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Sep. 20th, 2025 08:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The camera angles work really hard to make the dogs look vicious and dangerous, but they can't fool me! Those are some happy, friendly puppers!
Up betimes and to my office, where I found my brother Tom, who tells me that his mistress’s mother has wrote a letter to Mr. Lull of her full satisfaction about Tom, of which I was glad, and do think the business will take. All this morning we sat at the office, Sir J. Minnes and I. And so dined at home, and among my workmen all the afternoon, and in the evening Tom brought Mr. Lull to me, a friend of his mistress, a serious man, with whom I spoke, and he gives me a good account of her and of their satisfaction in Tom, all which pleases me well. We walked a good while in the garden together, and did give him a glass of wine at my office, and so parted.
So to write letters by the post and news of this to my father concerning Tom, and so home to supper and to my lodgings and to bed.
To-night my barber sent me his man to trim me, who did live in King Street in Westminster lately, and tells me that three or four that I knew in that street, tradesmen, are lately fallen mad, and some of them dead, and the others continue mad. They live all within a door or two one of another.
"Alcazaba" is the Spanish rendering of "the citadel" in Arabic, which is why Málaga's Alcazaba is one of many in Spain. Like most, the monumental structure in Málaga is the product of many centuries of addition, modification, embellishment, and destruction.
Although historical texts mention earlier fortresses in its current location, the Alcazaba as we know it was primarily built in the 11th century and then significantly improved in the 13th and 14th centuries by a series of small Moorish kingdoms, or "taifas," that controlled Málaga after the fall of the powerful caliphate based in Córdoba.
When the city fell to the troops of Ferdinand and Isabella in 1487 after a siege of over three months, it became the residence of the crown's local military governor. As the centuries passed, the Alcazaba's importance as an administrative center diminished, and it served a variety of functions, including as an artillery outpost and prison. Its condition deteriorated significantly following an earthquake in 1680 and a French naval bombardment in 1693. By the end of the 18th century, it had been occupied by the townsfolk, becoming a marginal and picturesque residential neighborhood. It remained that way, partially hidden by the houses of local residents, until 1931, when it was declared a national monument.
The Alcazaba's rehabilitation was initially directed by the same architect responsible for restoring the Alhambra in Granada, Leopoldo Torres Balbás. He took a historicist approach, seeking to restore the structure's appearance as faithfully as possible during the time of the Moors. When construction teams undertook the removal of the neighborhood's houses, they were happy to discover that residents had often simply covered up or walled off the remains of arches and columns — cheaper than demolishing and removing them entirely — thereby preserving these features for posterity. What visitors explore today is the result of the restorations carried out from the 1930s to the 1960s, which combined the remains of the original structure with reconstructions informed by archaeological evidence and historical drawings.
A visit inside the Alcazaba's formidable walls reveals lush gardens and numerous fountains, harmoniously combining manmade and natural elements. The monument's highlights include the arched doorways of a series of original towers leading up into the fortress's residential interior, some of which incorporate columns from the ruins of the adjacent Roman theater. There's also the Patio de las Armas, a small plaza with a fountain and garden overlooking the port of Málaga, and the upper palace, featuring its own water-cooled interior courtyards, elegant arches, and numerous other intricately detailed decorative elements.
Henry Ford’s failed attempt at setting up a rubber production facility in Brazil is now well-known thanks to Greg Grandin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Fordlandia. Hardly known at all, however, is the English farming experiment he began in 1931.
As historian Kit Kowol explains, Ford tried to apply the “techniques of mass production, scientific management, and high wages” he had made famous in the auto industry to “serve the interests of agriculture and the rural community” in Essex.
In the midst of the Great Depression, this experimental farm was supposed to show how industrial American farming methods could be applied to England. Kowol calls the effort to “harmonize modern technology with traditional patterns of life” an “experiment in conservative modernity.” Ford and his allies in the Conservative Party were attempting to forge their sort of modern rural utopia amidst the global capitalist disaster, when “the English countryside was bursting with schemes to rural regeneration.”
The Ford scheme: stem the rural exodus, preserve traditional rural life, and introduce industrial farming with Ford-produced tractors and trucks. As with today’s megalomaniac billionaires, Ford had plenty of money to spend on his notions. (His anti-Jewish obsessions, for instance, made him Hitler’s favorite American.)
At heart a paternalistic small-town reactionary, Ford believed his workers should combine agricultural and industrial labor. This would lead, he thought, “to greater industrial and political stability. Workers who could grow their own food were less likely to engage in industrial agitation in periods of economic downturn.”
“Though he personally disliked agricultural work,” continues Kowol, the farm-raised Ford nonetheless saw it as a way of “making men more productive, efficient, and proud when they returned to the factory.”
The Ford factory at Dagenham was purposely located on the marshes east of London, away from the corruptions—and the working class tradition and organization—of the city. But the original garden allotments there for his workers proved to be a bust; as in Fordlandia, the land “was totally inappropriate for the task he had set for it.” In addition, it turned out that factory workers didn’t have the “necessary skills nor attitude for farming.” Not to mention the time.
Percival Perry, the Conservative party activist who headed Ford Motors Ltd. in England, suggested Ford test his “pet beliefs” about agricultural mechanization further afield. They settled on a dilapidated estate in Boreham, about thirty miles southwest of London. They named it Fordson Estate, after the Ford’s UK tractor brand. For a while, the press would call that part of Essex “Ford Country.”
As it happened, Ford moved on to other crotchets, but Perry continued to rule over the farm.
“Able to manipulate his employer’s will and considerable resources, Perry engineered the farming venture as a means to demonstrate his own Conservative social and political philosophy,” Kowol writes. Perry wanted Fordson to show “how self-consciously enlightened industrialists [like himself] could use mechanization and other modern techniques to create a more productive, vibrant, and harmonious rural society.”
A “family wage” was supposed to maintain traditional family structure, so women weren’t accepted at the Fordson school for agricultural engineering. Workers were paid 25 percent over the county minimum and received a yearly bonus based on the profit made by the estate. The idea was to “remove the injustice of those who did most to increase the land’s value, namely the agricultural worker, receiving the slimmest financial reward.”
Worker contracts lasted a year, though many were fired before they were vested in the cooperatives. At harvest time, half of the labor force were “casuals,” typically Irish immigrants, who weren’t provided with housing, a situation which riled locals. Borehamites were also upset because they weren’t allowed to glean the farm’s unharvested produce, a traditional practice. So much for rural harmony.
During World War II, when the government guaranteed agricultural prices, Fordson boomed. As an avowed alternative-to-socialism, however, this was particularly ironic. The war also saw a piece of Fordson land turned into a US Army Air Force base. The Women’s Land Army, meanwhile, chucked both Ford’s and Perry’s gendered view of rural life out of the barn.
When Labour ushered in the end of Conservative rule after the end of the war, the Fordson experiment no longer made any sense. Ford died in 1947, marking an end to his funding. Perry and investors ended up buying the operation out. It would eventually be run by “precisely the kind of absentee owners that Perry had once actively sought to exclude.”
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Pascal’s post came on the heels of other Marvel stars taking their support a step further by endorsing a boycott of the studio and its subsidiaries, including platforms that stream their work. Marisa Tomei, who played Aunt May opposite Tom Holland in the Spider-Man franchise (a Marvel property distributed by Sony, though she appears in Disney releases from the Avengers universe), reposted a call to “unsubscribe and boycott” platforms under the Walt Disney Company umbrella, including Marvel, ABC, ESPN, Fox Entertainment, Hulu, Pixar, Lucasfilm and Bamtech Media.
Tatiana Maslany, who starred in the title role of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law, a Marvel series that debuted on Disney+, posted a behind-the-scenes photo of herself on set, urging her Instagram followers to “cancel your Disney+, Hulu, ESPN subscriptions!” Mark Ruffalo, who played the Hulk on the big screen, participated in a No Kings online event during which he weighed in. “My industry doesn’t really understand what’s happening right now, but what they do understand is our freedom of speech is being attacked.”
Up betimes and to my office, and at 9 o’clock, none of the rest going, I went alone to Deptford, and there went on where they left last night to pay Woolwich yard, and so at noon dined well, being chief at the table, and do not see but every body begins to give me as much respect and honour as any of the rest. After dinner to Pay again, and so till 9 at night, my great trouble being that I was forced to begin an ill practice of bringing down the wages of servants, for which people did curse me, which I do not love. At night, after I had eaten a cold pullet, I walked by brave moonshine, with three or four armed men to guard me, to Redriffe, it being a joy to my heart to think of the condition that I am now in, that people should of themselves provide this for me, unspoke to. I hear this walk is dangerous to walk alone by night, and much robbery committed here. So from thence by water home, and so to my lodgings to bed.
The Franklin Cider Mill is an essential autumn pilgrimage for anyone passing through the Detroit suburbs.
Located near Franklin, a quaint village in suburban Detroit whose 19th-century main street has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1969, the cider mill is one of the town’s main attractions during apple season, which runs from the end of August through the end of November.
Franklin was first settled in the 1820s, thanks in part to the Erie Canal helping open up the Midwest. In 1837 Michigan became a state, and Colonel Peter VanEvery purchased a property on the banks of the Franklin River. In what was certainly a smart business move, he built a grist mill on the river, and all the farmers from the surrounding area came right to the mill to get their grain ground into flour.
The mill was wheat-based until the early 1900s, when a flood damaged it and forced it to close. It was purchased in 1918 by Robert McKee and reopened as a cider mill, operating during the apple season. Since 1966 it has been owned and operated by the local Peltz family.
The Franklin Cider Mill is an autumnal wonderland. The fresh-baked apple donuts and the cider itself are obviously main attractions, but there’s also a plentiful fall market open every day, with produce and gifts from the mill and across Michigan (including pumpkins and seasonal gourds) plus live music, face-painting, and hot dogs.
The best part is the mill itself. Visitors can walk right inside the mill for a glimpse behind the scenes: Watch the massive waterwheel and the original 90-ton cider press work, and peek inside the kitchen to watch the cider getting bottled and the donuts being baked as well. Before the end of your visit, make sure to toss some breadcrumbs or donut bits to the very spoiled ducks that paddle up and down the water.