Rae

Shelf full of books & most of my teeth. Create nothing, but love all your stuff. Art/words/food/funnies. Love Twitter's diversity & democracy. I'm also @RaeHick

[helen warlow @HWarloww]

Oooh I meant to post this. My heads all wrong today.

[nic @grqntt]

remember when sam neill made a series of funny skits called 'cinema quarantino' with other actors and actresses like helena bonham carter, timothy spall and many more to entertain and cheer people up during covid times 🥹

[UtterlyInteresting @UtterlyInterest]

Architects dressed as their own famous New York City skyscraper creations at the 1931 Beaux-Arts Ball. The event took place at the Hotel Astor to showcase the designs of these prominent architects.

[nick @herbieblunt]

old school sunday strips had some crazy artistry to them. winsor mccay was doing this in 1905!!! we were only like 10 years into the invention of comics!!!!!!

[Mister Knauf 👹🌎 @daniel_knauf]

HT, James Grissom.

“I once told my wife I was going out to buy an envelope: ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘well, you’re not a poor man…why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?’ And so I pretended not to hear her and went out to get an envelope because I have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babies. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know. The moral of the story is…we’re here on Earth to fart around. Of course, the computers will do us out of that. But what the computer people don’t realise, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.”—Kurt Vonnegut

[PhilipLarkinSociety @PLSoc]

Larkin’s father died on 26 March 1948. A week the following Sunday it snowed in Warwick. This beautiful elegy was never printed in the poet’s lifetime and yet, arguably, it is his first great poem.

[Rae @OpenedEar]

♥️

[Wodehouse Tweets @inimitablepgw]

Dedication: To my daughter Leonora without whose never-failing sympathy and encouragement this book would have been finished in half the time.

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

This wrecks me every time.

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

A child who saves a sparrow is stronger than a man who makes war. The war-maker has done nothing the most unimaginative brute couldn't do. The child, though—like the saint, like any empath—has done something much bolder: truly imagined the suffering of another living thing.

[Joseph Fasano @Joseph_Fasano_]

My 4yo calls this "our tree," and I always thought it was just because we rest beside it sometimes on our walks. But today he said it's because "the two parts go this way and that way but are always connected"—and I swear children are divine beings.

[Ciaran Jenkins @C4Ciaran]

For those in need of a moment of peace and reflection..

Happy St David’s Day 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿
Dydd Gwyl Dewi Hapus cyfeillion 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

"Why can't people just sit and read books and be nice to each other?"

— David Baldacci, The Camel Club

[Rae @OpenedEar]

@MooseAllain Oh Moose! I am so terribly sorry. Yours is one of the first accounts I followed where I could feel everything about it was (is) good. I don’t really know you, of course, but I feel your heart and send my sincerest condolences. .. Hope there’s a suitably-qualified dog around x

[David Benedict 🏳️‍🌈🕎 @eggsbened]

A gorgeous story.
#KennethWilliams

[🎸 Rock History 🎸 @historyrock_]

He plays like he's been through 2 divorces, has 4 children, cirrhosis, and smokes 4 packs a day

[🎼🌺Music Love♥️ @ThoNg676733]

So beautiful! This video was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1961 ❤❤❤

[Roy Rogers Happy Trails Music Shop  @RoyRogers_HTMS]

Im pretty sure this is how Rumpelstiltskin spun straw into gold . 😂

[Cian McCarthy @arealmofwonder]

Exquisite.

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

In 1707, two thousand sailors DROWNED.
Not because of a storm.

Because nobody could tell where they were at sea 🇬🇧

This was the longitude problem. The deadliest puzzle in science.

Parliament offered £20,000 to anyone who could solve it.

Nearly four million today.

Every great scientist in Europe tried. Newton. Halley. The finest minds alive.

All of them failed.

The man who solved it was a carpenter from Yorkshire.

His name was John Harrison.

No formal education. No university. No wealthy patron. He taught himself clockmaking.

Built timepieces out of wood.

His idea was “simple”. If you know the exact time at home and the exact time at sea, you can calculate exactly where you are.

The problem?

No clock could keep accurate time on a moving ship. Heat warps metal. Cold contracts it. The ocean never stops moving.

Harrison spent DECADES on it.

H1. Twenty years of work. Not good enough.

H2. Better. Still not enough.

H3. Seventeen years. Over 700 parts.

Still not enough.

Then he did something nobody expected. He stopped building clocks.

He built a watch.

H4. Thirteen centimetres across. The most important watch ever made.

They sent it across the Atlantic. Eighty-one days at sea.

When they arrived, it had lost five seconds.

Five seconds. In eighty-one days. The problem was solved.

But here's the uncomfortable part.

They didn't give him the prize.

The Board of Longitude was run by astronomers.

The very men who'd been trying to solve it their own way.

The Astronomer Royal was both judge and competitor.

They changed the rules. Demanded his designs. Refused to pay.

A working-class carpenter had beaten every astronomer in Europe. And the establishment couldn't accept it.

Harrison was nearly EIGHTY before he got justice.

He went directly to King George III.

The king tested the watch himself and told Harrison to petition Parliament with the king's full backing.

Parliament paid. Harrison died three years later.

After his death, every ship on earth carried a chronometer based on his design.

Every GPS satellite. Every ship's navigation. Every flight path. All of it traces back to a carpenter from Yorkshire who taught himself to build a watch.

His watches are still at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich. Still ticking.

Still perfect.

The establishment tried to bury him once.

We're not letting it happen again 👇 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf

Be part of us.

Be proud of us. 🇬🇧