It’s been bugging me for weeks. Did you know Andre Norton has two Witch World books (magical matriarchy!) with a character called Herrel who is an initially disempowered magic user and also a man who is not what he seems?
This week's review covers Australian swimmer and movie star Annette Kellerman, who was named "the perfectly formed woman" in 1910 by a Harvard weirdo and she took that endorsement straight to the bank, slipping in some radical feminism in the bargain.
moviessilently.com/2026/02/22/t...
Everyone should get to relive the joy of being young with the maturity of correct dosage titration
A photo of a cat under a bed with a rotisserie chicken with the caption: This is Beans. Beans stole a while rotisserie chicken off the counter. Not a piece. The whole chicken. Beans dragged it under the bed and growled at us for forty minutes. Beans is 9 pounds.
Become ungovernable
![BT: Everybody who came in to audition for the Joker was doing, basically, [Adam West–era Joker actor] Cesar Romero. They weren’t treating the character seriously. All of the actors that we tested were all doing these really silly and bizarre voices. None of it had any serious threat to it at all. Tim Curry actually came in and gave us something really close to what we wanted. It was funny and weird but also definitely had some menace to it. So we hired Tim. He did about three episodes for us. And then Alan Burnett came to me after we did the third one, and we listened to the assembled tracks, and he said, “I think we have to replace Tim.”
AR: He just couldn’t wrap his head around Tim’s performance. And the truth of it is, I never would have recast Tim.
BT: I didn’t want to do it because we had already recorded a bunch of episodes with him and I knew we would have to rerecord them in post, which I knew was going to be a nightmare. But it didn’t take much for him to convince me, because I was kind of leaning that way myself. It’s not that Tim was doing anything bad, it just wasn’t quite what we wanted.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:474ldquxwzrlcvjhhbbk2wte/bafkreicp7nlfegzs6i2hjxdk5qwnt7wcnszrm4ojuo7o7sghjenzgrn724)
BT: Everybody who came in to audition for the Joker was doing, basically, [Adam West–era Joker actor] Cesar Romero. They weren’t treating the character seriously. All of the actors that we tested were all doing these really silly and bizarre voices. None of it had any serious threat to it at all. Tim Curry actually came in and gave us something really close to what we wanted. It was funny and weird but also definitely had some menace to it. So we hired Tim. He did about three episodes for us. And then Alan Burnett came to me after we did the third one, and we listened to the assembled tracks, and he said, “I think we have to replace Tim.” AR: He just couldn’t wrap his head around Tim’s performance. And the truth of it is, I never would have recast Tim. BT: I didn’t want to do it because we had already recorded a bunch of episodes with him and I knew we would have to rerecord them in post, which I knew was going to be a nightmare. But it didn’t take much for him to convince me, because I was kind of leaning that way myself. It’s not that Tim was doing anything bad, it just wasn’t quite what we wanted.
AR: I got a phone call from Mark Hamill’s agent — which was absolutely astounding — saying, “Mark is a huge comic-book fan, a major Batman fan, and would please very much like to be a part of the Batman series.” Mark Hamill (The Joker): I actively wanted to get on this show because I was reading about the people that they were putting together in key positions. I followed the fan press in terms of comic books. I was reading in, I think, Comics Buyer’s Guide that their goals were to make the episodes of Batman analogous to the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the ’40s. That was their benchmark of quality. I thought, Oh, my gosh, they’re really going to do this right. It’s not going to be aimed at grade-school kids, like some earlier iterations of the Batman cartoons. AR: So I found a very nice guest role for him. BT: Mark came in and played a corporate tycoon who was responsible for Mr. Freeze’s wife dying. MH: I went in and I just let my geek flag fly. I was asking them all these questions: “Are you going to do Ra’s al Ghul? Are you going to do Dr. Hugo Strange?” AR: He was very grateful, and he pulled me aside at the end of the session and said, “I had so much fun doing this, and thank you so much for bringing me in. But I really want to be a part of the series. I don’t want to just come in and do a guest-star and disappear.” And then, coincidentally, here comes the need to recast the Joker.
![MH: I got a call saying, “They want you to come in and audition for the Joker.” And I said, “Oh, gosh, that’s a little too high-profile for my liking. Not only has it been done with Cesar Romero, but it’s been done by Jack Nicholson. What can I bring to the table that hasn’t been done before?” I said, “I’d rather play Two-Face or Clayface or someone who hasn’t been done.” The reason I went in was because I was absolutely certain that they would be unable to cast me as the Joker simply because, public-relations-wise, the idea of the guy who played Luke Skywalker — this icon of heroism, this virtuous character — playing this icon of villainy? Comic-book fans are notoriously demanding. They’re very opinionated and not shy about letting you know how they feel. I thought it would be a PR disaster that they would not be able to withstand. It gave me a great confidence, since I didn’t think there was any shot at all of me getting the part, so I had that performance anxiety removed.
PD: I remember listening to his audition, and when he did the laugh, I said, “That’s it. That’s just it.” The laugh was cruel, it was funny, there was an undercurrent of terrible sadness to it. It was a laugh from a destroyed soul.
MH: I had done Mozart in Amadeus in the first national tour, and then they transferred me over to Broadway, and one of the things that is relevant to my audition [for the Joker] is that Mozart had this sort of ghastly laugh that threw everybody. I played with that laugh a lot. I’d do a little Dwight Frye, I’d do a little Sydney Greenstreet. I love all those old Warner Bros. movies, so I was just slipping people in. Sometimes I’d get notes like, “It was a little too ‘Jerry Lewis at the matinee’. Reel it back.” I’m telling you this because, in retrospect, after getting the part, I asked Andrea Romano, “How did I get it? What was the process? How did you know that you wanted me?” And she said, “The laugh.” I didn’t want to get pigeonholed into a specific laugh. With the…](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:474ldquxwzrlcvjhhbbk2wte/bafkreihpixqca4m27sihmd2hfhimpnfxajk43vpzhozrncbjllbwofuzxa)
MH: I got a call saying, “They want you to come in and audition for the Joker.” And I said, “Oh, gosh, that’s a little too high-profile for my liking. Not only has it been done with Cesar Romero, but it’s been done by Jack Nicholson. What can I bring to the table that hasn’t been done before?” I said, “I’d rather play Two-Face or Clayface or someone who hasn’t been done.” The reason I went in was because I was absolutely certain that they would be unable to cast me as the Joker simply because, public-relations-wise, the idea of the guy who played Luke Skywalker — this icon of heroism, this virtuous character — playing this icon of villainy? Comic-book fans are notoriously demanding. They’re very opinionated and not shy about letting you know how they feel. I thought it would be a PR disaster that they would not be able to withstand. It gave me a great confidence, since I didn’t think there was any shot at all of me getting the part, so I had that performance anxiety removed. PD: I remember listening to his audition, and when he did the laugh, I said, “That’s it. That’s just it.” The laugh was cruel, it was funny, there was an undercurrent of terrible sadness to it. It was a laugh from a destroyed soul. MH: I had done Mozart in Amadeus in the first national tour, and then they transferred me over to Broadway, and one of the things that is relevant to my audition [for the Joker] is that Mozart had this sort of ghastly laugh that threw everybody. I played with that laugh a lot. I’d do a little Dwight Frye, I’d do a little Sydney Greenstreet. I love all those old Warner Bros. movies, so I was just slipping people in. Sometimes I’d get notes like, “It was a little too ‘Jerry Lewis at the matinee’. Reel it back.” I’m telling you this because, in retrospect, after getting the part, I asked Andrea Romano, “How did I get it? What was the process? How did you know that you wanted me?” And she said, “The laugh.” I didn’t want to get pigeonholed into a specific laugh. With the…
AR: Any actor whom I hired to be the Joker replacement voice would have to match the mouth flaps established by Tim Curry’s performance. And that’s really hard to come up with while introducing a character as intense as Joker — you’re stuck with somebody else’s timing. And Mark was crazy good. BT: It was just like, Hallelujah! Who knew that Luke Skywalker would be our perfect Joker? KC: Luke Skywalker is the nice, young leading man, and most times in films, that’s probably the least interesting character in a film. Well, Mark Hamill could not be further from that. This madman came into the recording studio and he was totally eccentric and he goes a million miles an hour. He talks a million miles an hour. His imagination never stops jumping from topic to topic. He’s a very intellectually alive person, and if you get Mark on a topic, you can’t shut him up for an hour.
Yes — Mark Hamill getting cast as The Joker because he was begging to be on the show RIGHT when Tim Curry got fired is a classic example, as documented in my 2017 oral history of Batman: The Animated Series:
archive.is/uFoOU
A digital flat lay of a femme and unisex white shirt with a three-colour green illustration of a tiny hiker disappearing into a giant forest of Aoteraoa native trees. It says trees please in a psychedelic font.
A digital artwork of a three-colour green illustration of a tiny hiker disappearing into a giant forest of Aoteraoa native trees. It says trees please in a psychedelic font.
A digital detail of a three-colour green illustration of a tiny hiker disappearing into a giant forest of Aoteraoa native trees. It says trees please in a psychedelic font.
First tee of 2026 and it's a BANGER: Trees Please, feat. seven Aotearoa native tree species in a three-colour screenprint of verdant greens, plus painstakingly hand-lettered text (nearly killed me ngl).
Pre-order open: please do pre-order to help gauge demand and secure your size: pepperraccoon.com
I do wonder if anyone else noticed that Yan is not just short for Yamaha. It’s also a respelling of I Am.
(He was one of the scientists who thought the 1986 HIV theory wasn’t fully proved & suspected another factor, so def a contrarian of the time, but when contrarians do good science, they help make sure the consensus is correct)
Absolute UNIT of a hornet beside an array of puny common wasps.
A guide for Aucklanders keeping watch for yellow-legged hornets:
1. “Hmm, is this stripy waspy thing a hornet?” = not a hornet
2. “JESUS EFFING C what the F is that MONSTER, that’s he biggest wasp I’ve ever SEEN, NO Jaden KEEP AWAY, shit I think it has yellow legs” = hornet
Fabulous takes. Especially the Puddleglum. I remember thinking of the forest in Michael Scott Rohan’s Forge in the Forest as a possible source for the wood in Hexwood.
Performer as a black silhouette against a vivid audience of blue and green blobs with 400 names.
I think this is my favourite.
Huge paintings - a close up of a man with a microphone and running eyeliner and other art in the distance.
Cordula Taiwo’s awesome exhibition of Nick Cave inspired paintings at Thistle Hall in Wellington is well worth a look.
Yup. Pregnancy & childbirth are still very much life-threatening activities for women, even those in great health with ready access to the best medical care.
It was a big surprise to learn this the hard way: whenever we celebrate my kid's birthday, it's always also "we narrowly escaped death" day.
Multiple art pose references of a man crouching in anger.
Multiple art pose references of a man standing while holding a spear.
Multiple art pose references of a man holding a sword.
Multiple art pose references of a man draped in chains, and holding them like a weapon.
New pose references! ❤️🔥🗡️
Aaron is back, an he's giving orc barbarian berserker.
Duck Ellington, from the Acoustic Rooster cartoon, is a vaguely Duke Ellington-evocative green duck sitting at a piano. He's got white spats, a black bow tie, a pencil-thin mustache, and a combover.
"Why?" you would be reasonable to ask.
Well, see, my 3-year-old is absolutely fucking obsessed with a cartoon duck based on Duke Ellington.
Another wonderful episode! Left me realising that I’ve always kind of seen this book as Granny Weatherwax vs the Mists of Avalon, with Pratchett’s original cover artist dictating the background characters. (The original Granny W from Equal Rites, who is much less polished than the later one.)
Handwritten note on a knitting pattern that reads: “Dear Knitting Friend The first row, on the front only, shows the spots in the wrong place on the pattern. Each of the spots needs to move two stitches to the right so you maintain the offset pattern of the spots. Also note on row 10, on the front there is one spot in the wrong place, 4th to the right of the underarm. Happy Knitting.”
Thank you to whoever left this note in Dunedin City Library’s copy of M’Lou Baber’s “Double Knitting: Reversible Two Colour Designs.”
It has literally never occurred to me they aren’t. Having them separate feels very wrong
CRASHOUT FOR THE AGES
And this is why Ishmael is right that whales are fish. 😂 Middle kid is correct.
🐋
I look forward to hearing what you have to say about this book when you get up to the Pinhoe Egg.
Thanks for the heads up. Appalled that this is how I got it.
A black and white photo from an old baking cookbook which shows how to shape the dough for a crown brioche. It looks suspiciously like a certain obscene meme picture (goatse) that Bluesky just banned.
From the 1966 Sunset Magazine “Sunset Cook Book of Breads”
The phrase above is also related to the following exchange, occasionally heard on Costa Rican playgrounds…
¡Me cago en tu padre!
(“I shit on your father!”)
¡No me importa, es lavable!
(“I don’t care, he’s washable!”)
So very cool that you have transcripts for when I’m having issues with parsing words!
Finally realised what my issue is with your interpretation of the scene with Tacroy’s soul. I’ve always read the soul as feeling pleasant to Christopher because Tacroy cares about the kid. It’s love, not cricket, or empire. (Totally agree on much of your commentary on overall racism though.)
