mumby road

  • Cahokia Jazz

    Loved the audiobook of Francis Spufford’s amazing novel, read by Andy Ingalls. It’s a great listen, and Ingalls is an excellent reader. But I recommend also getting a print copy for the great maps, family trees, etc. (Check your library!) Dynamite as a pair.

    cover image of Cahokia Jazz, a novel by Francis Spufford
  • Bag it
    Auto-generated description: A crumpled brown paper bag with the text 10 Duro Dubl Life 100% Recycled Paper printed on it.
    I am a huge fan of the lunch-size brown paper bag. (And not merely because of its contents, though they often also are worthy of praise.)
  • Two years
    My mom died September 1, 2022: 4 months and 4 days shy of her 99th birthday.
    I think of her and Dad all the time. The best is when they're in my dreams.
    Color photo of an old woman with white hair and an active expression
  • The Finder Found | Edwin Muir

    Will you, sometime, who have sought so long, and seek

    Still in the slowly darkening searching-ground,

    Catch sight some ordinary month or week

    Of that rare prize you hardly thought you sought—

    The gatherer gathered and the finder found,

    The buyer who would buy all himself well bought—

    And perch in pride in the buyer’s hand, at home,

    And there, the prize, in freedom rest and roam?


  • More Mysterious

    “By never trusting, cynics never lose. They also never win. Refusing to trust anyone is like playing poker by folding every hand before it begins….

    The cynical voice … claims that we already know everything about people. But humanity is far more beautiful and complex than a cynic imagines, the future far more mysterious than they know.”

    Jamil Zaki


  • Shadows on the pitch: Aston Villa vs Stinkpots

    Players and their shadows on a green football pitch near sunset

    (Odegaard, #5, appears to be wiping the pitch — literally — with an unfortunate Villa player. Right-click to open a bigger image in a new tab, then embiggen.) BTW, the Stinkies won. 🙁


  • The Leheriya Gate at the City Palace, Jaipur, India
    Golden doors surrounded by ornate green plasterwork in an Indian style

    Image: Wikimedia/Jakub Hałun, CC BY-SA 4.0)


  • Sunday at the Ventura County Farmers Market
    Buckets of orange, purple, and pink flowers at a farmers' market Purple and pink gomphrena flowers at a farmers' market
  • Lucky
    I am so lucky to have the world's greatest brother-in-law.
  • Preach, Jaroslav
    Tradition is a good thing. It is traditionalism that is bad. Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide.

    —Jaroslav Pelikan

    (h/t blog.angloromanticism.org - btw, my new band name)


  • Wild Wombats in the White House

    Jim Schutze:

    ... his entire industry is on pins and needles, terribly anxious about a Trump victory. I asked him if it’s because Trump is opposed to his industry on specific policy issues. He said no.

    “That’s not it. It’s that Trump is crazy. That’s what we worry about.”

    My friend’s business involves putting big chunks of money into long-range investments that already involve plenty of risk. The added risk of wild wombats in the White House with regulatory power over their deal is way too much.


  • Duane Thomas
    RIP, Duane Thomas, one of the greatest runners in Cowboys history. When an interviewer referred to the Superbowl as "the ultimate game," Thomas' never-to-be-forgotten response was, "If it's the ultimate, why are they playing it again next year?"
    Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas in the 1970s.

  • Leah Bayans:

    When I first sat with Wendell [Berry] to talk about educating farmers as farmers, he started by turning to the idea of love—in the fullness of the term, not sentimentalized but fully rounded, with the joyful and the difficult joined through membership in a place and with its people.

    He then asked a question that I try to answer every day: what works does this love propose?

    Start with love, then see what works that love proposes. (H/T: @ayjay)


  • from Kottke:
    Public Work is an image search engine that boasts 100,000 “copyright-free” images from institutions like the NYPL, the Met, etc. It’s fast with a relatively simple interface and uses AI to auto-categorize and suggest possibly related images (both visually and content-wise). And it’s fun to just visually click around on related images. On the downside, their sourcing and attribution isn’t great — especially when compared to something like Flickr Commons.

  • GOAT

  • C'est Vrai
    Capers are white people's fish sauce. Briny and salty and umamiful. -- my daughter

  • Roses | P.S. Krøyer, 1893

    Oil painting of a bush of white roses in the foreground and a 19th century woman wearing white and reading in the rose garden in the background

    Yes, please. Some of that.


  • Which Vision: Sunrise or Carnage?
    David Brooks, quoting Michael Strain
    A Trump win would play into the narrative of Americans as helpless victims. The economics of grievance is ineffective, counterproductive, and corrosive, eroding the foundations of prosperity. Messages matter. Tell people that the system is rigged, and they will aspire to less. Champion personal responsibility, and they will lift their aspirations. Promoting an optimistic vision of economic life can increase risk tolerance, ambition, effort, and dynamism.

  • Moo, Baa, Cluck, Oink
    The late, great Kinky Friedman:
    I'm not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.
  • Hate the Sinner, Hate the Sin
    David Frum, via Nick Cataggio:
    Nobody seems to have language to say: We abhor, reject, repudiate, and punish all political violence, even as we maintain that Trump remains himself a promoter of such violence, a subverter of American institutions, and the very opposite of everything decent and patriotic in American life.

  • Una Escaramuza - Mothered by Aunts and Horses

    Charra en un caballo. Photo credit: Constance Jaeggi

    Photo: Constance Jaeggi (a tip of the Hatlo Hat to @ayjay)

  • Kräuterbuch - “Book of Herbs” | Johannes Hartlieb - 1462 1462 painting of a hosta plant

    Hosta [really?!] 🌱


  • Listening to Lucinda (and cicadas)
    Black & white photo of a dog looking up at something outside of the image frame.

  • If Trump ever used words to render reality, I never heard it.*

    Heather Cox Richardson:

    *Mark Edmonson, Harpers, January 2023


  • At the parade


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