Via Peter Atwood, a map made by Paramount Studios in 1927 to show directors and producers that they didn’t need to film in exotic locations: California and Nevada offered all the necessary exoticism! (I’d like to get a closer look, though, at the parts of southeastern California that are supposed to stand in for Sherwood Forest. And at a number of other things, if I’m being honest.)
Everybody, including me, is shouting VAR MUST GO! (And if it does, then the first time a ref flubs a big call everybody will be shouting BRING BACK VAR! But I solemnly pledge that I will not join that chorus.)
There is no handball rule in European football. Anything might or might not be a handball in any given circumstances. Whenever there’s a possible handball the ref should just flip a coin.
So much going on in the garden right now I can’t keep it all in focus.
Wow, more than a third of the 100 best novels of all time were written in my lifetime, almost all of them in English. I guess we’re just a lot better at writing novels than non-Anglos and all those mediocrities who preceded us (Balzac, for instance).
Many people have already written about the chatbot-generated phishing scams directed at writers: We love your writing and can’t wait to promote your book etc. But what surprises me is how many of them there are. I get them almost every day now. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for spam filters to figure them out … which is interesting in itself. Such messages are unlike typical spam in most respects, so what gives them away?
Frank Hughes, A Somerset Farm (c. 1930)