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Arts Diary: Shadowlands
2026-Feb-22, Sunday 13:00![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
andrew_rilstone_feedArts Diary: Shadowlands: Aldywich, London
andrew_rilstone_feed
Sunday photoblogging: Life in the UK
2026-Feb-22, Sunday 11:37crooked_timber_feedIt has been like this for weeks and weeks. And not just in the UK, but across much of Western Europe.
New Cover: “Fall At Your Feet”
2026-Feb-21, Saturday 17:20scalziwhatever_feed
Yes, I’ve been on a bit of a tear recently as far as covers go, but let’s just say I had a bit of a backlog from when I was writing the novel. Now that it’s been cleared off the table I have a little time to do this sort of thing. This is currently how I do my “me” time. It’s this or setting fire to things.
This song is one of my favorite songs from one of my favorite bands, and I had been meaning to get to it for a bit. Also for this one I had a technical project of trying to nail the vocal balance, which is for me the trickiest part of doing any of this. I think I did pretty decent job sitting it into the mix this time around. It’s fun to still be learning things.
Enjoy!
— JS
More in Sadness than in Anger
2026-Feb-21, Saturday 11:05charlie_stross_diary_feedSorry I haven't updated the blog for a while: I've been busy. (Writing the final draft of a new novel entirely unconnected to anything else you've read—space opera, new setting, longest thing I've written aside from the big Merchant Princes doorsteps. Now in my agent's inbox while I make notes towards a sequel, if requested.)
Over the past few years I've been naively assuming that while we're ruled by a ruthless kleptocracy, they're not completely evil: aristocracies tend to run on self-interest and try to leave a legacy to their children, which usually means leaving enough peasants around to mow the lawn, wash the dishes, and work the fields.
But my faith in the sanity of the evil overlords has been badly shaken in the past couple of months by the steady drip of WTFery coming out of the USA in general and the Epstein Files in particular, and now there's this somewhat obscure aside, that rips the mask off entirely (Original email on DoJ website ) ...
A document released by the U.S. Department of Justice as part of the Epstein files contains a quote attributed to correspondence involving Jeffrey Epstein that references Bill Gates and a controversial question about "how do we get rid of poor people as a whole."
The passage appears in a written communication included in the DOJ document trove and reads, in part: "I've been thinking a lot about that question that you asked Bill Gates, 'how do we get rid of poor people as a whole,' and I have an answer/comment regarding that for you." The writer then asks to schedule a phone call to discuss the matter further.
As an editor of mine once observed, America is ruled by two political parties: the party of the evil billionaires, and the party of the sane (so slightly less evil) billionaires. Evil billionaires: "let's kill the poor and take all their stuff." Sane billionaires: "hang on, if we kill them all who's going to cook dinner and clean the pool?"
And this seemed plausible ... before it turned out that the CEO class as a whole believe entirely in AI (which, to be clear, is just another marketing grift in the same spirit as cryptocurrencies/blockchain, next-generation nuclear power, real estate backed credit default options, and Dutch tulip bulbs). AI is being sold on the promise of increasing workforce efficiency. And in a world which has been studiously ignoring John Maynard Keynes' 1930 prediction that by 2030 we would only need to work a 15 hour work week, they've drawn an inevitable unwelcome conclusion from this axiom: that there are too many of us. For the past 75 years they've been so focussed on optimizing for efficiency that they no longer understand that efficiency and resilience are inversely related: in order to survive collectively through an energy transition and a time of climate destabilization we need extra capacity, not "right-sized" capacity.
Raise the death rate by removing herd immunity to childhood diseases? That's entirely consistent with "kill the poor". Mass deportation of anyone with the wrong skin colour? The white supremacists will join in enthusiastically, and meanwhile: the deported can die out of sight. Turn disused data centres or amazon warehouses into concentration camps (which are notorious disease breeding grounds)? It's a no-brainer. Start lots of small overseas brushfire wars, escalating to the sort of genocide now being piloted in Gaza by Trump's ally Netanyahu (to emphasize: his strain of Judaism can only be understood as a Jewish expression of white nationalism, throwing off its polite political mask to reveal the death's head of totalitarianism underneath)? It's all part of the program.
Our rulers have gone collectively insane (over a period of decades) and they want to kill us.
The class war has turned hot. And we're all on the losing side.
The US state has proved itself dispensable
2026-Feb-21, Saturday 05:00crooked_timber_feedNot long after Trump took office, I observed that the status of the US as the “indispensable nation” could not be sustained. A year later, the US, considered strictly as a state actor, is already dispensable and has, in fact, been largely dispensed with, by Europe in particular. The standing ovation given to Rubio in Munich recently (made almost unavoidable when his retinue jumped to their feet in Stalinesque fashion) should not obscure the fact that almost no one interpreted it as anything more than a politer restatement of Vance’s tirade a year ago. At that time, Europe needed to keep Trump on-side to prevent a sudden collapse in support for Ukraine and to avoid an all-out trade war.
None of that is particularly relevant now. Europe (include Ukraine) has held Russia to a standstill for a year despite the complete cessation of US military aid. The US is still relevant as an arms exporter and as a patchy supporter of sanctions against Russia, but that’s about it. Trump has turned his attention to his desire to rule the Americas from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, as well as returning to the forever wars of the Middle East.
US discussions of European military dependence commonly assume that independence requires the attributes of a superpower: global reach, expeditionary capacity, and a highly centralised state authority. But Europe does not need to replicate a superpower model. It needs only sufficient political cohesion and integrated military capability to deny territorial aggression on its own continent. In that sense, the relevant model is a Greater Switzerland: coordinated and capable enough for credible defence, without aspiring to global hegemony and without transforming itself into a unitary — or even fully federal — state.
Measured against this objective, Europe has already surpassed the US. Ukraine alone has more troops, hardened by years of war, than the US, and Europe as a whole many more. Europe’s armaments industry, much derided in the early years of the war, is now churning out munitions (particularly artillery shells and drones) at a capacity far greater than that of the US. There are gaps, notably in missile defence, but these are being closed quite rapidly.
Against this, arguments for continued dependence on the US commonly focus on logistics, command-and-control, and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance). These arguments sound impressive, but collapse on closer investigation.
Logistics is the clearest example. Before Trump, analysis of a possible war with Russia assumed a massive lift of US forces to Europe for which only the US had any capacity. But it’s clear that this won’t happen. Europe will have to fend (almost) entirely for itself. The resulting logistics problems are immense, but they all involve land transport within Europe – bridges that can’t support the weight of tanks for example.
In fact, the dependence now goes the other way. The global force projection capacity of the US depend critically on bases in Europe like Rammstein, not to mention the UK-leased Diego Garcia. Until recently, a loss of US access to these bases was unthinkable. But it would be a low-cost path to retaliation in the event of an occupation of Greenland.
The same points apply to command-and-control. The US military is central to NATO and would be crucial in the (now improbable) event of a war between NATO and Russia. But in the actual war between Ukraine/Europe and Russia, it’s irrelevant. At the operational level, Ukraine is in charge of its own military. At the logistical level, it’s increasingly integrated with Europe.
Finally, there is ISR. Most of the work these days is being done by drones, which have made concealment nearly impossible anywhere near the front lines. US military satellites play a role, but it’s less important than it was. The most important US player is not the state but Elon Musk’s Starlink, which is gradually being challenged by European alternatives.
Then there is “intelligence” in the sense of analysis, where the US is arguably worse than useless. The US intelligence system scored a win at the beginning of the war by correctly predicting the Russian invasion, but it was right for the wrong reasons, expecting an easy Russian win. Because of the dominance of superpower thinking, the US has routinely overestimated Russia.
This can be seen in the remorselessly pessimistic reporting of the New York Times, which (not surprisingly) reflects the advice it is getting from US intelligence officials. The NYT first announced the imminent fall of Pokrovsk (a relatively unimportant city in Eastern Ukraine) as a likely consequence of Ukraine’s incursion into Kursk in 2024. The latest announcement, accompanied by a concession that Russian progress had been slower than expected, was a week ago. Perhaps they will be right this time. But anyone who had read consistent NYT reports of Russian advances for the past three years, without checking the map, would have been anticipating T-72s on the Champs-Elysees by now. These reports are clearly guiding the thinking (to describe it kindly) of the Trump Administration, and reflected in the advice given to Ukraine.
That’s the military side of things. As far as dispensing with the US role in global society is concerned, Trump is doing the work himself. USAid has been gutted, with catastrophic consequences . The US just withdrew from dozens of international organisations , and is sowing chaos in others
The big steps here, with respect to the UN, World Bank and IMF, have not yet been taken But even if Trump does not make the first move, the continued location of these institutions in the US can’t be sustained. With the US out of most UN organisations, UN presence in New York is likely to shrink to the provision of a meeting place for the Security Council and General Assembly, and even that role is threatened by travel restrictions. Their buildings can presumably be taken over by Trump’s Board of Peace. A similar process will play out as Trump attempts to direct the lending policies of the World Bank and IMF
The big force for inertia is the idea that Trump will be gone in 2029. That seems increasingly unlikely, but unless Trumpism is completely defeated, the process will continue with the next Republican administration. A complete defeat of Trumpism would require a massive constitutional upheaval in the US, which would entail a need to focus almost entirely on domestic problems.
The US state may already be dispensable, but the same is not true of the US role in technology and finance. Conflict in these areas is only just starting, but will be intense. More soon I hope.
Imperia: A European Culture Story, Part 1
2026-Feb-21, Saturday 00:35crooked_timber_feed
Just north of the Alps, on the border between Germany and Switzerland, lies beautiful Lake Constance. And on the northwest shore of the lake is the lovely small city of Constance, Germany.
Constance is well worth a visit. A lot of German cities have rather bland or unattractive centers, thanks to the American and British air forces. But Constance escaped these attentions entirely, because the Allies didn’t want to risk any bombs landing in neutral Switzerland. So Constance has an unusually intact Old Town with lots of interesting old buildings, some going right back to medieval times.
Constance also has this::quality(80)/images.vogel.de/vogelonline/bdb/1272600/1272674/original.jpg)
A nine meter tall, 18 ton statue of a medieval sex worker. She’s down at the harbor, on the lake. She rotates once every four minutes. Her name is Imperia.
You may reasonably ask, what? And part of the answer is, she’s memorializing the Council of Constance, the great political-religious council that happened here 600-some years ago, from 1414 to 1417. And you may ask again, what?
I’ll try to explain.
Constance
Lake Constance gets its modern name from the city of Constance. And the city of Constance is named after Constantius, a fourth century Roman emperor.
[probably this guy, though it might have been his grandson. it was the 4th century, stuff got confused.]
Back in the first century AD, the Romans pushed up through the Alps into what’s now southern Germany. They brought peace to the region via their traditional mix of mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and forced Romanization. They seem to have built a bridge at Constance — the lake tapers down to a narrow neck there. And credit where it’s due: the Romans loved nothing better than building transport infrastructure. Bridge going north, good Roman roads going south, inevitably a town sprang up. Later, in the 4th century when the Empire was turtling up against the ever more aggressive barbarians, the trading town built walls. It became a border fortress, and got a new Imperial name.
(You have to work a bit to find corners of Europe that haven’t been touched by someone’s empire. Roman, Frankish, Byzantine, Holy Roman, Ottoman, Spanish, French, Russian, British, German… ruins and roads, castles and place names, borders and battlefields. The continent is pock-marked with them like acne scars.)
The Romans eventually departed, but the bridge and the town seem to have survived. Certainly both were still there a thousand years later, when the Catholic Church convened a General Council there in 1414.
So is Imperia about the Roman Empire, then?
No, not at all. Well… not directly.
Three Popes, One Council
“And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power.” — Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
For a while, back in the 14th century, there were two rival Popes. Each had his own Papal court and hierarchy, each was doing all sorts of Papal things — collecting religious dues, appointing Bishops and Cardinals, excommunicating heretics — and each was recognized by about half of Europe. This was generally agreed to be a bad situation! So there were several attempts to fix this problem. They all failed, and one went so spectacularly wrong that it produced a third Pope, recognized by another couple of European countries.
At this point pretty much everyone agreed that something drastic had to be done. So a General Council of the Church was called, with implicit power to sit in judgment on all three rival Popes. Italy was problematic for a bunch of reasons, France was in the middle of the Hundred Years War — 
[Branagh or Olivier? discuss.]
— so after some discussion it was decided to convene the Council in the small neutral city of Constance, which if nothing else was centrally located.
In Conference Decided
“A conference is a gathering of people who singly can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done.” — Fred Allen
The Council of Constance is just so darn interesting.
I’ll try not to chase too many rabbits, but here’s a thought. In the early 15th century Europe was, in terms of global civilization, a backwater. The Chinese were more technologically advanced, India was richer. Asia was full of cities that were larger, cleaner, safer, and better designed than Europe’s grubby little burgs. Heck, the contemporary Aztecs had a capital at Tenochtitlan that was bigger and nicer than anything in Europe, and those guys were barely out of the Stone Age.
Europe had nothing that the rest of the world particularly wanted to buy, which meant that Europe had been running a trade deficit for literally centuries. (This would lead to a serious economic crisis later in the century, as the continent nearly ran out of gold and silver.) Militarily, Europeans had been losing battles and wars to non-Europeans for a while, and this would continue for some time. In particular, the Ottomans had just embarked on a long career of kicking Europe’s ass. Within a century, a huge chunk of the continent would be Ottoman provinces or tributaries.
And yet. Somewhere along the line, Europe went from “D-tier also-ran kind of lame civilization” to “planetary apex predator”.
Why? Why Europe?
Some of the world’s smartest people have spent lifetimes of scholarship trying to answer that question. Not for a moment will I imagine I can add anything useful to that great debate. But here’s an offhand thought: there’s a short list of things that are, historically, unique or nearly unique to Europe. One of those things? International conferences. 
[it doesn’t get much more European than this.]
This is probably because international conferences started as a particularly Christian thing. The early Church was spread broadly but thinly across a politically united Roman Empire that had, for a premodern state, unusually excellent transport links. (See earlier comment re: Romans and transport infrastructure.) So it made sense to periodically come together: to keep doctrine and practice consistent, to resolve leadership disputes, and just generally to settle questions that couldn’t be worked out locally. The great-grandfather of them all was the Council of Nicaea, back in 325 AD, which gave us the Nicene Creed. 
[BEGOTTEN NOT MADE HERETIC iykyk]
And there were lots more Councils, all through late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Chalcedon, Constantinople, Lateran, Lyons.
But there’s a second line of mostly secular conferences called by Europeans to resolve international disputes: most typically to end a war, but often with a sidebar of “and let’s try to set up some sort of international order”. And you can argue with a straight face that the Council of Constance is the takeoff point for this second line.
Because Constance was a Church council, yes. But it was also political in a way that previous medieval Councils hadn’t been. It was attended by kings and dukes and counts, lawyers and professors and representatives of Imperial Free Cities — in fact, the lay attendees may have outnumbered the clerics. It relied on the Emperor Sigismund to provide security and enforcement. Its decisions required buy-in from the secular authorities. Voting at the council was done by “nations” — groups of Churchmen, but sorted geographically by region within Europe. And while Church reform and heresy were on the agenda, the overriding imperative was straight-up power politics: to resolve the Papal schism and settle the Church’s internal government.
So on one hand, Constance was just another in that long line of Church councils from Nicaea to Vatican II (1962-65). But at the same time, it was arguably the first great multilateral peace conference. Lodi, Westphalia, Vienna, Versailles, Yalta: Europeans have been holding these conferences for a long time. There’s a direct line from Constance to the G-20.
— No, I’m not claiming that international conferences are what made Europe special. I’m just noting that these secular peace-and-international-order councils really get going in the 15th century, right around the time that Europe begins its slow ascent out of mediocrity. Almost certainly a coincidence! Still: interesting.
Deliverables
So the Council of Constance had three declared goals, plus one goal that was undeclared but universally recognized.
The declared goals were:
1) Fix the whole three Popes thing.
2) Deal with heresy. Specifically, deal with Jan Hus, who was the beta version of Martin Luther, and his followers. The Hussites had basically taken over one European country already, and were threatening to spread.
3) Reform the Church, which everyone agreed was spectacularly corrupt, and doing a pretty terrible job of providing spiritual guidance and moral leadership to Catholic Europe. (This was cross-wired with (2) because the Hussites were claiming to be, not heretics, but reformers.)
The undeclared goal was
4) By asserting the superiority of a Church Council over Popes, convert the Catholic Church from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy.
Nobody was publicly saying this was the plan, but this was totally the plan. There had been a bunch of bad Popes already. It was clear that giving that much power to anyone was a dubious idea to begin with, and that this was made worse by a selection process that favored ruthless conniving corrupt SOBs.
Getting rid of the Papacy was unthinkable, of course. But regular Church Councils to keep the Popes in check? That seemed entirely doable.
Key Performance Indicators
They succeeded at (1) and failed at the other three.
They did burn poor Jan Hus. It’s a sad story and I won’t go into the details. TLDR, they burned him, but the Hussites took over Bohemia anyway — the modern Czech Republic, more or less — and stayed in power there for over a century. The secular rulers around them did manage to contain the Hussite heresy and keep it from spreading, but that wasn’t because of anything the Council did.
But the really consequential failures were that they utterly failed to reform the Church and they didn’t curb the powers of the Papacy. The Church would remain horrifically corrupt, and the Popes would remain autocratic — and all too often greedy, cruel, and completely uninterested in providing spiritual or moral leadership.
It would take nearly another century for these particular chickens to come home. But the eventual, inevitable result was the Protestant Reformation.
[hammer time]
By failing to fix the system, the attendees of the Council guaranteed that the system would eventually explode.
But, really, how could they do otherwise? Cardinals and bishops and abbots, counts and dukes and kings, priests and professors… they were all products of the system, and they were all benefiting from it.
Somewhere, Imperia is smiling. We’ll get back to Imperia.
One fled, one dead, one sleeping in a golden bed
So what happened to those three Popes, anyway?
Well: John, the Neapolitan Pope, was a pretty sketchy character even by the low standards of late medieval Popes. Among other things — many, many other things — he was plausibly suspected of having poisoned his predecessor. So the Council offered him a deal: resign, and we won’t open an investigation into these accusations. Since an investigation would lead to a trial, and a trial would lead to a conviction, Pope John agreed and stepped down.
But then! John slipped out of Constance — disguised as a postman, some say. He fled to the castle of a friendly noble, un-resigned, and declared the Council dissolved.
The Council wasn’t having it. The Holy Roman (German) Emperor summoned an army to besiege the castle. John fled again, but the Emperor’s forces followed. Eventually he was caught and dragged back to Constance, where they did put him on trial, and convicted him too. He spent several years in comfortable but secure confinement. He was allowed out once it was clear that he would behave himself, i.e. not try to be Pope any more.
Now, one of John’s few accomplishments as Pope was choosing the Medici of Florence as his bankers. Did you ever wonder why the Medici were such a big deal? It’s because they were the bankers for the Papacy for almost a century. Immense sums of money flowed into Rome from all over Europe. All of it passed through Medici hands at some point, and of course the bankers took their cut.
And, credit to the Medici, they used at least some of that money to become some of the greatest patrons of art that the world has ever known. Michelangelo, Botticelli, the Duomo, Donatello, the Sistine Chapel… all that happened because of bad Pope John.
[“Award of a Sole Source Contract for Financial Services”, fresco, c. 1509]
When the disgraced ex-Pope eventually died, the reigning Pope didn’t want to give him a burial in Rome. So the grateful Medici whisked John’s body off to Florence, where they gave him a nine-day funeral. Then they built him a nice little tomb. It was eight meters tall, marble and gilt, with Corinthian columns and a bronze effigy — you know, the usual — designed by Medici client artists Donatello and Michelozzo. It’s still there in Florence today.
[phrases rarely found together: “Medici” and “tasteful understatement”]
Gregory, the Venetian Pope? He cut a deal. He agreed to resign if (1) the Council subsequently acknowledged that he had been the One True Pope all along, so that his rivals were declared schismatic antipopes, and also (2) he got a unique one-time title of “Second Most Important And Holy Guy In The Church, After The Pope”. The Council decided this was cheap at the price, and agreed.
So Gregory is still counted by the Catholic Church as an official Pope. (Which means he was the last official Pope to resign the office until Benedict XVI’s abdication in 2013, five hundred and ninety-seven years later.)
[he even got to keep the hat]
Benedict, the Spanish Pope? He refused to resign. But the Council went to work on the remaining countries and monarchs who were supporting him, and talked them around. So Benedict ended up abandoned by most of his supporters. He died a few years later, mule-stubborn to the end, isolated and mostly ignored.
That time they elected the Pope in a shopping mall
Once the Council had eliminated or sidelined the three Popes, they needed to choose a new one. For this, they used a unique, one-time-only system of voting. Council attendees gathered into geographic “Nations”, each nation picked six guys to represent them, those six guys cast one vote. This was an attempt to put a new, Council-based system of Pope selection in place, since the existing College of Cardinals process kept throwing up Popes who were scheming evil bastards.
It didn’t take. The next Papal election took place when there was no Council, so they went right back to the College of Cardinals.
[and they’ve kept it ever since]
But they also had the problem of where to hold the election. Because traditionally, Papal electors are isolated, cut off from outside influences until they decide. So they needed a building that was large, but that could be sealed off, but also handed over to the electors for some indefinite period of time. As it turned out, medieval Constance had exactly one building that fit the requirements: the town Kaufhaus.
Today the word “Kaufhaus” gets translated as “department store”. But the Constance Kaufhaus was a combination warehouse and retail center. Foreign merchants kept and sold premium goods there. It was a big building full of little shops selling luxury items. Literally, a high-end shopping mall.
Still, needs must. And credit to the electors: they managed to reach a consensus and elect a Pope who was, if not brilliant, at least not an incompetent, a criminal, or a monster. Pope Martin V would rule for 13 years and while he wouldn’t do much that was memorable, neither would he poison his enemies, appoint a bunch of nephews and bastard sons to high office, run the Church into bankruptcy, or otherwise disgrace the office.
Of course, this goes to a deep structural problem. The Council chose a kindly mediocrity because they were afraid that a strong Pope would claw power back from Councils. (Which is exactly what happened, a Pope or two later.) But the Church desperately needed reform, which a kindly mediocrity couldn’t possibly deliver.
Also, the College of Cardinals absolutely hated the idea of anyone else being involved in electing the Pope. Partly this was a status issue. Partly it was about ambition — most Popes came out of the College, after all. (Still true.) But most of all, it was about cold hard cash. Would-be Popes were often willing to pay immense bribes in order to buy votes. Kings and Dukes would throw in more bribes to support or oppose a particular candidate. Banks and wealthy families would coolly lend money to finance these bribes, since backing a winning Pope could mean an instant flow of massive wealth.
This is, of course, how the Medici became the Papal bankers. It was they who funded the election of bad Pope John in the first place. 
[Allegory of a Papal Election, c. 1480. the winged figures represent the Medici, scattering flowers (money) as they blow the candidate to the shores of success. the handmaiden (the Church) is about to clothe her in a robe decorated with flowers (even more money). the candidate gazes into the middle distance, seemingly unaware.]
So reforming the electoral process would not only have been a hit to the Cardinals’ status, it would also have drastically curtailed their future income. It’s no surprise that they weren’t enthusiastic about the new system, and abandoned it as soon as they could.
Somewhere, Imperia is still smiling. We’ll get back to Imperia.
Everybody goes home
The Council wrapped up in 1418. Joan of Arc would have been in first grade, if medieval French peasant girls went to first grade, which they didn’t. She was about 10 years away from starting her brief incredible career as the savior of France. Johannes Gutenberg was a freshman at the University of Erfurt. He was about twenty years away from inventing the printing press. Over in England, a handsome young Welshman named Owen Tudor was hanging around the court of King Henry V. In a few years, King Henry would die of dysentery. His widowed Queen would marry handsome Owen. Their grandson would be the first Tudor king of England, and their descendants are sitting on the British throne today.
Jan van Eyck was in his twenties, just getting started on his career as a painter.
[weird mirrors were already a thing]
And down in Portugal — a kingdom small and obscure even by medieval European standards, out on the far edge of the continent — Prince Henry the Navigator was forming an ambitious plan. Portugal, like the rest of Europe, was running out of gold. But there was gold down in Africa… somewhere. It came north regularly, after all, in caravans across the Sahara. The trade was controlled by Islamic middlemen, who took a hefty cut.
But what if Portuguese ships could work their way down along the African coast? They might find the source of the gold… and who knows what else?
[just getting started]
And that’s the story of the Council of Constance.
But wait, you ask. What about Imperia?
Yes, well… this post got a little out of hand. But Imperia is not forgotten! Modern Constance has a nine meter, 18 ton concrete statue of a medieval sex worker that rotates every four minutes, and there’s a reason for that. We’ll get to her story shortly.
Because she is most certainly still smiling.
25 Years in Ohio
2026-Feb-20, Friday 14:11scalziwhatever_feed
February marks an anniversary for us: in this month in 2001, Krissy and Athena and I moved to this house in Bradford, Ohio, so now we have been citizens of this village and state for 25 years. On the 20th anniversary, I wrote a long piece about moving here and what that meant to us, and that’s still largely accurate, so I’m not going to replicate here. I will note that in the last five years, we’ve become even more entrenched here in Bradford, as we went on a bit of a real estate spree, purchasing a church, a campground, and a few other properties, and started a business and foundation here in town as well. We’ve become basically (if not technically precisely) the 21st century equivalent of landed gentry.
It’s possibly fitting that after a quarter century here in rural Ohio, I finally wrote a novel that takes place in it, which will be out, as timing would have it, on election day this year. The town in the novel is fictional but the county is real, as it my own, and it’s been interesting writing something about this place, now — that also, you know, has monsters in it. I certainly hope people around here are going to be okay with that, rather than, say, “you wrote what now about us?” There is a reason I made a fictional town, mind you.
I continue to be a bit of an odd duck for the area, which I don’t see changing, and despite the fact the number of full-time writers in Bradford has doubled thanks to Athena. On the other hand, as I’ve noted before, my output is such that Bradford is the undisputed literary capital of Darke County, and I think that’s something both Bradford and Darke County can be proud of.
Anyway, Ohio, and Darke County, and Bradford, have been good to me in the last quarter century. I hope I have been likewise to them. We’re likely to stay.
— JS
The Cult Behind the ShamWow Guy’s Congressional Run
2026-Feb-19, Thursday 17:00skepchick_feedThis post contains a video, which you can also view here. To support more videos like this, head to patreon.com/rebecca! Transcript: Today I want to talk about the upcoming mid-term election to decide who will represent Texas’s 31st Congressional District in the United States House of Representatives–not because this is a crucial race that we …
Chapter 3: The Poet, The Tourist, and the Waterfall
2026-Feb-19, Thursday 19:54andrew_rilstone_feedIn 1943, C.S Lewis published a series of four lectures on the subject of moral realism. His point of departure was a school textbook which he accuses of promoting moral relativism. To avoid upsetting its authors unduly, he refers to it as The Green Book.
"The practical result of education in the spirit of The Green Book" he warns “Must be the destruction of the society which accepts it."
[C.S Lewis, The Abolition of Man, page 1]
Readers may not be entirely surprised to learn that Lewis's Green Book and my Australian English Textbook are one and the same. The book is actually called The Control of Language, and the authors, who Lewis cryptically refers to as Gaius and Titus, were named Alec King and Martin Ketley. Both were British by birth and both were Oxford graduates; but both had spent their adult lives in Australia. King was a professor of English at Monash University near Melbourne; and Ketley taught English at a prestigious private school in Adelaide.
Lewis's quarrel with King and Ketley may be fairly simply stated. According to Lewis, The Control of Language takes for granted that if you say that something is "pretty" you are not talking about the thing itself, but stating how you feel about it. If this is correct, then it must apply in all cases. Whenever we call something pretty or ugly or beautiful or good, we are only projecting our own emotions on to the object. "Murder is wicked" means no more than "I personally dislike murder" —no more, indeed, than "When I read about murder I experience feelings which I happen to dislike." So why not raise children to believe that murder is good? What is to stop future educators, if it ever becomes convenient, from training infants in such a way that they had beautiful, happy thoughts when they contemplated Jack the Ripper?
*
The first thing that Lewis takes issue with is Ketley and King's treatment of an anecdote concerning the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Here is Lewis's opening salvo:
In their second chapter Gaius and Titus quote the well-known story of Coleridge at the waterfall. You remember that there were two tourists present: that one called it “sublime” and the other “pretty”; and that Coleridge mentally endorsed the first judgement and rejected the second with disgust.
[C.S Lewis, Page 1]
Here are King and Ketley themselves:
This is a story told by Coleridge: he was standing with a group of tourists beside a waterfall, and, after a silence, one of the men in the party said, "That is sublime." Coleridge felt that “sublime" was exactly the right word. And then one of the women in the party added "Yes, it is pretty," and Coleridge turned away in disgust, feeling that "pretty" was exactly the wrong word.
[Alex King and Martin Ketley, The Control of Language, page 17]
Ketley and King have just introduced their readers to the distinction between reference and emotive meaning: that is the title of this second chapter. Reference is for them a technical word: they tell their students that it is part of an “official jargon”. They argue that expostulations ("wow!"), swearwords ("damn!") and gesture words ("good morning") have emotive meaning but no reference. Scientific and technical words, on the other hand, have reference but no emotive meaning, although they may acquire the latter with use.
They then turn to a problematic case. There are, they think, two kinds of adjectives. Words like "big" and "green" have a reference: they refer to a quality in the object, and can therefore be judged "correct" or "incorrect". (It would be simply incorrect to say that the sky was green.) Words like "pretty" and "good", on the other hand do not have a reference because they do not refer to a quality. You might think that I was wrong to say that the sky was beautiful today, but you couldn’t say that I was, in the defined sense, incorrect. The claim is that “sublime” and “pretty” are in the second category.
The waterfall story comes originally from Dorothea Wordsworth's diary: and her version differs substantially from King and Ketley's paraphrase.
A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before.
“Yes, sir," says Coleridge, "it is a majestic waterfall."
“Sublime and beautiful," replied his friend.
Poor Coleridge could make no answer, and, not very desirous to continue the conversation, came to us and related the story, laughing heartily.
[Dorothea Wordsworth, Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, AD 1803, first published 1874. Second Week, Sunday August 21s.]
In this original version, it isn’t Coleridge who thinks the waterfall is sublime, it is the tourist. The lady doesn’t participate in the conversation; no one mentions the word “pretty”; and Coleridge isn’t disgusted with the tourist's opinion—he finds it funny.
Eighteenth and nineteenth century aesthetes spent a great deal of time worrying about the precise distinction between these kinds of words. Edmund Burke wrote an entire book, A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Sublime and Beautiful, explaining the distinction. This is why Coleridge laughs at the tourist's howler. He and William Wordsworth (the poet, Dorothea's brother) have spent all afternoon trying to establish a philosophical distinction between the very words which the tourist has used interchangeably.
The disagreement, then, is about the use of language. Coleridge had been considering "the precise meaning of the words" and felt that the tourist had first of all chosen an "accurate epithet" to describe the waterfall. Ketley and King's "exactly the right word" is a perfectly good paraphrase.
Why do the details of Ketley and King's version of the story differ from Wordsworth's original: and why doesn’t Lewis point this out? In 1909, an Oxford Poetry professor named A.C Bradley, had published an essay which, like Burke, sought to draw fine distinctions between words like “pretty”, “beautiful” and “sublime”. Like Ketley and King, he takes the Coleridge story as his jumping off point:
Coleridge used to tell a story about his visit to the Falls of Clyde; but he told it with such variations that the details are uncertain, and without regard to truth I shall change it to the shape that suits my purpose best.
[AC Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, “The Sublime”]
The "used to tell" part is a little puzzling. Coleridge died some twenty years before Bradley was born, so he can't be relying on oral testimony; but I can't track down any written source outside Dorothea Wordsworth's journals.
After gazing at the Falls for some time, he began to consider what adjective would answer most precisely to the impression he had received; and he came to the conclusion that the proper word was “sublime”. Two other tourists arrived, and, standing by him, looked in silence at the spectacle. Then, to Coleridge's high satisfaction, the gentleman exclaimed, "It is sublime”. To which the lady responded, "Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw”.
So Bradley also thinks that the story is about vocabulary. Coleridge is looking for the "precise" adjective; and the "proper" word. “Exactly the right word” would be another way of putting it. And the problem, again, is that the lady thinks she is agreeing with Coleridge. She thinks that “pretty” and “sublime” are synonyms; just as the man in the original story thought that “sublime” meant the same thing as “majestic”.
It is worth summarising how the story mutates:
What was Coleridge looking for?
Wordsworth: "The accuracy of the epithet" "the precise meaning of the word"
Bradley: "Which adjective would answer most precisely the impression which he had received" "the proper word"
Ketley/King: "Exactly the right word"
What was the difference of opinion?
Wordsworth: "Yes, it is a Majestic waterfall" / “Sublime and beautiful."
Bradley: "It is Sublime" / "Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw."
Ketley & King: "That is sublime" / "Yes it is pretty"
Lewis: "One called it sublime"/"The other called it pretty"
How did Coleridge react?
Wordsworth: “He related the story, laughing heartily"
Bradley: “Her incapacity was ludicrous"
Ketley and King: “He turned away in disgust"
Lewis: “He rejected the judgment with disgust"
When Lewis says that the story of the waterfall is well-known, I think he means that Bradley's essay is well known. Very few general readers in 1943 would have been familiar with Dorothea Wordsworth’s journals; but Bradley's lectures would have been widely read. (His Shakespearean Tragedy is a standard work even today.) It seems clear that The Control of Language relies on Bradley’s lecture, not on Wordsworth’s diaries. (There are two tourists, the words at issue are pretty and sublime.) And it seems equally clear that Lewis is following King and Ketley without going back to Bradley. (Lewis says that Coleridge felt disgust, a word that Ketley and King have introduced.)
But Lewis makes one substantive change to the story. The three other versions are agreed that the dispute is about vocabulary; about choosing “exactly the right word.” In Lewis’s version, what Coleridge disputes is the lady’s judgment. He thought, in King and Ketley’s sense, that she had said something incorrect.
Here is the first part of Ketley and King's commentary on the story.
Why did Coleridge think the one word was exactly right, and the other exactly wrong? Obviously not because the one adjective described correctly, as we say, a quality of the water or the rocks or the landscape, and the other adjective described this quality incorrectly. It is not as if the man had said "That is brown" (referring, say, to the water) and the woman (also referring to the water) had added, "Yes, it is green”. No, Coleridge thought “sublime" exactly the right word, because it was associated in his mind with the emotion he was himself feeling as he looked at the waterfall in its setting of rock and landscape; and he thought "pretty" exactly the wrong word, because it was associated with feelings quite different from those he was actually feeling at the time, and with feelings that, to his way of thinking, no sensitive person would ever have while looking at such a sight.
[Page 17]
So: objects have qualities, such as size and colour; and statements about those qualities can be correct or incorrect. This is a perfectly coherent claim. If I said "the elephant is small" you might say that I was incorrect. But if I said "the elephant is funny" you could only say that you disagreed with me; that the elephant was not funny to you.
And here, I think, is the whole of Lewis's quarrel with the Green Book.
King and Ketley do not think that "prettiness" or "funniness" or "wonderfulness" or “sublimity" are (in their technical sense) qualities. Lewis thinks they are. King and Ketley think that "Elephants are big" and "Elephants are funny" are different kinds of statement. Lewis thinks they are statements of the same kind.
Ketley and King equivocate on this point. When they first tell the story, they say that Coleridge “felt that pretty was exactly the wrong word”. When they repeat it, they said that he “thought that pretty was exactly the wrong word” and add that the lady’s feelings are “feelings which to his way of thinking no sensitive person would ever feel.” If you are going to draw a philosophical distinction between thoughts and feelings, it would be better not to use “feel” as a synonym for “think”.
And the anecdote is not, in fact, very apt for the point they are making. When philosophers and aesthetes wrote about sublimity, they did, in fact, write about emotion. According to Edmund Burke, humans have two basic needs—for sex and companionship, and for self-preservation. We have one set of feelings when we see an attractive lady (or, presumably, a handsome gentleman) and a different set of feelings when we see a ferocious tiger. Objects which are analogous to pretty ladies—flowers and birds and delicate paintings—make us feel nice feelings; big things like mountains and volcanoes and waterfalls that could potentially hurt us make us feel nasty feelings. But the sensations we experience when we look at a dangerous thing from a safe distance can, in fact, be pleasantly exciting or thrilling. Things which give us one kind of feeling (e.g oil paintings) we call “beautiful”; things which give us the other kind (e.g waterfalls) we call “sublime”
This raises philosophical questions about whether we call objects sublime because we experience pleasantly terrifying sensations when we look at them; or whether we happen to experience pleasantly terrifying sensations when we look at things which have the innate quality of sublimity. The hymn writer Joseph Addison argued that God so created humans that they would take pleasure in looking at things which did in fact have the quality of "beauty"—and would have had that quality even if no humans had ever existed to look at them. He thought that human beings were created to take pleasure in the contemplation of God, who is the biggest and most terrifying thing that it is possible to imagine; and that God kindly put waterfalls and volcanoes onto the earth as a means for them to experience an analogous numinous awe.
Andrew Wilton’s catalogue for a 1981 exhibition called “Turner and the Sublime” is concerned with neither C.S Lewis nor S.T Coleridge, although it does contain several paintings of waterfalls. Quoting a 1805 essay by one Payne-Knight, he writes:
“All sublime feelings are…feelings of exultation and expansion of the mind tending to rapture and enthusiasm.”
[Andrew Wilton, Turner and the Sublime, p10.]*
Now, that is an interesting turn of phrase: “sublime feelings”.
King and Ketley's second example (which Lewis doesn’t quote) makes their point rather more clearly. They ask the reader to compare the phrases "a big, red fire" and "a wonderful, beautiful fire”. Most of us would agree that “red” describes a quality that the fire itself may or may not have; but “wonderful” refers to the speaker's feelings about the fire.
But they also acknowledge a difficulty. If I speak of a "wonderful fire" you will probably think of the kind of fire that you think that I would think is wonderful: say, one that's giving off a lot of heat, is under control and not too smoky. And you, like me, are very probably imagining a camp fire, complete with sausages, boy scouts and guitars. A 1940s Australian student would have been more likely to think of a roaring coal fire in a domestic house. If I were a psychotic arsonist (which, for the avoidance of doubt, I am not) then a "wonderful, beautiful fire" might mean something very different indeed!
So, on King and Ketley’s terms, "wonderful" does have both a reference and an emotive meaning. If I call a horse "beautiful" I am probably saying that the horse has a set of measurable qualities that people who know about horses regard as desirable; and also that I myself am experiencing pleasure from looking at them.
But now we come to a difficulty which has, I think, up to now been overlooked. King and Ketley say that when the lady declared the waterfall to be pretty, Coleridge “turned away in disgust”. And Lewis repeats this. Coleridge “rejected the judgement with disgust”.
But disgust is an emotion.
It is, in fact, a gut feeling. It bypasses the brain altogether. We don't feel disgusted by a pile of dog mess because we think it is unhealthy: if anything, we know that it is unhealthy because we find it physically repellent. It requires some intellectual effort to override the feeling: I feel that rotting food is disgusting, but I think that it is my duty to do the recycling and I believe I will suffer no ill-effect if I wash my hands afterwards. Dog owners and people with babies are particularly good at suppressing feelings of disgust towards human and animal waste. The feeling is distinct from the belief.
Do the authors of the Control of Language envisage Coleridge recoiling from the insensitive lady as he might have recoiled from something a cow had deposited in the adjoining field? Do they say "Coleridge appeared to be saying something about the lady's feelings towards the waterfall: really he was only describing the state of his own gut?" Come to that, does Lewis accuse them of reducing a subtle distinction between beauty and sublimity to the level of a nasty smell? Or did he think that the lady's aesthetic misjudgement had the objective quality of disgustingness in the same way the sky has the objective quality of blueness?
Lewis states that
The reason why Coleridge agreed with the tourist who called the cataract sublime and disagreed with the one who called it pretty was of course that he believed inanimate nature to be such that certain responses could be more “just” or “ordinate” or “appropriate” to it than others. And he believed (correctly) that the tourists thought the same. The man who called the cataract sublime was not intending simply to describe his own emotions about it: he was also claiming that the object was one which merited those emotions.
[page 9]
But King and Ketley have stated:
Pretty was exactly the wrong word, because it was associated with feelings quite different from those he was actually feeling at the time, and with feelings that, to his way of thinking, no sensitive person would ever have while looking at such a sight.
[page 17]
How, exactly, do these claims differ? For King and Ketley, Coleridge felt disgust because he thought that what the lady felt about the waterfall was inappropriate. Lewis says that Coleridge and the tourist both believed that the waterfall was such that it deserved particular feelings more than others; that some feelings were “just” or “appropriate” and some were “unjust” and “inappropriate”.
I suppose “no sensitive person would have those feelings when looking at this thing” is a weaker claim than “this thing is such that those emotions are appropriate to it.” I suppose that “he felt this was the wrong word” and “to his way of thinking the feelings were wrong” are weaker claims than “the word and the feelings were in fact, objectively, wrong.”
But it’s a very fine distinction: not one likely to lead to the end of human civilisation.
But C.S Lewis hasn’t yet deployed his biggest guns.
[*] The quotes from Addison also come from the Turner catalogue.
This is the first section of an ongoing critique of C.S Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I think that my essays should make sense if you aren't familiar with that tome.) This first section (which runs to six chapters) has already been published in full on my Patreon page, and the second section is being serialised there at present.
Please consider joining the Patreon if you would like to read them, and to support the writer.
The Big Idea: Gideon Marcus
2026-Feb-19, Thursday 18:55scalziwhatever_feed
On occasion, you know the ending of your story before you start writing. Most other times, you find the path as you go, each twisting turn appearing before you as you continue on your merry way. The latter seems to be the case for author Gideon Marcus, who says in his Big Idea that he wasn’t always sure how to wrap up his newest novel, Majera.
GIDEON MARCUS:
What’s the big idea with Majera? That’s a hard one, because there are lots of threads: the unstated, obvious, valued diversity of the future, which helps define the setting as the future. That’s a familiar technique—Tom Purdom pioneered it, and Star Trek popularized it. There’s a focus on relationships: found family, love in myriad combinations. There’s the foundation of science, a real universe underpinning everything.
But I guess what I associate with Majera most strongly is conclusion.
Starting an exciting adventure is easy. Finishing stories is hard. George R. R. Martin, Pat Rothfuss. Hideaki Anno all have famously struggled with it. When Kitra and her friends first got catapulted ten light years from home in Kitra, I started them on a journey whose ending I only had the vaguest outline of. I had adventure seeds: the failing colony sleeper ship in Sirena, the insurrection in Hyvilma, and the dead planet in Majera, but the personal journeys of the characters I left up to them.
I know a lot of people don’t write the way I do. I think writers mirror the opposing schools of acting: on one end, the Method of sliding deep into character; on the other, George C. Scott’s completely external creation of an alternate personality. In the Scott school of writing, characters are puppets acting out an intricate dance created by the author. In the Method school of writing, of which I am a member, the characters have independent lives. I know that seems contradictory—how can fictional agglomerations of words achieve sentience?
And yet, they do! I didn’t plan Kitra and Marta’s rekindling of their relationship. Pinky’s jokes come out of the ether. Heck, I didn’t even come up with the solution that saved the ship in Kitra—Fareedh and Pinky did (people often congratulate me on how well I set up that solution from the beginning; news to me! I just write what the characters tell me to…)
All this is to say, I didn’t know how this arc of The Kitra Saga was going to end. But I knew it had to end well, it had to end satisfyingly, for the reader and for the characters. There had to be a reason the Majera crew would stop and take a breather from their string of increasingly exotic adventures. The worldbuilding! All of the little tidbits I’d developed had to be kept consistent: historical, scientific, character-related. There had to be a plausible resolution to the love pentangle that the Majera crew found themselves in, one that was respectful to all the characters and, more importantly, the reader’s sensitivies and credulity.
That’s why this book took longer to put to bed than all the others. It’s not the longest, but it was the hardest. Frankly, I don’t think I could even have written this book five years ago. I needed the life experience to fundamentally grok everyone’s internal workings, from Pinky’s wrestling with being an alien in a human world, to Peter’s coming to grips with his fears, to Kitra’s understanding of her role vis. a vis. her friends, her crew, her partners. In other words, I had to be 51 to authentically write a gaggle of 20-year-olds!
Beyond that, I had to, even in the conclusion, lay seeds for the rest of the saga, for there is a central mystery to the galaxy that has only been hinted at (not to mention a lot more tropes to subvert…)
Conclusions are hard. I think I’ve succeeded. I hope I’ve succeeded. I guess it’s for you to judge!
Majera: Amazon|Amazon (eBook)|Audible|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Kobo
Cover Reveal: Monsters of Ohio
2026-Feb-19, Thursday 16:35scalziwhatever_feed
Just look at this cover for Monsters of Ohio. Look at it! It is amazing. I am so happy with it. It’s the work of artist Michael Koelsch (whose art has graced my work before, notably the Subterranean Press editions of the Dispatcher sequels Murder by Other Means and Travel by Bullet) , and he’s knocked it out of the park. I am, in a word, delighted.
And what is Monsters of Ohio about? Here’s the current jacket copy for it:
In many ways Richland, Ohio is the same tiny, sleepy rural village it has been for the last 150 years: The same families, the same farms, the same heartland beliefs and traditions that have sustained it for generations. But right now times are especially hard, as social and economic forces inside and outside the community roil the surface of the once-placid town.
Richland, in other words, is primed to explode… just not the way that anyone anywhere could ever have expected. And when things do explode, well, that’s when things start getting really weird.
Mike Boyd left Richland decades back, to find his own way in the world. But when he is called back to his hometown to tie up some loose ends, he finds more going on than he bargained for, and is caught up in a sequence of events that will bring this tiny farm village to the attention of the entire world… and, perhaps, spell its doom.
Ooooooooooh! Doooooom! Perhaaaaaaaps!
If that was too much text for you, here is the two-word version: Cozy Cronenberg.
Yeah, it’s gonna be fun.
When can you get it? November 3rd in North America and November 5 in the UK and most of the rest of the world. But of course you can pre-order this very minute at your favorite bookseller, whether that be your local indie, your nearby bookstore chain, or online retailer of your choice. Why wait! Put your money down! The book’s already written, after all. It’s guaranteed to ship!
Oh, and, for extra fun, here’s the author photo for the novel:
Yup, that pretty much sets the tone.
I hope you like Monsters of Ohio when you get a chance to read it. In November!
— JS
A Secret Project is Afoot at the Scalzi Compound!
2026-Feb-18, Wednesday 21:39scalziwhatever_feed
What is it? I can’t tell you! When will you be able to know? I can’t say! But when I can tell you, will I? We’ll see!
What I can tell you is that Athena is working on it with me, she’s been great to work with so far, and my decision to hire her at Scalzi Enterprises was pretty smart. Clearly I know what I’m doing all the time.
Anyway, my kid’s awesome and we’re doing cool stuff. I hope we get to share it with you. Eventually.
— JS
RIP Scalzi DSL Line, 2004 – 2026
2026-Feb-18, Wednesday 18:38scalziwhatever_feed
As most of you know, I live on a rural road where Internet options are limited. More than 20 years ago, DSL became available where I live, which meant that I could ditch the satellite internet of the early 2000s, which topped out at something like 1.5mbps and rarely achieved that, and which went out entirely if it rained, for a line that had a, for me, blisteringly fast 6mbps speed.
That was the speed it stayed at for most of the next twenty years, until my provider, rather grudgingly, increased the speed to 40mbps — not fast, but certainly faster — and there it stayed. Over time the DSL service stopped being as reliable, rarely actually got up to 40mbps, and, actually started going out when it rained, like the satellite internet of old, but without the excuse of being, you know, in space and blocked by clouds.
A few months back I went ahead and ordered 5G internet service from Verizon, because it was faster and doesn’t have usage caps, which had been a stumbling block for 5G service previously. It’s not top of the line, relative to other services that are available elsewhere — usually 120+mbps, where the church’s service is at 300+mbps, and Athena’s in town Internet is fiber and clocks in at 2gbps — but it’s fast enough for what I use the internet for, and to steam high-definition movies and TV. I held on to the DSL since then to make sure I was happy with the new service, because that seemed a sensible thing to do.
No more. The 5G wireless works flawlessly and has for months, and the time has come. After 20+ years, I have officially cancelled my DSL line. A big day in the technology life of the Scalzi Compound. I thank the DSL for its service, but its watch has now ended. We all most move on, ceaselessly, into the future, where I can download stuff faster.
I’m still keeping my landline, however, to which the DSL was attached. Call me old-fashioned.
— JS
Welcome to McKinley: How the U.S. almost colonized a chunk of Cuba
2026-Feb-17, Tuesday 21:29strange_maps_feed
In an abandoned cemetery on Cuba’s Isla de la Juventud stands the weathered headstone of Estefania Koenig. When she died in 1981, at the ripe old age of 95, she was the last American of what had once been called the McKinley Colonies. A century ago, it was a thriving citrus-growing community, American in everything except the letter of the law. Then came a couple of devastating hurricanes — and the closure of a geopolitical loophole.
A forgotten footnote in American history
The story of the McKinley Colonies is more than a forgotten footnote in history. William McKinley, the 25th president of the United States (from 1897 until his assassination in 1901), was America’s last unabashed expansionist-in-chief. Under his watch, the U.S. snapped up Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba from Spain (with full sovereignty over the former three and only temporary control over the latter).
McKinley matters today because the current occupant of the White House is a fan: Trump name-checked him in his second inaugural address, and his own musings about acquiring the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland suggest an urge to outdo McKinley’s territorial haul. Yet as the failed Cuban experiment shows, reality has a way of trumping even the most bullish dreams — pun very much intended.
At 934 square miles (2,419 km2), Isla de la Juventud is slightly smaller than Rhode Island, yet still the seventh-largest landmass in the Caribbean. It’s twice the size of Martinique, but with just over 80,000 inhabitants, it has barely one-fifth of its population. It lies just 29 miles (47 km) off Cuba’s southwest coast across the shallow Gulf of Batabanó — so shallow that a healthy cow could swim across at low tide, a rather unorthodox legal argument for Cuban ownership once claimed.
The Island of the 500 Murders
Over the centuries, the island has had many identities and many names: Siguanea, Camaraco, or Ahoa to indigenous groups; La Evangelista to Columbus, who sighted it on his second voyage to the New World in 1494; Parrot Island for its flamboyant birdlife; and Treasure Island for its popularity as a pirate hideout. (It is rumored to have inspired Robert Louis Stevenson’s eponymous adventure story.)
In the 20th century, it acquired grimmer monikers — Island of the Deported, Island of the 500 Murders — after the opening of the notorious Presidio Modelo prison. Its most enduring name throughout the centuries, however, was Isle of Pines — until Fidel Castro rebranded it Isle of Youth in 1978.
Under Spanish rule, the Isle of Pines was barely governed and thinly populated. The 1864 census tallied just 2,000 souls. The plot twist came after the 1898 Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War.
Article I of the treaty handed Cuba over to U.S. oversight with the promise of eventual independence. Article II, however, granted the U.S. full sovereignty over Puerto Rico and “other islands” in the West Indies formerly held by Spain. Was the Isle of Pines, far larger and more distant than Cuba’s minor keys, one of those “other islands”?
The swimming-cow faction said no. The New York Times, too, scoffed at the idea, comparing the idea to exempting Long Island from U.S. treaties or Ireland from the U.K. (the latter comparison hasn’t aged well, to say the least).
But U.S. land promoters said yes — and loudly. In 1901, they helped ram the Platt Amendment through Congress; later embedded in Cuba’s constitution, it left the island’s status “to future adjustment by treaty,” conveniently excluding it from Cuba’s new boundaries. Cue the land rush!
Manifest Destiny rebooted
Glossy brochures billed the place as a “Veritable Garden of Eden.” (Fine print: Hurricanes? What hurricanes?) With the Wild West frontier officially closed in 1890, this was Manifest Destiny rebooted — with palm trees substituting for sagebrush. Citrus beckoned: The soil and climate were ideal, and access to American markets was easy.
American investors and settlers flooded in. In 1900, just 10 Yanks lived on the Isle of Pines. A decade later, up to 5,000 had bought plots and around 2,000 had settled permanently — effectively doubling the island’s population.
Land companies scooped up vast tracts on the cheap from locals, subdivided them into neat grids, and flipped them at a tidy profit. They were bought by Americans eager to try a sunnier version of capitalism among the orange trees. Colonies popped up by the dozen, mostly in the north. (The swampy center and rocky south stayed stubbornly unproductive.)
Founded in 1902, Columbia was one of the first American towns. Eight years later, it had a hotel, general store, school, post office, and a wharf on the Jucaro River. Also in 1902, colonists from Buffalo founded McKinley, a not-so-subtle appeal to the expansionism of the president assassinated the previous year at the Pan-American Exposition in their hometown. The town would sprout an East and West McKinley and lend its name to the broader McKinley Colonies.
“American ministers preach from Protestant pulpits”
Other American outposts followed. Santa Barbara featured Nordic-style houses and, improbably, an art gallery. Los Indios became the nucleus of a burgeoning citrus empire, with a direct connection to New York. Even Nueva Gerona, the old Spanish center, acquired an Old Virginia Café and an American Club. Settlers read their own newspaper, The Isle of Pines Appeal.
By 1910, as author I.A. Wright observed, Americans were in the majority on the island:
“American money is not only the official but the actual currency of trade; the prevailing architecture outside the towns is American; American ministers preach from Protestant pulpits; American teachers preside over schools where American children congregate, and these schools are conducted in English.”
“American spring wagons and automobiles have replaced the clumsy ox-cart and the picturesque coach, and they travel over the best of roads — wide, smooth highways, which facilitate shipments of fruits from orchards and gardens owned by Americans, producing for American markets. It is literally true that Americans own the Isle of Pines. Not two per cent of its area is the property of persons of other nationality.”
That sounds just about right. Another source states that, by 1925, Americans owned between 90% and 95% of the island, turning it into citrus central. One booster even published a 250-recipe cookbook for pineapples and grapefruit — as if gastronomic versatility was an argument for annexation.
Optimists foresaw the full and swift Americanization of the island, de jure as well as de facto. But there was trouble in paradise. The devastating hurricanes of 1917 and 1926 didn’t read the brochures. America’s entry into World War I in 1917 diverted attention — and fertilizer — from the island. Many settlers lacked capital, know-how of tropical farming, or both.
A two-decade “slumber” in the Senate
Worst of all, the Hay-Quesada Treaty of 1903, which had “slumbered” in the U.S. Senate for over two decades, was finally ratified in 1925, confirming Cuban sovereignty over the Isle of Pines and slamming the annexation door shut.
The American dream withered. Most would-be colonists left. From its peak of about 2,000 settlers, the island’s American population plummeted to 276 in 1931, and just 150 year-rounders by 1942. Citrus acreage shrank from 4,000 to 1,000; ownership shifted to Brits and Canadians. A small but active Japanese colony became very successful in vegetable-growing.
A brief revival came in the 1950s under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who offered tax breaks to promote tourism on the island, which contrasted favorably with the vice, crime, and anti-Americanism of Havana and other hotspots on the Cuban mainland. But then came Castro.
In the mid-1950s, when they were still revolutionaries fighting Batista, Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl had done time in the Presidio Modelo, a panopticon prison for political enemies of the regime. After they ousted Batista in 1959, the Castros kept a close interest in the island, remaking it with youth camps, schools, and farms, and ultimately renaming it.
Lessons for Donald Trump
As with the rest of Cuba, what remained of American interests on the island was nationalized. By 1961, there were just 35 Americans left. By 1971, just one.
President McKinley, as adept at raising tariffs as at raising flags, is an obvious example for his current successor. But do the failed McKinley Colonies hold any lessons for Donald Trump?
Perhaps just this: Hype, hubris, and aggressive land grabs can redraw a map for a while. But geopolitical reality tends to catch up, as evidenced by those forgotten headstones in the Cementerio Americano.
Still, if recent patterns hold, one of these nights President Trump will tweet about that old Yankee grapefruit grove just off Cuba’s coast, declare it “rightfully American,” and demand an urgent return to its proper owners. Trump Colonies? It does have a certain ring to it …
Strange Maps #1285
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This article Welcome to McKinley: How the U.S. almost colonized a chunk of Cuba is featured on Big Think.
The Big Idea: Darby McDevitt
2026-Feb-17, Tuesday 16:48scalziwhatever_feed
The intentions behind one’s actions speaks louder than words ever could. Author Darby McDevitt leads us on a journey through the exploration of intention, desires, and consequences in the Big Idea for his newest novel, The Halter. Take the path he has laid out for you, if you so desire.
DARBY MCDEVITT:
Many years ago I worked for a video game company in Seattle that shoveled out products at a rate of four to six games per year. Most of these were middling titles, commissioned by publishers to fill a narrow market gap and slapped together in six to nine months by teams of a dozen or two crunch-weary developers. We worked hard and fast, with passion and determination, but the end results never quite equaled the ambitions we had.
A common joke around the office, told at the end of every draining development cycle, went like this: “Sure, the game isn’t fun, but the design documents are amazing.” The idea of offering consumers our unrealized blueprints in lieu of a polished game was ridiculous, of course, but it came from a place of real desperation. We wanted our players to know that, despite the poor quality of the final product, we really tried.
The novelist Iris Murdoch has a saying that I repeat often as a mantra, always to guard against future disappointment: “Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.” Here again is the notion of a Platonic ideal at war with its hazy shadow. How familiar all this is. Experience tells us that people falling short of their ideals is the natural course of life. We never live up to the best of our intentions.
In my new novel, The Halter, I compare this process of “intension erosion” to the more upbeat phenomenon of Desire Lines – footpaths worn over grassy lawns out of an unconscious need for efficiency. Desire lines appear wherever the original constraints of an intentionally designed geographic space don’t conform with the immediate needs of the men and women walking through it. In video games we use a related term – Min-Maxing – the act of looking for ways to put in a minimum amount of effort for maximum benefit. In both cases, the original, ideal use of a space or system is superseded by a desire for efficiency.
In The Halter, these same principles take hold on a grand scale inside an idealized “surrogate reality” metaverse called The Forum, where artists, scientists, and thinkers from all disciplines are invited to probe the deepest and most difficult aspects of human behavior and society. One Forum designer creates a so-called theater to explore the tricky business of language acquisition by sequestering one-hundred virtual babies together with no adult interaction. Another theater offers visitors a perfect digital copy of themselves as a companion, as a therapeutic approach to self-discovery. A third lets visitors don the guise of any other individual on earth so they may literally fulfill the empathetic idiom of “walking a mile in another man’s shoes.”
Noble intentions, arguably – yet in every case, after repeated exposure to actual human users, each theater devolves into something less than the sum of its parts. A prurient playground, or an amusing distraction, or a mindless entertainment. Shortcuts are taken, efficiencies are found, novel-uses imposed. The empathy theater is transformed into a celebrity-fueled bacchanalia; the digital doppelganger becomes a personal punching bag. The baby creche, a zoo. Each and every time, execution falls short of intention. Each theater crumbles, becoming a wreck of its original, perfect idea … and audiences are riveted.
The phenomena described here are common enough that several terms encompass them, each one differentiated for the situation at hand. Desire paths were my first exposure to the concept. The CIA calls it Blowback, when the side effects of a covert operation lead to disastrous results. Unintended Consequences and Knock-On Effects are cozier names, both of which can yield positive or negative results. And a Perverse Incentive is the related idea that the design of a system may be such that it encourages behavior contrary to its intended purpose. Taken together we begin to see the shape of the iceberg that wrecks so many perfect ideas.
I wrote The Halter to explore the highs and lows of these effects, and to shed light from a safe distance on the invisible forces that push and pull constantly at our behavior, often without our knowledge or consent. At one point in the middle of the novel, a collection of idealistic designers, most of whom have given years of their lives to the Forum designing and testing theaters of varying utility, commiserate on what they feel has been a collective failure. Their beloved theaters, they fret, have been co-opted and corrupted by The Forum visitors who have no incentive to behave or play along – they simply show up and engage in the simplest and most efficient way possible. How sad. How crushing. If only these morose designers could share their original design documents….
Their folly, in my view, was to treat their original intentions as merely a point of inspiration and not a goal to be achieved. Their error was to abandon their work in the face of a careless, sleepwalking opposition. The heroic path forward requires vigilance, not surrender, and if an outcome is unexpected, unwarranted, or undesirable, it may be more productive to tweak the inputs than blame the user.
We mustn’t fret that our perfect idea is laying at the bottom of the sea, five fathoms deep. We mustn’t fetishize our design documents – be it a holy book, an artwork, a game, a manifesto, or the U.S. Constitution – because design documents are merely static pleas for unrealized future intentions. They can always be corrupted, upended, misinterpreted. Have faith and patience. The hopeful paths are yet unmade, lying in wait for a thousand shuffling feet to score the way forward.
The Halter: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s
New Cover: “But Not Tonight”
2026-Feb-17, Tuesday 02:14scalziwhatever_feedI was not expecting to make another cover so soon, so, uh, surprise: A cover of Depeche Mode’s most cheerful song, done as if Erasure decided to crack at it. Why did I do this? Because I was trying to clean up a previous version of this song that I did (it was sonically a little smeary and I hadn’t learned how to edit out when I loudly took in breaths), which necessitated laying down a new vocal track, and once I did that, one thing led to another, and here we are.
I am actually really happy with this one. I did harmonies! Intentionally! Also, I do think it really does sound kinda like Erasure covering Depeche Mode (if such a thing is a possible considering the bands share a Vince Clarke in common). I mean, I don’t sing like Andy Bell, but then, who does, so, fine. Good enough for an afternoon! Enjoy.
— JS
A Lovely Valentine’s Day Dinner At Dozo
2026-Feb-16, Monday 20:09scalziwhatever_feed
If you caught my last two posts over Dozo, Dayton’s premier underground sushi dining experience, then you already know how much I love it. What better way to celebrate the day of love than with Dozo’s special Valentine’s Day 7-course omakase style chef’s menu that offers off-menu selections and limited, intimate seating at the bar so you can watch the chefs work their magic? And trust me, it is indeed magic.
Not only was I extremely excited about the curated sushi menu and brand new sake pairing to go alongside it, but Tender Mercy (the bar that houses Dozo) posted their Valentine’s Day cocktail line-up a few days ago, and it looked incredible, as well.
Long story short, I knew my tastebuds were in for a real treat.
I booked the 8:30pm slot on their first day of offering this menu, which was Tuesday. Getting a later start to dinner than usual only made me that much hungrier for what was to come.
I got to Tender Mercy about twenty minutes early, so I just had a seat at their bar and perused the special cocktail menu:
I love this dessert cocktail menu because whatever your poison is, they’ve got it. A gin drink, a vodka cocktail, even tequila and bourbon. And, of course, a mocktail. They all sounded so delicious but also very rich, and I didn’t want to spoil my appetite with something on the heavier side (like that cheesecake foam, YUM) so I actually opted for the Pillow Princess and asked the bartender to put his spirit of choice in it. He said he recommended Hennessey Cognac (I’m pretty sure it was Hennessy Very Special but I’m just guessing from the brief look I got at the bottle).
I can’t say I’ve had Cognac all that much, but the sweet, almost vanilla-like flavor of the Hennessy worked super well in it.
I’m glad I went with the bartender’s recommendation, he’s truly a pro and has never steered me wrong before so I trust his judgement a hundred percent.
After a few minutes, it was time to get seated in Dozo. There were only six of us total at the bar, a group of three on my right and a couple on my left. Our menu was tucked into our envelope shaped napkin and I briefly surveyed what was going to be served.
Truly the most eye-catching dish was the wasabi ice cream. Listen, I trust Dozo, but man, did that sound absolutely bonkers. I held strong in my faith, though.
Per usual, I went with the sake pairing, because when else do I get to try so many different expertly curated sakes? Plus, the chef said he tried each of the sake pairings and highly recommended it.
Up first was a spicy salmon onigiri:
I wasn’t sure how spicy the salmon would actually end up being, so I had my water on standby. After getting through the warm, soft, perfectly seasoned rice, I was met with a generously portioned salmon filling that wasn’t at all too spicy! This onigiri was hands down the best one I’ve ever had, though I will admit my experience is rather limited in that department. Of course, it’s not everyday I have an onigiri, but this one definitely takes the cake.
For the sake pairing I was served Amabuki’s “I Love Sushi” Junmai. Obviously, this is a fantastic name for a sake. It says all you need to know about it right in the name, plain and simple. Jokes aside, this was a perfectly fine sake. With a dry, crisp flavor, it didn’t really stand out to me much but paired well with the umami flavor of the onigiri.
Off to a great start (I expected no less), the second course was looking mighty fine:
From left to right, we have hamachi (yellowtail), hirame (flounder), and skipjack tuna. The hamachi’s wasabi sauce packed a ton of great wasabi flavor without painfully clearing my sinuses. It had just the right amount of strength, a very balanced piece. The flounder was exceptionally tender with a melt-in-your-mouth texture. The skipjack has always been a tried and true classic in my previous Dozo experiences, and today’s serving of it was no different. All around a total winner of a course, with tender, umami packed pieces.
To accompany this course, I was served Takatenjin “Soul of the Sensei,” which is a Junmai Daiginjo. This sake is made with Yamadanishiki, which is considered to be the king of sake rice. “Soul of the Sensei” was created as a tribute to revered sake brewer Hase Toji. Much like the first sake we were served, it was crisp with a slight dryness, pairing well with the fresh fish and savory flavors. It had just a touch of melon.
Up next was this smaller course with a piece of chu toro and a piece of smoked hotate:
Both pieces looked stunning and fresh. The chef explained that chu toro is the fatty belly meat of the tuna, which is a more prized and delicious cut, a real treat. Indeed, it was very buttery and had a rich mouthfeel. I didn’t know what hotate was, but it turns out it’s a scallop, and I think they mentioned something about hotate scallops come from a specific region in Japan, but I might be misremembering. Anyways, I love scallops, but I’ve definitely never had one that’s been smoked before. It was fun to watch the chef smoke all of the pieces before dishing them out.
Oh my goodness this piece was incredible. It had a luscious texture and complex, beautifully smokiness that didn’t detract from the flavor of the scallop. It was a masterfully smoked piece of high quality, fresh scallop. Remarkable piece! Great course all around.
Instead of sake for this course, we were served a shot of Suntory Whiskey. but I have no idea which type specifically. Maybe the Toki? But also very well could’ve been the Hibiki Harmony because the shot was definitely a dark, ambery color. I wish I had a palate for whiskey, especially premium Japanese whiskey that the kitchen so generously gifted upon each guest, but truthfully it was a tough couple of sips for me. Like fire in my throat, that shit put some damn hair on my chest. Super grateful for the lovely whiskey, but sheesh it definitely burned. The chefs actually took the shot with us, how fun!
Fear not, there was some lovely mushroom and yuzu ramen on the way to ease the pain:
This ramen is actually vegetarian, made with umami-packed mushrooms and bright yuzu citrus. The green onions and drops of chili oil drizzled on top added a fantastic balance of flavors for a well-rounded, hearty, warm bowl of delicious ramen that was good to the last drop. I wish they had ramen more often, it was so great to sip on some warm broth while it was below freezing outside. I absolutely loved the stoneware bowl it was served in, I would love to have something like that in my own kitchen.
For the sake, this one was truly special. Hana Makgeolli “MAQ8 Silkysonic.” Look how CUTE these cans are! These adorable single-serve cans contain a fun, slightly bubbly, just-a-touch-sweet sake that was a great addition to the night’s line-up. It’s a bit lower alcohol content than some other sakes at 8%, making it so you can enjoy more than one can of this bubbly goodness if you so desired.
I was definitely pretty full by this point, but I powered on for this next course consisting of some torched sake, unagi, and suzuki.
It was a little confusing with the first piece of fish in this lineup being called sake, since I assumed sake was just the drink we all know and love, but sake is actually also salmon. It was fun to watch the chefs use a blowtorch to torch the salmon, as any course involving fire is a great course. The salmon had a sauce on top that I hate to say I can’t remember what exactly it was. I know, I had one job! I should’ve taken better notes, but there was so much going on between being served the sake and explained the specifics of that plus the chefs explaining the whole course, plus the couple next to me conversing with me (we had lovely conversations). It was a lot, okay! Sauce aside, the salmon was excellent and beautifully torched.
For the unagi, I actually love eel, so I knew this piece was about to be bomb. With the sweet, thick glaze on top and fresh slice of jalapeno, this piece was loaded with deliciousness. I was worried the jalapeno slice would bring too much heat to the dish for me, but it was perfect and not hot at all, just had great flavor.
The final piece, suzuki, is Japanese sea bass. There is a small pickled red onion sliver on top, it is not a worm, to be clear. Apparently the Japanese sea bass is known by different names depending on how mature the fish is, suzuki being the most grown stage of the fish. This piece was very simply dressed and the tender fish spoke for itself.
The sake for this course was Tentaka’s “Hawk in the Heavens” Tokubetsu Junmai. Much like with the food of this course, I should have taken better notes, because I don’t remember this sake at all. I don’t remember what it tasted like, my thoughts on it, nothing. I didn’t even remember the name until I looked at the menu again. I am so sorry, it is truly only because it was the sixth course and I had just taken a shot and was busy talking! Forgive me and we shall move on.
For our last savory course, it was two pieces of the chef’s choice:
The chefs said in honor of it being Valentine’s Day, they wanted to give us a bit more of a lux piece, and opted for wagyu and torched toro. Sending off the savory courses with wagyu was truly a delight, it really provided the turf in “surf and turf.” Every time I’ve had wagyu from Dozo it’s been so tender and rich, the fat just melting in my mouth. It’s also a fun novelty since I don’t really have wagyu anywhere else.
Finally, it was time for dessert. I couldn’t wait to try the wasabi ice cream:
I would’ve never imagined that wasabi ice cream could be even remotely edible, let alone enjoyable, but oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. How was this so good?! The creaminess contrasting with the crunchy wasabi peas, the perfect amount of sweetness mixing with the distinct flavor of the wasabi, LORD! It was incredibly, bizarrely delicious. The wasabi didn’t have that sinus-clearing bite to it, yet retained its unmistakable palate. What a treat.
For the final sake, I was served Kiuchi Brewery’s “Awashizuki” Sparkling Sake. I was particularly excited for this one because I love sparkling sakes, they are undoubtedly my favorite category of sake. Anything with bubbles is just better! I will say that the Awashizuki seemed to be much more lowkey on the bubbles than some other sparkling sakes I’ve had before. The bubbles were a bit more sparse and toned down, but it was still lightly carbonated enough that you could tell it wasn’t still. It was sweeter and more refreshing than the others in the evening’s lineup, which makes sense since it was the dessert course pairing. I really liked this one!
All in all, I had yet another fantastic experience at Dozo, and I absolutely loved their Valentine’s Day lineup. The limited seating at the bar made it feel all the more exclusive and special, and every course was totally delish. I got to try lots of new sakes and have really nice chats with the people next to me, and really just had a great evening all around.
The ticket for this event was $95, after an added 18% gratuity and taxes, it was more like $125. The sake pairing was $50 and I also tipped the waitress that was pouring the pairings and telling me about them. It was definitely a bit of a splurge event but hey, it was for V-Day! Gotta treat yourself. And I’m so glad I did!
Which piece of fish looks the most enticing to you? Or perhaps the ramen is more your speed? Have you tried any of the sakes from the lineup? Let me know in the comments, and have a great day!
-AMS
Arts Diary: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
2026-Feb-15, Sunday 22:38andrew_rilstone_feedArts Diary: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy: So: I saw the new Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy stage show, at the Riverside Theatre in Hammersmith. I didn’t know quite what to make of i...
Arts Diary: Wuthering Heights
2026-Feb-15, Sunday 21:53andrew_rilstone_feedArts Diary: Wuthering Heights: I have seen the future of cinema, and it is Jacob Elordi, looking sexy and simmering; and Owen Cooper looking winsome, forever. It is classi...
New Cover Song: “These Days”
2026-Feb-16, Monday 00:10scalziwhatever_feedI moved my home music studio up from the basement to Athena’s old bedroom in the last couple of weeks, so now it’s time to put it to use, and for my first bit of music in the new space, I decided to record an old tune: “These Days” by Jackson Browne, first released in 1973.
Having said that, this arrangement is rather more like the 1990 cover version by 10,000 Maniacs, which was the first version of the song I ever heard. I originally tried singing it in the key that Natalie Merchant sang it in, and — surprise! — I was having a rough time of it. Then I dropped it from G to C and suddenly it was in my range.
I’m not pretending my singing voice is a patch on either Ms. Merchant or Mr. Browne, but then, that’s not why I make these covers. Enjoy.
— JS