Cosy Day

11/01/2023

Dobranoc 💙
Jaskinia lodowa na Islandii 💙❄

11/01/2023

Świat kolorami się mieni

11/01/2023

10/01/2023

Part of many one-and-done parents' contentment is the impact their decision has on other parts of their lives, such as careers, hobbies and interests. "There's the question of what you want an adulthood to look like," says Sandler. "Like, what does it take to go to the movies? What does it take to go out to dinner? What does it take to have adult friendships where you actually get to have an uninterrupted conversation?"

It is also, of course, potentially easier to maintain one's health. Pregnancy, labour and the postpartum period all carry risks, including for fathers. Particularly for women older than 35, those giving birth to a second or later child, rather than their first, are at increased risk of pregnancy complications like eclampsia, gestational hypertension and preterm labour.

06/01/2023

the Canadian filmmaker has been celebrated so much for raising the bar for cinematic endeavours – as with The Terminator, The Abyss and Titanic – that South Park parodied him in a 2012 episode. "James Cameron doesn't do what James Cameron does for James Cameron," a fictionalised, cartoon version of the director says after completing a deep-sea mission that sees him literally raise the bar for society. "James Cameron does what James Cameron does because James Cameron is… James Cameron."

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26/12/2022

Demonstration against illegal immigration, Iquique, Chile, January 2022

A man sits on a lawn chair holding a pretty pastel parasol against the blazing sun, seemingly oblivious of the apocalyptic plumes of smoke billowing up from the burning tyres, a few feet away, that are scattered across the highway on which he is surreally perched. Impeding access to Iquique, a city in north Chile near the border with Bolivia, where groups agitating against illegal immigration have organised protests, he is an implausible paragon of imperturbable calm. The incongruity of his relaxed posture (which rhymes with the idyllic beach, sparkling sea, and poetic palm tree pattern repeated on his parasol) and the chaos raging around him is reminiscent of several Surrealist paintings from the 20th Century – such as Salvador Dalí's Sewing machine with Umbrella (1941) – that portray the ostensibly innocuous object as absurdly foretokening doom.

23/12/2022

Part of the secret of the Sheridan universe's success is that the natural landscape is vast and pretty, and the family's loyalties, betrayals and infighting can be absorbing even when the plot turns are ludicrous. In 1883, the Duttons headed West and Jacob's brother, James, created the Yellowstone ranch on the site where his daughter, Elsa, was buried. In over-the-top Western fashion, she staggered around with a poisoned arrow through her abdomen and even rode a horse before the arrow killed her. Elsa's excruciatingly overwritten narration ran through the series: "The river doesn't care if you can swim. The snake doesn't care if you love your children." Unfortunately, her voiceover turns up again in 1923, but at least she offers useful information, telling us that Jacob and Cora arrived in 1894 and raised James' two orphaned sons. And she follows Cora's lethal first scene with a voiceover that goes to the heart of the Sheridan world. "Violence has always haunted this family," she says. "We hunt it down, we seek it."

21/12/2022

In Mao II, a reclusive novelist, Bill Gray, who has become famous for two books written decades earlier, is struggling with whether to publish his third. He's also aware that writers no longer change things. "The future belongs to crowds." Rather than words, DeLillo argues, we are driven by the power of the image, usually of great and horrifying spectacles: the book is structured around televised images of, among other things, the Hillsborough Stadium disaster and the Ayatollah Khomeini's funeral. Do we share in the grief of those suffering when we witness such events, one character wonders, or are we voyeurs?

DeLillo's vision never flinches, never looks away, which may be why his work can seem cold in its unsentimental approach to human horror. We see it in The Names, filming terrorist murders; in White Noise, separating Hi**er from his actions through the academic fe**sh of Hi**er studies; in Falling Man, where the book is centred on the iconography of one of the men who jumped from the twin towers. His books riff on cults and death and mass murder, which are a part of life. "Life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound," says a character in Mao II; once again, DeLillo saw what was coming.

16/12/2022

Yoghurt, meanwhile, is surprisingly low-carbon, 2.7kg of CO2e per 100g of protein, as not much milk is needed to produce it (much less than in the case of cheese) and there are a number of by-products, such as cream and butter, which means the GHG footprint is distributed across numerous food items,says Marbach.

Plants

Animal products are responsible for 57% of global food-related emissions, compared to plant-based foods which contribute 29% of the total.

The UK's Climate Change Committee (CCC) has recommended a 20% reduction in meat and dairy consumption by 2030, rising to 35% by 2050 for meat, to meet the country's climate goals.

The lowest emissions option would be to adopt a vegan diet and cut out meat and dairy altogether. If the whole world went vegan, global food-related emissions would fall by up to 70% by 2050, according to a study by the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford.

14/12/2022

Trompe l'oeil reached its height in 17th-Century Europe, in paintings so realistic that the objects in them seem to be projecting forward from the canvas into the viewer's space, close enough to touch. In a common motif, straps seem to be physically holding up various objects – such as sheet music or letters – on a display board, when the entire image, wooden frame included, is actually a painted illusion. The Cubists, of course, did the opposite, fracturing images to grasp an object's essence. In her memoir Life With Picasso, Francoise Gilot quotes the artist as saying, "We tried to get rid of trompe l'oeil to find a trompe l'esprit. We didn't any longer want to fool the eye; we wanted to fool the mind." But a major point of the exhibition is that mind games questioning the nature of reality and of art itself were already there in the most ambitious 17th-Century trompe l'oeil paintings. "Any mimesis is not real, despite how real it might look," Braun tells BBC Culture. Trompe l'oeil, she says, offered a "sophisticated and philosophical discourse in the Baroque period, and then again when the Americans took it up in the 1890s," a pattern the Cubists were heir to.

09/12/2022

And yet, ley lines continue to weave their allure. Perhaps it's not surprising. "Humans have always searched for inner and outer maps or frameworks to help them navigate the world," reflects Jake Farr, coaching psychologist, psychotherapist, and co-founder of Leading Through Storms, a community-interest company supporting meaningful adaptation into the future. "The need to belong is also a primary human driver," she tells BBC Culture. "Where do we belong, who do we belong with, what's our place? Contrary to this, the modern western world pivots towards individualism, capitalism's bed fellow, leaving many feeling lonely and lacking connection to place and community. Ley lines may provide people with a way to map felt connections to place and, on a deeper level, may speak to the interconnectedness of all life; reaching for harmony and balance which, of course, buying the latest product simply can't touch."

06/12/2022

Ley lines? Energy lines? Surely the preserve of myth makers and fairy followers? Not to start with. The term was originally posited, just three years after the end of World War One, by Alfred Watkins, a councillor in rural Herefordshire in the UK. Born in 1855 into a well-to-do farming family, Watkins was also an amateur archaeologist; it was while out riding in 1921 that he looked out over the landscape and noticed what he later described as a grid of straight lines that stood out like "glowing wires all over the surface of the county", in which churches and standing stones, crossroads and burial mounds, moats and beacon hills, holy wells and old stone crosses, appeared to fall into perfect alignment.