millie

pic from last fall, a photographer was taking photos of gays w bikes

Victorine Meurent in pink silk, with parrot. Love monocle she fingers (look at me!), & peeled lemon at base of parrot's perch is so 17th-century Dutch! 1866 by Edouard Manet, born OTD in 1832.

digital painting of somebody sleeping in a messy bed as sunlight pours in to the room. Clothes, food wrappers and cups are scattered around. A poster of a famous golfer is on the wall above the bed.

Non-starter

BAGGER: (spilling my groceries on the floor) Oh God. I'm so sorry. This isn't what I'm supposed to do.

ME: How are you supposed to do it?

MANAGER: She means she was gonna be a fox. In the woods and shit. But something happened and she got stuck.

BAGGER: (crying) Got so stuck.

Bookes are like Cheese, that is neuer well seasoned to euery mans tast; for one will say it is too salt, another wil say it is too fresh, a thirde will say it is to tart, another thinkes it to be too milde; one will haue it too hard, another too soft, another too tough, another too brittle, it neuer pleaseth euery mans tast; no more do Bookes.

Barnabe Rich explaining that "bookes are like cheese"

2/2 Monkeys and leopards get their page too in the Farnese Hours by Giulio Clovio, 1540s.

Sleeping dog, drawn by Hendrick Goltzius of Haarlem, at the end of his day. Good night!

townsend's warbler, western tanager, barred owl, cinnamon teal

northern lapwing, eurasian curlew, common ringed plover, common kingfisher

my favourite lifers this year :--D

I've heard this conversation a dozen times this month.

Person 1: You notice how The Grinch is everywhere this year?
Person 2: Yeah, there must be another movie coming out.

There isn't. The last Grinch media was the NBC musical in 2020. No reason other than the oldest reason in marketing: sex sells

insanely good thing to say when you enter a room

the aesthetic signifiers i love are IN for 2026! and the aesthetic signifiers i loathe? baby you better believe they’re OUT!

Anna Aslanyan | On the Picket Line On Monday morning, more than a hundred people formed a picket line outside one of the entrances to the British Library...

British Library staff asked for a decent pay. Instead they got ‘a few money-saving present ideas’, such as ‘consider not giving presents this holiday season’. They are on strike this week. I wrote about it for @lrb.co.uk. www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/de...

Give it up, Sub-Subs!

Annunciation, in a charming Flemish domestic-ecclesiastical interior, 1480. By Aelbrecht Bouts, whose day is today.

I PULL UP TO THE GIG READY TO DIE

One of the most colorful figures in the black market for ancient art has died. For @lrb.co.uk, I wrote about Jonathan Tokeley-Parry - a smuggler who made fake fakes to defeat border inspections to get Egyptian artifacts to the UK and US, whose downfall both changed and didn’t change the market.

Small dour boy in all black feeds biscuit to evil goat in 1655. No good ending forecast for this lad! By Anthonie Palamedesz, whose day is today.

A White-tailed Ptarmigan, an all white chicken-like bird, stands on the snow near tiny branches.

A Willow Ptarmigan, an all white chicken-like bird with black tail feathers, stands on the snow near a willow bush.

It's getting closer to Ptarmigan Ptime.
White-tailed Ptarmigan will drop down from the highest alpine areas of the #AB Rockies to overwinter in the subalpine where they can find willows. Likewise Willow Ptarmigan will move into #AB from harsher northern areas. #birds

in retrospect the metoo movement did not go too far and in fact should have been given spanish inquisition levels of power and authority

Music is basically a detective novel where the musicians are the suspects/criminals, the listener is the detective and of course the music is the crime. The listener tries to determine what happened and what was the motivation, while the musicians try to obscure this, so they can get away with it.

long landscape of a marl pit in may split over 4 images

The Marl Pit in four parts
digital painting

Digital painting of a wooden train set with tracks and scenery props on a patterned rug

Wooden Train

Maybe Don’t Talk to the New York Times About Zohran Mamdani It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a studen…

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written.

lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

digital painting: a little egret hunts against the wind, wading through tall grasses

salt marsh

A tribute to a small patch of vegetation on a local beach that has driven everyone completely insane

Woodcut print by Eline Brontsema, Blue Swimming Hall , Fincknsteinallee 2024. Size 67.8 x 51 cm.

Just keep this in mind and every day is easier.