Alex MacLaren

@alexmaclaren

Reading, cooking, counting my blessings. Resident of Folkestone, UK

612 Siguiendo279 Seguidores2976 Publicaciones

Bluesky

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Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· 8d

Poem by e e cummings

I Like my Body When It Is With Your Body
I like my body when it is with your body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more. i like your body. i like what it does, i like its hows. i like to feel the spine of your body and its bones, and the trembling
—firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of
you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking
fuzz
of your electric furr, and what-is-it
comes
over parting flesh...And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill of under me you so quite new

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· 9d

FFS Great Yarmouth.

Wikipedia Chart with the numbers from the Great Yarmouth General Election result for 2024; Lowe on 14,385, Labour on 12,959 and the Conservatives on 10,034 (35, 31 and 24% respectively)

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· 12d

Quick reminder of the kind of graph Whitty and Valance had put in front of them

UK Govt graph from late 2020, after the Eat Out to Help Out summer; plots the whole course of the pandemic up to that point, tracking hospital admissions. A vertiginous upward line through March and Aoril until the first lockdown impacts hit, and then what looks like a smooth ski-jump downward curve as reduced transmission was felt, and then a steep steady swoop upwards after the summer reopening, with a dotted-line projection back into the future danger zone.

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Jul 7

Is this the most fiendishly subtle breach of the first rule of Fight Club ever?

Jonathan David Harvey,[2] also known as Count Binface, is a British comedian and perennial novelty candidate.[1] Binface is an "independent space warrior" who wears a large bin-shaped helmet. Harvey previously stood as a similar character, Lord Buckethead, but was forced to create a new character due to a dispute with Todd Durham, who owns the Buckethead character.

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Jul 7

V much! I had a Lancashire Catholic childhood, which is why I instantly recognised Jacinda Ardern’s media affect

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Jul 6

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Jun 3

Still at large

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Jun 3

Brownshirts in 1930s Germany, from Babylon Berlin. Not the British way

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· May 24

Honestly I will try any kind of bean puree. Once in Greece when my missus and I were starving at a scruffy harbourside café in Rafina I ordered ‘beans’ and along came something like this. Been making it at home ever since.

Puréed beans, extra-virgin olive oil, tomatoes, onion, herbs, lemon, pickled chilies, olives, black pepper, flatbread… I mean these Greeks are not messing about

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· May 9

Joseph Fiennes in today’s Guardian. An important story that every actor knows, hidden from civilans in the ‘omertá cloud’ created by the extraordinary competition in the profession. I recognise it. Sad.

There’s no compassion in our business.”

To illustrate, he tells a story about how, aged about 23, he asked to miss a matinee performance of “a big West End gig” (maths suggests this was his stage debut, The Woman in Black at the Fortune theatre) to attend his mother’s memorial the year after she died. The producers demurred. They “felt it too risky” to send on his understudy. They played for time, asking him to come into work and ask each actor in turn if they’d agree to his missing a performance – “Which they did, immediately,” he says, even if the request was oddly humiliating. The producer then instructed the director to prevent him from going. “So I locked him in my dressing room and caught the train to the service. The understudy was tremendous and grateful for the opportunity. From that moment on, I understood the business. That this world, however much I love it, won’t always return the compassion when you need it.”

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· May 4

uh huh

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· May 4

We should situate the camps in the east, Poland maybe

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· May 2

Fair, and I should have said I live about 90 seconds walk from the English Channel, where there is a tiny small-boat fishing fleet. I made this with whiting

A whiting fillet in very crunchy-looking batter, on a plate next to some mushy peas

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 26

This trilogy of novels by Edith Pargeter has really knocked me out. It’s about the trials and revelations of the life of Jim Benison, an infantryman in WWII, as his Midland regiment wages war in France, Libya, Malaysia and Singapore, and then D-Day, Holland and Germany. /1

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 26

Wtf

Wikipedia detail about Sylvia Salis: she is a retired hammer thrower

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 18

RIP Nathalie Baye. One of my favourite characters in film ever, doing the continuity on the Nice set of a movie in Truffaut's La Nuit Americaine

Nathalie Baye in her pomp as the script editor in Truffaut's 'La Nuit Americaine', stating her artistic and romantic rule: "I'd drop a guy for a film. I'd never drop a film for a guy!"

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 18

What bollocks. This is what the raw images from Juno look like; that picture may be based on a photo but it was created/enjanced using computer software, specifically with Van Gogh and internet virality in mind.

Bowtie-shaped Digital image of a portion of the surface of the planet Jupiter taken from the Juno probe; specifically before any colour enhancement - so all the signature swirls look grey, murky and dark. Still miraculous, but!

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 13

Striking choice of portrait - this is from his own website, the page celebrating his elevation to the peerage. He looks enraged about something. Do not mess with Lord Biggar

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 12

Very nice! Mine (£15 quid in a Sussex chazza):

Corona portable typewriter, in its carry case - not sure what year

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 11

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 9

Summary
An imitative or expressive formation.
Etymon: -le suffix.
Ultimately ‹ an element imitative of a buzzing, humming, or droning sound (compare boom v.!, bum v.3) +-le suffix.
Compare humble v.?
Notes
Compare classical Latin bombilāre to hum, to buzz (see bombilate v.).

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 7

Thinking of David Cronenberg, at his desk, leaving phone messages thanking all the gas customers for their loyalty over the years, in ‘Last Night’

Silhouetted suited man at a desk, calling people. It’s David Cronenberg in Don McKellar’s film ‘Last Night’. No one in the film has long, and he’s contacting customers to say thank you

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Apr 6

My Easter read was this very surprising novel – the writer is more famous under another name, Ellis Peters, of the medieval Brother Cadfael mysteries. It’s the first of a war trilogy about a WWII infantryman, but it is not a ‘historical novel’: set in 1939/40, it was published in 1945. /1

Paperback edition of Edith Pargeter's The Eighth Champion of Christendom "one of the outstanding six novels of the war" - image of artillery units and searchlights in a rural silhouetted landscape

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Mar 29

If you ever feel pessimistic about the English language, Antony and Cleopatra is the medicine you need

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Mar 29

I thought of How to Read Now by Elaine Castillo, which goes deep on the critical and political side of thinking and reading inclusively /4

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Mar 29

I thought of Daniel Pennac’s ‘The Rights of the Reader’, the poster for which I think should be in every bedroom and study: /3

Quentin Blake illustrations for The Rights of the Reader
by Daniel Pennac illustrated by Quentin Blake
I'm keepy in
1 The right not to read.
3 The right not to finish a book.
2 The right to skip.
4 The right to read it again.
5 The right to read anything.
6 The right to mistake a book for real life.
7 The right to read anywhere.
8 The right to dip in.
9 The right to read out loud.
10 The right to be quiet.

10 rights — 1 warning: don’t make fun if people who don’t read, or they never will.

by permission of Walker Books Lid, London SE11 5HJ • illustrations ©

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Mar 29

I thought of Robertson Davies‘ ‘A Rake at Reading’, and the close identification he makes with another reader at the start of it: /2

The opening of Robertson Davies’ ‘A Rake at Reading’:
“People say that life is the thing, but
I prefer reading." Did I say that? No, Logan Pearsall Smith said it, but I have thought it so many times that sometimes I mistake it for my own. However, as you will know by the time I have done, that is not my final, most carefully considered opinion. All my life long, reading has been my great refuge and solace, and in those words I have given myself away. What, you are thinking, does he not read for informa-tion, for enrichment, in order to acquaint himself with the best which has been thought and said in the world? Is he admitting that he reads for escape?
Alas, though necessity has driven me to read much that even Matthew Arnold would have approved, and a mountain of rubbish that nobody could approve - I mean mediocre journalism, government publications, the essays of students, and all that sort of thing-when I read for my own satisfaction, I read just as I please. That is why I have called this address "A Rake at Reading." The phrase comes from a letter written to a friend by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: "I have been a rake at reading," says she. The word rake, in the middle of the eighteenth century when Lady Mary made her confession to the Countess of Bute, still meant to roam or stray, but I think she also meant it to have a hint of what was dissolute and irresponsible. So - I confess I have been a rake at reading. I have read those things which 1 ought not to have read, and I have not read those things which I ought to have read, and there is no health in me - if by health you mean an inclusive and coherent knowledge of any‘…

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Mar 27

‘Honey, how are you so fine?’

Poster for infant vitamins, called WellBaby, inspiring an obvious joke

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Mar 25

Ideal sport movie double bill for Gen X British men:

I mean where do I start? Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine and Pelé defiantly face the greatest moral crisis of WWII: escape from a Nazi POW camp, or humiliate them on the football field? It’s one, or the other. Isn’t it? ISN’T IT??!! Watch out for most of the 1981 Panini sticker album of Division One as the rest of the team, esp. Osvaldo Ardiles, before things became uncomfortable at Spurs during the Falklands war

The poster for Lagaan, Aamir Khan’s monumental face on the left, gazing with desert eyes into a future free perhaps of the British; on the right his rag-tag team of locals, with no chance, surely, of winning in the imminent & humiliating exhibition cricket match they are about to play?

Alex MacLaren@alexmaclaren· Mar 22