Robert Hanks

I thought he was something of a discovery once, a long time back, but he’s too busy being odd. Wouldn’t mind rereading some bits, though.

Oh god, you didn’t go and read the whole thing did you?

Is this Thomas Lovell Beddoes?

And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy Pond
Of water, never dry;
I've measured it from side to side:
'Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.

Geoffrey, Bungle, Zippy and George from the ITV children's television series Rainbow.

Zippy is very obviously BDSM-coded.

Which fictional characters do you think were having the nastiest sex off-screen?

Extraordinary stuff. I'd love to hear his theory about what multiple 'foreigners' living in a house registered to one British couple has to do with election fraud. I'd assume that if only two people appear on the register, only two people at that address get to vote

But does leaving your bike unlocked = "I think people are good" or "I think the police function very effectively"?

Opinion | Daryl Hannah: How Can ‘Love Story’ Get Away With This?

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Good gag.

Let's not both-sides this: the guy with the Rolex lives in a nasty fantasy world in which Britain has a massive crime problem, and where UK immigration is a blight while UAE's ≤90% immigrant population is wonderful.

America is an insane country.

Also, those aircraft carriers were commissioned under the last Labour government. (Though, to be fair, they seemed to be about the only thing Cameron and Osbourne didn't cut when they got the chance.)

Oh quit meaulnesing.

JET (Joint European Torus). Pictures shows lots of pipes and industrial infrastructure in a huge hall, perhaps 30m high

Going into see JET are people from museums, historians etc with hard hats. Sign above door says ‘The Assembly Hall and Torus Hall. Home of JET’

Had an amazing day on a tour of the Joint European Torus (JET) nuclear fusion facility, beginning to be decommissioned at Culham

what is becoming clear is that the means are the ends. The weapons aren't being used in pursuit of anything; Hegseth's goal is to be using the weapons, a far more deliverable objective than 'regime change'.

"This is a better war because a/ we dropped more bombs, and b/ we don't care what effect they have."

That's a fun book.

He really doesn’t do chronology, does he?

“We were living in the Middle East and never expected to be impacted by instability in the geographical area” is one heck of a take.

I was about to say the same thing.

So much for the post-McSweeney reset.

I’ve been doing Radio 3, though that’s gone downhill – too much film music, too much ‘light’ music. (It feels especially bitter on a Saturday morning – my routine for 40 years involved Record Review, and I’m still not reconciled to the switch to the afternoon.)

I gave up listening some years ago because of the combative interview style Jo misses, which to me always felt performative, and because John Humphrys’ political biases had become too glaring.

What, are you trying to do Chris Mason out of a job?

I don't see that we could reasonably ask that of anyone.

No, the party that lost the seat is by definition the biggest loser. I don’t see this story as anti-Labour: possibly feeling the same frustration with Labour that I and many other people feel, but that’s a frustration born of affection for the party and a wish that it would do better

Is this the Robert Wyatt/Lynsey de Paul team-up the fans were clamouring for?

white voters get their legitimate concerns addressed, non-white voters are pandered to. it's an irregular verb.

Contemporary HR discourse has an awful lot in common with Health & Safety discourse a few years back – obsessed by the marginal cases where the people doing this stuff can be painted as rules-obsessed jobsworths, blind to their genuinely important function.