I got my first Macbook recently, after being a Windows PC guy for almost 35 years, and making the switch from one ecosystem to the other has been humbling. The time I set aside for writing this morning has been spent engaging in a contest of wills with the Macbook. I know I’ll ultimately prevail, but we’re both gonna be bloodied by the time this thing is over.
That will come later. Now, I am off to see LES MISÉRABLES.
READING: CONGO, Michael Crichton
Behold: the new pendant light. It took about an hour to install this morning, which was significantly faster than I’d imagined it would take. This was my first time attempting something like this on my own (with M as my copilot, of course). This isn’t a brag; this was not an onerous or technically challenging task. It’s just that no one who knows me well would ever describe me as being adept in the electrical arts, either. Also, I have no innate ability at electricianing. I’m a go slow, read the instructions seven times, take photos of how the pendant light’s predecessor was connected, overthink every step, and ask Hephaestus to look upon me favorably kind of fellow. So that it went up smoothly and actually turned on when the switch was flipped is kind of amazing to me.
I’m obsessed with it.
This weekend is gonna be a busy one, so at the proverbial last minute yesterday, M and I took off today to hang up the pendant light and hang out. Not working is itself inherently terrific, but even setting that aside, today was really fucking fun. French toast and bacon, booking a summer beach trip, other stuff, and then ending the day with fried Oreos.
LISTENING: REVOLVER followed by ABBY ROAD, The Beatles
THINKING ABOUT: At the café this morning, three older guys were seated in the booth behind me. I was partaking in some light eavesdropping, one of my favorite hobbies. One guy muttered some comment I couldn’t make out. One of the other guys piped up brightly, “We’re Romeos! You know: Retired Old Men Eating Out.”
The only place I am marching off to is bed. It’s been a long, mostly really good week, and I’m off work tomorrow. So I am going to relish not having to set an alarm and not having any set plans for the day, other than hang pendant light, get brunch, start new book.
LAST READ: SOFT CORE, Brittany Newell
LAST WATCHED : TARANTULA
Writing here this morning because this evening I will be seeing TARANTULA at my favorite cinema in Dayton, the Historic Plaza Theatre.
I have a fondness for classic scifi, but the oldest era that I’m usually drawn to is the 60s. TARANTULA came out in 1955, a decade whose scifi films I am not super familiar with, beyond THIS ISLAND EARTH, FORBIDDEN PLANET, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, and a few others. To be honest, I’d only vaguely heard of TARANTULA before the Plaza put it on their schedule. So I’m chuffed to expand my horizons a bit more tonight, at my favorite theatre.
READING: SOFT CORE, Brittany Newell
LISTENING: “Goodbye”, Sabrina Carpenter
Thirty degrees today, here in southwest Ohio. A veritable heatwave compared to the subzero and single-digit temps we’ve experienced of late. It also snowed here for a couple of hours — big, fat flakes — but, weirdly, none of it much stuck to the ground. Maybe because the temps were close to cresting above freezing, the flakes simply melted when they touched down. I dunno, I’m no Phil Connors, and I’m not invested enough to look it up. Regardless, one day it will be warm enough, for long enough, for the snow to melt. But today wasn’t it.
READING: SOFT CORE, Brittany Newell
LISTENING: THE RISE AND FALL OF A MIDWEST PRINCESS, Chappell Roan
RANDOM THOUGHT: The size between medium and large is not called “schmedium”, as too many on the web would have you believe. It’s called largium.
But I love this piece by Cayman K, photographed in the wild at Blind Bob’s sometime last year.
Honestly, I don’t even hate Mondays anymore. I find them annoying in the sense that I would rather not be working, but that’s about it. (Of course, this can easily be chalked up to having a good job and a contented personal life.) I’m fortunate, and I know it.
Fairly typical workday today, though; no complaints. Over lunch, I tried something new: I pulled out my pomera and wrote a little bit of one of the short stories I’ve got in flight. It wasn’t much, but it was more than nothing, and it felt good. Now I just need to do more of it.
LINKS:
READING: SOFT CORE, Brittany Newell
LISTENING: “Let Your Love Flow” by the Bellamy Brothers has been a right earworm the last few days and I’m okay with it
Approaching the end of a good little weekend. Yesterday, we started laying out pieces for our gallery wall, working out how much more space we have to play with. I emptied the last few boxes of my books, so now everything is on a bookcase. The only thing still to do is to bring some level of order to the haphazardness. That’s a less daunting prospect than it would have been a few years ago, before I’d relaxed my previously strict cataloging system. Then we used the penultimate batch from our embarrassment of bananas to make some banana bread. While that baked, we had an easy dinner of leftover rosemary & parmesan focaccia with bolognese sauce from Grist. Dessert was, of course, banana bread, paired with honey-vanilla bean ice cream, which we ate while INTERSTELLAR.
Today was spent cleaning, lounging, and thinking.
‡
Today is also the 32nd of the year and also of project three six five(ish). I didn’t write on two days in January: days 20 and 30. On both days, the day had gotten away from me, it was late, and I was tired, and I made a conscious decision not to write. No regerts. As I’ve noted before, I’m building a habit, and habits are not designed to be perfect. The important thing to note to me is: it’s getting easier.
READING: SOFT CORE, Brittany Newell
LAST WATCHED: INTERSTELLAR
LISTENING: my own playlist of songs by Great Big Sea
Getting this one in before the wire. It’s been a really good day. And look: we made banana bread.
More tomorrow.
I had a decently bad headache earlier today, the kind that is best treated by several ibuprofen and a short lie-down in the dark. When I closed my eyes, instead of quieting down so I could fall asleep, my brain asked, What’s the name of that Spanish dude who was the British double agent who spied against the Germans in WWII? Eventually, I was able to dredge up the fellow’s name: Juan Pujol Garcia. That was apparently all my goofy brain needed, because I dozed off right after.
When I woke up a little later, the headache was mostly kaput. So before I got up, I picked up my phone and reread the post that originally introduced me to Mr. Garcia a decade ago.
My bros I have been doing a lot of reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a story because I love it okay
once upon a time there was a dude in Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol hated him some goddamn fascists.
See Spain had recently ended its civil war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty bullshit
so soon after war breaks out Pujol travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on the Nazis for you”
“who the fuck are you?” say the British, and kick him out
but Pujol is not deterred! He still wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”
“yeah okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”
and just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England
Pujol had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books and set about just wholesale making shit up
this is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen, because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so that’s probably the same right?
Here is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves this. “wow this dude is a great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new awesome spy that the British start to get worried
you see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England. The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies
so there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail
“oh shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they have to and from this mysterious super spy.
“hey wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending. “someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”
At this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we know that guy”
so in 1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case officer so he can start making up even better bullshit
and he does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+ sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK
none of these people actually exist
Pujol just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents
Pujol, now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended
crazily enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent. After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which require personal authorization from Hitler), and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)
unable to resist being totally fucking ridiculous, Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”
and that’s exactly what he did. Juan Pujol Garcia died in 1988, at the age of 76
An absolute legend. And profmeowmers did a masterful job of telling Pujol’s story. Sheer artistry.
READING: SOFT CORE, Brittany Newell
LISTENING:
I recently started following a new art account on Tumblr, Pmamtraveller. Every day it shows me moody, lovely images. This type of content is one of the major reasons why I like Tumblr and still use it for some things. It’s especially useful at the moment, as I’m looking to acquire some new art.
I mean, Christ — just look at these.
READING: TWELVE MONTHS, Jim Butcher
LISTENING: PIECES OF YOU, Jewel
FORECAST: I bought tickets to see a double feature of HOWL’S MOVING CASTLE and GHOST IN THE SHELL, and I am fucking stoked.
