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#Algeria: #Biodiversity in Algeria: breathtaking #natural #parks
Algeria is located at the junction of two vast #geographical regions: the #Mediterranean region and the #Sahara. The division of the relief into large, roughly east-west oriented strips accentuates the contrasts between the various #natural #environments that succeed each other from north to south.In the south, the Sahara presents a great diversity, ranging from vast, uniform expanses of rocky plateaus (hamadas du Draa) to depressions dotted with dunes (Grand Erg occidental, Grand Erg oriental), as well as imposing mountain massifs in the far south, notably the Hoggar, which peaks at around 3,000 meters.
In the north, in the #Maghreb region, two mountain ranges with marked relief surround the High Plateaus, where a few isolated mountains (djebels) stand above vast depressions, often occupied by saltwater lakes (sebkhas). The Tell region consists of small coastal or sub-coastal plains (such as the Mitidja) alternating with relatively low mountain massifs, but with steep slopes, mixing elements of old massifs (such as the Grande Kabylie) and fragments of folded, fractured, and uplifted sedimentary layers repeatedly during the Tertiary era.
Further south from the High Plateaus, on the edge of the Sahara, a second mountain range, the Saharan Atlas, features more regular folds in a rock mainly composed of limestone and marls.
A pleasantly temperate climate
The coastal regions benefit from a Mediterranean climate, with mild winters (around 12 °C in Algiers) and bearable summers (around 25 °C in the same city). Humidity is high and precipitation relatively abundant, with an average of 762 mm per year concentrated in a few months in autumn and spring. It rains more in Algiers than in Paris.
In summer, the weather is dominated by the influx of Saharan high pressure systems towards the north. However, from autumn to spring, the weather deteriorates due to the movement southwards in the Mediterranean of the temperate air flow or the arrival of polar air masses at higher altitudes, resulting in unsettled and rainy weather conditions in Algeria, with a drop in temperatures. These conditions naturally vary depending on altitude and geographical location.
Belezma National Park
English https://africalinks24.com/algeria-biodiversity-in-algeria-breathtaking-natural-parks/
French https://translated.turbopages.org/proxy_u/en-fr.fr.fa5099e1-65e49b9d-2cdec132-74722d776562/https/africalinks24.com/algeria-biodiversity-in-algeria-breathtaking-natural-parks/
#Algerie #afrique #nature -
CW: suicide mention, r/touhou mod lore
Anyway jesus christ can this Darkslayer415 guy just shut up already lol, like I swear everytime the r/touhou #moderation team makes a moderation decision he always fucking has something to say against it. Or will slam the modteam for being incompetent or whatever. All because he's salty that he isn't chosen as #reddit mod in the main #touhou #subreddit
This is the same guy that tried to guilt-trip me and other r/touhou mods in a #Discord during #rplace2023 where he basically told everyone in a general channel that he's killing himself because of me and the r/touhou mods (despite me not really interacting with him that much). And of course he didn't continue with his threat of #suicide and continues hounding the modteam. Really surprised he hasn't gotten permabanned from the sub at this point (and to be fair to my former colleagues they did try, but head mod really likes bureaucracy so I guess this guy is gonna continue gaming the system until it's very much clear he's violating the sub rules and there are no more second chances for him)
And yes that's one of the reasons why I am no longer moderator of r/touhou. It wasn't the trigger that led me to leave the modteam for good but man it does feel better knowing you won't get hounded by this salty mod wannabe whereever you go :seija_coffee:
https://old.reddit.com/r/touhou/comments/1b06nzg/meta_updated_rule_regarding_ai_art/ks7drs6/
RE: https://makai.chaotic.ninja/notes/9q6f0s5am3 -
Silver Coast…………..the New Algarve?
Tourist Information for Silver Coast and Central Portugal
Silver Coast
Is the nearest town at 4kms from Villa Vida Nova Villa Rental. It boasts a very safe sandy beach where the water is much warmer than the Atlantic ocean as the bay is shell shaped, almost enclosed. There are board walks along the beach and a quay with plenty of cafes and restaurants to enjoy. All manner of watercraft can be rented here during the summer months. It is a wonderful place to sit relax and people watch. A tourist information office is here.
The beach at Foz do Arelho is a natural wonder. To one side of the large sandy strip is the Atlantic Ocean, to the other side are the tranquil waters of the Óbidos Lagoon. The warm salty waters of the lagoon are ideal for kids and a variety of water sports, they are even said to have therapeutic properties. Kite surfing video
This is a popular surf spot and the waves can get pretty good here, the flat calm waters of the lagoon are ideal for kite surfing, kayaks and bathing. There are many beach bars and restaurants to choose from.
The delightful town of Óbidos, with white houses adorned with bougainvillea and honeysuckle was captured from the Moors by the first king of Portugal, D. Afonso Henriques, in 1148 is one of the most perfect examples of Portugal’s medieval fortress. Inside the walls, which at sunset take on a golden colouring, one can sense a cheerful medieval ambience of winding streets, old whitewashed houses bordered with blue or yellow, Manueline embrasures and windows, reminding us that King D. Manuel I (sixteenth century) carried out major works here, and masses of colourful flowers and plants. Spend the day here, there is plenty to see and do, taste the local cuisine including the liquor Ginja fermented from locally grown cherries. 15 best things to do in Obidos
This famous spa town, a short 15 minute drive south of the villa, owes its name to the thermal spring that was much appreciated by Queen Dona Leonor. It has a daily food market and weekly Gypsy market, (Mondays). It has all the big box stores and several supermarkets. The town centre has a main street of shops with several sides streets to explore, plenty of pastry shops and cafe’s to tempt you. Several interesting museums and historic sites are well worth a visit. 15 best things to do in Caldas da Rainha Try your driving skills at the Indoor Karting, loads of fun!
About a half hours drive from the villa you will find this delight historic town. Plenty of free parking with just a few minutes walk to the historic centre where you will find the spellbinding Monastery of Alcobaça. The monument is the final resting place for the 14th-century King Pedro I and his star-crossed lover, Inês de Castro, whose lives were haunted by tragedy. The town has plenty to see and some great eateries, a great place to spend a half day or longer. 15 best things to do in Alcobaca
Only 10 minutes drive North of the villa along a cliff top lane with stunning views of the coast and inland. A typical beach holiday destination with dozens of restaurants. Do take the funicular railway to Sitio on top of the cliffs for spectacular views and yes, more restaurants. Nazare is world famous for it’s enormous freak waves where surfers take up the challenge, this is not for the faint hearted, one can watch the spectacle from Sitio, winter is the best time as the waves are generated in mid Atlantic storms. Live web cam.
The development of Tomar is closely linked to the Order of the Templars, which received these lands in 1159 as a reward for the assistance they gave Dom Afonso Henriques (the First King of Portugal) in the Christian reconquest of the territory. It was Dom Gualdim Pais, the first Grand Master of the Order in Portugal, who founded the castle and the remarkable Convent of Christ inside. Enlarged and altered over the centuries, this retains the influences of various architectural styles; it is the centrepiece of the city and classified as a World Heritage site by UNESCO. The Convento do Cristo and Castelo Knights templar can be seen at the same time, (same entrance) and is must see. As always there so much more to see in Tomar, enough to spend a day or more. 15 best things to do in Tomar.
Peniche the most western city of continental Europe and has been a port since the Early Modern Age, when a fort was constructed to defend it. This monument has an absorbing history, first as a maritime defence and then a prison during the Estado Novo regime in the 20th century. And since Peniche is still a fishing port, the fish and seafood could not be fresher. And on top of everything, you also have to make time for a boat trip to the Berlingas Islands, a natural reserve off the coast. 15 best things to do in Peniche.
Rio Maior is a town known for a strange natural phenomenon, salt flats and much further from the ocean than you’d ever expect to find them, and exploited by locals since the 12th century. Don’t miss the salt pans!
The natural park should figure in your plans, whether you’re traversing its arid and vast valleys on foot, bike or horseback, or venturing below the surface into epic show-caves. There’s also a good helping of local sights to check out, from a prehistoric dolmen integrated into a church, to a Roman villa that has mosaics in almost pristine condition. 15 Best things to do in Rio Maior.
Bombarral Companhia Agrícola do Sanguinhal
Visit one of our local wine and brandy producers, Mon- Fri twice daily tours, learn, taste and shop. What an absolutely wonderful spot! 10/10 recommend. This is a family owned/operated business – wonderful people. We enjoyed our tasting and tour. Great value and delicious wine. Make the stop!
Grutas de Mira de Aire, Caves of Mira de Aire
The Portuguese Central region between Rio Maior, Alcobaça, Porto de Mós, Batalha, Leiria, Ourém, Torres Novas and Alcanena is occupied by Limestone Mountains, which form the Estremadura Limestone Massif. Of these the mains mountains are the Aire and Candeeiros. This area is littered with caves to explore, many can be accessed freely by experienced cavers but there are several open to the public with guided tours the best being Grutas de Mira de Aire. With parking, bar and restaurant and waterslide park it is an ideal day out for the family.
If you like walking or hiking then you have come to the right place. There are recognised walks that start right at the villa or you can take a short car journey to dozens of others. You can also join a group, they organise short and long walks weekly, a great opportunity to meet people also.
Know as the Venice of Portugal. Situated on a massive lagoon Aveiro is intersected by canals, genuine streets of water, along which can be seen gliding the brightly coloured boats known as barcos moliceiros. Originally founded in the time of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Aveiro is now one of the most interesting cities on the Portuguese coast. 15 best things to do in Aveiro.
On the high banks of the Mondego River, Coimbra is a city with the oldest university in the country. The prestige of this school will hit you when you step onto the Paço das Escolas courtyard. In this rich ensemble of buildings is one of the finest libraries you’ll ever set foot in. The university is found precisely where Portugal’s first kings had taken up residence centuries before, and the city’s monasteries have tombs for these rulers. For culture, you’ll learn about the tragic love affair between the medieval Prince Pedro I and the noblewoman Inês, while Coimbra has its own genre of fado music that also originated at the university. 15 best things to do in Coimbra.
Lisbon and nearby
An hours drive from the villa park up and use public transport from there, though traffic can be heavy and parking not cheap. Better still park you car in one of the free car parks in Caldas da Rainha and take a coach from the bus station to Lisbon, Rede Express, it takes and hour and ten minutes and there over 20 trips each way every day, tickets are very reasonable. The coach will drop you at one of two stations where you can embark on public transport and see the sights or a show. 25 best things to do in Lisbon.
Quake is home to the story of the most extraordinary event: on the morning of the 1st of November 1755, an extremely violent earthquake destroyed Lisbon, followed by a tsunami and ranging fires that lasted a week. By entering in this experience you will feel and see the impact the earthquake had on the city and its people. Quake – Lisbon Earthquake Centre is located near to Avenida da Índia, in the historic area of Belém. The best way to get to Quake is by public transport – bus, train or tram, which connect the area to many points in the city of Lisbon and the other side of the river.
A large main aquarium, holding 5 million litres of seawater.
Four marine habitats create the illusion of a single aquarium and a sole ocean.
This exhibition features terrestrial and marine ecosystems, as well as the temperate, tropical and cold waters of the Earth’s oceans.No vacation in Portugal would be complete without a day or more in Sintra. Just an hours drive from the villa. Sintra, the Moon Hill, is a place full of magic and mystery, where nature and man have combined in such a perfect symbiosis that UNESCO has granted it Word Heritage Site status. You can make your own way to visit as many palaces as you like or join a tour 15 best Sintra tours.
Time Out Market Lisboa is a food hall located in the Mercado da Ribeira at Cais do Sodré in Lisbon, Portugal. With 26 restaurants, 8 bars, a dozen shops and a high-end music venue, all with the very best in Lisbon (the best steak, the best hamburger, the best sushi and the best live performances, amongst others); home to some of the city’s best known (and longest-running) market vendors of meat, fish, fruit and flowers.
Today, together, both sides are proud of having turned the building, its immediate surroundings and the whole Cais do Sodré neighbourhood into a huge attraction for visitors, day and night. Where: Av. 24 de Julho 49, 1200-479 Lisboa
When well-heeled Lisboans need a change of airs in summer they go west to Cascais. At this beach getaway you can bathe in transparent waters at peaceful coves.
Portugal’s royal family holidayed at Cascais at the turn of the 20th century, and that glamour has never faded: The president spends his summer in a palace beside the marina, while neighbouring Estoril has an enormous casino once frequented by the jet set. There are elegant parks, noble mansions replete with precious furnishings and a superb art museum for Paula Rego. 15 best things to do in Cascais
More Day Trips
On the slopes above the Douro Estuary, Porto is a historic mercantile city with business and trade written into its very name. The centre is a World Heritage site, and you’ll be struck by how rich and varied this heritage can be: There are medieval walls, gleaming Baroque churches, the compact streets of the Ribeira district, the Romanesque Cathedral and that’s just the beginning. Fortified port wine is still stored in warehouses on the south bank of the Douro, and if you track the river to the ocean you arrive at the stylish Foz do Douro district for beaches and hip restaurants. 25 Best things to do in Porto
The most exciting 516 meters of your life!
Come live the experience of crossing a pedestrian bridge suspension over one of the wildest rivers in Europe, Paiva River.
Witness a true engineering prodigy and be dazzled by a landscape inserted in a UNESCO Global Geopark.
Here nature reigns. Discovering this village means diving into the magical world of Serra da Lousã and immersing yourself in lush vegetation where deer, roe deer, wild boar and many other species lurk.
There are several ancient villages built entirely out of Xisto, Schist (a type of slate), Talasnal has been, for a long time, “the” Schist Village of Serra da Lousã it has given more visibility and charisma to the whole. For its size and layout, but also for the many details of the restoration of its houses and for the way the village seduces us through it’s gastronomy. Other Xisto villages within a short drive or hike from Lousa, Cerdeira, Candal, Catarredor, Casal Nova, Cadaval cimeiro, Pena, Aigra Velha. All these villages are connected by trails.
#CentralPortugal #NorthOfLisbon #SilverCoast #TouristInformation #TouristInformationPortugal
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Just like McDonald’s in the past, Febreze carefully watches their language.
What was/is McDonald’s guilty of in their advertisements? It’s “made with 100% pure beef,” for its hamburgers.
Now obviously a burger isn’t all beef. There are the bun and condiment parts of the burger. That’s why they have the “made with” part.
But the patty isn’t 100% pure beef either because McDonald’s for sure adds salt to their meat which a simple taste can easily show. It’s likely that they add binder/filler, possibly eggs, as well. As long as they add 100% pure beef to this other stuff, they haven’t lied in their advertisements.
Similarly, Febreze “eliminates odours”. Febreze doesn’t eliminate 100% of odours. It “eliminates odours”. This could mean it eliminates 5% of odours or 95% of odours. We don’t really know, because Febreze never tells us.
Because they are watching their language it is kind of hard to tell. But I’m willing to meet Febreze halfway and say that their product eliminates 50% of odours.
Which explains why they never release an unscented version of their product. If they did, we would be able to tell easily that this product doesn’t get rid of all odours. The scent covers up what ever odours haven’t been eliminated.
And an unscented odour eliminator would be a guaranteed seller. There are large amounts of people who are bothered by the scents of certain products. They would buy the scent free odour eliminator in droves. If it got rid of all odour.
Also, Febreze uses the term “noseblind” in other ads. That’s when, through long exposure, you become immune to certain odours. Well I can easily think up a scary Halloween horror story for this.
What if our farts don’t dissipate, what if we just become noseblind to them? That would mean that every fart we’ve made in our current house is still there.
Yes, I know if we go out for a few hours, then come back inside, most odours that we are noseblind to will come back, and we’ll notice them again. Maybe it just takes longer for us to become aware of old farts again. Maybe it takes years.
But wouldn’t that mean that outside visitors would smell the built up farts immediately after coming over to our home?
Well they fart too and the buildup of farts in their house might average out to the same smell as the buildup of farts in our house, So we are mutually noseblind to the smell.
Now if an alien came to our door, his first words would be “Your place stinks really, really badly. So badly in fact that I have to leave!”
Ever notice that haunted houses are inevitably old houses. Maybe the buildup of enough bad farts becomes a truly evil spirit and that’s why those places are haunted. And maybe, just maybe for a haunting, you might be able to get rid of it with a few squirts of Febreze. I can see it now. Every exorcist needs Febreze. Maybe that could be their next slogan.
https://larryrusswurm.com/2023/10/28/the-horror-of-febreze/
#EliminatesOdours_ #MadeWith100PureBeef_ #Noseblind_ #advertisements #aliensWouldShunUs #exorcist #Febreze #hauntedHousesAreUsuallyOldHouses #manyPeopleBotheredByArtificialScents #McDonaldS #McDonaldSPattiesForSureHaveSaltAddedToBeef #NoUnscentedVersionsOfFebreze #noseblindToFarts #whatIfFartsDonTDissipate_
-
Just like McDonald’s in the past, Febreze carefully watches their language.
What was/is McDonald’s guilty of in their advertisements? It’s “made with 100% pure beef,” for its hamburgers.
Now obviously a burger isn’t all beef. There are the bun and condiment parts of the burger. That’s why they have the “made with” part.
But the patty isn’t 100% pure beef either because McDonald’s for sure adds salt to their meat which a simple taste can easily show. It’s likely that they add binder/filler, possibly eggs, as well. As long as they add 100% pure beef to this other stuff, they haven’t lied in their advertisements.
Similarly, Febreze “eliminates odours”. Febreze doesn’t eliminate 100% of odours. It “eliminates odours”. This could mean it eliminates 5% of odours or 95% of odours. We don’t really know, because Febreze never tells us.
Because they are watching their language it is kind of hard to tell. But I’m willing to meet Febreze halfway and say that their product eliminates 50% of odours.
Which explains why they never release an unscented version of their product. If they did, we would be able to tell easily that this product doesn’t get rid of all odours. The scent covers up what ever odours haven’t been eliminated.
And an unscented odour eliminator would be a guaranteed seller. There are large amounts of people who are bothered by the scents of certain products. They would buy the scent free odour eliminator in droves. If it got rid of all odour.
Also, Febreze uses the term “noseblind” in other ads. That’s when, through long exposure, you become immune to certain odours. Well I can easily think up a scary Halloween horror story for this.
What if our farts don’t dissipate, what if we just become noseblind to them? That would mean that every fart we’ve made in our current house is still there.
Yes, I know if we go out for a few hours, then come back inside, most odours that we are noseblind to will come back, and we’ll notice them again. Maybe it just takes longer for us to become aware of old farts again. Maybe it takes years.
But wouldn’t that mean that outside visitors would smell the built up farts immediately after coming over to our home?
Well they fart too and the buildup of farts in their house might average out to the same smell as the buildup of farts in our house, So we are mutually noseblind to the smell.
Now if an alien came to our door, his first words would be “Your place stinks really, really badly. So badly in fact that I have to leave!”
Ever notice that haunted houses are inevitably old houses. Maybe the buildup of enough bad farts becomes a truly evil spirit and that’s why those places are haunted. And maybe, just maybe for a haunting, you might be able to get rid of it with a few squirts of Febreze. I can see it now. Every exorcist needs Febreze. Maybe that could be their next slogan.
https://larryrusswurm.com/2023/10/28/the-horror-of-febreze/
#EliminatesOdours_ #MadeWith100PureBeef_ #Noseblind_ #advertisements #aliensWouldShunUs #exorcist #Febreze #hauntedHousesAreUsuallyOldHouses #manyPeopleBotheredByArtificialScents #McDonaldS #McDonaldSPattiesForSureHaveSaltAddedToBeef #NoUnscentedVersionsOfFebreze #noseblindToFarts #whatIfFartsDonTDissipate_
-
Just like McDonald’s in the past, Febreze carefully watches their language.
What was/is McDonald’s guilty of in their advertisements? It’s “made with 100% pure beef,” for its hamburgers.
Now obviously a burger isn’t all beef. There are the bun and condiment parts of the burger. That’s why they have the “made with” part.
But the patty isn’t 100% pure beef either because McDonald’s for sure adds salt to their meat which a simple taste can easily show. It’s likely that they add binder/filler, possibly eggs, as well. As long as they add 100% pure beef to this other stuff, they haven’t lied in their advertisements.
Similarly, Febreze “eliminates odours”. Febreze doesn’t eliminate 100% of odours. It “eliminates odours”. This could mean it eliminates 5% of odours or 95% of odours. We don’t really know, because Febreze never tells us.
Because they are watching their language it is kind of hard to tell. But I’m willing to meet Febreze halfway and say that their product eliminates 50% of odours.
Which explains why they never release an unscented version of their product. If they did, we would be able to tell easily that this product doesn’t get rid of all odours. The scent covers up what ever odours haven’t been eliminated.
And an unscented odour eliminator would be a guaranteed seller. There are large amounts of people who are bothered by the scents of certain products. They would buy the scent free odour eliminator in droves. If it got rid of all odour.
Also, Febreze uses the term “noseblind” in other ads. That’s when, through long exposure, you become immune to certain odours. Well I can easily think up a scary Halloween horror story for this.
What if our farts don’t dissipate, what if we just become noseblind to them? That would mean that every fart we’ve made in our current house is still there.
Yes, I know if we go out for a few hours, then come back inside, most odours that we are noseblind to will come back, and we’ll notice them again. Maybe it just takes longer for us to become aware of old farts again. Maybe it takes years.
But wouldn’t that mean that outside visitors would smell the built up farts immediately after coming over to our home?
Well they fart too and the buildup of farts in their house might average out to the same smell as the buildup of farts in our house, So we are mutually noseblind to the smell.
Now if an alien came to our door, his first words would be “Your place stinks really, really badly. So badly in fact that I have to leave!”
Ever notice that haunted houses are inevitably old houses. Maybe the buildup of enough bad farts becomes a truly evil spirit and that’s why those places are haunted. And maybe, just maybe for a haunting, you might be able to get rid of it with a few squirts of Febreze. I can see it now. Every exorcist needs Febreze. Maybe that could be their next slogan.
https://larryrusswurm.com/2023/10/28/the-horror-of-febreze/
#EliminatesOdours_ #MadeWith100PureBeef_ #Noseblind_ #advertisements #aliensWouldShunUs #exorcist #Febreze #hauntedHousesAreUsuallyOldHouses #manyPeopleBotheredByArtificialScents #McDonaldS #McDonaldSPattiesForSureHaveSaltAddedToBeef #NoUnscentedVersionsOfFebreze #noseblindToFarts #whatIfFartsDonTDissipate_
-
Just like McDonald’s in the past, Febreze carefully watches their language.
What was/is McDonald’s guilty of in their advertisements? It’s “made with 100% pure beef,” for its hamburgers.
Now obviously a burger isn’t all beef. There are the bun and condiment parts of the burger. That’s why they have the “made with” part.
But the patty isn’t 100% pure beef either because McDonald’s for sure adds salt to their meat which a simple taste can easily show. It’s likely that they add binder/filler, possibly eggs, as well. As long as they add 100% pure beef to this other stuff, they haven’t lied in their advertisements.
Similarly, Febreze “eliminates odours”. Febreze doesn’t eliminate 100% of odours. It “eliminates odours”. This could mean it eliminates 5% of odours or 95% of odours. We don’t really know, because Febreze never tells us.
Because they are watching their language it is kind of hard to tell. But I’m willing to meet Febreze halfway and say that their product eliminates 50% of odours.
Which explains why they never release an unscented version of their product. If they did, we would be able to tell easily that this product doesn’t get rid of all odours. The scent covers up what ever odours haven’t been eliminated.
And an unscented odour eliminator would be a guaranteed seller. There are large amounts of people who are bothered by the scents of certain products. They would buy the scent free odour eliminator in droves. If it got rid of all odour.
Also, Febreze uses the term “noseblind” in other ads. That’s when, through long exposure, you become immune to certain odours. Well I can easily think up a scary Halloween horror story for this.
What if our farts don’t dissipate, what if we just become noseblind to them? That would mean that every fart we’ve made in our current house is still there.
Yes, I know if we go out for a few hours, then come back inside, most odours that we are noseblind to will come back, and we’ll notice them again. Maybe it just takes longer for us to become aware of old farts again. Maybe it takes years.
But wouldn’t that mean that outside visitors would smell the built up farts immediately after coming over to our home?
Well they fart too and the buildup of farts in their house might average out to the same smell as the buildup of farts in our house, So we are mutually noseblind to the smell.
Now if an alien came to our door, his first words would be “Your place stinks really, really badly. So badly in fact that I have to leave!”
Ever notice that haunted houses are inevitably old houses. Maybe the buildup of enough bad farts becomes a truly evil spirit and that’s why those places are haunted. And maybe, just maybe for a haunting, you might be able to get rid of it with a few squirts of Febreze. I can see it now. Every exorcist needs Febreze. Maybe that could be their next slogan.
https://larryrusswurm.com/2023/10/28/the-horror-of-febreze/
#EliminatesOdours_ #MadeWith100PureBeef_ #Noseblind_ #advertisements #aliensWouldShunUs #exorcist #Febreze #hauntedHousesAreUsuallyOldHouses #manyPeopleBotheredByArtificialScents #McDonaldS #McDonaldSPattiesForSureHaveSaltAddedToBeef #NoUnscentedVersionsOfFebreze #noseblindToFarts #whatIfFartsDonTDissipate_
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**A fresh load of finished audio fiction! Prestige & The Lesser Dead + 4 complete series, 2 season finales, and 4 new seasons coming soon! 🎧😄
- The End #50**Yesterday, the 50th issue of The End, the weekly newsletter that shines a light back on audio fiction shows after they've reached the finale of a season or the conclusion of the series, was sent to 1,537 inboxes around the world. If your inbox wasn’t one of them, here’s what you missed:
### Featured Audio Fiction
These are my personal recommendations for great audio fiction. As with all things in life, YMMV.
🇭🇹👗🏰 • Prestige, a nicely done bit of international historical fiction that is all too familiar from Raenbo Media (1 season, 8 episodes | 1h 25m)
🧛🕺🗽 • The Lesser Dead, a dramatized thriller from Echoverse & SALT that’s packed with pro talent and no sparkly vampires—just some funky ones. And wow... what an ending! (Complete, 1 season, 8 episodes | 3h 53m)
### Complete Stories
These shows have reached the end of the entire story so that you can enjoy the whole tale all at once!
👩🏿💻💜🤖 • Life With LEO(h), a romantic comedy from Octavia Bray & Atypical Artists (2 seasons, 18 episodes | 7h 04m - It was created and directed by Black women and features a primarily POC cast as well as many queer characters.)
🤠 ☠️🏺 • Skulls and Treasure, a dramatized adventure from Amy Thorstenson & Littlest Viking Productions (4 episodes | 3h 31m - Skulls & Treasure is both a love letter to the Indiana Jones franchise and also a re-examination of the franchise for the 21st century.)
### Season Finales
These shows have reached the end of a season, but more seasons are in the works:
🌌💪🪖 • Mud 79 - A Fan Made Star Wars Story, a dramatized scifi from Fearless Fred Kennedy & Curiouscast (12 episodes | 8h 58m - It features a diverse cast and all advertising dollars earned by Fred Kennedy goes to Make A Wish Foundation.)
🕵️♀️🖌️🇨🇭 • Blum, a dramatized mystery mockumentary from El Extraordinario (9 episodes | 3h 16m - It is a Spanish-to-English release. With backing from Switzerland Tourism, this is El Extraordinario's first venture into English language as a Spain-based shop.)
🌔☠️🕵️♂️ • Homicide at Heavensgate, a dramatized scifi mystery tale from Sentinel Studios (6 episodes | 3h 5m - One of the lead characters is a detective with Dwarfism, and is played by a actor with Dwarfism.)
🌆🫂🛟 • You Feeling This, a dramatized slice-of-life “podcast mixtape” from James Kim & Overtones Media (13 episodes | 4h 01m - The majority of the cast, crew, writers and performers are all PoC, identify as LGBTQ+, women. It debuted at Tribeca Festival.)
💋🔪🙅🏾♂️ • Kiss: The Audio Series, a dramatized erotic thriller from Xperience J & Shhh! Jus' Listen Media @[email protected] (1 season, 7 episodes | 1h 58m - BIPOC Podcast)
🤖 🔬💥 • Dear Earth, I'm Really Sorry, a dramatized scifi comedy from Amy Thorstenson & Littlest Viking Productions (1 season, 8 episodes | 7h 19m - Highlights queer and women's voices in the often male-dominated realm of scifi.)
### New Seasons Coming Soon
Get caught up on the prior finished seasons of this show before it starts up again soon!
Season 4 of Old Gods of Appalachia, a narrated horror from DeepNerd Media & Rusty Quill, starts on 24 Aug 2023 (27h 15m for Season 3) 🧑🌾🧺👹
Season 2 of The Royals of Malibu, a dramatized fiction from Diversion Audio & Pod People, starts on 28 Aug 2023 (6h 21m for Season 1) 🌆💵💦
Season 2 of Mansfield Mysteries @mansfield_mysteries, a dramatized comedy mystery from The QuaranTeam Group, starts on 15 Sep 2023 (3h 29m for Season 1) 🍸🔪🔎
Season 2 of Project Pulse, a dramatized cyberpunk from Eyes Shut Studio, starts on 15 Sep 2023 (2h 01m for Season 1) ⚔️🎮♿️
Check out the 50th issue for links to listen, descriptions, artwork, and more at https://newsletters.theend.fyi/preview/159417/emails/96767726875313481
And have you listened to the companion podcast? It includes trailers, a bit of commentary, and is always short and sweet. Follow along at https://theend.fyi/podcast
That’s it from The End for this week. See you next Friday!
#AudioDrama #FictionPodcast #AudioFiction #podcast #FictionFriday #BeFound #HotAF @AudioFiction @FinalesandCompletions
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Around Craigentinny: the thread about Scots, English, Gaelic, Dutch, Cornish and Irish origins of suburban streetnames
I recently wrote a thread about the meanings of the street names on the old Easter Duddingston estate, and how nearly all are linked to the Abercorn family. So now it is the time to boldly stray north of Moira Terrace and the Portobello Road to see what lies on the other side and where its street names come from (spoiler: it’s Craigentinny, and once again they come almost entirely from one family!)
By Craigentinny I mean the area defined by the old estate on that name, which was itself the eastern portion of the older Barony of Restalrig. The origins of Craigentinny are somewhat obscure but the most frequently told version says it was land acquired by one James Nisbet1 from the Logans of Restalrig in 1604. Here he built a tower house (or improved an existing one) which for reasons known to himself Christened Craigentinny. The roots of that name are Gaelic but the precise meaning is lost to time, the usual explanation is Creag an t’Sionnaich or Fox Rock. You can read a bit more on the origins and history of the house over at Stravaiging Around Scotland.
Craigentinny House, much modified in a Scottish Baronial Revival style in Victorian times, c. 1880. © Edinburgh City LibrariesAfter 160 years in hands of various Nisbets the house and estate was bought in 1762 by William Miller (1722-1799), a wealthy Quaker seed merchant from the Canongate who was known locally as “King of the Quakers“. He had a single surviving son late in life by his third wife, his heir William Henry Miller. William Henry inherited on his father’s death in 1799.
- James Nisbet (1557-1621), son of Henry Nisbet of Dean, established the Nisbet of Craigentinny line.
He was followed by his son Sir Henry Nisbet (1584-1667), who was followed by his 4th son Sir Patrick Nisbet (1623-1682). Patrick exchanged titles with his cousin – Sir Alexander Nisbet of Dean – in 1672 with the latter becoming Sir Alexander Nisbet of Craigentinny (1630-1682). He was succeeded by his second son, Capt. Alexander Nisbet (1688-1735), his eldest son Sir William having succeeded instead to the Nisbet of Dirleton line. The former did not have a male heir, so Craigentinny passed via Alexander’s sister – Christian Nisbet (1692-1738) – to his nephew John Scott (1729-1764), the oldest grandson of Sir Alexander Nisbet. John took the double-barrelled surname Scott-Nisbet to inherit the title and sold Craigentinny to William Miller the Quaker in 1762, whose father already possessed Fillyside Farm on the estate. ↩︎
The image below shows the 1847 estate boundary, which was altered slightly when the North British Railway came through this district to make sure there were no isolated parts of Craigentinny or Duddingston on the respectively wrong side of the tracks.
Outline of the Craigentinny estate (and surrounding principal estates) projected onto a modern 2023 aerial photo.William Henry Miller became MP for Newcastle-Under-Lyme in 1830, spending most of his time on an estate he purchased in England, where he set about amassing one of the most important book collections of its time. It is he who is buried far beneath the magnificent Craigentinny Marbles mausoleum on his Edinburgh estate, which you will find sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the 1930s bungalows of Craigentinny Crescent.
The Craigentinny Marbles, CC-by-SA 4.0 BlackpuddinonabikeWhen William Henry Miller died in 1848 he was unmarried and without heir (there are baseless antiquarian rumours that he may have been variously a Roman Catholic, adopted, a woman or even intersex, but those are beside the point here). His will disbarred his closest relations from inheriting and the estate was instead bequeathed to his “nieces” or “cousins”, Sarah and Ellen Marsh, who continued to lived at Britwell and Craigentinny. There is an unsolved mystery as to the precise relation of the Marsh sisters to Miller; they certainly weren’t direct relations and may instead have been close companions of his Mother. The sisters had to defend the will in court – there were years of legal wrangling and competing claims by other Miller relative – before they could inherit. When they did, the Lord Lyon granted them the use of the Miller title and arms.
On the death of the surviving sister, Ellen, the estate was inherited by a distant cousin of the Millers, Samuel Christy. He was an English hatter from the well known firm Christy & Co. and also a Quaker. As part of his inheritance Samuel formally changed his surname to Christy-Miller. This was was soon changed to the Scottish form of Christie-Miller (the Christys were, after all, descendants of an Aberdeen Christie).
Cover of “One Hundred and Seventy Five Years of the House of Christy” by Arthur Sadler FRSANote that some sources will tell you that William Henry Miller was also known as Christiemiller; that’s patently not true. He died in 1848, and Samuel Christy didn’t fully inherit and change his name until fourteen years after his death in 1862! To confuse matters further, Samuel also had an unrelated uncle called William Miller Christy! It was this establishment of the new family name of Christie-Miller that gives us our first street name on this local history tour – Christiemiller Avenue (and later Place and Grove), which was developed from 1931 onwards.
Christiemiller Avenue, Place and Grove highlighted. 1944-45 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandSamuel Christie-Miller was predeceased by his only son so Craigentinny passed to his nephew Wakefield Christy in 1889, who thus became Wakefield Christie-Miller and gives his name to Wakefield Avenue. (Wakefield being his mother’s maiden name.)
Wakefield Avenue highlighted. 1944-45 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAt the other end of the bungalow belt from Wakefield Avenue is Britwell Crescent. Britwell is a medieval Cambridgeshire name (from Bright Well) and it was where William Henry Miller had bought the estate and house of Britwell Place as his southern residence on becoming an MP in 1830. It was here where Miller built a library for his book collection in a purpose-built, fireproof wing. This property passed via the Marsh sisters to the Christie-Millers and is now known as Grenville Court.
Britwell Place, now Grenville Court, site of William Henry Miller’s libraryMoving east through Craigentinny again, we come to Sydney Terrace, Place and Park. These are named for Sydney Richardson Christie-Miller, who inherited the estate in 1898 on the death of his father Wakefield.
Sydney Terrace, Place and Park highlighted. 1944-45 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBordering these last streets are Vandeleur Avenue, Grove and Place, which are named for Evelyn Vandeleur, wife of Sydney. She was of the Anglo-Irish gentry but Vandeleur is an old Dutch and Flemish name – Van de Laer or Vanderloo means one who lives in a grove. There have been Vandeleurs in Kilrush, Co. Clare, since Oliver Cromwell’s time. That Dutch / Flemish connection is highly unusual in Edinburgh place names (it may be unique!) and I think we can say the same of the next street along, Kekewich Avenue, which is Cornish! The connection here is that the Christie-Miller family lawyer when this street was formed was one C. Granville Kekewich, esq.
General Sir John Ormsby Vandeleur, great Grandfather of Evelyn Vandeleur. By William Salter, pre-1849. National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG3762.Up from Kekewich is the solidly Scottish Bryce Avenue and Grove. Andrew Bryce of Southside Bank Farm was the estate factor for the Christie-Millers. His Victorian farmhouse still exists, hiding in plain site between Vandeleur and Kekewich Avenues off the Portobello Road.
Southside Bank Farmhouse, also known as Craigentinny MainsOff of Bryce is Goff Avenue. Goff is from the Anglo-Irish wing of the Christie-Miller family again, from the English Goffe or Gough – Wakefield Christie-Miller’s youngest son was Edward Goff Christie-Miller. The Goff branch descended from Major General William Goffe, or William the Regicide, a parliamentarian army officer and Cromwell loyalist who had put his seal and signature on the death warrant of King Charles I. This connection again may be unique in Edinburgh street names.
William Goffe’s signature and seal on the death warrant of King Charles I. Parliamentary Archives, HL/PO/JO/10/1/297AIn the northern sector of the Craigentinny Bungalowopolis we find Nantwich Drive and Stapeley Avenue. Both are Cheshire placenames: Stapheley House in Nantwich was bought by the Christie-Millers in 1910 and Geoffrey Christie-Miller settled there. It was turned over to a war hospital in 1914-18. Geoffrey, another of Wakefield’s sons, was a decorated war hero in that conflict with the Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry. He and his wife honeymooned at Craigentinny House in 1908 and he took an active interest in the running of the Craigentinny estate and family hat business
Geoffrey Christie-Miller, 1881-1969 Buckinghamshire County Archives Roll of Honour.The last 2 streets with Christie-Miller connections lie to the south of Moira Terrace: Parker Road / Avenue / Terrace and Farrer Terrace and Grove. Christopher Parker and Helen Farrer were parents-in-law to Sydney Christie-Miller’s brother Charles and were godparents to a number of his children.
Parker and Farrer street names highlighted. 1944-45 OS Town Plan of Edinburgh. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandAll of these streets are part of the bungalow belt sprawl (although there are some earlier Edwardian villa flats) dating from around 1934 and on the lands of the Southside Bank and Fillyside Bank farms. But the estate had a third farm in addition to these, that of Wheatfield. The Georgian farmhouse of Wheatfield is another of those “oh, I didn’t realise I’d been looking at it the whole time” buildings, it’s just down from the Marbles, set back far enough from Moira Terrace behind a tall, gateless wall to be quite unobtrusive and it does not lend its name to any streets.
Wheatfield farmhouse off of Moira Terrace.Much of the lands of the farm of Wheatfield were purchased by the Corporation of Edinburgh in 1932, along with Craigentinny House and its gardens, the old Piershill Barracks and Piersfield portion of the Parson’s Green Estate for council housing and a new school. These streets were given Loganlea and Loaning names. The former comes from Loganes Ley, a field elsewhere on the old Logan Restalrig barony where the wappenschaw took place: the muster and demonstration of men and their weaponry who were obliged to perform military service for the town or laird. The latter street names come from loaning, a generic and common old Scots placename; a loan being a lane, and a loaning implying a public right of way along it. This refers to the old route across the Craigentinny Meadows, which began at the gates of Craigentinny House.
Loganlea council housingThe Craigetinny Loaning lead across those “Irrigated Meadows” to the farm of Fillyside Bank. Most of the land of this farm was not built upon for housing, it instead was developed to form the Craigentinny Golf Course, with portions containing a Corporation refuse depot and sewage pumping station and the Meadows Yard railway sidings.
Kirkwood’s 1817 Town Plan, with Craigentinny House and Fillyside Bank farm highlighted. The loaning runs between the two. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandBut there was some bungalow building on the farmland, inclduing the streets of Fillyside Road, Terrace and Avenue. Fillysydebank, also known as Greenbank, is first mentioned in 1553. It was also at times the East Mains and North Mains of Restalrig. Filly- comes from the Scots Falu-, a topographical descriptor for “yellowish” land. There is yet another old house hiding in plain site nearby, off Seafield Street, that takes the name Fillyside. However it took this purely as a loan when it was built in 1810 and was never on the Nisbet / Miller / Christie-Miller Craigentinny estate land, but just over the boundary from it.
Fillyside House, as seen from Seafield StreetNote to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
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#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret - James Nisbet (1557-1621), son of Henry Nisbet of Dean, established the Nisbet of Craigentinny line.
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CW: CW: surgical procedures, period talk, pregnancy talk, discussion of bodies and eating habits
I had an orchidectomy about 2 months ago.
Prior to that, my HRT wasn't working properly because even on double the spiro, my T levels weren't dropping. God only knows what my T levels were like pre-blockers. So after an entire year of going to the bathroom every 90 minutes and actively restricting my fluid intake while also eating eyewatering amounts of salt, I booked the procedure and paid the $4000 and spent several days on the couch while my partner looked after me.
I haven't had my T levels checked since, but I can tell that the hormonal changes are taking hold much more strongly. My skin's softer, my hair's changed texture, and there's stuff going on in the swimsuit areas as well.
The thing is though, that while I sort of got the baby version of a period as of like February, I've been getting the full experience (minus the bleeding because I'm not a uterus owner) this month. Don't get me wrong, it's great to feel like your body's actually doing what it's supposed to for the first time in your life, but I was not expecting to sit down on the couch this morning to watch some old episodes of Masterchef and to start crying because the judges were being mean. Also, big shout-out to my body for deciding that we're on a 21 day cycle.
The other really interesting thing that happened this month was that I was like "hmm I'd actually really like to be a surrogate for queer people who can't have kids of their own". Fortunately that might be a reality for me in the future because the RWH in Sydney has formally declared that they'll be looking to do uterus transplants within the next 5 years, which gives me plenty of time to get GCS. It's wild actually, I don't want kids of my own but I can think of a shitload of queer folks who'd make amazing parents. I'm a big advocate of adoption as well, but I don't think queer people should be told "if you want kids you have to adopt". It's rude to the parents and rude to the kids.
When the egg cracked in 2021, I was like "no I think I'm just going to transition in terms of presentation, I don't think I'm considering surgery". I wasn't getting huge amounts of dysphoria from my body, but that all changed when I realised my eating disorder was fueled by dysphoria. Fast-forward by 2.5 years though, and everything's changed, but I don't think this was as simple as "Kita changes her mind", and I can't help but think that this is also one of the things that conservatives are a bit scared of with the Trans Agenda; there's an amount of radical honesty that's required when you're examining the world and your own place within it, and when you start going "oh being forced into this role because of the body I got assigned at birth kind of sucks actually" you start looking at all the other areas that people are being hurt by being forced into roles, but that's a whole other area and I have a brunch with my besties to get to.
#trans #transfemme #transfemmeenby -
The thread about Marionville; the house that thread built and home to the unfortunate “Fortunate Duellist”
There’s an old Georgian villa in the east of Edinburgh called Marionville. It lends its name to the district, a few streets and a fire station. It’s your typical regular, 3-storey, 5-bay, 6-over-6 window, sandstone job and although it is quite a rarity in a largely 20th century part of town, at first glance it is otherwise unremarkable for Edinburgh.
Marionville. Cc-BY-SA Kim TraynorUnremarkable that is until you find out a little bit about the place’s history! It was built some time between the 1760s and 1780s by the Misses Ramsay of Old Lyon Close, milliners renowned in the burgh for their ribboned hats. When built it was called Viewfrith (as in a house where one could view the Frith, or Firth of Forth. On account of its occupants trade, it was scornfully nicknamed the Lappet Ha‘, lappet referring to the woven lacework that was common in Georgian women’s hats. Ha’ for ball; the house that lappet built. The misses Ramsay saw out their days in their fine house and its gardens, and in October 1780 it was noted as being for sale:
Sale notice for Viewfrith, Caledonian Mercury, October 16 1780About 1786 it passed to one James Macrae of Holmains Esq. who liked to be known as Captain Macrae on account of his service in the 6th Dragoon Guards (Irish Carabiniers), a Hanoverian cavalry regiment. By accounts he was both a sophisticated, cultured charmer and an arrogant, pompous “Goth“. It was Macrae who renamed the house, calling it for his wife, Maria Cecile le Maistre.
Uniforms of horsemen of the Irish Carabiniers (6th Dragoon Guards)Captain Macrae had a quick temper and an overinflated sense of his own status. He was nicknamed the “fortunate duellist” on account of his propensity to call for satisfaction and on not being dead as a result. He practised by firing at a barber’s block kept specially for the purpose, or so John Kay caricatured him.
“The Fortunate Duellist”: caricature of Captain Macrae with an inset image of him practising duelling with the barber’s block, from “Original Portraits and Caricature Etchings” by John Kay, 1799The Macraes soon built up a reputation as a home of the “gayest private theatricals, perhaps in Britain“. Being wealthy and aspirational with tastes “gay and fashionable” they had a 150-seat private theatre built, complete with stage, curtain and scenery in the house where the couple themselves took the starring roles. The great and the good of Edinburgh were invited and the shows were a hot ticket in town, being well reviewed in the papers. The Scots Magazine and Caledonian Mercury were full of gushing praise for them.
Edinburgh Advertiser, May 9 1789Maria Macrae was the daughter of the Swedish ambassador’s wife and had spent time in Paris with her cousins. It was there she got a taste for the private theatricals of the time and it was she who was chiefly responsible for reproducing them at Marionville. The Macrae’s inner circle was a centre of Georgian high fashion in Edinburgh, the women wore head-dresses so tall that they had to “sit on the carriage floor” and the men wore “bright coats with tails to their heels” and “wigs with great side curls“. The innermost of their circle were the Ramsays (no relation to the Misses), Sir George Ramsay of Bamff, 6th Baronet and his wife, Eleanor Fraser. They were “warmly attached and intimate” with the Macraes.
An engraving of Marionville in happier times from Old & New Edinburgh by James Grant.So all was good. Everyone was happy and Marionville was the place to be seen around town. Macrae was highly regarded in the right circles, but his pomposity and temper would be his unravelling. An example of this was when a messenger of the law tried to arrest his cousin, the Reverend John Cunningham, Earl Glencairn, at a private party in Drumsheugh House. Macrae was outraged that a common man would insult a gentleman, and threw the messenger over the stairwell. When it later came to light that Cunningham was a debtor who had refused all chance to settle his obligations and that the messenger had been gravely injured, Macrae made an apology and paid compensation of 300 guineas to settle the matter.
And then we come to the fateful night of April 7th 1790. Captain Macrae had been out at the Theatre Royal, which stood on Shakespeare Square, opposite the General Register Office and where the General Post Office would later be built. Being a gentleman, he was helping a lady to get a chair to convey her home (this meant a sedan chair; at this time were still the principal form of public transport of choice for the moneyed classes around town). He had secured the lady her chair when a liveried footman appeared on the scene and seized one of the poles of the chair to reserve it for his mistress. The outraged Macrae rapped the impertinent servant’s knuckles with his cane.
The Theatre Royal on Shakespeare Square, the corner of Princes Street, North Bridge, Leith Street and what is now Waterloo Place. John Le Conte, 1857. Credit; Edinburgh City LibrariesThe footman, not to be cowed, denounced Macrae as a scoundrel and punched him in the chest. Macrae responded by striking him across the head with his cane. An almighty fracas ensued, sucking in passers-by on both sides. Somehow the conflict was defused and the lady was spirited to safety in another chair. And there it might have ended until Macrae was made aware that the footman in question was an employee of his dear friend, Sir George Ramsay.
A Georgian cartoon of a drunken gentleman fighting with a coachman and footman. Isaac Cruikshank, 1809. © The Trustees of the British MuseumAnd so, the following day Macrae sought out Ramsay at his place of business. His friend informed him that the servant in question was recently engaged by his wife and he felt that he had no hand in the matter. Macrae insisted that he would therefore apologise to the lady at once. Hurrying to the Ramsay’s house on St. Andrew Square, he found her sitting for an up and coming your artist, one Henry Raeburn. Theatrically going down on one knee, Macrae begged forgiveness for having chastised her servant. And there it would have ended. But…
A few days later at Marionville, an anonymous letter arrived stating that Macrae had meddled with the “Knights of the Shoulder Knot” (the name given to footmen for their elaborate uniforms) and they would have their revenge for the insult to their brother. The footman in question, James Merry, took the matter further by making it known he would take legal proceedings against his assailant for the injuries he had suffered. Piqued, Macrae wrote to Ramsay and demanded that the man be put in his place and discharged. For whatever reason, Ramsay declined to satisfy his friend and their relationship quickly soured as the two engaged in a protracted series of increasingly intemperate letters. This culminated in Macrae having his messenger inform Ramsay that he was not a gentleman, but a scoundrel!
Georgian caricature of a foppish, arrogant footman. George Moutard Woodward, 1799. © The Trustees of the British MuseumThat was that! Macrae had overstepped the mark for sure, Ramsay was a proper gentleman, with a title, not someone you could go around insulting. The intermediary, one Captain Amory, arranged a meeting of both parties in Bayle’s Tavern at which “rough epithets were exchanged“. The outcome was inevitable and satisfaction was demanded by Macrae. But he let it be known that he considered Ramsay the challenger, for refusing to deal with his servant.
The time and place was set for the shore outside of Musselburgh at noon the next day. What better place to settle your differences than in the cool sea breeze of the Honest Toun? And so it was that the next day the two gentlemen, each with another in tow as second, met at Wards Inn off of the Musselburgh Links. A surgeon, Benjamin Bell, was sensibly arranged for.
Benjamin Bell (left), following a different duelist on his way to Musselburgh to settle a score. Bell must have been the go-to man for calling to a duel. The woman heading the other way is a salter, carrying her load in a basket, supported by a leather strap around her head. From John Kay’s caricatures, Vol. 2. Credit; Edinburgh City LibrariesA parlay took place to see if things could be settled amicably, without either side losing face. Macrae demanded that if Ramsay dismiss his servant he would apologise profusely for all that had followed and consider it closed. Ramsay demanded an apology first, before any further progress could be made. Both sides were intransigent. The seconds which each side had brought as counsel declined further compromise and the course of action was now set. Each man took a pistol from a pair and made his way to the allotted spot on the Links. Each then walked 14 paces away from the other and the duel commenced. Ramsay shot first and nicked the collar of his late friend, grazing the neck. Macrae did not miss and Ramsay was mortally wounded. Macrae would later claim that he had planned to shoot high and miss on purpose, but was so outraged that Ramsay had not deliberately missed and had drawn blood that he decided to settle the matter once and for all by not missing. For a sure shot like Macrae, the outcome was inevitable.
“The Duel”, a cartoon in the style of Kay by amateur Edinburgh artist J. Jenkins in 1805. CC-BY 4.0 National Library of ScotlandThe deed done, Macrae was suddenly remorseful and had to be convinced to leave his dying friends’ side by Ramsay’s second, Sir William Maxwell. Edinburgh society was outraged and it was Macrae, the lower status gentleman that they squarely blamed for this calamity. Being a proper class scandal, the detail was all printed at the time (then, as now, controversy was good for sales) and Macrae was immortalised as “The Fortunate Duellist” by Edinburgh caricaturist John Kay. By trade Kay was a barber, so the story of the practice target may have appealed to him as much as the chance to satirise events.
Facing a potential murder charge, Macrae abandoned Marionville and his family and fled to Paris accompanied by his second, Captain Amory. They took up lodgings in the Hôtel de la Dauphine. A summons soon arrived from Edinburgh to return and face the law. Ignoring it, both were declared outlaws and consigned themselves to live out their days in exile. To add insult to Macrae’s injury, 2 years later the Sheriffs awarded damages and compensation to the footman for his original injuries, which were paid from Macrae’s estate in his absence. Macrae stayed in Paris until the coming of the French revolution compelled his to flee further, this time to Altona in Italy. He had hoped that the passage of time would allow him to return home to Marionville, but society and the law were resolved against it.
And so it was that the gayest house in town fell into “an air of depression and melancholy such as could barely fail to strike the most unobservant passenger“. It was advertised as being to let in 1793 and the following year it was for sale. Macrae was soon forgotten by the chattering classes of Edinburgh. That is until 1814, when publisher Robert Chambers relates that “a gentleman of my acquaintance was surprised to meet him one day in a Parisian coffee house“. “The wreck or ghost of the handsome, sprightly man he had once been.” “The comfort of his home, his country and his friends, the use of his talents to all these, had been lost, and himself obliged to lead the life of a condemned Cain, all through the one fault of a fiery temper“.
Captain Macrae, late of Marionville, died alone in Paris on the 16th January 1820, 30 years an exile from his home, wife and 2 children. “Captain Macrae was a strange character. To those of his own class a tyrant and bully. To those below him he was kind and obliging”. At this time his old house was in the possession of a Mr and Mrs Dudgeon although it was for sale again shortly after, the new owner being Walter Stirling Glas, esq. The house was repeatedly for sale and let throughout the 19th century. A flick through some old Post Office directories enlightens us that from approximately 1858 to 1869, it was being used by Dr. Guthrie’s “Original Ragged Industrial School” .
In 1932, Marionville was purchased by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Edinburgh and St. Andrews for use as the manse for St. Ninian’s & Triduana’s Church, which was built in the grounds at this time. Its last occupant before the church took it over would appear to be one Miss W. Crawford Brown and the house was sold back into private use within the past few years. The church, which was never actually completed to the intended design, is surprisingly the work of that most British of British architects, Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (of red telephone box and Battersea power station fame).
St. Ninian’s & Triduana’s R.C. church in the grounds of Marionville.Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.
If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.Explore Threadinburgh by map:
Travelers' Map is loading...
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.
NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.
#Lochend #Logan #Restalrig #StMargaret -
Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry
A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.
I want to take the legend apart and see what is left.
The Lattice, in Grinberg’s framing, refuses the picture of space that physics offers. Space, in Syntergic Theory, behaves as a high-coherence informational matrix. The brain produces what he called a “neuronal field” that interacts with the Lattice the way a film negative interacts with a beam of light, decoding a hologram. Reality, in this picture, gets read off a substrate that already contains every point in space, every moment in time, and every state of consciousness. The brain becomes one of many possible decoders. High coherence, the kind Grinberg believed he saw in expert meditators and in the Mexican curandera he studied for years (Bárbara Guerrero, known as Pachita), allowed certain brains to interact with the Lattice directly. Telepathy followed from that interaction. Remote viewing came next. Materialization, in the most extreme reading of Pachita’s psychic surgery, sat at the far end of the same continuum.
This is a beautiful theory. It is also, as stated, almost entirely unfalsifiable.
The temptation, when you encounter writing like this, is to either swallow it whole or dismiss it whole. Both responses are lazy. The work has a testable core and a metaphysical shell, and the two need to be separated before anything useful can be said about either.
The testable core is the transferred potential experiment. Two people interact for twenty minutes. They are placed in electromagnetically shielded rooms separated by a distance that rules out ordinary signaling. Only one subject of each pair is stimulated by one hundred light flashes. An EEG records evoked potentials in the stimulated subject. A second EEG records the unstimulated subject. Grinberg and his coauthors, including the theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, claimed that when the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the nonstimulated subject showed “transferred potentials” similar to those evoked in the stimulated subject. They titled the 1994 paper “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain,” and they proposed that the brain has a macroscopic quantum component capable of nonlocal correlation across distance.
If the effect were real and robust, it would rank among the most important findings in the history of neuroscience. So what does the replication record show?
Leanna Standish and colleagues at Bastyr University and the University of Washington repeated the design in 2003 and 2004, recording simultaneous EEGs from pairs of subjects placed in sound-attenuated rooms separated by ten meters, later extending the work to fMRI. They reported small correlations in some pairs, statistically above chance, broadly consistent with Grinberg’s direction. A 2018 re-analysis by groups at IULM in Milan and the University of Padova, applying machine-learning classifiers to two pooled datasets covering forty-five pairs, found classification accuracies of 50.74 percent on the first dataset and 51.17 percent, 50.45 percent, and 51.91 percent across stimulation conditions on the second. The honest reading of those numbers is that there is, at best, a faint signal above noise, on the order of one to two percent above chance, and that the signal does not hold up under stricter analytical methods. The “one in four pairs” claim from the original paper is the kind of effect size that thins out when sample sizes grow and protocols tighten. The result might be noise. It might be small and real. The data, after thirty years, cannot tell us which.
The Lattice does not announce itself in clean experimental data. What announces itself is a smear of weakly positive results, sensitive to method, sample, and the personal coherence of the experimenters and subjects. A smear of that kind, in any other branch of biology, would be treated as a candidate artifact rather than a candidate discovery.
So where are the weak spots in Grinberg’s argument? I count five.
The first concerns decoherence. Quantum entanglement is fragile. It survives at extremely low temperatures, in highly isolated systems, in laboratories where engineers work for years to prevent contact with the surrounding environment. The human brain operates at 310 Kelvin, immersed in saltwater, packed with thermal vibration and electrochemical traffic. The mainstream physical objection to any macroscopic quantum brain is that entangled states cannot last long enough at body temperature to do anything cognitively useful. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have proposed microtubules inside neurons as a possible shelter for such states, and that proposal has critics of its own. Grinberg borrowed the language of EPR correlation without supplying a physical mechanism that addresses decoherence at all.
Venue makes a second weakness. Physics Essays publishes heterodox work. It is peer-reviewed, but it is not Physical Review Letters. Goswami, the coauthor who supplied the quantum framework, is a theoretical physicist whose later career was spent largely outside academic physics, writing for general audiences on consciousness. David Bohm, whose Wholeness and the Implicate Order Grinberg cited as foundational, was taken seriously by working physicists in a way that Goswami’s idealist consciousness work has not been. None of this disqualifies Grinberg’s results. It does qualify the weight one should give them before independent replication settles the question.
Pachita is a third problem. Grinberg believed he was watching a high-coherence shaman manipulate the Lattice when he observed the curandera apparently materializing tissue and performing organ transplants without anesthesia. The skeptical literature on psychic surgery is well developed, going back to James Randi’s documentation of Filipino practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s. The techniques are reproducible by stage magicians using animal tissue concealed in the hand. I do not claim that Pachita was fraudulent. I claim that Grinberg’s failure to engage with that literature on his own observations was a methodological gap large enough to fall through.
A fourth weakness sits in the unfalsifiability of the Lattice itself. The transferred potential is testable. The claim that space is a holographic informational matrix decoded by the brain is, as currently stated, not testable in any sharp way. The interpretation can absorb any outcome by adjusting what counts as coherence. A theory closed to refutation has crossed out of science and into philosophy, where Bohm’s implicate order belongs and where Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory should be argued.
The fifth weakness is the disappearance, which has worked as an evidentiary force-multiplier in the opposite direction the mystics imagine. Because the man vanished, the work is treated as forbidden knowledge. Because the work is treated as forbidden, it is shielded from the ordinary correction processes of science. The romance of the vanishing has done more damage to the theory than any single critic ever could.
That is the harsh audit. Here is what survives it.
What survives is a serious twentieth-century researcher who took indigenous practitioners seriously when most of his peers would not, who designed and ran controlled experiments on a phenomenon his discipline refused to study, who published in peer-reviewed venues with a theoretical physicist as coauthor, and whose specific empirical claim of brain-to-brain correlation across electromagnetic shielding has been independently tested by university laboratories in the United States and Europe with weakly positive but unconvincing results. The Lattice as cosmology fails the audit, while the transferred potential as a research program clears it.
Which brings me to the question worth taking seriously. What would real entry into the Lattice look like, if Grinberg’s empirical claim deserves another hearing?
Entry would begin by separating Syntergic cosmology from transferred-potential empiricism, permanently. The cosmology is interesting as a philosophical proposition and belongs in the philosophy of mind, alongside Bohm, Whitehead, and the slow-burning literature on panpsychism. The empiricism is interesting as a falsifiable claim and demands the methodological rigor the original work lacked. That means preregistered protocols, pair samples in the hundreds rather than the dozens, blinded analysis, machine-learning classifiers reported with confidence intervals, datasets shared openly, and a pre-committed null hypothesis the field will accept if the signal fails to clear it. The work has been creeping in that direction for twenty years, slowly, in the parapsychology literature and in a small set of medical schools. It needs to migrate into mainstream cognitive neuroscience or it will live on the margins forever.
Mechanism comes next. Holographic metaphors are not mechanisms. A specific physical proposal must explain how two brains separated by fifteen meters of air and steel could correlate at all. Decoherence is the wall. Until someone proposes a mechanism that survives a hostile physics seminar, the empirical results, even if they hold up, will be read as artifact rather than discovery. Penrose and Hameroff at least attempted a mechanism. Grinberg never did, and the field has not done it for him in the thirty years since.
Last, we would have to give up the romance of the vanishing. Grinberg probably did not step into his own theory. The most likely reading of the available evidence is that he died in late 1994, in circumstances Mexican authorities never resolved, with attention focused on his immediate domestic situation. The investigation failed. The case remains open. As long as his disappearance functions as evidence for his theory, we are doing magical thinking under the cover of physics. A theory has to survive on its experimental record, not on the mystery of its author’s death.
Is any of this real, or possible? The transferred potential, in its weak form, might be real. The Lattice, as Grinberg drew it, is most likely not real in the literal physical sense he intended. What is real is the underlying scandal that consciousness studies were starved of funding and respectability for most of the twentieth century, that a serious researcher who tried to bring rigor to the question was treated as fringe in his own lifetime, that he disappeared before he could finish his work, and that the field has only now begun to catch up to the questions he was asking.
If we want to enter the Lattice, the entry point is methodological, not mystical. We pick up where he left off. The testable parts get tested. Cosmology stands as a working metaphor that may, or may not, be redeemed by data. Above all, we resist the temptation to make the man’s death do the work that his experiments could not finish.
That is the only honest way to read him now.
#argument #entry #grinberg #hypothesis #integration #lattice #legend #philosophy #reality #remoteViewing #science #surgery #syntergy #theory -
Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry
A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.
I want to take the legend apart and see what is left.
The Lattice, in Grinberg’s framing, refuses the picture of space that physics offers. Space, in Syntergic Theory, behaves as a high-coherence informational matrix. The brain produces what he called a “neuronal field” that interacts with the Lattice the way a film negative interacts with a beam of light, decoding a hologram. Reality, in this picture, gets read off a substrate that already contains every point in space, every moment in time, and every state of consciousness. The brain becomes one of many possible decoders. High coherence, the kind Grinberg believed he saw in expert meditators and in the Mexican curandera he studied for years (Bárbara Guerrero, known as Pachita), allowed certain brains to interact with the Lattice directly. Telepathy followed from that interaction. Remote viewing came next. Materialization, in the most extreme reading of Pachita’s psychic surgery, sat at the far end of the same continuum.
This is a beautiful theory. It is also, as stated, almost entirely unfalsifiable.
The temptation, when you encounter writing like this, is to either swallow it whole or dismiss it whole. Both responses are lazy. The work has a testable core and a metaphysical shell, and the two need to be separated before anything useful can be said about either.
The testable core is the transferred potential experiment. Two people interact for twenty minutes. They are placed in electromagnetically shielded rooms separated by a distance that rules out ordinary signaling. Only one subject of each pair is stimulated by one hundred light flashes. An EEG records evoked potentials in the stimulated subject. A second EEG records the unstimulated subject. Grinberg and his coauthors, including the theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, claimed that when the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the nonstimulated subject showed “transferred potentials” similar to those evoked in the stimulated subject. They titled the 1994 paper “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain,” and they proposed that the brain has a macroscopic quantum component capable of nonlocal correlation across distance.
If the effect were real and robust, it would rank among the most important findings in the history of neuroscience. So what does the replication record show?
Leanna Standish and colleagues at Bastyr University and the University of Washington repeated the design in 2003 and 2004, recording simultaneous EEGs from pairs of subjects placed in sound-attenuated rooms separated by ten meters, later extending the work to fMRI. They reported small correlations in some pairs, statistically above chance, broadly consistent with Grinberg’s direction. A 2018 re-analysis by groups at IULM in Milan and the University of Padova, applying machine-learning classifiers to two pooled datasets covering forty-five pairs, found classification accuracies of 50.74 percent on the first dataset and 51.17 percent, 50.45 percent, and 51.91 percent across stimulation conditions on the second. The honest reading of those numbers is that there is, at best, a faint signal above noise, on the order of one to two percent above chance, and that the signal does not hold up under stricter analytical methods. The “one in four pairs” claim from the original paper is the kind of effect size that thins out when sample sizes grow and protocols tighten. The result might be noise. It might be small and real. The data, after thirty years, cannot tell us which.
The Lattice does not announce itself in clean experimental data. What announces itself is a smear of weakly positive results, sensitive to method, sample, and the personal coherence of the experimenters and subjects. A smear of that kind, in any other branch of biology, would be treated as a candidate artifact rather than a candidate discovery.
So where are the weak spots in Grinberg’s argument? I count five.
The first concerns decoherence. Quantum entanglement is fragile. It survives at extremely low temperatures, in highly isolated systems, in laboratories where engineers work for years to prevent contact with the surrounding environment. The human brain operates at 310 Kelvin, immersed in saltwater, packed with thermal vibration and electrochemical traffic. The mainstream physical objection to any macroscopic quantum brain is that entangled states cannot last long enough at body temperature to do anything cognitively useful. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have proposed microtubules inside neurons as a possible shelter for such states, and that proposal has critics of its own. Grinberg borrowed the language of EPR correlation without supplying a physical mechanism that addresses decoherence at all.
Venue makes a second weakness. Physics Essays publishes heterodox work. It is peer-reviewed, but it is not Physical Review Letters. Goswami, the coauthor who supplied the quantum framework, is a theoretical physicist whose later career was spent largely outside academic physics, writing for general audiences on consciousness. David Bohm, whose Wholeness and the Implicate Order Grinberg cited as foundational, was taken seriously by working physicists in a way that Goswami’s idealist consciousness work has not been. None of this disqualifies Grinberg’s results. It does qualify the weight one should give them before independent replication settles the question.
Pachita is a third problem. Grinberg believed he was watching a high-coherence shaman manipulate the Lattice when he observed the curandera apparently materializing tissue and performing organ transplants without anesthesia. The skeptical literature on psychic surgery is well developed, going back to James Randi’s documentation of Filipino practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s. The techniques are reproducible by stage magicians using animal tissue concealed in the hand. I do not claim that Pachita was fraudulent. I claim that Grinberg’s failure to engage with that literature on his own observations was a methodological gap large enough to fall through.
A fourth weakness sits in the unfalsifiability of the Lattice itself. The transferred potential is testable. The claim that space is a holographic informational matrix decoded by the brain is, as currently stated, not testable in any sharp way. The interpretation can absorb any outcome by adjusting what counts as coherence. A theory closed to refutation has crossed out of science and into philosophy, where Bohm’s implicate order belongs and where Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory should be argued.
The fifth weakness is the disappearance, which has worked as an evidentiary force-multiplier in the opposite direction the mystics imagine. Because the man vanished, the work is treated as forbidden knowledge. Because the work is treated as forbidden, it is shielded from the ordinary correction processes of science. The romance of the vanishing has done more damage to the theory than any single critic ever could.
That is the harsh audit. Here is what survives it.
What survives is a serious twentieth-century researcher who took indigenous practitioners seriously when most of his peers would not, who designed and ran controlled experiments on a phenomenon his discipline refused to study, who published in peer-reviewed venues with a theoretical physicist as coauthor, and whose specific empirical claim of brain-to-brain correlation across electromagnetic shielding has been independently tested by university laboratories in the United States and Europe with weakly positive but unconvincing results. The Lattice as cosmology fails the audit, while the transferred potential as a research program clears it.
Which brings me to the question worth taking seriously. What would real entry into the Lattice look like, if Grinberg’s empirical claim deserves another hearing?
Entry would begin by separating Syntergic cosmology from transferred-potential empiricism, permanently. The cosmology is interesting as a philosophical proposition and belongs in the philosophy of mind, alongside Bohm, Whitehead, and the slow-burning literature on panpsychism. The empiricism is interesting as a falsifiable claim and demands the methodological rigor the original work lacked. That means preregistered protocols, pair samples in the hundreds rather than the dozens, blinded analysis, machine-learning classifiers reported with confidence intervals, datasets shared openly, and a pre-committed null hypothesis the field will accept if the signal fails to clear it. The work has been creeping in that direction for twenty years, slowly, in the parapsychology literature and in a small set of medical schools. It needs to migrate into mainstream cognitive neuroscience or it will live on the margins forever.
Mechanism comes next. Holographic metaphors are not mechanisms. A specific physical proposal must explain how two brains separated by fifteen meters of air and steel could correlate at all. Decoherence is the wall. Until someone proposes a mechanism that survives a hostile physics seminar, the empirical results, even if they hold up, will be read as artifact rather than discovery. Penrose and Hameroff at least attempted a mechanism. Grinberg never did, and the field has not done it for him in the thirty years since.
Last, we would have to give up the romance of the vanishing. Grinberg probably did not step into his own theory. The most likely reading of the available evidence is that he died in late 1994, in circumstances Mexican authorities never resolved, with attention focused on his immediate domestic situation. The investigation failed. The case remains open. As long as his disappearance functions as evidence for his theory, we are doing magical thinking under the cover of physics. A theory has to survive on its experimental record, not on the mystery of its author’s death.
Is any of this real, or possible? The transferred potential, in its weak form, might be real. The Lattice, as Grinberg drew it, is most likely not real in the literal physical sense he intended. What is real is the underlying scandal that consciousness studies were starved of funding and respectability for most of the twentieth century, that a serious researcher who tried to bring rigor to the question was treated as fringe in his own lifetime, that he disappeared before he could finish his work, and that the field has only now begun to catch up to the questions he was asking.
If we want to enter the Lattice, the entry point is methodological, not mystical. We pick up where he left off. The testable parts get tested. Cosmology stands as a working metaphor that may, or may not, be redeemed by data. Above all, we resist the temptation to make the man’s death do the work that his experiments could not finish.
That is the only honest way to read him now.
#argument #entry #grinberg #hypothesis #integration #lattice #legend #philosophy #reality #remoteViewing #science #surgery #syntergy #theory -
Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry
A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.
I want to take the legend apart and see what is left.
The Lattice, in Grinberg’s framing, refuses the picture of space that physics offers. Space, in Syntergic Theory, behaves as a high-coherence informational matrix. The brain produces what he called a “neuronal field” that interacts with the Lattice the way a film negative interacts with a beam of light, decoding a hologram. Reality, in this picture, gets read off a substrate that already contains every point in space, every moment in time, and every state of consciousness. The brain becomes one of many possible decoders. High coherence, the kind Grinberg believed he saw in expert meditators and in the Mexican curandera he studied for years (Bárbara Guerrero, known as Pachita), allowed certain brains to interact with the Lattice directly. Telepathy followed from that interaction. Remote viewing came next. Materialization, in the most extreme reading of Pachita’s psychic surgery, sat at the far end of the same continuum.
This is a beautiful theory. It is also, as stated, almost entirely unfalsifiable.
The temptation, when you encounter writing like this, is to either swallow it whole or dismiss it whole. Both responses are lazy. The work has a testable core and a metaphysical shell, and the two need to be separated before anything useful can be said about either.
The testable core is the transferred potential experiment. Two people interact for twenty minutes. They are placed in electromagnetically shielded rooms separated by a distance that rules out ordinary signaling. Only one subject of each pair is stimulated by one hundred light flashes. An EEG records evoked potentials in the stimulated subject. A second EEG records the unstimulated subject. Grinberg and his coauthors, including the theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, claimed that when the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the nonstimulated subject showed “transferred potentials” similar to those evoked in the stimulated subject. They titled the 1994 paper “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain,” and they proposed that the brain has a macroscopic quantum component capable of nonlocal correlation across distance.
If the effect were real and robust, it would rank among the most important findings in the history of neuroscience. So what does the replication record show?
Leanna Standish and colleagues at Bastyr University and the University of Washington repeated the design in 2003 and 2004, recording simultaneous EEGs from pairs of subjects placed in sound-attenuated rooms separated by ten meters, later extending the work to fMRI. They reported small correlations in some pairs, statistically above chance, broadly consistent with Grinberg’s direction. A 2018 re-analysis by groups at IULM in Milan and the University of Padova, applying machine-learning classifiers to two pooled datasets covering forty-five pairs, found classification accuracies of 50.74 percent on the first dataset and 51.17 percent, 50.45 percent, and 51.91 percent across stimulation conditions on the second. The honest reading of those numbers is that there is, at best, a faint signal above noise, on the order of one to two percent above chance, and that the signal does not hold up under stricter analytical methods. The “one in four pairs” claim from the original paper is the kind of effect size that thins out when sample sizes grow and protocols tighten. The result might be noise. It might be small and real. The data, after thirty years, cannot tell us which.
The Lattice does not announce itself in clean experimental data. What announces itself is a smear of weakly positive results, sensitive to method, sample, and the personal coherence of the experimenters and subjects. A smear of that kind, in any other branch of biology, would be treated as a candidate artifact rather than a candidate discovery.
So where are the weak spots in Grinberg’s argument? I count five.
The first concerns decoherence. Quantum entanglement is fragile. It survives at extremely low temperatures, in highly isolated systems, in laboratories where engineers work for years to prevent contact with the surrounding environment. The human brain operates at 310 Kelvin, immersed in saltwater, packed with thermal vibration and electrochemical traffic. The mainstream physical objection to any macroscopic quantum brain is that entangled states cannot last long enough at body temperature to do anything cognitively useful. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have proposed microtubules inside neurons as a possible shelter for such states, and that proposal has critics of its own. Grinberg borrowed the language of EPR correlation without supplying a physical mechanism that addresses decoherence at all.
Venue makes a second weakness. Physics Essays publishes heterodox work. It is peer-reviewed, but it is not Physical Review Letters. Goswami, the coauthor who supplied the quantum framework, is a theoretical physicist whose later career was spent largely outside academic physics, writing for general audiences on consciousness. David Bohm, whose Wholeness and the Implicate Order Grinberg cited as foundational, was taken seriously by working physicists in a way that Goswami’s idealist consciousness work has not been. None of this disqualifies Grinberg’s results. It does qualify the weight one should give them before independent replication settles the question.
Pachita is a third problem. Grinberg believed he was watching a high-coherence shaman manipulate the Lattice when he observed the curandera apparently materializing tissue and performing organ transplants without anesthesia. The skeptical literature on psychic surgery is well developed, going back to James Randi’s documentation of Filipino practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s. The techniques are reproducible by stage magicians using animal tissue concealed in the hand. I do not claim that Pachita was fraudulent. I claim that Grinberg’s failure to engage with that literature on his own observations was a methodological gap large enough to fall through.
A fourth weakness sits in the unfalsifiability of the Lattice itself. The transferred potential is testable. The claim that space is a holographic informational matrix decoded by the brain is, as currently stated, not testable in any sharp way. The interpretation can absorb any outcome by adjusting what counts as coherence. A theory closed to refutation has crossed out of science and into philosophy, where Bohm’s implicate order belongs and where Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory should be argued.
The fifth weakness is the disappearance, which has worked as an evidentiary force-multiplier in the opposite direction the mystics imagine. Because the man vanished, the work is treated as forbidden knowledge. Because the work is treated as forbidden, it is shielded from the ordinary correction processes of science. The romance of the vanishing has done more damage to the theory than any single critic ever could.
That is the harsh audit. Here is what survives it.
What survives is a serious twentieth-century researcher who took indigenous practitioners seriously when most of his peers would not, who designed and ran controlled experiments on a phenomenon his discipline refused to study, who published in peer-reviewed venues with a theoretical physicist as coauthor, and whose specific empirical claim of brain-to-brain correlation across electromagnetic shielding has been independently tested by university laboratories in the United States and Europe with weakly positive but unconvincing results. The Lattice as cosmology fails the audit, while the transferred potential as a research program clears it.
Which brings me to the question worth taking seriously. What would real entry into the Lattice look like, if Grinberg’s empirical claim deserves another hearing?
Entry would begin by separating Syntergic cosmology from transferred-potential empiricism, permanently. The cosmology is interesting as a philosophical proposition and belongs in the philosophy of mind, alongside Bohm, Whitehead, and the slow-burning literature on panpsychism. The empiricism is interesting as a falsifiable claim and demands the methodological rigor the original work lacked. That means preregistered protocols, pair samples in the hundreds rather than the dozens, blinded analysis, machine-learning classifiers reported with confidence intervals, datasets shared openly, and a pre-committed null hypothesis the field will accept if the signal fails to clear it. The work has been creeping in that direction for twenty years, slowly, in the parapsychology literature and in a small set of medical schools. It needs to migrate into mainstream cognitive neuroscience or it will live on the margins forever.
Mechanism comes next. Holographic metaphors are not mechanisms. A specific physical proposal must explain how two brains separated by fifteen meters of air and steel could correlate at all. Decoherence is the wall. Until someone proposes a mechanism that survives a hostile physics seminar, the empirical results, even if they hold up, will be read as artifact rather than discovery. Penrose and Hameroff at least attempted a mechanism. Grinberg never did, and the field has not done it for him in the thirty years since.
Last, we would have to give up the romance of the vanishing. Grinberg probably did not step into his own theory. The most likely reading of the available evidence is that he died in late 1994, in circumstances Mexican authorities never resolved, with attention focused on his immediate domestic situation. The investigation failed. The case remains open. As long as his disappearance functions as evidence for his theory, we are doing magical thinking under the cover of physics. A theory has to survive on its experimental record, not on the mystery of its author’s death.
Is any of this real, or possible? The transferred potential, in its weak form, might be real. The Lattice, as Grinberg drew it, is most likely not real in the literal physical sense he intended. What is real is the underlying scandal that consciousness studies were starved of funding and respectability for most of the twentieth century, that a serious researcher who tried to bring rigor to the question was treated as fringe in his own lifetime, that he disappeared before he could finish his work, and that the field has only now begun to catch up to the questions he was asking.
If we want to enter the Lattice, the entry point is methodological, not mystical. We pick up where he left off. The testable parts get tested. Cosmology stands as a working metaphor that may, or may not, be redeemed by data. Above all, we resist the temptation to make the man’s death do the work that his experiments could not finish.
That is the only honest way to read him now.
#argument #entry #grinberg #hypothesis #integration #lattice #legend #philosophy #reality #remoteViewing #science #surgery #syntergy #theory -
Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry
A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.
I want to take the legend apart and see what is left.
The Lattice, in Grinberg’s framing, refuses the picture of space that physics offers. Space, in Syntergic Theory, behaves as a high-coherence informational matrix. The brain produces what he called a “neuronal field” that interacts with the Lattice the way a film negative interacts with a beam of light, decoding a hologram. Reality, in this picture, gets read off a substrate that already contains every point in space, every moment in time, and every state of consciousness. The brain becomes one of many possible decoders. High coherence, the kind Grinberg believed he saw in expert meditators and in the Mexican curandera he studied for years (Bárbara Guerrero, known as Pachita), allowed certain brains to interact with the Lattice directly. Telepathy followed from that interaction. Remote viewing came next. Materialization, in the most extreme reading of Pachita’s psychic surgery, sat at the far end of the same continuum.
This is a beautiful theory. It is also, as stated, almost entirely unfalsifiable.
The temptation, when you encounter writing like this, is to either swallow it whole or dismiss it whole. Both responses are lazy. The work has a testable core and a metaphysical shell, and the two need to be separated before anything useful can be said about either.
The testable core is the transferred potential experiment. Two people interact for twenty minutes. They are placed in electromagnetically shielded rooms separated by a distance that rules out ordinary signaling. Only one subject of each pair is stimulated by one hundred light flashes. An EEG records evoked potentials in the stimulated subject. A second EEG records the unstimulated subject. Grinberg and his coauthors, including the theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, claimed that when the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the nonstimulated subject showed “transferred potentials” similar to those evoked in the stimulated subject. They titled the 1994 paper “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain,” and they proposed that the brain has a macroscopic quantum component capable of nonlocal correlation across distance.
If the effect were real and robust, it would rank among the most important findings in the history of neuroscience. So what does the replication record show?
Leanna Standish and colleagues at Bastyr University and the University of Washington repeated the design in 2003 and 2004, recording simultaneous EEGs from pairs of subjects placed in sound-attenuated rooms separated by ten meters, later extending the work to fMRI. They reported small correlations in some pairs, statistically above chance, broadly consistent with Grinberg’s direction. A 2018 re-analysis by groups at IULM in Milan and the University of Padova, applying machine-learning classifiers to two pooled datasets covering forty-five pairs, found classification accuracies of 50.74 percent on the first dataset and 51.17 percent, 50.45 percent, and 51.91 percent across stimulation conditions on the second. The honest reading of those numbers is that there is, at best, a faint signal above noise, on the order of one to two percent above chance, and that the signal does not hold up under stricter analytical methods. The “one in four pairs” claim from the original paper is the kind of effect size that thins out when sample sizes grow and protocols tighten. The result might be noise. It might be small and real. The data, after thirty years, cannot tell us which.
The Lattice does not announce itself in clean experimental data. What announces itself is a smear of weakly positive results, sensitive to method, sample, and the personal coherence of the experimenters and subjects. A smear of that kind, in any other branch of biology, would be treated as a candidate artifact rather than a candidate discovery.
So where are the weak spots in Grinberg’s argument? I count five.
The first concerns decoherence. Quantum entanglement is fragile. It survives at extremely low temperatures, in highly isolated systems, in laboratories where engineers work for years to prevent contact with the surrounding environment. The human brain operates at 310 Kelvin, immersed in saltwater, packed with thermal vibration and electrochemical traffic. The mainstream physical objection to any macroscopic quantum brain is that entangled states cannot last long enough at body temperature to do anything cognitively useful. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have proposed microtubules inside neurons as a possible shelter for such states, and that proposal has critics of its own. Grinberg borrowed the language of EPR correlation without supplying a physical mechanism that addresses decoherence at all.
Venue makes a second weakness. Physics Essays publishes heterodox work. It is peer-reviewed, but it is not Physical Review Letters. Goswami, the coauthor who supplied the quantum framework, is a theoretical physicist whose later career was spent largely outside academic physics, writing for general audiences on consciousness. David Bohm, whose Wholeness and the Implicate Order Grinberg cited as foundational, was taken seriously by working physicists in a way that Goswami’s idealist consciousness work has not been. None of this disqualifies Grinberg’s results. It does qualify the weight one should give them before independent replication settles the question.
Pachita is a third problem. Grinberg believed he was watching a high-coherence shaman manipulate the Lattice when he observed the curandera apparently materializing tissue and performing organ transplants without anesthesia. The skeptical literature on psychic surgery is well developed, going back to James Randi’s documentation of Filipino practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s. The techniques are reproducible by stage magicians using animal tissue concealed in the hand. I do not claim that Pachita was fraudulent. I claim that Grinberg’s failure to engage with that literature on his own observations was a methodological gap large enough to fall through.
A fourth weakness sits in the unfalsifiability of the Lattice itself. The transferred potential is testable. The claim that space is a holographic informational matrix decoded by the brain is, as currently stated, not testable in any sharp way. The interpretation can absorb any outcome by adjusting what counts as coherence. A theory closed to refutation has crossed out of science and into philosophy, where Bohm’s implicate order belongs and where Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory should be argued.
The fifth weakness is the disappearance, which has worked as an evidentiary force-multiplier in the opposite direction the mystics imagine. Because the man vanished, the work is treated as forbidden knowledge. Because the work is treated as forbidden, it is shielded from the ordinary correction processes of science. The romance of the vanishing has done more damage to the theory than any single critic ever could.
That is the harsh audit. Here is what survives it.
What survives is a serious twentieth-century researcher who took indigenous practitioners seriously when most of his peers would not, who designed and ran controlled experiments on a phenomenon his discipline refused to study, who published in peer-reviewed venues with a theoretical physicist as coauthor, and whose specific empirical claim of brain-to-brain correlation across electromagnetic shielding has been independently tested by university laboratories in the United States and Europe with weakly positive but unconvincing results. The Lattice as cosmology fails the audit, while the transferred potential as a research program clears it.
Which brings me to the question worth taking seriously. What would real entry into the Lattice look like, if Grinberg’s empirical claim deserves another hearing?
Entry would begin by separating Syntergic cosmology from transferred-potential empiricism, permanently. The cosmology is interesting as a philosophical proposition and belongs in the philosophy of mind, alongside Bohm, Whitehead, and the slow-burning literature on panpsychism. The empiricism is interesting as a falsifiable claim and demands the methodological rigor the original work lacked. That means preregistered protocols, pair samples in the hundreds rather than the dozens, blinded analysis, machine-learning classifiers reported with confidence intervals, datasets shared openly, and a pre-committed null hypothesis the field will accept if the signal fails to clear it. The work has been creeping in that direction for twenty years, slowly, in the parapsychology literature and in a small set of medical schools. It needs to migrate into mainstream cognitive neuroscience or it will live on the margins forever.
Mechanism comes next. Holographic metaphors are not mechanisms. A specific physical proposal must explain how two brains separated by fifteen meters of air and steel could correlate at all. Decoherence is the wall. Until someone proposes a mechanism that survives a hostile physics seminar, the empirical results, even if they hold up, will be read as artifact rather than discovery. Penrose and Hameroff at least attempted a mechanism. Grinberg never did, and the field has not done it for him in the thirty years since.
Last, we would have to give up the romance of the vanishing. Grinberg probably did not step into his own theory. The most likely reading of the available evidence is that he died in late 1994, in circumstances Mexican authorities never resolved, with attention focused on his immediate domestic situation. The investigation failed. The case remains open. As long as his disappearance functions as evidence for his theory, we are doing magical thinking under the cover of physics. A theory has to survive on its experimental record, not on the mystery of its author’s death.
Is any of this real, or possible? The transferred potential, in its weak form, might be real. The Lattice, as Grinberg drew it, is most likely not real in the literal physical sense he intended. What is real is the underlying scandal that consciousness studies were starved of funding and respectability for most of the twentieth century, that a serious researcher who tried to bring rigor to the question was treated as fringe in his own lifetime, that he disappeared before he could finish his work, and that the field has only now begun to catch up to the questions he was asking.
If we want to enter the Lattice, the entry point is methodological, not mystical. We pick up where he left off. The testable parts get tested. Cosmology stands as a working metaphor that may, or may not, be redeemed by data. Above all, we resist the temptation to make the man’s death do the work that his experiments could not finish.
That is the only honest way to read him now.
#argument #entry #grinberg #hypothesis #integration #lattice #legend #philosophy #reality #remoteViewing #science #surgery #syntergy #theory -
Reading the Lattice Without the Legend: Grinberg, Syntergy, and the Argument for Real Entry
A scientist walks out of his office in Mexico City on December 8, 1994, and never walks back in. The man is Jacobo Grinberg-Zylberbaum, forty-eight years old, a UNAM-trained neurophysiologist with a doctorate from New York Medical College, the author of a stack of monographs on consciousness, and the last serious researcher to claim that the human brain could be wired into a holographic substrate of reality he called the Lattice. He had spent years measuring electroencephalographic correlations between separated human subjects. Two months before he vanished, he published a paper in Physics Essays arguing that pairs of subjects, separated inside semisilent Faraday chambers fourteen and a half meters apart, showed brain activity that mirrored stimulation given to only one of them. Then he was gone. The laboratory was found. Several notes were missing. His wife, who had cause to suspect him of an affair and a documented history of violence, became a person of interest and was never charged. Mexican press cycled through the story for years. Mystics and conspiracy theorists folded the disappearance into the theory, as if the man had stepped sideways into his own hypothesis.
I want to take the legend apart and see what is left.
The Lattice, in Grinberg’s framing, refuses the picture of space that physics offers. Space, in Syntergic Theory, behaves as a high-coherence informational matrix. The brain produces what he called a “neuronal field” that interacts with the Lattice the way a film negative interacts with a beam of light, decoding a hologram. Reality, in this picture, gets read off a substrate that already contains every point in space, every moment in time, and every state of consciousness. The brain becomes one of many possible decoders. High coherence, the kind Grinberg believed he saw in expert meditators and in the Mexican curandera he studied for years (Bárbara Guerrero, known as Pachita), allowed certain brains to interact with the Lattice directly. Telepathy followed from that interaction. Remote viewing came next. Materialization, in the most extreme reading of Pachita’s psychic surgery, sat at the far end of the same continuum.
This is a beautiful theory. It is also, as stated, almost entirely unfalsifiable.
The temptation, when you encounter writing like this, is to either swallow it whole or dismiss it whole. Both responses are lazy. The work has a testable core and a metaphysical shell, and the two need to be separated before anything useful can be said about either.
The testable core is the transferred potential experiment. Two people interact for twenty minutes. They are placed in electromagnetically shielded rooms separated by a distance that rules out ordinary signaling. Only one subject of each pair is stimulated by one hundred light flashes. An EEG records evoked potentials in the stimulated subject. A second EEG records the unstimulated subject. Grinberg and his coauthors, including the theoretical physicist Amit Goswami, claimed that when the stimulated subject showed distinct evoked potentials, the nonstimulated subject showed “transferred potentials” similar to those evoked in the stimulated subject. They titled the 1994 paper “The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen Paradox in the Brain,” and they proposed that the brain has a macroscopic quantum component capable of nonlocal correlation across distance.
If the effect were real and robust, it would rank among the most important findings in the history of neuroscience. So what does the replication record show?
Leanna Standish and colleagues at Bastyr University and the University of Washington repeated the design in 2003 and 2004, recording simultaneous EEGs from pairs of subjects placed in sound-attenuated rooms separated by ten meters, later extending the work to fMRI. They reported small correlations in some pairs, statistically above chance, broadly consistent with Grinberg’s direction. A 2018 re-analysis by groups at IULM in Milan and the University of Padova, applying machine-learning classifiers to two pooled datasets covering forty-five pairs, found classification accuracies of 50.74 percent on the first dataset and 51.17 percent, 50.45 percent, and 51.91 percent across stimulation conditions on the second. The honest reading of those numbers is that there is, at best, a faint signal above noise, on the order of one to two percent above chance, and that the signal does not hold up under stricter analytical methods. The “one in four pairs” claim from the original paper is the kind of effect size that thins out when sample sizes grow and protocols tighten. The result might be noise. It might be small and real. The data, after thirty years, cannot tell us which.
The Lattice does not announce itself in clean experimental data. What announces itself is a smear of weakly positive results, sensitive to method, sample, and the personal coherence of the experimenters and subjects. A smear of that kind, in any other branch of biology, would be treated as a candidate artifact rather than a candidate discovery.
So where are the weak spots in Grinberg’s argument? I count five.
The first concerns decoherence. Quantum entanglement is fragile. It survives at extremely low temperatures, in highly isolated systems, in laboratories where engineers work for years to prevent contact with the surrounding environment. The human brain operates at 310 Kelvin, immersed in saltwater, packed with thermal vibration and electrochemical traffic. The mainstream physical objection to any macroscopic quantum brain is that entangled states cannot last long enough at body temperature to do anything cognitively useful. Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff have proposed microtubules inside neurons as a possible shelter for such states, and that proposal has critics of its own. Grinberg borrowed the language of EPR correlation without supplying a physical mechanism that addresses decoherence at all.
Venue makes a second weakness. Physics Essays publishes heterodox work. It is peer-reviewed, but it is not Physical Review Letters. Goswami, the coauthor who supplied the quantum framework, is a theoretical physicist whose later career was spent largely outside academic physics, writing for general audiences on consciousness. David Bohm, whose Wholeness and the Implicate Order Grinberg cited as foundational, was taken seriously by working physicists in a way that Goswami’s idealist consciousness work has not been. None of this disqualifies Grinberg’s results. It does qualify the weight one should give them before independent replication settles the question.
Pachita is a third problem. Grinberg believed he was watching a high-coherence shaman manipulate the Lattice when he observed the curandera apparently materializing tissue and performing organ transplants without anesthesia. The skeptical literature on psychic surgery is well developed, going back to James Randi’s documentation of Filipino practitioners in the 1970s and 1980s. The techniques are reproducible by stage magicians using animal tissue concealed in the hand. I do not claim that Pachita was fraudulent. I claim that Grinberg’s failure to engage with that literature on his own observations was a methodological gap large enough to fall through.
A fourth weakness sits in the unfalsifiability of the Lattice itself. The transferred potential is testable. The claim that space is a holographic informational matrix decoded by the brain is, as currently stated, not testable in any sharp way. The interpretation can absorb any outcome by adjusting what counts as coherence. A theory closed to refutation has crossed out of science and into philosophy, where Bohm’s implicate order belongs and where Grinberg’s Syntergic Theory should be argued.
The fifth weakness is the disappearance, which has worked as an evidentiary force-multiplier in the opposite direction the mystics imagine. Because the man vanished, the work is treated as forbidden knowledge. Because the work is treated as forbidden, it is shielded from the ordinary correction processes of science. The romance of the vanishing has done more damage to the theory than any single critic ever could.
That is the harsh audit. Here is what survives it.
What survives is a serious twentieth-century researcher who took indigenous practitioners seriously when most of his peers would not, who designed and ran controlled experiments on a phenomenon his discipline refused to study, who published in peer-reviewed venues with a theoretical physicist as coauthor, and whose specific empirical claim of brain-to-brain correlation across electromagnetic shielding has been independently tested by university laboratories in the United States and Europe with weakly positive but unconvincing results. The Lattice as cosmology fails the audit, while the transferred potential as a research program clears it.
Which brings me to the question worth taking seriously. What would real entry into the Lattice look like, if Grinberg’s empirical claim deserves another hearing?
Entry would begin by separating Syntergic cosmology from transferred-potential empiricism, permanently. The cosmology is interesting as a philosophical proposition and belongs in the philosophy of mind, alongside Bohm, Whitehead, and the slow-burning literature on panpsychism. The empiricism is interesting as a falsifiable claim and demands the methodological rigor the original work lacked. That means preregistered protocols, pair samples in the hundreds rather than the dozens, blinded analysis, machine-learning classifiers reported with confidence intervals, datasets shared openly, and a pre-committed null hypothesis the field will accept if the signal fails to clear it. The work has been creeping in that direction for twenty years, slowly, in the parapsychology literature and in a small set of medical schools. It needs to migrate into mainstream cognitive neuroscience or it will live on the margins forever.
Mechanism comes next. Holographic metaphors are not mechanisms. A specific physical proposal must explain how two brains separated by fifteen meters of air and steel could correlate at all. Decoherence is the wall. Until someone proposes a mechanism that survives a hostile physics seminar, the empirical results, even if they hold up, will be read as artifact rather than discovery. Penrose and Hameroff at least attempted a mechanism. Grinberg never did, and the field has not done it for him in the thirty years since.
Last, we would have to give up the romance of the vanishing. Grinberg probably did not step into his own theory. The most likely reading of the available evidence is that he died in late 1994, in circumstances Mexican authorities never resolved, with attention focused on his immediate domestic situation. The investigation failed. The case remains open. As long as his disappearance functions as evidence for his theory, we are doing magical thinking under the cover of physics. A theory has to survive on its experimental record, not on the mystery of its author’s death.
Is any of this real, or possible? The transferred potential, in its weak form, might be real. The Lattice, as Grinberg drew it, is most likely not real in the literal physical sense he intended. What is real is the underlying scandal that consciousness studies were starved of funding and respectability for most of the twentieth century, that a serious researcher who tried to bring rigor to the question was treated as fringe in his own lifetime, that he disappeared before he could finish his work, and that the field has only now begun to catch up to the questions he was asking.
If we want to enter the Lattice, the entry point is methodological, not mystical. We pick up where he left off. The testable parts get tested. Cosmology stands as a working metaphor that may, or may not, be redeemed by data. Above all, we resist the temptation to make the man’s death do the work that his experiments could not finish.
That is the only honest way to read him now.
#argument #entry #grinberg #hypothesis #integration #lattice #legend #philosophy #reality #remoteViewing #science #surgery #syntergy #theory -
LLANELLI: Forget the Scarlets — Llanelli has just been crowned the home of Wales’ second best Nando’s
Llanelli has long had reason to hold its head high — the Scarlets, the mural, the seaside. But now there’s a new entry on the town’s list of achievements: the second best Nando’s in Wales.
That’s according to a new study by BingoWebsites.org.uk, which crunched Tripadvisor review data for every Nando’s in Wales and ranked them by the percentage of customers who rated their visit as “excellent”.
Llanelli’s branch came in at 42.7% — with 85 of its 199 Tripadvisor reviews awarded the top score. Reviewers were full of praise, with mentions of “amazing service”, “vibrant ambience” and a “spotless restaurant”. Not bad for a peri-peri chicken chain on a retail park.
Only Newport got close — the Friars Walk branch topped the table with a 50% excellent rate from 112 reviews. After that, Llanelli is comfortably clear of the rest of the pack.
Swansea has two branches in the rankings, and neither can quite match their Carmarthenshire neighbours. The Morfa Retail Park branch came sixth with 38.1% — though that figure is based on just 21 reviews, making it one of the smallest samples in the table, so perhaps a pinch of peri-peri salt is needed there.
The City Gates branch tells a different story — with a much more substantial 250 reviews, it came ninth with 30%. A larger sample, but a noticeably lower satisfaction rate.
That makes Llanelli more than 12 percentage points clear of Swansea’s better-reviewed branch. A gap even the most diplomatic rugby fan would struggle to ignore.
Further down the table, Cardiff’s three branches — Mermaid Quay, Old Brewery Quarter and St David’s — all sit in the lower half, clustered around the 27-30% range. Bridgend and Merthyr Tydfil brought up the rear, with Merthyr finishing bottom of all 14 Welsh branches with just 23.9% of its reviews rated excellent.
The study was carried out by analysing Tripadvisor reviews for all Nando’s locations listed on the chain’s website. Branches with no Tripadvisor page or zero reviews were excluded — which accounted for Cardiff Capital Retail Park.
Matt White from BingoWebsites.org.uk, who commissioned the research, said the 26-point gap between Newport and Merthyr showed how difficult it can be for national chains to deliver a consistent experience across every branch. “The results suggest that customer experience at Nando’s can vary significantly across Wales,” he said.
For what it’s worth, Waterloo in London topped the UK-wide rankings with a 94.3% excellent rate from 53 reviews. Nobody in Wales is troubling that particular leaderboard yet — but Llanelli, at least, is flying the flag.
And the chain itself clearly hasn’t given up on south Wales. Plans have been lodged to open a new Nando’s at Parc Fforestfach Retail Park in Swansea, taking over the current Card Factory unit and potentially creating 40 jobs — which would give Swansea a third branch and push the city further up any future rankings.
Of course, the ranking comes at a time when eating out is getting harder for everyone — restaurants and customers alike. Llanelli has felt that pressure as much as anywhere.
The Tinhouse taproom on Murray Street closed earlier this year after the owners cited mounting hospitality costs. Ali Raj and the Bryngwyn closed on the same day in a blow that left customers heartbroken. And the Sandpiper faced an outpouring of community anger when Whitbread announced it was among those earmarked for closure.
So while Llanelli’s Nando’s clearly has plenty of fans — the data says so — the wider message is simple enough. Use it or lose it.
Llanelli’s hospitality scene
Two much-loved Llanelli restaurants close on the same day
Ali Raj and the Bryngwyn both shut their doors simultaneously, leaving customers heartbroken.Much-loved Llanelli taproom The Tinhouse to close as hospitality pressures mount
The Murray Street taproom became the latest victim of the cost pressures hitting hospitality.‘A bombshell for all concerned’ — community rallies to save the Sandpiper
The campaign to save one of Llanelli’s best-known pubs after Whitbread earmarked it for closure.Four local restaurants face closure as Whitbread axes up to 3,800 jobs
#foodDrink #Llanelli #NandoS #restaurant
The national picture behind the local closures. -
Discovering North Alabama Chicken Stew
I’ve lived in Alabama my entire life. My parents were born here, as were their parents, and their parents, and…well, you get the picture. To put it simply, I’m about as deeply rooted as a person can be. But it wasn’t until I was researching my home state for an article a few years ago that I came across North Alabama Chicken Stew for the first time. My mother’s side of the family is from a town in North Alabama, so I asked her about the dish. It turns out her grandmother made something slightly similar, but it wasn’t quite the same as the traditional version. Since Allrecipes didn’t have a recipe at the time, my mom and I looked at a bunch of recipes and patched together our own.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it was love at first taste. Once I started researching the history of the stew through old newspaper articles and Emily Blejwas’s phenomenal book The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods, my 23andMe results and my mother’s maiden name (Stephenson) suddenly made a lot more sense: It originated with the Scottish-Irish pioneers who settled in the region more than 200 years ago. As my boss said, this stew literally runs through my veins.
What Is Alabama Chicken Stew?
Traditional North Alabama chicken stew is a soul-warming combination of chicken, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and corn cooked slowly in a homemade stock. More modern versions include more vegetables—such as carrots and celery—and simple seasonings like bay leaves, salt, and pepper.
The long-simmered potatoes are what makes this dish truly unique: They almost melt into the broth, serving as a natural thickener.
#Cooking, #MealPlanning, #Recipes,
Follow -
Discovering North Alabama Chicken Stew
I’ve lived in Alabama my entire life. My parents were born here, as were their parents, and their parents, and…well, you get the picture. To put it simply, I’m about as deeply rooted as a person can be. But it wasn’t until I was researching my home state for an article a few years ago that I came across North Alabama Chicken Stew for the first time. My mother’s side of the family is from a town in North Alabama, so I asked her about the dish. It turns out her grandmother made something slightly similar, but it wasn’t quite the same as the traditional version. Since Allrecipes didn’t have a recipe at the time, my mom and I looked at a bunch of recipes and patched together our own.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it was love at first taste. Once I started researching the history of the stew through old newspaper articles and Emily Blejwas’s phenomenal book The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods, my 23andMe results and my mother’s maiden name (Stephenson) suddenly made a lot more sense: It originated with the Scottish-Irish pioneers who settled in the region more than 200 years ago. As my boss said, this stew literally runs through my veins.
What Is Alabama Chicken Stew?
Traditional North Alabama chicken stew is a soul-warming combination of chicken, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and corn cooked slowly in a homemade stock. More modern versions include more vegetables—such as carrots and celery—and simple seasonings like bay leaves, salt, and pepper.
The long-simmered potatoes are what makes this dish truly unique: They almost melt into the broth, serving as a natural thickener.
#Cooking, #MealPlanning, #Recipes,
Follow -
Discovering North Alabama Chicken Stew
I’ve lived in Alabama my entire life. My parents were born here, as were their parents, and their parents, and…well, you get the picture. To put it simply, I’m about as deeply rooted as a person can be. But it wasn’t until I was researching my home state for an article a few years ago that I came across North Alabama Chicken Stew for the first time. My mother’s side of the family is from a town in North Alabama, so I asked her about the dish. It turns out her grandmother made something slightly similar, but it wasn’t quite the same as the traditional version. Since Allrecipes didn’t have a recipe at the time, my mom and I looked at a bunch of recipes and patched together our own.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it was love at first taste. Once I started researching the history of the stew through old newspaper articles and Emily Blejwas’s phenomenal book The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods, my 23andMe results and my mother’s maiden name (Stephenson) suddenly made a lot more sense: It originated with the Scottish-Irish pioneers who settled in the region more than 200 years ago. As my boss said, this stew literally runs through my veins.
What Is Alabama Chicken Stew?
Traditional North Alabama chicken stew is a soul-warming combination of chicken, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and corn cooked slowly in a homemade stock. More modern versions include more vegetables—such as carrots and celery—and simple seasonings like bay leaves, salt, and pepper.
The long-simmered potatoes are what makes this dish truly unique: They almost melt into the broth, serving as a natural thickener.
#Cooking, #MealPlanning, #Recipes,
Follow -
Discovering North Alabama Chicken Stew
I’ve lived in Alabama my entire life. My parents were born here, as were their parents, and their parents, and…well, you get the picture. To put it simply, I’m about as deeply rooted as a person can be. But it wasn’t until I was researching my home state for an article a few years ago that I came across North Alabama Chicken Stew for the first time. My mother’s side of the family is from a town in North Alabama, so I asked her about the dish. It turns out her grandmother made something slightly similar, but it wasn’t quite the same as the traditional version. Since Allrecipes didn’t have a recipe at the time, my mom and I looked at a bunch of recipes and patched together our own.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it was love at first taste. Once I started researching the history of the stew through old newspaper articles and Emily Blejwas’s phenomenal book The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods, my 23andMe results and my mother’s maiden name (Stephenson) suddenly made a lot more sense: It originated with the Scottish-Irish pioneers who settled in the region more than 200 years ago. As my boss said, this stew literally runs through my veins.
What Is Alabama Chicken Stew?
Traditional North Alabama chicken stew is a soul-warming combination of chicken, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and corn cooked slowly in a homemade stock. More modern versions include more vegetables—such as carrots and celery—and simple seasonings like bay leaves, salt, and pepper.
The long-simmered potatoes are what makes this dish truly unique: They almost melt into the broth, serving as a natural thickener.
#Cooking, #MealPlanning, #Recipes,
Follow -
Discovering North Alabama Chicken Stew
I’ve lived in Alabama my entire life. My parents were born here, as were their parents, and their parents, and…well, you get the picture. To put it simply, I’m about as deeply rooted as a person can be. But it wasn’t until I was researching my home state for an article a few years ago that I came across North Alabama Chicken Stew for the first time. My mother’s side of the family is from a town in North Alabama, so I asked her about the dish. It turns out her grandmother made something slightly similar, but it wasn’t quite the same as the traditional version. Since Allrecipes didn’t have a recipe at the time, my mom and I looked at a bunch of recipes and patched together our own.
It’s not an exaggeration to say it was love at first taste. Once I started researching the history of the stew through old newspaper articles and Emily Blejwas’s phenomenal book The Story of Alabama in Fourteen Foods, my 23andMe results and my mother’s maiden name (Stephenson) suddenly made a lot more sense: It originated with the Scottish-Irish pioneers who settled in the region more than 200 years ago. As my boss said, this stew literally runs through my veins.
What Is Alabama Chicken Stew?
Traditional North Alabama chicken stew is a soul-warming combination of chicken, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, and corn cooked slowly in a homemade stock. More modern versions include more vegetables—such as carrots and celery—and simple seasonings like bay leaves, salt, and pepper.
The long-simmered potatoes are what makes this dish truly unique: They almost melt into the broth, serving as a natural thickener.
#Cooking, #MealPlanning, #Recipes,
Follow -
The Most Exquisite Tiny Books in the World
For all of the bookworms, here are some of the most exquisitely rendered miniature books in the world.
As a warm up, here’s a picture of the bombed-out Holland House library in London during WW2. The message was loud and clear. Readers won’t be perturbed from doing what they love, no matter what else is going on around them. There is something comforting in that.
Shiki no Kusabana (The Flower of Seasons)
This miniscule book has pages measuring a measly 0.75 millimetres (0.03 inches), and writing that’s impossible to read with the naked eye.
The charming 22 page book has monochromatic illustrations of Japanese flowers and their descriptions. The printing company responsible for Shiki no Kusabana used similar technology as used by money printers to prevent forgery, with letters spaced an amazing 0.101 mm apart.
This book was created in recent years to compete against the current Guiness World Record holder for the world’s smallest book, but failed to cut the mustard. Still, it’s incredibly beautiful in its own right. Shiki no Kusabana is on display at the Toppan Printing Museum in Tokyo.
Here it is next to the eye of a needle…
The Chameleon by Anton Checkov
The claim for the smallest book in the world goes to the 30 page volume (in English) of the Russian novel The Chameleon by Anton Checkov. This was created by Siberian craftsman Anatoly Konenko in 1996 and measures a tiny 0.9 mm, or about the same size of a grain of salt. Astonishingly, this book also has three colour illustrations, but nothing can be seen with the naked eye.
The University of Iowa Library
This library has around 4,000 miniature books on the shelves.
For more mini book inspiration visit The Telegraph and Word Histories
My Very Own Tiny Book
This one comes from a country market in Cardigan, Wales. It’s leather-bound with gold leaf writing on the cover and entitled The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, printed in Glasgow by David Brice and Sons, published in MCMV (1905).
It’s probably the oldest thing I own and one of the most treasured. Other treasured old things include, a 1940’s vintage red dress from Poland, which I wear all the time (it most certainly has a story), a pair of battered old leather boots, and books, lots more books.
Do you have any books that you treasure? do you have any tiny books?
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#art #books #GuinessWorldRecord #History #inspiration #literature #storytelling #TheLadyOfTheLake #TinyBooks #Wales #WalterScott #words #writing -
The Most Exquisite Tiny Books in the World
For all of the bookworms, here are some of the most exquisitely rendered miniature books in the world.
As a warm up, here’s a picture of the bombed-out Holland House library in London during WW2. The message was loud and clear. Readers won’t be perturbed from doing what they love, no matter what else is going on around them. There is something comforting in that.
Shiki no Kusabana (The Flower of Seasons)
This miniscule book has pages measuring a measly 0.75 millimetres (0.03 inches), and writing that’s impossible to read with the naked eye.
The charming 22 page book has monochromatic illustrations of Japanese flowers and their descriptions. The printing company responsible for Shiki no Kusabana used similar technology as used by money printers to prevent forgery, with letters spaced an amazing 0.101 mm apart.
This book was created in recent years to compete against the current Guiness World Record holder for the world’s smallest book, but failed to cut the mustard. Still, it’s incredibly beautiful in its own right. Shiki no Kusabana is on display at the Toppan Printing Museum in Tokyo.
Here it is next to the eye of a needle…
The Chameleon by Anton Checkov
The claim for the smallest book in the world goes to the 30 page volume (in English) of the Russian novel The Chameleon by Anton Checkov. This was created by Siberian craftsman Anatoly Konenko in 1996 and measures a tiny 0.9 mm, or about the same size of a grain of salt. Astonishingly, this book also has three colour illustrations, but nothing can be seen with the naked eye.
The University of Iowa Library
This library has around 4,000 miniature books on the shelves.
For more mini book inspiration visit The Telegraph and Word Histories
My Very Own Tiny Book
This one comes from a country market in Cardigan, Wales. It’s leather-bound with gold leaf writing on the cover and entitled The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, printed in Glasgow by David Brice and Sons, published in MCMV (1905).
It’s probably the oldest thing I own and one of the most treasured. Other treasured old things include, a 1940’s vintage red dress from Poland, which I wear all the time (it most certainly has a story), a pair of battered old leather boots, and books, lots more books.
Do you have any books that you treasure? do you have any tiny books?
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi
#art #books #GuinessWorldRecord #History #inspiration #literature #storytelling #TheLadyOfTheLake #TinyBooks #Wales #WalterScott #words #writing -
The Most Exquisite Tiny Books in the World
For all of the bookworms, here are some of the most exquisitely rendered miniature books in the world.
As a warm up, here’s a picture of the bombed-out Holland House library in London during WW2. The message was loud and clear. Readers won’t be perturbed from doing what they love, no matter what else is going on around them. There is something comforting in that.
Shiki no Kusabana (The Flower of Seasons)
This miniscule book has pages measuring a measly 0.75 millimetres (0.03 inches), and writing that’s impossible to read with the naked eye.
The charming 22 page book has monochromatic illustrations of Japanese flowers and their descriptions. The printing company responsible for Shiki no Kusabana used similar technology as used by money printers to prevent forgery, with letters spaced an amazing 0.101 mm apart.
This book was created in recent years to compete against the current Guiness World Record holder for the world’s smallest book, but failed to cut the mustard. Still, it’s incredibly beautiful in its own right. Shiki no Kusabana is on display at the Toppan Printing Museum in Tokyo.
Here it is next to the eye of a needle…
The Chameleon by Anton Checkov
The claim for the smallest book in the world goes to the 30 page volume (in English) of the Russian novel The Chameleon by Anton Checkov. This was created by Siberian craftsman Anatoly Konenko in 1996 and measures a tiny 0.9 mm, or about the same size of a grain of salt. Astonishingly, this book also has three colour illustrations, but nothing can be seen with the naked eye.
The University of Iowa Library
This library has around 4,000 miniature books on the shelves.
For more mini book inspiration visit The Telegraph and Word Histories
My Very Own Tiny Book
This one comes from a country market in Cardigan, Wales. It’s leather-bound with gold leaf writing on the cover and entitled The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, printed in Glasgow by David Brice and Sons, published in MCMV (1905).
It’s probably the oldest thing I own and one of the most treasured. Other treasured old things include, a 1940’s vintage red dress from Poland, which I wear all the time (it most certainly has a story), a pair of battered old leather boots, and books, lots more books.
Do you have any books that you treasure? do you have any tiny books?
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi
#art #books #GuinessWorldRecord #History #inspiration #literature #storytelling #TheLadyOfTheLake #TinyBooks #Wales #WalterScott #words #writing -
The Most Exquisite Tiny Books in the World
For all of the bookworms, here are some of the most exquisitely rendered miniature books in the world.
As a warm up, here’s a picture of the bombed-out Holland House library in London during WW2. The message was loud and clear. Readers won’t be perturbed from doing what they love, no matter what else is going on around them. There is something comforting in that.
Shiki no Kusabana (The Flower of Seasons)
This miniscule book has pages measuring a measly 0.75 millimetres (0.03 inches), and writing that’s impossible to read with the naked eye.
The charming 22 page book has monochromatic illustrations of Japanese flowers and their descriptions. The printing company responsible for Shiki no Kusabana used similar technology as used by money printers to prevent forgery, with letters spaced an amazing 0.101 mm apart.
This book was created in recent years to compete against the current Guiness World Record holder for the world’s smallest book, but failed to cut the mustard. Still, it’s incredibly beautiful in its own right. Shiki no Kusabana is on display at the Toppan Printing Museum in Tokyo.
Here it is next to the eye of a needle…
The Chameleon by Anton Checkov
The claim for the smallest book in the world goes to the 30 page volume (in English) of the Russian novel The Chameleon by Anton Checkov. This was created by Siberian craftsman Anatoly Konenko in 1996 and measures a tiny 0.9 mm, or about the same size of a grain of salt. Astonishingly, this book also has three colour illustrations, but nothing can be seen with the naked eye.
The University of Iowa Library
This library has around 4,000 miniature books on the shelves.
For more mini book inspiration visit The Telegraph and Word Histories
My Very Own Tiny Book
This one comes from a country market in Cardigan, Wales. It’s leather-bound with gold leaf writing on the cover and entitled The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, printed in Glasgow by David Brice and Sons, published in MCMV (1905).
It’s probably the oldest thing I own and one of the most treasured. Other treasured old things include, a 1940’s vintage red dress from Poland, which I wear all the time (it most certainly has a story), a pair of battered old leather boots, and books, lots more books.
Do you have any books that you treasure? do you have any tiny books?
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi
#art #books #GuinessWorldRecord #History #inspiration #literature #storytelling #TheLadyOfTheLake #TinyBooks #Wales #WalterScott #words #writing -
The Most Exquisite Tiny Books in the World
For all of the bookworms, here are some of the most exquisitely rendered miniature books in the world.
As a warm up, here’s a picture of the bombed-out Holland House library in London during WW2. The message was loud and clear. Readers won’t be perturbed from doing what they love, no matter what else is going on around them. There is something comforting in that.
Shiki no Kusabana (The Flower of Seasons)
This miniscule book has pages measuring a measly 0.75 millimetres (0.03 inches), and writing that’s impossible to read with the naked eye.
The charming 22 page book has monochromatic illustrations of Japanese flowers and their descriptions. The printing company responsible for Shiki no Kusabana used similar technology as used by money printers to prevent forgery, with letters spaced an amazing 0.101 mm apart.
This book was created in recent years to compete against the current Guiness World Record holder for the world’s smallest book, but failed to cut the mustard. Still, it’s incredibly beautiful in its own right. Shiki no Kusabana is on display at the Toppan Printing Museum in Tokyo.
Here it is next to the eye of a needle…
The Chameleon by Anton Checkov
The claim for the smallest book in the world goes to the 30 page volume (in English) of the Russian novel The Chameleon by Anton Checkov. This was created by Siberian craftsman Anatoly Konenko in 1996 and measures a tiny 0.9 mm, or about the same size of a grain of salt. Astonishingly, this book also has three colour illustrations, but nothing can be seen with the naked eye.
The University of Iowa Library
This library has around 4,000 miniature books on the shelves.
For more mini book inspiration visit The Telegraph and Word Histories
My Very Own Tiny Book
This one comes from a country market in Cardigan, Wales. It’s leather-bound with gold leaf writing on the cover and entitled The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, printed in Glasgow by David Brice and Sons, published in MCMV (1905).
It’s probably the oldest thing I own and one of the most treasured. Other treasured old things include, a 1940’s vintage red dress from Poland, which I wear all the time (it most certainly has a story), a pair of battered old leather boots, and books, lots more books.
Do you have any books that you treasure? do you have any tiny books?
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi
#art #books #GuinessWorldRecord #History #inspiration #literature #storytelling #TheLadyOfTheLake #TinyBooks #Wales #WalterScott #words #writing -
Fantasyland
Non-specific Fantasy World Map (credit: http://freefantasymaps.org/The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Gollancz, 2004 (1996).Dark Lord (dread lord). There is always one of these in the background of every Tour, attempting to ruin everything and take over the world. He will be so sinister that he will be seen by you only once or twice, probably near the end of the Tour. Generally he will attack you through MINIONS (forces of Terror, bound to his will), of which he will have large numbers. When you do get to see him at last, you will not be surprised to find he is black […] and shadowy and probably not wholly human. He will make you feel very cold and small. […]
In The Tough Guide to Fantasyland Diana Wynne Jones created an imaginary tourist’s guidebook to a generic world where magic is a given — in fact the kind of world conjured up for almost any example of the epic fantasy genre you can name. Think Middle Earth, Narnia, Earthsea or, less familiarly, the Old Kingdom, Prydain, Zimiamvia or Pellinor. Jones imagines them all perhaps as aspects of Fantasyland, though it’s clear that the Disney version is not really what she has in mind. As pretty much all fantasy is predicated on conflict leading to some sort of resolution the nemesis of each world is thus nearly always some incarnation of a Dark Lord. It’s hard to think of any dread adversary who doesn’t conform in some way to Jones’ description, their motivations exactly those of Milton’s Satan:
One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.But a Dark Lord alone does not a Fantasyland make.
Redrawn map based on that in the first Vista edition (credit http://dianawynnejones.wikia.com/wiki/File:Tough-guide-fantasyland-map.png)Jones’ Tough Guide, like any genuine Rough Guide to our world, lists places as well as people, concepts as well as concrete (and not so concrete) objects. Open any page at random and you will find no end of examples of fantasy tropes and clichés: from prophecy (“used by the Management to make sure that no Tourist is unduly surprised by events, and by GODDESSES AND GODS to make sure that people do as the deity wants. All Prophecies come true. This is a Rule…”) to inns (they “exist in TOWNS and CITIES, but seldom outside them, except at crossroads that are miles from anywhere”), from dwell (“used throughout the Tour meaning to live somewhere. The inhabitants are always Dwellers“) to sex (“obligatory at some stage in the Tour. The Rules differ according to whether you are male or female…”). All entries are recognisable to a greater or lesser extent, and for any fantasy writer worth their salt they can be a useful corrective to lazy writing, should they choose to aim at original plots, characters and situations.
Then there is the MAP. All guidebooks have them, and this one is no exception. “No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one.” The Tough Guide‘s map is weird and wonderful, until you realise that it’s our outline map of Europe — with north at the bottom. This is the author’s way of saying that most epic fantasy is basically a topsy-turvy version of life in medieval Europe. The map is peppered with ‘unpronounceable’ names or barely disguised familiar placenames, usually with ominous descriptions. Some versions of this map are based on the first Vista paperback, but the Gollancz edition has both additional and alternative names on its map, redrawn by Dave Senior. An assiduous reader will have fun winkling out the original source of these aberrations.
But rely on the map at your peril. Nothing is as it seems, and where there is nothing on the map it seems there is inevitably something unexpected. Not only is this evident in the maps one sees as a frontispiece in most epic fantasies, DWJ is very specific about their failings: some placenames “may be names of countries, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell […] there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places.” Her conclusion? “The Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get.”
Fantasyland (http://thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/a-history-of-epic-fantasy-part-5.html)As soon as she was embarked on the Tough Guide Diana must have been thinking of writing narratives set in this landscape. But how to incorporate a spoof born of familiarity and no little affection in stories which, while mocking the conventions of the genre, also reflected her sense of responsibility towards her audience? Two years after the original Tough Guide she produced Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), and two years after that came Year of the Griffin (2000). In these — to put it bluntly — she excoriated those who wielded power and extracted profit from the general population or who showed a narrow-mindedness where education and creativity are concerned. Don’t expect Victorian morality tales, however; these are subtle fairytales in which, while magic is normal, fine though flawed individuals learn life lessons, most wrongs are eventually righted and a devastated world starts on the road to rebuilding and some kind of happily-ever-after.
But the Tough Guide harboured the germs of a slightly darker vision under its breezy exterior. In an earlier review of the 1996 paperback I gave the impression that this was principally a tongue-in-cheek spoof, and indeed this was the general assessment (Terry Pratchett called it “an indispensable guide for anyone stuck in the realms of fantasy without a magic sword to call their own”). Nevertheless DWJ had always been aware of the fantasy writer’s propensity to play God in their created universe — though she would have argued that it’s actually humans who attribute human creativity to their various deities — and to order characters, situations and events according to their arbitrary will. In Dark Lord she portrays the sinister offworlder Roland Chesney (perhaps a denizen of our own world) fashioning Fantasyland into a giant theme park for earth-based package tourists. Here he forces the unwilling local inhabitants to act out epic fantasy roles such as wizard guides, mercenaries, bards, thieves, starving villagers, enchantresses and so on. After four decades, the strain on Fantasyland and its peoples is proving not only hugely burdensome but also unsustainable, not to forget immoral.
We all know the Roland Chesneys of our world. Whether they are on the more benign end of the spectrum (perhaps DWJ was thinking of Walt Disney and his own Fantasyland) or, less benign, like the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, they peddle entertainment on a global scale while seeking to maximise profits and to acquire the greatest monopoly the law allows. Their rapacious greed outweighs any true concern for the common man, and they may well choose to devastate a planet rather than relinquish any power. These days they may, indeed, govern countries.
For some readers of the Tough Guide in its various manifestations such sombre thoughts mayn’t cast any shadows: this is about magic, isn’t it, make-believe, and we all know that it doesn’t exist, don’t we? This Gollancz hardback includes — instead of the occasional antique illustrations of the Vista paperback — rather more jokey line drawings by Douglas Carrel. Fine in themselves, they remind me a little of the cartoons, by the likes of the UK’s Josh Kirby, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. But then, we all know by now that underneath the veneer of Pratchett’s sense of the ridiculous there lurked a lot of suppressed anger and subversive polemic. As with Pratchett’s writings, if you scratch the surface of Jones’ writing you’re likely to find rather more than you bargained for.
First posted 2nd June 2017 with this note: “This is the last of a short series of posts on Diana Wynne Jones: the first was by Tamar Lindsay on Fantasyland’s Dark Lord, and the second was a repost of a review of a collection of that author’s non-fiction writings. DWJ (born 16 August 1934, died 26 March 2011) was an intelligent as well as prolific writer of mainly fantasy for readers of all ages.” Now reposted for #MarchMagics2026.
#dianaWynneJones #Fantasyland #maps #MarchMagics2026 #TerryPratchett #TheToughGuideToFantasyland -
Fantasyland
Non-specific Fantasy World Map (credit: http://freefantasymaps.org/The Tough Guide to Fantasyland
by Diana Wynne Jones.
Gollancz, 2004 (1996).Dark Lord (dread lord). There is always one of these in the background of every Tour, attempting to ruin everything and take over the world. He will be so sinister that he will be seen by you only once or twice, probably near the end of the Tour. Generally he will attack you through MINIONS (forces of Terror, bound to his will), of which he will have large numbers. When you do get to see him at last, you will not be surprised to find he is black […] and shadowy and probably not wholly human. He will make you feel very cold and small. […]
In The Tough Guide to Fantasyland Diana Wynne Jones created an imaginary tourist’s guidebook to a generic world where magic is a given — in fact the kind of world conjured up for almost any example of the epic fantasy genre you can name. Think Middle Earth, Narnia, Earthsea or, less familiarly, the Old Kingdom, Prydain, Zimiamvia or Pellinor. Jones imagines them all perhaps as aspects of Fantasyland, though it’s clear that the Disney version is not really what she has in mind. As pretty much all fantasy is predicated on conflict leading to some sort of resolution the nemesis of each world is thus nearly always some incarnation of a Dark Lord. It’s hard to think of any dread adversary who doesn’t conform in some way to Jones’ description, their motivations exactly those of Milton’s Satan:
One who brings
A mind not to be changed by place or time.
The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.But a Dark Lord alone does not a Fantasyland make.
Redrawn map based on that in the first Vista edition (credit http://dianawynnejones.wikia.com/wiki/File:Tough-guide-fantasyland-map.png)Jones’ Tough Guide, like any genuine Rough Guide to our world, lists places as well as people, concepts as well as concrete (and not so concrete) objects. Open any page at random and you will find no end of examples of fantasy tropes and clichés: from prophecy (“used by the Management to make sure that no Tourist is unduly surprised by events, and by GODDESSES AND GODS to make sure that people do as the deity wants. All Prophecies come true. This is a Rule…”) to inns (they “exist in TOWNS and CITIES, but seldom outside them, except at crossroads that are miles from anywhere”), from dwell (“used throughout the Tour meaning to live somewhere. The inhabitants are always Dwellers“) to sex (“obligatory at some stage in the Tour. The Rules differ according to whether you are male or female…”). All entries are recognisable to a greater or lesser extent, and for any fantasy writer worth their salt they can be a useful corrective to lazy writing, should they choose to aim at original plots, characters and situations.
Then there is the MAP. All guidebooks have them, and this one is no exception. “No Tour of Fantasyland is complete without one.” The Tough Guide‘s map is weird and wonderful, until you realise that it’s our outline map of Europe — with north at the bottom. This is the author’s way of saying that most epic fantasy is basically a topsy-turvy version of life in medieval Europe. The map is peppered with ‘unpronounceable’ names or barely disguised familiar placenames, usually with ominous descriptions. Some versions of this map are based on the first Vista paperback, but the Gollancz edition has both additional and alternative names on its map, redrawn by Dave Senior. An assiduous reader will have fun winkling out the original source of these aberrations.
But rely on the map at your peril. Nothing is as it seems, and where there is nothing on the map it seems there is inevitably something unexpected. Not only is this evident in the maps one sees as a frontispiece in most epic fantasies, DWJ is very specific about their failings: some placenames “may be names of countries, but since most of the Map is bare it is hard to tell […] there is no scale of miles and no way of telling how long you might take on the way to see these places.” Her conclusion? “The Map is useless, but you are advised to keep consulting it, because it is the only one you will get.”
Fantasyland (http://thewertzone.blogspot.co.uk/2015/08/a-history-of-epic-fantasy-part-5.html)As soon as she was embarked on the Tough Guide Diana must have been thinking of writing narratives set in this landscape. But how to incorporate a spoof born of familiarity and no little affection in stories which, while mocking the conventions of the genre, also reflected her sense of responsibility towards her audience? Two years after the original Tough Guide she produced Dark Lord of Derkholm (1998), and two years after that came Year of the Griffin (2000). In these — to put it bluntly — she excoriated those who wielded power and extracted profit from the general population or who showed a narrow-mindedness where education and creativity are concerned. Don’t expect Victorian morality tales, however; these are subtle fairytales in which, while magic is normal, fine though flawed individuals learn life lessons, most wrongs are eventually righted and a devastated world starts on the road to rebuilding and some kind of happily-ever-after.
But the Tough Guide harboured the germs of a slightly darker vision under its breezy exterior. In an earlier review of the 1996 paperback I gave the impression that this was principally a tongue-in-cheek spoof, and indeed this was the general assessment (Terry Pratchett called it “an indispensable guide for anyone stuck in the realms of fantasy without a magic sword to call their own”). Nevertheless DWJ had always been aware of the fantasy writer’s propensity to play God in their created universe — though she would have argued that it’s actually humans who attribute human creativity to their various deities — and to order characters, situations and events according to their arbitrary will. In Dark Lord she portrays the sinister offworlder Roland Chesney (perhaps a denizen of our own world) fashioning Fantasyland into a giant theme park for earth-based package tourists. Here he forces the unwilling local inhabitants to act out epic fantasy roles such as wizard guides, mercenaries, bards, thieves, starving villagers, enchantresses and so on. After four decades, the strain on Fantasyland and its peoples is proving not only hugely burdensome but also unsustainable, not to forget immoral.
We all know the Roland Chesneys of our world. Whether they are on the more benign end of the spectrum (perhaps DWJ was thinking of Walt Disney and his own Fantasyland) or, less benign, like the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, they peddle entertainment on a global scale while seeking to maximise profits and to acquire the greatest monopoly the law allows. Their rapacious greed outweighs any true concern for the common man, and they may well choose to devastate a planet rather than relinquish any power. These days they may, indeed, govern countries.
For some readers of the Tough Guide in its various manifestations such sombre thoughts mayn’t cast any shadows: this is about magic, isn’t it, make-believe, and we all know that it doesn’t exist, don’t we? This Gollancz hardback includes — instead of the occasional antique illustrations of the Vista paperback — rather more jokey line drawings by Douglas Carrel. Fine in themselves, they remind me a little of the cartoons, by the likes of the UK’s Josh Kirby, of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. But then, we all know by now that underneath the veneer of Pratchett’s sense of the ridiculous there lurked a lot of suppressed anger and subversive polemic. As with Pratchett’s writings, if you scratch the surface of Jones’ writing you’re likely to find rather more than you bargained for.
First posted 2nd June 2017 with this note: “This is the last of a short series of posts on Diana Wynne Jones: the first was by Tamar Lindsay on Fantasyland’s Dark Lord, and the second was a repost of a review of a collection of that author’s non-fiction writings. DWJ (born 16 August 1934, died 26 March 2011) was an intelligent as well as prolific writer of mainly fantasy for readers of all ages.” Now reposted for #MarchMagics2026.
#dianaWynneJones #Fantasyland #maps #MarchMagics2026 #TerryPratchett #TheToughGuideToFantasyland -
A multi-storey problem story: the thread about the Castle Terrace Car Park
Threadinburgh does like to try and keep things topical sometimes, so when news broke that car park operator NCP had entered administration with huge debts I felt it was an opportune moment to take a quick look into its most prominent Edinburgh location; Castle Terrace Car Park and by extension a brief history of the Castle Terrace Gardens that it replaced and – presciently – the city’s hard lesson that car parking just didn’t pay.
The broad street of Castle Terrace was built up around 1833 on a natural slope that was once an area called Orchardfield, for centuries the site of market gardens. This was part of a scheme to build new “western approach roads” into the Old Town, which saw the construction of Johnston Terrace up and along the south face of the Castle Rock and the King’s Bridge over the old King’s Stables Road route. Any further development stalled at this time and for almost four decades the embankment between Castle Terrace and the lower level road was simply a grassy slope. This changed in 1868 when architect Sir James Gowans began to develop sumptuous tenement housing along Castle Terrace and landscaped the slope below into private gardens for the proprietors. Maps of 1876 and 1893 show that the gardens were largely planted with trees and had a pair of footpaths leading down from Castle Terrace. There had been an original intention to connect this route to West Princes Street gardens with a footbridge but this came to nothing.
A quiet, shady spot with the most dramatic of views. Castle Terrace Gardens in 1945, H. D. Wyllie photograph. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.In 1875 Gowans built the grand New Edinburgh Theatre venture further along Castle Terrace, a scheme that quickly failed and caused its architect such financial stress that it hastened him to his grave. The building was taken over by the United Presbyterian Church and became the Synod Hall, later yet occupied by the Poole’s Synod cinema. By 1880 newspapers reported that the gardens were also in failing health and in such a state of neglect that the owners were served notice to improve by the Town Council. This obviously didn’t have the intended effect as they were ultimately taken over by the city in 1888 to be put “in order for the public benefit and advantage“.
Comparison of 1876 and 1967 OS Town Plans of Edinburgh showing the location of the Castle Terrace Gardens and then Car Park. Note in 1966 the Synod Hall building, formerly the New Edinburgh Theatre, had been demolished in expectation that a new opera house would be built in that location. Move the slider to compare. Reproduced with the permission of the National Library of ScotlandFor the next forty or so years very little happened with the park, it was just a quiet, leafy spot in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle only a walk across the road away from the far busier and more manicured Princes Street Gardens. Things began to change in March 1938 when Edinburgh City Police approved both Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road as official on-street car parks, providing spaces for 100 vehicles. Parking was becoming an increasing problem in the city at this time and the City Prosecutor had issued the first fines for obstructive parking at the West End in June 1936 (although these were only a token 5s each and intended as a warning to future offenders). This wider scheme turned a number of picturesque city streets into car parks, including Charlotte Square, St James’ Square, the foot of the Mound, North Bridge and the centres of the Grassmarket and Chambers Streets.
Copy of the 1938 police plan for parking in the centre of Edinburgh. The Scotsman, 24th March 1938The first suggestion of a purpose-built car park for the Castle Terrace area came in 1939 from an unlikely source – the Edinburgh Unemployed Association – who mooted a make-work scheme for a new fire headquarters between Johnston Terrace and King’s Stables Road with a 500-place car park on its roof. The war intervened and any such plans were shelved indefinitely. Parking in the wartime city during the hours of darkness was tightly controlled; both to keep streets clear for emergency vehicles and also to reduce the risk of collisions with parked vehicles during blackouts.
It did not take long after the cessation of hostilities for the city to approve what would be its first purpose-built car parks. In November 1946 plans were announced for two underground facilities, one each beneath Charlotte and St Andrew Squares. The Edinburgh Evening News’ columnist Athenian was less than impressed by the likely cost of these and preferred more on-street parking, explicitly suggesting “the east footpath of Castle Terrace” as it was “hardly used by pedestrians – and even the almost sacrilegious suggestion of using a section of Princes Street Gardens between Waverley Bridge and the National Gallery. By the time the Civic Survey and Plan of the city (aka The Abercrombie Report) was published in 1949 these car parks had been quietly dropped, indeed although it went to great details about huge urban roadbuilding schemes, this document hardly mentioned parking at all. It did however suggest the rehabilitation of Castle Terrace Gardens as part of a new Festival Centre located around the locus of the Usher Hall, Lyceum Theatre and Synod Hall.
Photograph of a scale model of central Edinburgh produced to accompany The Abercrombie Report of 1949, showing grand plans for new urban motorways throughout the city centre. Look closely and you can see the lower deck roads inserted below Princes Street and the Mound! Notice also that Waverley Station has been put underground and that the entirety of Princes Street has been demolished and replaced with new city blocks complete with mezzanine-level walkways.Nothing much came of any of these schemes due to a lack of money and political indecision about how to deal with the city’s blossoming car and parking problem. In 1954 a proposal was made by a senior city councillor, Bailie Mackenzie, to take over part of the (privately owned) Queen Street Gardens as a car park. In 1955 the threat to East Princes Street Gardens was revived with an outline scheme of £235,000 (£5.4m in 2026) approved by the Town Council over the protestations of the Lord Provost John G. Banks. This would, he said, “desecrate the great gardens” and cause “vandalism of our great heritage.” With a premonition for the now understood phenomenon of induced demand, Banks said of the 500 space car park:
Artists impression of the approved scheme for East Princes Street Gardens car park. Scotsman, 20th September 1955.[It] would do nothing to alleviate the congestion in the centre of the city. Another 500 cars will appear to-morrow
The idea went down as well as you might expect with the citizen letter writers of Edinburgh and there there was an indignant bulge in the mailbags sent to the letters pages of the Scotsman. Others weren’t opposed to car parks per se – in October one Ian G. Fyfe of 8 Drummond Place wrote to describe an alternative scheme of instead building a concrete deck over King’s Stables Road and turning it into a two-storey car park. Mr Fyfe allowed his imagination to run wild in his letter, suggesting “the adoption of an American garaging device” that would slide vehicles tightly into spaces to cram the maximum number into the space.
Perhaps the city was listening as just over a month later the same paper announced that the plans for Princes Street Gardens had been dropped and an alternative scheme was being proposed by the Joint Sub-Committee on Traffic Arrangements in the Centre of the City to build a two level car park on the Castle Terrace Gardens site. City Engineer W. P. Haldane calculated this would cost £121,400 (£2.8m in 2026) and have space for 505 vehicles. The Scotsman found this idea “less objectionable” on account of it being cheaper, accommodating more cars and of “Castle Terrace gardens in the their present state are not particularly attractive“, but also noted that “open green spaces in the centre of the city [were] pleasant” and their loss “distinctly disturbing“. The paper feared this might be the thin end of the wedge, with other city gardens being covered in reinforced concrete and tarmac in the future.
A report on traffic control produced for the city at this time by the architects J. L. Gleave and W. H. Kininmonth noted that car parking was already an “acute” problem in the centre and with car ownership and traffic increasing at an exponential rate then if nothing were done it would either become insoluble or require “desperate remedies which in the long run may well be contrary to the best interests of the city“. The authors recommended a long-term parking plan be prepared with the immediate needs being met by introducing parking meters for on-street spaces and with progressing the Castle Terrace scheme as a priority.
Edinburgh’s first parking meter was installed in October 1960 outside the City Chambers; but it was at this time only for display purposes to show the curious public what they might look like. Photograph in Edinburgh: The Fabulous Fifties by Paul Harris, 1995Once again the city fathers thanked the authors of a strategic report for their efforts and filed it away in the depths of City Chambers. Nothing was done. The Castle Terrace Car Park was an idea that just wouldn’t stay dead for long however and the following year architect Alan Reiach proposed a new Festival Centre for the area, one that would build a vast new opera and concert hall on the site of the Synod Hall, with a multi-storey car park in the gardens connecting directly to it underneath Castle Terrace. This was yet another city dream of a concert venue that would come to nothing, although one of its various attempts to resurrect the idea did see the Synod Hall demolished in 1966 only to be left as a gap site for almost 30 years.
Sketch design by Alan Reiach for the 1956 Opera and Festival Centre on Castle Terrace and Lothian Road. The building with the domed roof is the Usher Hall, which was to be retained. Oppenheim had acquired the Lyceum, to its left, for speculative redevelopment.The Joint Sub-Committee re-considered the Castle Terrace idea again in 1957, a proposal for a two-tier, 800 space car park, but once again nothing was done. Four years later the Town Council once again found themselves looking at yet more plans for a car park on the street and met on Thursday April 27th 1961 to decide on the fate of the Castle Terrace Gardens.
Castle Terrace Gardens, looking north with King’s Stables Road below on the right. Probably 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP612535 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.At this meeting they approved a five-tier structure with a capacity for 829 vehicles and at a cost of £386,602. It would be the first of its kind in Scotland and one of the very first of a “continuous ramp” design in the UK. All but a small portion of the gardens at the northern end of the site would be obliterated and as a sop to this loss a paved public area was included on the top deck at street level which was to have some replacement planting. This time the twin planets of money and political will aligned and finally the city actually began its first purpose-built, off-street car park.
Invitation for tenders for the Castle Terrace Car Park, The Contract Journal, August 24th 1961Construction was commenced in December 1961 by Holloway’s Scottish Constructions Ltd. with work to be completed by June 1963 so that it was ready in time for that year’s Festival. In a matter of days the logging teams moved in to fell the trees, closely followed by the diggers to grub up their roots and begin excavating the embankment. The letter-writers were unimpressed.
The destruction of Castle Terrace Garden, December 1961. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611220 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.Relentlessly they pursue their declared policy of destruction of what is full of grace and beauty only to replace that with something vulgar – such as the car park in Castle Terrace – which may help them retain their seats at the next election. The barbarian is within our gates!
Ken Jones, writing to the Editor of the Scotsman, 19th January 1962As is typical for the Grand Projets of the city of Edinburgh, problems were quick to emerge. Local residents and the operators of Poole’s Synod cinema across the street complained about the incessant noise from the works. The City Engineer had to have scaffolding installed at numbers 8 and 12 Castle Terrace to brace the façades of the tenements which had begun to visibly bow outwards. Captain W. J. Scotcher who lived at number 11 complained of cracks forming in the wall of his house and told the News’ reporter that gas and water pipes in the building had cracked. Things got worse in February 1962 when a six-month delay to construction was announced; pilings which had expected to hit rock at a 9 feet depth were still in soft earth 40 feet down! Work was paused and it took until July for a substantial re-design to complete, requiring an excavation of 37 feet down, a 40 foot retaining wall top be built and pilings sunk up to 50 feet deep. This it was thought would add £50,000 to the budget – an increase of 13%.
Castle Terrace Gardens in January 1962, a few weeks after the trees were felled and the excavators moved in to start levelling the site. Scotsman, 11th January 1962If the Corporation were hoping the worst was behind them then they were very wrong. In December 1962 the City Engineer J. C. Adamson, announced a further delay of a year on account of ongoing difficulties with the foundation works and terrible weather.
Castle Terrace car park struggles to emerge from the ground in July 1962. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP611696 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.A partial opening of the first 260 spaces in the car park did not finally take place until August 10th 1964, although it was not until October 1965 that it was finally fully completed. There were no charges for the first month in an attempt to entice in the on-street parkers.
August 10th 1964. Lord Provost Duncan M. Weatherstone opens the partially completed Car Park to a thoroughly disinterested looking audience of official onlookers. Scotsman Archive Scran photograph DP524936 via Trove.Scot but with date metadata lost.However the City Engineer F. R. Dinnis warned the Corporation that their new toy was not likely to be busy unless they began installing parking meters in the area. He was proved correct and once parking charges came in (6d per hour, up to a maximum of 4s per day) custom dropped right off. On the first day even the limited section that had been completed was only one third occupied, while the surrounding streets were full. On October 2nd it was reported that only £330 in revenue had been taken in the first seventeen days since ticketing against £2,071 in operating costs and capital charges! By November the attendants complained of a lack of work due to motorists preferring to continue to park instead, for free, on Castle Terrace and King’s Stables Road. The Police agreed to install no parking signs in these locations but the Corporation’s Highways and Road Safety Committee was told by Chief Constable John R. Inch that he had run out of such signs! The City Engineer was asked to arrange for more. Installation of parking meters in the district was promised for 1965 but in September 1966 the Scotsman quoted Councillor George Hedderwick, convenor of the previous committee in saying that the car park was rarely more than half full during the day time and was empty overnight.
April 22nd 1965, a photo which apparently shows a full car park even though the majority of it was still not yet completed. Scotsman photograph.It took until 1968 for the final cost of the project to be settled with the contractors; the bill came out at £598,000 (£10.7m in 2026) which was an increase of over 50% on the original budget. The city announced that the surplus income from its newly installed parking meters would need to be used to offset this deficit. The finances did not improve with age; indeed they got steadily worse and proved to be millstone around the city’s neck. In February 1971 the Scotsman reported that while Glasgow had made a surplus of £7,000 on its parking operations the previous year, Edinburgh had lost £77,500: operational losses at Castle Terrace had turned a £5,666 surplus from on-street meters into a deficit of £89,500, almost entirely to financing the construction debt. It was projected these losses would widen to £120,000 the following year and so the city responded by doubling parking charges at the site from 5p to 10p an hour; charges for an annual season ticket went up by 380% from £25 to £120!
In 1975 operation and ownership passed to the new upper-tier local authority – Lothian Regional Council. Realising Castle Terrace was a poisoned inheritance they immediately doubled charges yet again to 20p an hour. This backfired in expensive fashion however as the Region found itself taken to the Court of Session by the Freight Transport Association as raising parking charges in excess of limits set out in the Edinburgh Corporation Order (1971). The court found in favour of the pursuers in June 1977, cancelled the increases and forced a refund to all season ticket holders and any parkers who had kept their receipts. On top of legal expenses this cost the public purse a further (£25,000 in 2026). The Region was quick to retaliate and passed a new order allowing them to put charges back up again. And yet despite fifteen years of almost continual increase in charges, losses just kept on widening. In 1979 council-run parking operations in Edinburgh cost the Region £450,000, widening to £600,000 in 1980. The hourly doubled yet again, this time to 40p.
Public Notice of 23rd April 1980 in the Scotsman confirming increased parking charges at Castle Terrace and other council-operated off-street car parks.The Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce were less than impressed with matters and offered instead to step in and run things themselves, imagining that they could somehow do so at a profit where the council had abjectly failed.
We don’t believe that any private enterprise organisation could lose this amount of money on a car parking operation.
David Mowat, Chief Executive of Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, 7th November 1979, The ScotsmanLothian Regional Council struggled on operating its own car parks for just two more years before finally admitting defeat in July 1982 by which point annual losses were £300,000 (£1.1m in 2026). The convenor of the Transportation Committee, Conservative Councillor Ian Cramond, stated it was a “millstone round their necks” and proposed putting their operations in Edinburgh out to private tender. Labour councillors opposed the move, as did employees who went on strike, however the proposal was passed. Castle Terrace was leased to National Car Parks Ltd who got a great deal as it was the public purse that was left paying off the huge interest charges on Castle Terrace! The other sites – in reality plots of wasteland that had resulted from past civic demolition schemes – and were leased to Chamber Developments, a company owned by the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce!
Castle Terrace Car Park from King’s Stables Road, 2015, by Jim Barton CC-by-SA-2.0 via Geograph.org.ukNCP and Edinburgh District Council (the lower tier authority) fell out in 1987 over responsibility for maintenance of the paved area adjacent to Castle Terrace; benches and noticeboards were in disrepair, planters were overgrown, litter was not being collected and syringes had been discarded in the area. On investigation it was found that the lease between Lothian Region and NCP failed to determine where responsibility lay. As a “goodwill gesture” NCP agreed to fund a £300 spring clean in advance of the Festival that year. The matter took nearly two years to resolve, it eventually being found that the District Council had responsibility for the benches but that the planters belonged to Lothian Regional Council. Neither the latter authority nor NCP had the liability to maintain them so ownership was transferred instead to the District council who neatly solved the issue by removing them entirely so that the location could be used as a works compound for a construction site for the Synod Hall gap site.
An aerial photo of the Synod Hall gap site in 1989, 23 years after the block had been cleared in preparation for the Opera Hall that never was. Eventually the new Traverse Theatre and Saltire House would occupy the spot. Castle Terrace Car Park is on the left. Edinburgh and Scottish Collection, Edinburgh City Libraries.With all the upside and little of the downside of running the carpark, NCP were able to make the place pay and have run it ever since. Historic Environment Scotland caused much consternation – and a degree of disbelief to the operators – in 2019 when they listed the structure as Category B on the grounds that it was the first such built in Scotland, that it is almost unaltered since opening (hence had high “authenticity“) and that it was felt to deal very sensitively with its historic setting below the city’s Castle. You can read the full details of the listing here.
Castle Terrace Car Park looking towards its namesake, 2022. © Fiona Coutts via Britishlistedbuildings.co.ukAnd if you’d like to see a quite brilliant piece of the photographer’s art which makes use of Castle Terrace Car Park as an al fresco, reinforced concrete photography studio, do check out this post by Daveybot on his WordPress.
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