Almost always used in the plural form, much like scissors, and can take either a singular or plural verb. Taken in the 1880s from French sécateurs, plural of sécateur (from Latin secāre, to cut) + -ateur (from Latin -ātor, verbal suffix forming a noun of agency). So, cutters. Nicely obvious.
Via Oregon Coast Aquarium, which writes, “A special thanks to the donor who shopped our wishlist! It’s safe to say that the otters are thoroughly enjoying their new enrichment items!”
Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for March 24, 2026 is:
cadence • \KAY-dunss\ • noun
Cadence is used to refer to various rhythmic or repeated motions, activities, or patterns of sound, or to the way a person's voice changes by gently rising and falling while they are speaking.
// Ivy relaxed at the beach, listening to the cadence of the surf.
“Urged by a fast-talking auctioneer and his familiar cadence, paddles shot up as bids climbed into the four- and five-figure range.” — Lily Moayeri, Rolling Stone, 29 Jan. 2026
Did you know?
A cadence is a rhythm, or a flow of words or music, in a sequence that is regular (or steady as it were). But lest we be mistaken, cadence also lends its meaning to the sounds of Mother Nature (such as birdsong) to be sure. Cadence comes from Middle English borrowed from Medieval Latin’s own cadentia, a lovely word that means “rhythm in verse.” (You may also recognize a cadence cousin, sweet cadenza, as a word that is familiar in the opera universe.) And from there our cadence traces just a little further backward to the Latin verb cadere “to sound rhythmically, to fall.” Praise the rising and the falling of the lilting in our language, whether singing songs or rhyming or opining on it all.
Happy Covidversary to me! It's been six years now; the symptoms have not really gotten better (save for what's slightly ameliorated with famotidine+cetirizine).
I am hoping Elwood will chill out as he gets older and less puppy-ish; I've been taking care of him by myself while weezyl is off on the joco cruise, and it can be severely taxing.
noun 1. any of the short lines stemming from and at an angle to the upper and lower ends of the strokes of a letter
examples 1. Font options include bubble lettering, bold, serif, signature, and retro—all of which have a different look and feel to them. Lydia Mansel, Travel + Leisure, 4 Dec. 2025
2. Some studies suggest that sans-serif fonts, such as Calibri, are easier to read for those with certain visual disabilities. Humeyra Pamuk, USA Today, 11 Dec. 2025
origin probably from Dutch schreef stroke, line, from Middle Dutch, from schriven to write, from Latin scribere
After Ny's memorial I felt like a complete awkward pony; I talked myself down from an anxiety spiral with the very jadelennox-branded pep talk of, basically, "Stop being so damn full of yourself, kid, literally nobody is going to notice or remember how bad you were at personing in a room full of grieving people in shock, many of whom primarily know each other online. Nobody was looking at you."
Anyway I have heard from three different people, one of whom I see in person regularly, that I either didn't see them at all when they tried to talk to me, or I saw them and talked to them like they were strangers.
Honestly I think this is an achievement. Being so Not At My Best I was noticeably out of it even in a room full of people Not At Their Best. Awkward pony gold star!
Partner and I are in need of a solicitor for a fairly routine and non-urgent matter, so, looked up who it was we went to last time we had a routine life admin thing requiring the services of a legal professional.
(This was actually a bit more time-consuming than I anticipated, have I mentioned that archivists are really Not All That at keeping on top of their own papers? The cobbler's children syndrome.)
But, I found the name of the practice and looked them up on The Internetz and they are there, as having gone out of business some few years ago, on Companies House website.
And they are by no means the first solicitors I have had dealings with, though I think the ones in Kentish Town saw me through the purchase of First Flat and present dwelling and possibly various other legal matters, but are now no longer operating more or less adjacent to the Tube station.
I suppose that these days one should not anticipate that you have Old Mr Thing the attorney-at law and Young Mr Thing his son who keeps up the practice and Even Younger Mr Thing who is being brought on in the family tradition -
- and that these things come and go like everything else and they are no longer quite the repository of folk memory like in mystery novels.
Way back when I was starting out as a Wee Babby Archivist, I remember that a big thing of the day, practically A Crisis, was solicitors' records. As I was never actually employed in a repository where I had any direct dealings with the problem, I'm not sure whether this was due to practices going defunct, or just somebody going down into the cellar and realising that they still had all the papers from Jarndyce v Jarndyce back to its origins along with tons of other stuff. But anyway, there were Massive Amounts of Very Misc Material (quite surprising what turned up) which looking back I suspect had all sorts of issues around ownership to complicate matters even further.
(If anyone has recs for N London solicitors would be glad to hear of them.)
Make sure people know: DONALD TRUMP says airports will stay fucked until Democrats agree to vote for the Women’s Disenfranchisement (“save”) Act.
Everybody who complains about airports, everyone who complaints about gas prices, anyone who complains about anything: Donald Trump HIMSELF will not let it get fixed UNTIL 21 MILLION WOMEN are disenfranchised through his mass disenfranchisement act.
I don’t give a fuck if Fox says it’s not like that, it fucking well is. “RealID” doesn’t count. Name change documents don’t count. Marriage certificates don’t count. Changed your name when you got married? Well, if you didn’t also change your birth certificate or spend a couple of hundred dollars and many hours to get a passport, NO VOTING FOR YOU, BITCH.
Which is exactly how they want it. Way too much of “centrist” media is reporting this as a general effect, but it’s not. It’s targeting women (and trans people) and that’s how they want it, because they don’t want women to vote at all, and they’ve said so a lot since 2020. In the open. In words.
So they need to strap in and hold steady, because we absolutely cannot let that happen.
Donald Trump and the entire Republican Party want only elections if they are guaranteed to win.
Anybody whinges about airports, anybody complaints about gas, remind them: that’s what Donald Trump wants, because he wants to say in power forever.
ambsace (AYMZ-ays, AMZ-ays) - n., the lowest throw of a pair of dice, two aces; something worthless or unlucky; bad luck, misfortune.
Snake-eyes -- which in most dice games is a bad throw. We've had the word since Middle English ambes as, from Anglo-French, from Old French, from ambes, both (from Latin ambo, both) + as, aces (from Latin as in the sense of unit, originally a lowest value coin).
You unlock this bakery with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension.
A dimension of icing.
A dimension of piping bags.
A dimension of wreckitude.
You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of bad taste and even worse skill. You just crossed over into...
The Twilight Zone.
BUM BUM BAAAAAHHHH...
Picture, if you will... a monkey. This monkey:
I know, creepy right? [shivering] Brrrrrr. Totally.
[resuming serious announcer voice] Ahem. Now picture, if you will, five ravenous-yet-dim-witted Shih Tzu dogs:
[sternly] Let's call them Muffy, Boopsie, Precious, Buttercup and Mr. Snuggles.
Now picture, if you will, a face of terror that watches in malignant silence far beyond your present capacity to understand. A face enigmatically bizarre in terms of time and space. A face...
...of a tweety bird.
Now picture, if you will, Meerkat Zombies...raising the roof.
"What up, playah?"
This is the stuff of fantasy, the thread of imagination, the ingredients... of the Twilight Zone.
BUM BUM BAAAAAHHHHH...
SQUEEDLEDEEEE!!!
Jennifer P., Matt N., Christine S., and Melanie L., picture, if you will... a dolphin eating a Snickers bar in flip-flops and a cardigan. Then tell me what that looks like. I've always wondered.
UPDATE! LeAnna and Woobie took up the dolphin challenge and sent in their ideas.
First LeAnna's:
AWESOME! Check out the flip flop thongs on his flippers.
And next we have Woobie's
See, the snickers bar is wearing the cardigan and flip flops because I apparently have no grasp of sentence structure. ?thought Who would have
Touché!
One more!
This one's from Vanilla Smoke. Awesome!
*****
P.S. Here's one more read for you Rod Serling fans:
It's a graphic novel - so basically a long-form comic book - about Serling's career and "descent into his own personal Twilight Zone." OooOOOooh. Looks awesome, and it has great reviews!
Look closely. Can you see the differences between the pup coat and adult coat of a northern sea otter?
Sea otters have a different coat for the first three months of their life, with a longer loft and longer guard hairs than an adult coat. The pup coat keeps pups afloat on top of the water, just like a lifejacket.
Our rehab team has described it like “a cotton ball in water.”
Here’s a close-up look at Un’a’s coat when she was first admitted at about 2 months old, and at her coat again 6 weeks later after she molted. Notice the reduction of the lighter colored guard hairs.
Boston locals! Blue Heron, an acapella early music ensemble, is throwing a three-day shindig to celebrate Guillaume de Machaut (died 1377), May 1-3, mostly involving talks about Machaut's works, talks about his lyrics, talks about the illuminations in the manuscripts his works come from, concerts of his music, and also a little ars subtilior tacked on the end just because.
Affordability note: They have a free ticket option as part of the "Card to Culture program" for people with EBT, WIC, and ConnectorCare(!) cards*, and a discounted "low cost" option.
Of note, the "Opening Festivities: Keynote, Performance & Sing-Along" on Friday night includes (emphasis mine):
a keynote talk by one of the world’s leading scholars of 14th-century music, Anne Stone (CUNY Graduate Center), performances of pieces in several of the genres represented in Machaut’s oeuvre, and a sing-along of the Kyrie from the Messe de Nostre Dame.
Which: huh. Huh. The Kyrie, huh? Wow. Now that is certainly a choice. I commend their bravery. Were I in better health, I would consider showing up just to be in on the shenanigans.
If you're curious what the Kyrie from Machaut's Messe de Nostre Dame sounds and looks like, here you go.
* There is no separate ConnectorCare card like there is for MassHealth. They mean your regular insurance card, which if it's a ConnectorCare plan should say so on it, or so the Mass Cultural Council, whose program it is, thinks.
The YouTube algorithm pseudorandomly served me this, thereby answering the question I'd had on a distant back burner forever, "Hey, didn't I hear something about colored cotton cultivars once upon a time? Cotton that you didn't need to dye? Like back in the 90s?"
If you are a fellow fiber freak or interested in agriculture or organic crops or the underappreciated problem of sustainable clothing production, you may find this as fascinating as I did:
“As Marty Mauser, a wannabe table tennis champion who dreams and deceives his way through his shamble of a life ... [Timothée Chalamet] injects his scenes with enough nervous energy to fuel a plane. Nowhere will you see a performance more frenetic or impressive.” — Ralph Jones, Vanity Fair, 9 Feb. 2026
Did you know?
In modern use, frenetic can describe a focused and intense effort to meet a deadline, or dancing among a hyped-up crowd, but the word’s Middle English predecessor, frenetik, had a narrower use: it was used to describe those exhibiting a severely disordered state of mind. If you trace frenetic back far enough, you’ll find that it comes from Greek phrenîtis, a term referring to an inflammation of the brain. As for frenzied and frantic, they’re not only synonyms of frenetic but relatives as well. Frantic comes from frenetik, and frenzied traces back to phrenîtis.
There is Drama going around in the indie TTRPG community. Some people accuse a game designer of being a jerk, a cheat (someone who doesn't pay contractors, not someone involved in relationship shenanigans), a liar, and weaponizing their fame to harass other people in the community.
Others say the above comments are nothing but hate-speech aimed at a person of a marginalized identity, and this person has written great works and brings creativity and fresh insights to the community at large.
I'd love to figure out which is true, or if they both have elements of truth.
The details are apparently covered in a Rascal article, possibly some posts at Medium, and of course, in multiple Discords. If I joined the right ones, I might be able to find out who actually said what. (I will not be joining any Discords over this.)
I can confirm: • Creator in question has written some amazing stuff, not only much-lauded but also unique improvements to the TTRPG-sphere • People I respect (but do not know personally) are calling aforementioned creator a scoundrel and abuser
This week's bread: Elizabeth's David's Light Rye Loaf, which turned out nicely even though I discovered that the fresh yeast had finally given up and I had to fall back on Allinson's Easy Bake Yeast (which is not, horrors, the same as their former Active Dry Yeast).
Friday night supper: grocery order came early enough that I was able to put in hand the makings of a sardegnera with pepperoni.
Today's lunch: game casserole - mixture of pheasant, venison, duck and partridge with onion, garlic, bay leaf, juniper berries, coriander seeds and red wine; served with kasha, warm green bean and fennel salad, and baby pak choi stirfried with star anise
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![2 screencaps. On left, Hannah Brandt on X, 4:51pm 22 March:BREAKING: In a phone call just minutes ago President Trump told me Democrats want to make a deal on DHS funding but he doesn't "think any deal should be made on this until they approve save America."First I asked him how long he's prepared to have ice agents help out at airportsHe told me, "For as long as it takes."Then I asked "Some lawmakers are saying they should just fund TSA while they negotiate on DHS. What do you think about that?"President Trump said "Now that I did this the Democrats want to make a deal. And I don't think any deal should be made on this until they approve SAVE America."On right:Shitstain on Shithole Social, Sunday 22 March:I don't think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass "THE SAVE AMERICA ACT." It is far more important than anything else we are doing in the Senate, and that includes giving these same terrible people, the Dems (who are to blame for this mess!), a Five Billion Dollar cut in ICE funding, a deal which, even when disguised as something else, is unacceptable to me and the American people - UNLESS it includes their approval of Voter I.D., (with picture!), Citizenship to Vote, No Mail-In Voting (with exceptions), All Paper Ballots, [anti-trans hate propaganda], and [anti-trans hate propoganda]. Put it all together, and also, let Leader Thune clearly identify those few "Republicans" that are Voting against AMERICA. They will never be elected again! In other words, lump everything together as one, and VOTE!!! Kill the Filibuster, and stay in D.C. for Easter, if necessary. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! President DJT](https://solarbird.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/image-2-1024x783.png)
