After many travails and an extra plague year in transit, the latest of the Paleozoic Pals has made landfall from the Carboniferous.





My father adores his Diplocaulus salamandroides. My niece has been sent a picture of hers with its accompanying book, to be held in trust until her next visit. My mother has been presented with its enamel pin form, which is done in bands of lighter and darker purple instead of newt-like red and black. I had forgotten entirely about the stretch bonus of Bandringa rayi, whose spoonbill suggests the Amazon river dolphin of the Pennsylvanian period. I really am invested in the continued existence of the Paleontological Research Institution, which is one of the reasons I have gladly thrown in to its Kickstarters for almost ten years. The present being so very full of horror and stupidity, it is important that it can also produce such snuggable plush of the past.

Actually the temperature crashed by a solid thirty degrees Fahrenheit and with any luck will stay this moderately cool and dampish until everyone has rehydrated. Or we could just skip the next heat dome entirely.

I had worked up an entire rant about the scaremongering of this article and especially its anti-intellectual characterization of Zohran Mamdani as automatically out of touch because his father teaches at Columbia and his mother has directed films in Hollywood as if he were a Cabot who talks only to God when both of these professions especially in these days of DEI demonization mean something very different without whiteness and then I discovered that the author's big shtick is that she "came out" as politically conservative while an undergraduate at Harvard, at which point her already tenuous right to slate anyone for attending Bowdoin fared poorly on the pot-to-kettle scale. Anyway, spatch liked Monsoon Wedding (2001).

The Europeans (1979) turns out to have been the first foray of Merchant Ivory into costume drama and its modest budget gives it a slight, wonderful ghost-look of New England, nineteenth-century carriages on twentieth-century streets, the tarmac dirt-roaded over, telephone poles discreetly out of shot, the dry stone walls tumbledown in the picturesque rather than practically maintained day. I got such déjà vu from the Federal style of its historic houses—and the occasionally more modern construction of their neighbors—that I was reassured to see it actually had shot in Waltham, Concord, and Salem which I recognized from the red-bricked back side of the Customs House. Its autumn is the sugar-red drift of maple leaves, the pale punctuation of birches. Its actors have an indie air with their precisely characterful period clothes doing half the worldbuilding. Robin Ellis sports a moss-bronze corduroy coat and a waistcoat in pheasant paisleys I should like to bid for and a creditably mid-Atlantic accent, cast ironically on the colonial side of the plot of two sets of American cousins and their entanglement with a third, European set. I have not read its particular source novel by Henry James, but it has the light, sharp, not overly mannered observations, a sweet-sour bite in the chocolate box. In light of the setting, variations on "Simple Gifts" and "Shall We Gather at the River?" may have been unavoidable contributions to the score.

Because I had showed spatch a clip of a trumpet played into Jell-O, my attempt to explain Chladni figures netted us a 1989 Christmas lecture by Charles Taylor, after which we went through Delia Derbyshire's "Ziwzih Ziwzih OO-OO-OO" (1967), Belbury Poly's "Caermaen" (2004), and finally thanks to what must have been a very confused sidebar landed on Les Luthiers' "Rhapsody in Balls" (2009). Today has been generally breaking-down-tired, but during the part of the evening where I was still working on implementing a bagel for dinner, WERS had the decency to play the Dead Milkmen's "Punk Rock Girl" (1988).

For the hundred and thirteenth birthday of Alan Turing, spatch and I drove to Gloucester to watch the sunset on the water, so, queer joy?





I have worn this T-shirt since his centenary in 2012: it is a word cloud derived from "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950). The tide filled in around the barnacle-colored, seal-colored boulders we had climbed out onto, swirling the olivine shag of the rockweed in the late mirror of the sea. I had not been to Gloucester since before the last glaciation, in a warm autumn that was still cooler than this heat dome settled over Massachusetts like a fitted block of Death Valley. We saw the red-and-white blinks of buoys, the oil-slick necks of cormorants. We checked in on the ghost sign for Moxie at the top of Tablet Rock in Stage Fort Park. From our vantage point of one of the granite horns of Half Moon Beach, we saw three crewed boats practicing for what we realized later would be the races for St. Peter's Fiesta, the blessing of the fleet which had hung the streets with tricolor bunting and Italian flags and set up the Ferris wheel and concessions of a carnival as well as an open-air altar brilliantly painted with a seascape of Ten Pound Light, its foreground wheeling with gulls with their own successful fisher's catch in their beaks. The fisherman in his sunken-green bronze oilskins still holds the wheel against more than four centuries of the remembered drowned. Our designated clam shack had closed an hour before we expected it, so we drove down Route 1 in a sailor's delight of clouds like an electric fire and came to a bewildered halt in a retina-searing splatter of blue lights, because it turned out that half of Revere Beach was closed to traffic thanks to a hit-and-run on a state trooper. We managed nonetheless to salvage roast beef and fried clams from Kelly's at the cost of several miles' walk in the gelatinous night, which compensated at least with the white noise of waves at high tide. The cable-stays of the Christina and John Markey Memorial Pedestrian Bridge were lit up in rainbow neon. I admire Aimee Ogden's "Because I Held His Name Like a Key" (2025) for not being any of the things expected of a Turing fairy story. I look forward to whatever comes of these unshredded papers. We drove home covered in sea-salt and sweat-salt and an unavoidable admixture of strangers' weed smoke and I had a really nice time.

If telepathy is admitted it will be necessary to tighten our test up.
—Alan Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950)

For whatever it is worth to history, I wish to register that I do not like finding out that we are suddenly at war with Iran. I do not need any more specters of annihilation, nuclear or otherwise. I get enough stress from my regular life.

(These Crusader fantasists. My entire lifetime. Their Armageddon wet dreams. Why will the sand not eat them alone.)

Thanks to the effects of prolonged illness on my body, I have even more difficulty with it these days than in previous difficult years, but spatch took a picture of me on the way down the hill of Powder House Park that looked like I could still be the prow of a ship.



Listening to the radio in the car and tracking down songs at home, I seem to have amassed a small collection of music videos, more recent than not. I had never seen the studly single entrendres that accompany the blues-rock boasts of Elle King's "Ex's and Oh's" (2015). Rob identified the scratchy guitar chug in Sarah Barrios' "Thank God You Introduced Me to Your Sister" (2021) as a callback to Fountains of Wayne and thence the Cars, but it is a sapphic banger in its own right. It is generationally lovely to have the London Gay Men's Chorus backing up the acoustic version of Isaac Dunbar's "American High" (2024). Jean Dawson's "Pirate Radio" (2022) rocks like an Afrofuturist anthem and an autobiographical chantey at the same time. If it ever crossed your mind to wonder about a cross between the Preacher in True Stories (1986) and the High Voltage Messiah of The Ruling Class (1972), there's John C. Reilly in Jack White's "Archbishop Harold Holmes" (2025). The vintage riot grrrl of Halsey's "Safeword" (2025) is enthusiastically not safe for work. Patrick Wolf's "The Last of England" (2025) has so much Jarman in its DNA, it is almost gilding the lily to have filmed at Dungeness except that it feels like the correct acknowledgement. I just like the oneiric stop-motion of Witch Prophet's "Memory (feat. Begonia)" (2023).