So I have decided after much thought (actually, none whatsoever) that the only way in which my spending innumerable hours on the Internet each day of my life would seem to make some sort of sense (it does not have any, in all frankness) is if I made note of certain bits of information which I found intriguing, relevant and/or thought provoking and then shared them with others, so they can also waste their lives in a more efficient manner. This beautiful thought-baby developed into a first attempt to be perused below by all those with a moment (hour, day, week) to spare.

Sometime during July I had picked  up a tattered copy of Henry Miller’s Colossus of Marussi adamant on reading it during my sun drenched Greek holiday, only to realize that this year I’ll be going to Turkey. The Colossus has thus been stashed away for future use, and I’d almost forgotten about it when it suddenly popped up on a list of books referenced by Interpol’s Paul Banks.  Interpol had also been on my mind while walking towards my favourite Budapest coffee shop (Espresso Embassy, if you insist), when I succumbed to the impulse of taking a selfie of my shoes with an inscription constantly reminding me of Paul’s eternally relevant ‘subway, she is a porno’, and of his writing skills he quite poignantly mentions: I feel comfortable with language that reflects my uncertainty. If I’ve already found a way to say something with very few words, why would you want me to say the same thing with more words? Brevity is something I need to practice more, so I will quickly mention that Interpol incidentally have a brilliant album out just now called Marauder, and here you find their latest video, and here an insight into the music that influenced their sound. 

If someone, in a very distant future, were to write my epitaph based on this year’s August, it would probably be ‘she often sent random Interpol links to her friends who were generally unmoved’, so I’ll refrain for the time being and instead offer you a bit on mixtapes and a mixtape I made on Spotify based on an actual mixtape I once had- on a CD, songs carefully burned, one by one, for hours on end until final success. And it would still always skip a little when listened to on the discman. 

Speaking of walking, with discman or without, here’s one for those irked by slow walkers–I have been diligently trying to wean myself off this habit, but the more I try, the more fate sends large packs of human tortoises my way. While I generally avoid the Budapest metro, particularly in summer and particularly when one of the lines is (again) being refurbished, I love to investigate metros in foreign cities, and Tashkent seems the perfect destination for that. 

My amazing discovery of the summer is that I can easily run longer stretches if I listen to people talking ‘to me’, so I’ve become quite addicted to two Guardian podcasts, the one on football (I now know that the only thing better than everything ever being narrated by Morgan Freeman is everything ever being narrated by Barry Glendenning) and  the one on books , through which I discovered American poet Jericho Brown.

Some travel inspiration is never a bad thing, so here it goes: from France, the Mont Saint Michel, which I’m always used to see in that one standard shot with high tide around it, this time from exciting new angles, from the country formerly known as Yugoslavia, some lovely brutalism and from Portugal, a tale about that most Lisboeta of all Lisbon’s poets, Fernando Pessoa.

It might be time to question just in tune with the times I am, but I only got into Netflix when my mum got a family subscription and I think I’m still quite in control of any possible addictions as I’m containing myself to mini-series. The Budapest-shot Alienist, which went by without a lot of media hysteria and that is a sad thing, because it is quite excellent at creating tension and re-creating an era and a place (late 19th Century New York). Plus it has a main character named László, and I just love a good László at the middle of a story. Sacred Games, Netflix’s first Indian co-production (Sikh turban-outfit matchy-matchy alert, also I now realize this IS fate, because a László + a Sikh obviously means The English Patient, and Michael Ondaatje recently published a new book.) Finally, I only started watching Bordertown because it’s Finnish, and it is fittingly odd but once you settled into the weird, it can take you places, plus I also enjoy the fact that instead of taking a whole series on a case, or having one case per episode, they have 2-3 episode blocks for each story. 

Finally, here’s a bit of anything and everything: an important story on zippers (I’d actually just noticed the YKK on one of my jeans when I found it), some videos from Romain Gavras and one from French band PNL which intriguingly combines Nat Geo imagery with gangsta posturing. They also lead me to notice the fact that French (t)rap artists like to hang around on football fields, while Serbian ones prefer the basketball courts (make of that whatever you want), then there are these pictures of a very un-Brexit-y Britain, some wonderful but currently endangered lofts in New York,  an Austrian who invested money earned by trafficking butter in the best way possible, some new music from Muse, by which I am not all that convinced but the album will be called Simulation Theory, which incidentally was a major plot theme in a recent Elementary episode (still the best Sherlock adaptation around, by the way), some new music from Anna Calvi, by which I am fully convinced, some older music from a Greek stoner rock band I accidentally discovered in a a bar, a special take on the big questions of life, and finally,  an architect who knows how to handle colour.

PS: If you want to know the actual stardate for today, you can calculate it here.