I’m officially a bestselling author! 🥳
Huge thanks to the 2204 kids (! 🤯) who picked up a copy of The Doomsday Club: Shape-Shifters this week. It’s surreal to see my name on the list, especially alongside so many incredible (and properly famous) authors and illustrators
@theobrienpress.bsky.social
Fun
Aragorn saying 'but it is not this day'
Surfacing is a verb, but it is not this verb...
"I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can."
—A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce
#BookologyThursday
One of my favourite ‘after’ poems- Mary Ruefle’s Red, a response to William Carlos Williams’ Red Wheebarrow.
@news.rte.ie Ireland is hosting a dedicated pavilion at one of the world's most significant property conferences this week, on the French Riviera, as part of an effort to attract billions of euro in foreign investment into our housing system
The Irish government will do absolutely anything, including inviting in more absentee landlords, in order to avoid having to do something about the housing crisis. It’s not foreign investment, it’s international financial feudalism.
Tough times... I'm sure the families of the girls killed in the school strike sympathize...
New findings from a pilot randomized trial of psilocybin for smoking cessation are now published in JAMA Open Network — this is one of the largest controlled trials of psilocybin for substance use disorder, with promising results! jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...
Happy international woman’s day. Here’s Marion from #FewAndFarBetween trying to work out how to be the kind of woman that gets invited onto Woman’s Hour and feeling increasingly baffled by the whole thing. There is a lot of me in Marion.
Billboard ad for public transit visible from a freeway filled with cars and congestion, that says “You are not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.”
One of the best of all time.
“You’re not stuck in traffic. You ARE traffic.”
Wish we had come up with that one. #UrbanTruth
And next... The lobbyists obstructing restrictive gun legislation?
The GOP supermajority in Indianapolis (well, they mostly all live not in Indianapolis but that is the city they work in and they hate that they have to do that there) wanted to pass this last year and failed but now making it illegal to be homeless is up to one christofascist pen stroke
"About a third of children are now growing up in poverty."
Michael Marmot, the UK’s leading expert on health equity, urges Prime Minister Keir Starmer to take bold action to tackle child poverty in this interview with The BMJ
https://bit.ly/40rQ5Ip
Friends, read this thread and then go get this book. It'll break your heart, and as Mary Oliver wrote,
"...by which I mean only
that it break open and never close again
to the rest of the world."
An old illustration of Red Riding Hood encountering the wolf in her grandmother's bed
If you don't feel full from what you're doing inlife, then you are the one being eaten.
🎨 Arthur Rackham
Although I’ve been involved with homelessness policy for decades, I’m NOT an expert at it. Very few city planners are. @nerd4cities.bsky.social admits it’s out of his wheelhouse too, but I appreciate his data-driven approach here. Spoilers: rent rates are key & housing SAVES public money.
Comments?
This is a very important point.
I'm looking forward to The Naming but who (or what) the hell wrote the cover blurb for this edition?? It barely makes sense. If it was a new author I wouldn't have touched it!
Then & Now Portugal's Drug Decriminalization Key developments since Portugal decriminalized drugs in 2001 Overdose deaths 1999 369 2016|30 New HIV diagnoses due to injecting 2000 907 2017 18 Number of people incarcerated for drug offences 1999 2017 3,863 1,140 Sources: TheLancet, drugpolicy.org, EMCDDA, VHPA
Labour has been pushing lies about the Greens’ policy on reducing drug misuse. This is a policy that has already been very successful in Portugal. It has reduced harmful drug taking by ending the so-called “war on drugs”.
"I met a man along the road
To Withernsea;
Was ever anything so dark, so pale
As he?
His hat, his clothes, his tie, his boots
Were black as black
Could be,
And midst of all was a cold white face,
And eyes that looked wearily"
(H. H. Abbott)
🎨 Harry Clarke
#bookwormsat #goldenageofillustration
Large family dinner painting.
‘And so, while the streets are being decorated and the rich are preparing their feasts, let us not forget those who sit cold and hungry, shut out from the glow of Christmas cheer.’ ~ George Eliot, Middlemarch.
🖼️ Christmas Eve Dinner, Carl Larsson, c. 1904.
Picture of hardback edition of Everything Will Swallow You by Tom Cox
Special offer @kennysbookshop.bsky.social in Gallaimh 🥰
www.kennys.ie/shop/everyth...
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990) is on YouTube.
Gary Oldman and Tim Roth star in Tom Stoppard's big screen adaptation of his own stage play, itself a play on Shakespeare's Hamlet.
#TomStoppard
Claire Gleeson wins An Post Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year
Yay!!! 🥳🎉🎈 @cmgleeson.bsky.social
A man I met high in the Peak District who, due to crimes he would not disclose to me, had been turned into two conjoined Sycamore trees by a coven of witches and condemned to spend eternity waving his useless branch hands at the cold, cruel sky.
THREAD. A collection of photographs of excellent trees I have met on walks.
You will find the captions to each photo in the alt text.
Bobby Ten Gaffs complaining about the system his party created over a century of dominating the political landscape?
The sooner these gaslighting clowns are fired into the sun, the better.
Here's an idea... what about adequately organising and resourcing the institutions that evaluate asylum and visa applications so that people aren't in IPA/homeless limbo for 10 years, wanting to be part of our community and contribute and then targeted and abused for not integrating or contributing?
Some 470 Beaumont Hospital workers join call for boycott of Israeli firm’s drugs
I have a very bad feeling about this...
Spotify Support — Spotify at 10:04 PM, Oct 21 Jake R. is now connected and reviewing your question. They'll message you shortly. Hi there! Jake R. at 10:04 PM, Oct 21 Hi - I have read that Spotify is advertising ICE commercials. Is this true? If so, I would like to cancel my subscription. You at 10:05 PM, Oct 21 End of conversation. You can close the messaging window now.
Spotify customer service is immediately ending conversations if you ask about them airing ICE advertisements on the platform.
Cancel your Spotify subscription.
#BoycottSpotify
