typical Stephen Fry: blunt, matter of fact, and entirely correct.

Jeri’s Reflections From The City Different - Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA

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Ophelia of the West Country

Interesting story.

texthistory

Here’s a story from one of my favourite local history books, ‘Rural Rides of the Bristol Churchgoer’ by local newspaper editor Joseph Leech. In 1843 & 4 Leech visited churches in the Bristol region anonymously, and published his  reviews, much to the terror of local vicars. the results are a wonderful insight into the art and architecture of the region, but also brilliantly observed social histories. This is one of the saddest stories I have ever come across, his visit to Stapleton, then on the bleak outskirts of the city where a Poor House had been built, to replace a prison for French prisoner of war.

“The churchyard seems to be almost wholly used as a Golgotha for the neighbouring poorhouse, as the long ranks of little red clay-mounds, with a small inscribed footstone to each, indicated. I seldom saw a more desolate and cheerless-looking resting-place for the dead in…

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Undercover Video Shows Off-Duty Cops Laughing And Bonding With Would-Be Rapist

…so everyone but the cops. Wow.

Pic of the Day

Wonderful

This Kick-Ass Letter From A Father To His Bigoted Daughter Will Make You Believe In Humanity Today

Brilliant

The Politics Of Style: Reading T Magazine

Interesting.

To Mr. John Boehner

What on earth do you think you are doing?

Your job is to represent the American people, is it not? Where does holding the entire country to ransom with a host of absolutely ridiculous demands crop up in that job description? And they are ridiculous. You know that. They’ve been turned down before. And you think that you will be able to get them through by acting like a spoilt child and endangering not only America’s economy but the economy of the rest of the world. Do you honestly expect the people to support this childish grandstanding? Most of us learned that shit doesn’t fly at age ten. 

My first reaction when I saw the news was “Are they really pulling that crap AGAIN?” You and the hardliners of your party are behaving like children having a temper tantrum. “Give me what I want or else!” You don’t seem to have considered the effects your “or else” will have. You don’t seem to have thought at all.

“No Congress before this one has ever, ever, in history been irresponsible enough to threaten default, to threaten an economic shutdown, to suggest America not pay its bills, just to try to blackmail a president into giving them some concessions on issues that have nothing to do with a budget.” – President Obama. 

D’you want to hazard a guess as to why? Because previous Congresses have all been composed of adults who actually think before they speak and had the foresight not to throw potentially disastrous temper tantrums. You, sir, are being selfish and idiotic, when it is in your job description not to be.

Think about the fact that you are holding not just “those damn liberals” to ransom, but yourself and your voters as well. Think about the fact that threatening to let the US government default would plunge the country back into the depths of recession, and damage the rest of the world’s recovery significantly. 

Perhaps you should reevaluate your chosen profession. You don’t seem to have the intellectual capacity for it.