Are you a Robert Johnson obsessive? Musicologist Nick Dellow remastered a clean test pressing of Crossroads Blues. This is one of the cleanest recordings of Johnson I’ve ever heard.

Mr. Dellow seems to specialize in finding amazing things. Here’s an photo he uncovered taken in 1931 of McKinney's Cotton Pickers at the Pla-Mor Ballroom in Kansas City:

More Dellow goodness: An interview Brian Rust, with the creator of the Jazz Records 1897-1942. 

If you’ve ever been to Dhaka, you might know that capturing its colorful pulsing energy is difficult. There’s just too much going on. But this image by Noah Addis seems to get it. I keep coming back to it.

This image is part of his impressive Future Cities project where he documents “slums and informal settlements” where “one out of every seven people on the planet” live. He notes that they “may outwardly appear to be ruled by chaos and disorder, but they are in fact very organized places that grow almost organically to suit the needs of the people who live in them.” Addis is a photojournalist and artist who has long been focused on urbanization and climate change. 

Whenever I’m in a Egyptian gallery of a museum, I always look for pair statues. Starting in the around the Third Dynasty (2686 BC - 2613 BC) it became relatively common for Egyptian tombs to include statues of couples. What is so striking about these images is how intimate they feel. What other 4000-year-old art has these little nods to love?

It’s in the hands, mostly. I like how the an arm might drape protectively around a spouse’s shoulder. Or maybe they are sitting side-by-side, their hands resting just inches apart, almost touching. In a culture where art was governed by strict, formal rules and 'eternal' poses, these small gestures of proximity feel like a small nods to the everyday. I think about how statues were built for the afterlife to act as 'backup bodies' for souls. These Egyptians wanted to live forever together.

My abueltio and abuelita would sometimes joke about not being buried together (“Maybe I want to be with my sisters?” my abuelita would tell my abuelito, “Maybe you would be be happier at the ranch.” They were, of course, buried together. 

Some sources: Statues of sitting couples. 

I can think of few less important things to do in 2026 than reviving a 20 year old blog, but I’ve been thinking a lot about blogging lately and here we are. Keeping a public journal made me actively think about the shape of days. I liked that. I miss that.

For years after I stopped blogging, I would check in on my vintage Moveable Type 3 CMS software that powered the blog installing shims to keep going , but eventually it gave up and I gave up, and slowly the blog started falling apart like a rusty car left in the woods. 

Maybe because my kids are in college now, I felt the pull of having an easy way to throw thoughts into the ether on a platform that wasn’t controlled by companies I no longer trust. I wondered, “Could I vibe code a Mac native CMS into existance?" After a few false starts it took me about a week to build a shambolic, but totally workable CMS that does a bunch of things I’ve always wanted.

1. I have a a local version properly versioned site that lives in a folder on my computer.

2. I can edit in WYSIWYG / HTML / Markdown.

3. I can drag in or paste in pictures.

4. I can sync (or not) to the web whever I want. 

5. I can easily choose from various style templates of my own design. 

6. I can generate the whole thing as static files. 

7. I can automatically use a local model to analyze images, add alt text, and to handle grammar (Dsylexia is a curse). I’m so far resisting the urge to correct old posts, but I might. 

8. I’ve made a phone client that will allow me to post on the go.

9. I can manage a text blog and a photoblog in the same place.

10. etc.

What do I want to do next? I still have a lot of cleanup on the old blog content, and lots of unpublished stories that I want to get up. I also have multiple photoblogs to bring into this century. 

My hope is this will go quickly and I can just start to get into the rhythm of posting again. I’m enjoying it. Here’s to lost causes.

Over the last few years I’ve written a couple of children’s books. My younger son Gabriel is making some illustration tests. I love them. 

This is dark. 

We closed out 2020 still uneasy about the state of the world and what lay ahead.

This year, over and over, I’ve heard friends say ‘I just want to get through’ 2020.They talk about a ‘lost year’, a ‘lonely year’, a 'terrible year.’ The pandemic and our unsettled politics seem to have an amplifying effect on other troubles large and small, so a broken plate or a broken bone can become yet another proof that this is a uniquely awful time. For many of us adults this is indeed a year of extraordinary uncertainly and sadness. There is no denying this. Our children feel all this too. They are our emotional mirrors absorbing our frustrations and fears and reflecting them back to us. 
A year is a quarter of 4-year-old’s life. Younger children might not even be able to remember a “before”. And for the children who can remember, many are experiencing deep sadness especially around the separation from friends, teachers and family. We worry about the consequences of so much isolation. While my business at Tinybop to make content for screens, we worry about the effect of so much time in front of them.. None of us designed for this.
From the early days of the pandemic when schools began shutting down, children reached out to us for answers. A few even managed to find our company phone number and dial in. Many had a simple question: “What’s going on?” I always tried to start with the facts and talk about how we were feeling, then I would talk about empathy: “We’re staying home because we care about our neighbors.” I say, "There’s a lot we don’t know and we don’t know if this is the right way to solve this problem, but everyone is working on it. We’ll figure it out. Eventually everything will open up again." Kids always seem to get this.
While it is often our instinct to hide our worries from children. I think we do best by them by bringing them into the conversation and talking about the things that matter. I suspect these next couple of months will be especially difficult. Limbo is amorphous. The vaccine seems so close and yet for most of us it will be out of reach for some time. Again, the way through is honest dialog. 

Swan's Island, population 350, listed in one vintage guidebook as "a place where people vanish from the world" seemed pandemic friendly.  

The comet was easy to spot. 

It was my first visible-to-the-naked-eye comet, so I was pretty excited. Maybe moreso than the kids. 

Camping was a welcome escape.