Elizabeth Fraser - "Underwater"

Weird song that came up after playing The Smile a lot.  Slow vocals and bubbly sound.

From Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, worked with Massive Attack, Yann Tiersen, Craig Armstrong...!

Band of Cloud - "This is Tomorrow"

The Capture

Good, Black Mirror alike, series of a near future Britain where deep fakes, the Correction programme, are used by the government to "create evidence"

Marieke Lucas Rijnveld - "De avond is ongemak"

Niet mijn soort boek/stijl. Vooral het taalgebruik werd de hemel in geprezen, maar ik vond de constante vergelijking met eten niet heel prettig om te lezen. Liet wel op een goede manier delen van het verhaal weg die je zelf aanvoelde.

 

 

 

Ik kende deze blik niet van hem, al wist ik dat hij een hekel had aan wachten, want dan moest hij te lang stilstaan bij zichzelf en daarvan ging hij meer roken. Niemand in het dorp stond lang stil bij zichzelf, het kon dan zomaar gebueren dat de oogst verpieterde, en wij kenden alleen de oogst van het land, niet die in onszelf.

Mensen hebben nu eenmaal kleine problemen nodig om zich groter te voelen.

Catherine Graindorge ft Iggy Pop - "The Dictator"

great parlando, slightly less so when he starts to sing. Still fun.s

Kärlek och anarki / Love and Anarchy

OK series about a woman and IT guy who start challenging each other, of course the challenges bring about serious changes in their lives... not breathtaking but was enjoyable so far

John Mauceri - "For the Love of Music - A Conductor's Guide to the Art of Listening"

ok to read, although he makes some strange claims about how (classical) music is unique in ways other arts and senses are not. Does not always make sense to me. I wonder how critical his editor was, or whether this suffered from fanboy issues.

 

 

Since historians can choose where to begin and where to end their stories, Hayden White invented the word "emplotment" – meaning the imprint of dramatic structure onto what he saw as the randomness of events.

 

What Wagner did was create a set of short musical motifs that are presented at important moments in the drama and seem to represent those moments, characters, objects, and emotions. The brain links the melody with a visually and dramatically memorable moment. This procedure mysteriously creates a permanent relationship between the music and the object. From that moment onward, each time the melody is heard in the unfolding drama brings us back to its first iteration, and since the Ring takes place over generations, the sense of time and nostalgia become ever more emotive.

The Chantays - "Pipeline"

great surf rock

Amal El-Mohar & Max Gladstone - "This Is How You Lose the Time War"

wonderful original story about Red and Blue, agents of opposing forces Agency (cyborgs?) and Garden (organic), who fight each other through strands of time and leave letters.

    

A rush of wind splits the earth, a roar in darkness. Red clutches the petrified trunk closer than a lover. The wind peaks, screams, tosses bones about. A new note rises above the ossuary clatter, woken by the cavern's wind whistling over precise fluted pits in the bones Red has hung. The note grows, shifts, and swells into a voice.

So I go. I travel farther and faster and harder than most, and I read, and I write, and I love cities. To be alone in a crowd, apart and belonging, to have distance between what I see and what I am.

I love you. I love you. I love you. I'll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You'll never see, but you will know. I'll be all the poets, I'll kill them all and take each one's place in turn, and every time love's written in all the strands it will be to you.
    But never again like this.
    I am so sorry. If I had been stronger. Faster. Smarter. Better. If I had been worth you. If–
    You would not want me to curse myself this way.
    You'll have to burn this. I hope you can keep it. I keep the memory. I imagine your hands on the paper. I imagine your fire.
    I wish I could hold you.
    I love you.

R.

Kleo

Fun series about a former GBR (DDR) Stasi assassin who takes vengeance upon those who betrayed her after she is freed when the wall falls.

Good music at times.

We Own This City

Gripping account, fictional but based on real events, of corrupt cops in Baltimore.

Reverse Engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 Vaccine

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/reverse-engineering-source-code-of-the-biontech-pfizer-vaccine/

• The CAP to make sure the RNA looks like regular mRNA
• A known successful and optimized 5' untranslated region (UTR)
• A codon optimized signal peptide to send the Spike protein to the right place (amino acids copied 100% from the original virus)
• A codon optimized version of the original spike, with two ‘Proline’ substitutions to make sure the protein appears in the right form
• A known successful and optimized 3' untranslated region
• A poly-A tail with a ‘linker’ in there

 

If we look closely, we see that the majority of the changes happen in the third codon position, noted with a ‘3’ above. And if we check the universal codon table, we see that this third position indeed often does not matter for which amino acid is produced.

So, the changes are synonymous, but then why are they there? Looking closely, we see that all changes except one lead to more C and Gs.

So why would you do that? As noted above, our immune system takes a very dim view of ‘exogenous’ RNA, RNA code coming from outside the cell. To evade detection, the ‘U’ in the RNA was already replaced by a Ψ.

However, it turns out that RNA with a higher amount of Gs and Cs is also converted more efficiently into proteins,

And this has been achieved in the vaccine RNA by replacing many characters with Gs and Cs wherever this was possible.

This is one of the exceptionally clever bits about the vaccine. Our body runs a powerful antivirus system (“the original one”). For this reason, cells are extremely unenthusiastic about foreign RNA and try very hard to destroy it before it does anything.

This is somewhat of a problem for our vaccine - it needs to sneak past our immune system. Over many years of experimentation, it was found that if the U in RNA is replaced by a slightly modified molecule, our immune system loses interest. For real.

So in the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccine, every U has been replaced by 1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl, denoted by Ψ. The really clever bit is that although this replacement Ψ placates (calms) our immune system, it is accepted as a normal U by relevant parts of the cell.

Many people have asked, could viruses also use the Ψ technique to beat our immune systems? In short, this is extremely unlikely. Life simply does not have the machinery to build 1-methyl-3'-pseudouridylyl nucleotides. Viruses rely on the machinery of life to reproduce themselves, and this facility is simply not there. The mRNA vaccines quickly degrade in the human body, and there is no possibility of the Ψ-modified RNA replicating with the Ψ still in there. “No, Really, mRNA Vaccines Are Not Going To Affect Your DNA” is also a good read.

Lauren Groff - "Matrix"

"Matrix" for the Latin for Mother.

One of those exceptional books that tell the whole lifetime of a character and you actually believe it. Marie de France, unknown who she was according to wikipedia, but so influential in the 12th century....

But Goda needs to punish someone, and so the grave is dug in the unconsecrated ground outside the churchyard, without ceremony, Avice is lowered into it in her shroud facedown with her babe at her feet, so that in the Revelations her bones will never be able to rise to the hands of the Angels of the Resurrection. Such pitilessness, Marie thinks, for a sin of flesh.

At last, she shees a clump of darkness on a rise that, when Marie nears, revels the sheep saved, nuns running into the sodden fields waist deep to save more. Palenesses floating in the dark are drowned sheep. Marie wades out into the icy water to her waist, to her ribs. Cold sezies her and the wet habit grasps at her legs. She finds a ewe standing upon a dead sister, paddling with its front legs in panic, and though the beast is twice the size of an ordinary child and thashes in her frenzy, Marie picks her up in her arms and carriers her to the rise.

And her smell was strong, the soap of lemon balm and lavender at the heart of her braid, skin with honey and wild onions and leaf rot in it.

So hungry, the nun's faces are skulls skinned of flesh in the dark dortoir. There are soups in which meat is boiled and removed to save for future soups. Fingernails the cold blue of sky.

Tom Mueller - "Extra Virginity: the Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil"

Nice little book about olive oil and particularly all the ways it gets adulterated and messed with. You don't dare to buy the stuff anymore after reading this book.

Finally, on November 13, 1960, the European Parliament passed a groundbreaking law on olive oil quality, which created several new oil grades. The highest of these had an odd-sounding name, with overtones of science and religious mystery: extra virgin. The law stipulated that extra virgin oil be made solely by mechanical methods, without chemical treatment, and set a number of chemical requirements, including a maximum of 1 percent free acidity.

In olive oil fraud, an EU investigator told me, "profits were comparable to cocaine trafficking, with none of the risks." Widespread adulteration and huge supplies of refined olive oil fueled a price war, which forced even the largest oil companies like Unilever and Nestle to seek ever cheaper sources of oil, with the risk of purchasing and reselling, knowingly or not, adulterated products themselves. While the quality of estate olive oils soared, supermarket extra virgins plummeted.

Nobody knows which cultivars the Spanish monks of New Norcia brought over from their homeland. Many trees died during the ocean journey, and as Gordon Smyth says, those which survived the salt air of the voyage "were as tough as old boots by the time they got here." Over the last 150 years, in the antipodean sunshine and the breezes off the Indian Ocean, these trees have grown apart from their Mediterranean ancestors and are now considered a separate cultivar, the West Australian mission olive.

The first olive oil importers to the New World were the conquistadors, for whom, as for their contemporaries in Spain, olive oil was a crucial food, fuel for lamps and engines, and active ingredient in medicine and religious rites. Spanish explorers packed quantities of olive oil, together with wine, salt pork, sardines, raisins, sandals and weapons, in each ship they sailed to the Americas. As in Roman times, when the legions planted olives wherever they were stationed, olive trees grew in the furrows of the conquistadors' swords, becoming a vivid symbol of conquest.

Congressional hearings on margarine began in the early 1880s and continued through 1950. In 1886, Congress enacted a Margarine Act, slapping stuff taxes and restrictions on margarines; when he signed the act into law, President Grover Cleveland remarked that one of its main benefits was "the defense accorded the consumer against the fraudulent substitution and sale of an imitation of the genuine article of food of very general use. I venture to say that hardly a pound of oleomargarine ever entered a poor man's home under its real name and in its real character." Around the turn of the century, the Supreme Court heard several cases concerning margarine. "We need insistent recognition of the fact of the interdependence of the human animal upon his cattle," Herbert Hoover intoned. "The white race can not survive without its dairy products and no child can be developed on short or bad milk supply." The world wars and butter rationing boosted teh margarine industry, but strong limits remained on the way the product could be marketed and sold: through the 1950s, federal taxes remained in effect on the product, and in many states margarine could only be sold as a white block, with a pellet of yellow coloring that the consumer had to knead in. In Wisconsin it was still illegal to sell yellow margarine until 1968, and in Quebec, the substance was only legalized in 2008, after Unilever brought suit against the provincial government.

This suggests another fundamental difference between wine and oil. Grapes contain not wine but grape juice, which must be transformed by the vintner's art. Oil is already there in the olive, if we can only coax it free. Wine in the final analysis is man-made, while oil is made by nature, through the medium of the strange tree-mysterious, because it comes from something greater than ourselves. Wine in a meal is the soloist, set apart in its gleaming glass, while oil permeates the food, losing itself but subtly changing everything. Wine's effects on us are vivid and swift, while oil works on the body in hidden ways, slow and lingering in the cells and in the mind, like myths. Wine is merry Dionysus; oil is Athena, solemn, wise, and unknowable.

Charlie Jane Anders - "The city in the middle of the night"

Amazing sci-fi about the planet January where a human spaceship arrived generations ago. Tidal locked, one side of the planet is always blazing, one in eternal dark.

Various people, Mouth, and Sophie, struggling between the two cities (Xiophant, strict rules, strict times) and Argelo (party, freedom, no responsibility) and the Citizens (Mouth is the only survivor) as well as the Resourceful Couriers, "crocodiles" or Gelet that Sophie can speak with...

Amazing stuff.

Alix E. Harrow - "A Spindle Splintered"

Modern retelling of Sleeping Beauty, where multiverse-beauties break out of their fate.

okay, but could not get used to the "gen-z" ish word and language, the continuous need to sound snappy and sharp. Tiresome.

Mouse Heaven or Mouse Hell?

https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/mouse-heaven-or-mouse-hell

Eventually other deviant behavior emerged. Mice who had been raised improperly or kicked out of the nest early often failed to develop healthy social bonds, and therefore struggled in adulthood with social interactions. Maladjusted females began isolating themselves like hermits in empty apartments - unusual behavior among mice. Maladjusted males, meanwhile, took to grooming all day-preening and licking themselves hour after hour. Calhoun called them "the beautiful ones." And yet, even while obsessing over their appearance, these males had zero interest in courting females, zero interest in sex.

Intriguingly, Calhoun had noticed in earlier utopias that such maladjusted behavior could spread like a contagion from mouse to mouse. He dubbed this phenomenon "the behavioral sink."

Between the lack of sex, which lowered the birth rate, and inability to raise pups properly, which sharply increased infant mortality, the population of Universe 25 began to plummet. By the 21st month, newborn pups rarely survived more than a few days. Soon, new births stopped altogether. Older mice lingered for a while-hiding like hermits or grooming all day-but eventually they died out as well. By spring 1973, less than five years after the experiment started, the population had crashed from 2,200 to 0. Mouse heaven had gone extinct.

Recently, however, human birth rates have dropped sharply in many developed countries-often below replacement levels- and young people in those places have reportedly lost interest in sex. The parallels to Universe 25 seem spooky.

The Sandman

Enjoyable enough, but a bit too much the overwhelming CGI action we all expect these days.

The "24/7" diner episode is great, although the separate episodes with their sub plots work less in a series than in the graphic novel.

The Humans

Slightly disturbing film of a family coming together for Thanksgiving in a dilapidated New York City apartment. Each family member, particularly the dad, has their problems and fixations.

Carter (2021)

Crazy action film, semi-one shot, Korean, of a guy protecting his family, with a bomb in his mouth and has forgotten his memory.

Crazy stuff, quite enjoyable.