'in Lafcadio Hearn's travel narrative Two Years in the French West Indies in 1889. Hearn keeps asking what the Creole word means: he is told, variously, that it is a three-legged horse, a hanged man, a five-foot tall dog, or a fourteen-foot tall woman.'

Roger Luckhurst (2015).

Nasreen gathered the food quickly, but she, too, noticed a series of odd smells carried into the house by the wind. 'At first, it smelled bad, like garbage,' she said. 'And then it was a good smell, like sweet apples. Then like eggs.' Before she went downstairs, she happened to check on a caged partridge that her father kept in the house. 'The bird was dying,' she said. 'It was on its side.' She looked out the window. 'It was very quiet, but the animals were dying. The sheep and goats were dying.' Nasreen ran to the cellar. 'I told everybody there was something wrong. There was something wrong with the air.'

from here

Social grants are, in many senses, the glue holding families and communities together

Chris Webb on the social grants crisis in South Africa

oceans atop bus shelters

great plains on lamp posts

"Making Kaşar in Kars"

coins a statement of power indeed

I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord, but before he leaves that point will he at the next stage of the Bill bring forward some evidence from satisfied pubco tenants about how wonderful their relationship is with Enterprise Inns or Punch Taverns?

- Lord Snape* with a deserved burn for Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, pubco chum

Lords Hansard, 2nd December 2014, column 1289

* cash for influence yes

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognise 'how it really was'. It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

- Walter Benjamin, 'On the Concept of History'

Sandeep Parmar recording at The Poetry Archive

Now Cod fishing
In the winter time
Is very cold work.
In a Crabboat
I have known times
When it has been blowing
And snowing and freezing
And all the time my Father
Has been rowing the Boat
Up to the lines.

John Craske

260 million passengers per year the slated end figure for the burgeoning Dubai World Central - Al Maktoum International Airport.

Mark Featherstone on Naomi Klein

link to the .pdf '"When Did the Swiss Get so Rich?" Comparing Living Standards in Switzerland and Europe, 1800-1913' by Roman Studer (Journal of European Economic History, 2008)

Karajan making his players wear wigs on this documentary.

'in the middle of nowhere'