From Nov 24th, we progressively decorate the house, one item per day, throughout Brumalia - the old Roman/Byzantine winter festival - in preparation for Saturnalia.

Otherwise, we’ll have a pair of candles going for the eight sabbats themselves, regardless of anything else that we do for them, but I don’t think that candles alone really count as decorations.

Yes, fun idea. No problem with that but… that ‘flag’ is a sail. They’re different things.

Improve education for girls worldwide. A very strong link has been established by numerous studies.

Leaving aside points about driving licence numbers being unique or whatever, it would be the silver pentagram that I made back in the '90s and have worn (or occasionally carry in my wallet etc, when the cord breaks) ever since.

Facilities manager for a wildlife and heritage charity. I lead a small team looking after health & safety, compliance and building maintenance and repairs.

Ninety percent of my time is spent at the keyboard, but since I am peripatetic and move around the properties that I cover, I have a different, and usually beautiful, view out of the window each day of the week. When I am not sat behind a desk, I will be crawling through an attic or have my head down a sewer or something.

My time is spent arranging contractors for routine servicing or repair projects, reviewing fire risk assessments and dealing with outstanding actions, writing client briefs for renewable energy projects, chasing people to do workplace inspections, advising on risk assessments, updating our compliance tracker, arranging asbestos surveys, ensuring that everyone who needs training has it up to date, proving to utility companies that their meters are wildly inaccurate and need to be replaced, working out why the biomass boiler/sewage treatment plant/water heater/automatic gate/car park machine/phone system/greywater pump/security alarm/whatever isn’t working and getting it fixed and so on.

• A grass snake seems to have taken up residence under our compost heap. Hopefully it will be a suitable hibernation spot.
• New seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks and Shrinking are out.
• My SO and I went for a good walk in a nearby woodland nature reserve. The autumn colours are really coming though now.
• I now have some cosy fleece pyjamas. I haven’t owned pyjamas for decades, but can see will that they will revolutionise my weekend mornings. I don’t know why I didn’t get some years ago.

Checking the ones that I usually buy the ingredients are:

• Butter

Or, if I go for salted versions:

• Butter
• Salt

Recently went to a screening of the 1922 Nosferatu with a live accompanist creating an improvised soundtrack on violin, piano and waterphone - which was not an instrument that I had not encountered before, but evidently features in the score of The Matrix, Aliens and a range of other films. I can certainly see why - it was extremely atmospheric. I had seen Nosferatu a couple of times before - as well as the 1979 Herzog version, and Shadow of the Vampire (2000) - but this definitely added something new.

Is there any peer reviewed published research that studied if this was effective and the best available option.

Recently, this study found that although culling does reduce cattle infection in the immediate area, it seems to increase infection in surrounding areas - due to displaced badgers spreading it - which is exactly what everyone opposing the culls predicted way back when they started.

These are a very different type of drone, but I have worked on a site with a large colony of seabirds that also attracted a lot of recreational drone usage due to historical features on the site. These smaller, hovering drones would very obviously disturb the breeding birds in the short term - we would notice the disturbance before spotting the drone quite often - and there was a good deal of discussion about their growing use and possible consequences. The organisation currently has a ban on drones over their properties for this and various other reasons - but of course it is practically impossible to enforce, since you usually can’t find the operator when they not present on site.

I have not seen any formal study of the effect of drones on seabirds until this though.

My childhood imaginary friend(s) were a flock of flying bunnies of various colours. It is not often that you get to see them represented.

Woos-ter-shuh, like the sauce.

By that age, I was into my third long-term job (> 5 years) and had had upwards of 16 short term ones - multiple part time ones at once, or some just for a few weeks or a couple of months here and there between the long-term ones etc.

48 doesn’t seem that unlikely - nor even an indicator that they will not be staying put for any length of time unless your job is a shitty one with a high turnover anyway.

Not quite a scrotum pole, but there is certainly an interpretation of this statue of Cybele where what we are looking at are not multiple breasts, but actually the scrota of her eunuch priesthood.

It’s my turn to cook tonight. I’m doing a shakshuka.

I think that the closest that I had at school was the library. Even decades later I am still happy when surrounded by books.

Otherwise, somewhere green: walking in woodland or sitting by a stream always improves things.

I’d not encountered Bloody Knuckles before, but we did have the card variant when I was at school - the trick being to get a new pack, flex it a little and push the card so that all the edges are available to strike the knuckles in rapid succession. I was extremely good at it, as i recall, both in inflicting and (particularly) withstanding the pain.

We knew this game as Scabby Queen. Evidently there is an actual card game called that, it seems, with the knuckle skinning merely the end result. We did not bother with the game part (or even know about it) - just the knuckle skinning.

• Kaos - I’ve only seen the first ep so far, but it looks to have promise.
• Le Bureau de Legendes - this French spy series has a slow and meandering start but picks up over a couple of episodes and the initial time with the characters pays off.
• Pine Gap - After the first couple of episodes, I’m struggling to care about the characters - and am caring a LOT about the absurd lack of a Faraday cage around the main building which would have prevented the main plot point in the first place. It is only miniseries, but I doubt that we’ll finish it unless it picks up a lot and gives me a reason to get my disbelief suspended again.
• Slow Horses - the third of the spy tales that we are following at the moment and by far the most fun and engaging. Season 4 is as good as ever, and Oldman’s Lamb is wonderful.
• Carol and the End of the World - a low key, introspective little exploration of self-discovery and where you find value and it’s really quite charming.