Reading a book about Pink Floyd and baffled by the part Richard Wright manages to move from his architecture course to the Royal College of Music despite only having had some piano lessons and not being able to play his scales properly.
A derelict restaurant. The only part of the sign remaining reads: rant.
Excuse my rant.
Watching the Led Zeppelin documentary (for a thing) and it’s almost comic how dull they are, telling oft-told stories embroidered with such trite phrases as “we were paid the princely sum of” and “from whence we knew not where” (well done, Planty).
If someone posts a photo and doesn't specify the location where it was taken, they probably have a good reason; it's not an invitation to guess. Good morning!
Hellebore no. 15 - The Green Issue, with bluebells and daisies
IT’S HERE!
Nature sprites, magical blooms, holy and unholy trees, wild men of the woods, numinous forests, dying-and-reviving deities.
Shipping starts now.
👉🏼 helleborezine.com/products/the-green-issue
Illustration of Lobster (Homarus Americanus) from N.Y. Public Library
How old is this family of jokes?
"Waiter, do you serve shrimps here?" "Sure. We don’t care how tall you are. Sit down."
"Do you serve crabs?" "Yes, we treat all customers alike.”
"Do you serve lobsters here?” “Yes, we serve anyone."
quoteinvestigator.com/2026/04/21/s...
A pint of golden beer and a copy of Maigret's Rival by Georges Simenon.
I'm not waiting for the weekend.
I've just learned that the Americans named the helicopter evacuation from Saigon in 1975 ‘Operation Frequent Wind’.
My solo writing day in Bucharest was a year ago today, in fact.
Listening to Neu! and Warrington-Runcorn New Town Development Plan so that my 5+ hour train journey will feel like a relentless flight into a wide open, more optimistic future, rather than a tedious arseache.
“Of the twenty-one characters in The Big Sleep, seven were drawn directly from ‘The Curtain’, six were taken from ‘Killer in the Rain’, four were composites from the two stories, and four were new creations.”
The very senior guy at work who said months ago that adding alt text was a “chore” and a tech problem (“fix it with AI”) has still not fixed it with AI or started to add alt text.
Email text: Subject: The "Anchor Title" strategy for Hardwick Hall Message: Dear Mark Girouard, I’ve been analyzing the market positioning of Hardwick Hall, specifically your framework regarding the architectural expression of power and the revolutionary use of light and glass in Elizabethan England. In a landscape of disposable content, your work stands out as an Anchor Title—a foundational resource for what I call the Active Reader demographic.
A message arrives via my website. ‘Dear Mark Girouard.’ Oh dear. Got our architectural writing Gs muddled, have we? Also, he passed away four years ago aged 90, so might not be all that into market positioning.
an advertising figure that is a cone of chips with a face. Inexplicably the guy is eating one of his own chips and has his thumb up in appreciation
another advertising figure, this time a hotdog, who in similar vein to the chip guy, is putting sauce on his own head, presumably with the intention of eating himself.
Existential crises
#Photography
Pro tip.
(And anyone who follows me here, too, obvs.)
I'm really good at all this stuff, though. Everyone I meet this week will think I was really good value, funny, engaging, and so on, and perhaps get the impression I'm enjoying myself. Only I will know that by Friday I'm going to be a withered husk on 1% battery.
I'm going to find this week challenging: two away days with different teams, at different ends of the country, with nights away in hotels, and networking. The older I get, the more I understand that I'm a routines, habits and habitats guy. I like my own bed, my own desk, controlling my own space.
“We booked our flights and bought blue one-piece flight suits on Amazon that were almost certainly intended as Halloween costumes. We spent hours discussing the logistics of ordering customized mission patches.”
harpers.org/archive/2026...
A conjoined banana.
Two bananas inside the same skin.
Double banana! First time ever!
It is.
Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty fight to the death in the Mendips.
Now watching: ‘The Final Problem’, dir. George Ridgwell, 1923, with Eille Norwood as Sherlock Holmes. It relocates the fatal battle with Moriarty from Switzerland to... Cheddar Gorge.
oh pretty cool that you’ve got lana del rey to do your James Bond videogame theme. it’s not gameboy James Bond’s theme though, is it? youtu.be/VvVXebu1xMc?...
This is a fun feature of BlueSky: if you don't put a space after a full stop it reads it as a URL and adds a link, even if you then fix it.
I had fun making this although I realise for ultimate book promo potential it should be in portrait format and feature MY BIG FACE.
Taking back control!
Grandstand
Me! Self-facilitating media node &c.
