[Great Golden Digger Wasp (Sphex ichneumoneus) on a mint blossom.]

And so ends the month of August. Cooler evenings mean better sleep, if not necessarily more sleep. That comes with retirement or other forms of unemployment. I am almost fully recovered from the travels and travails of the past several weeks, but could use another couple of decades of down-time.

Reading

Other than the slow progress through Simulacra and Simulation, I am giving my brain a break and just wandering through my shelves like one might browse the contents of a bookstore.

Writing

This week I tried to catch up on my journaling – writing down the events of the past few weeks so that in the years and decades to come, I don’t lose those memories.

Weekly Writing Prompt

Subject: Kaiju, Apocalypse
Setting: Frontier
Genre: Science Fiction

Listening

A random comment on a social media prompted an old memory to surface, and I went down a small rabbit-hole of music research.

The Cookies, “On Broadway”, from their 1954 album Presenting The Cookies.

The Crystals, “On Broadway”, from their 1962 album Twist Uptown.

The Drifters, “On Broadway”, released in 1963.

George Benson, “On Broadway”, from his 1978 album Weekend in L.A.

Gary Numan, “On Broadway”, from Numan’s live album Living Ornaments ’79.

Clem Curtis & The Foundations, “On Broadway”, released in 1984.

Interesting Links

• The Phersu Atlas looks like an amazing resource for history buffs and scholars. Fully interactive. limited functionality at the free tier, but loads of information at the (reasonably priced) paid tiers. Discovered in the article “Dead States, Living Borders: Three Historical Cases of ‘State Revival’: Armenia, Vietnam, and Poland” by Lorenzo Hofstetter at Naked Capitalism.
• “Legal battle erupts between Michigan school librarian, activist parent” (Kim Kozlowski, Bridge Michigan). Another baseless attack on a librarian by the cowardly neo-Nazis of Moms for Liberty. Moms for Liberty’s stated goal is to stand up for parental rights. The only parental right Moms for Liberty is really interested in is the right of conservative parents to sexually assault their own children. The reason the members of Moms for Liberty want to ban all books dealing with gender and sexuality is because they don’t want their own kids to be able to understand or describe what their parents are doing to them. Everyone who supports Moms for Liberty’s book-banning goals should immediately be reported to Child Protective Services. There are no facts which contradict this statement.