Intended to be very sensible and restrained at Leeds Waterstones, but what’s a fellow to do?

To the Atkinson Grimshaw exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery which I have been promising to myself for months. Some absolute stunners, mostly but not exclusively his well known night scenes like this Roundhay nocturne

Ages since I was last in Pizza Pieces on Market Street, Bradford, and I am delighted to say they are still making amazing pizza for outrageously good value (£3.80 for those slices of pepperoni pizza which will keep me very happy till teatime)

Peer Gynt? Peer Git, more like

Fighting fire with fire seems a pretty bad idea

Using Generative AI is a useful indicator of unsuitability for your role.

It's filt, I tells ya, pure filt!

Satoshi Hashimoto

meow

In these times when the main creative "gatekeepers" seem to have surrendered to spiritual exhaustion and atrophy, it is down to the artists themselves to create as fearlessly and truly as it is in their (our) being to do; the "gatekeepers", having no real being of their own, have no will to stop us.

I have noticed that they never broadcast the original version, with Ira Gershwin's awfully disrespectful lyrics.

Norman Rockwell

Travelling back from London on the M1, and just approaching the Dunstable turnoff. Those who are, like me, fans of both Gilbert & Sullivan opera and the novels of P G Wodehouse, will understand the double association the name has for me.

I get the impression that Goon announcer Andrew Timothy was written as a very different, acerbic character from lovely old Wallace Greenslade - accounting for some of the different tone in The Last Goon Show of All when AT returned to the role. The tone reminds me of Humphrey Lyttelton in ISIHAC…

On a bus travelling through North London and would welcome an explanation of the difference between Haringey, Haringay, Harringay and Harringey

In London, visiting the National Portrait Gallery, and a little shocked to find the rumours are true, and that while the Millais portrait of Sullivan is still prominently on display, the equally great portrait of Gilbert by Frank Holl which used to hang alongside it has been relegated to the vaults

Reminds me of the episode of sort-of-improvised comedy panel show The 99p Challenge where the teams did inappropriate ambient meditation readings from Andy McNab etc

Aquarius: Your return to the dating scene next month will be hindered by your insistence on calling it "the dating scene."

Leo: Contingency plan 1B-Alpha is now in effect, proceed to the bunker immediately. Non-Leos ignore this, everything is fine.

If you were too cheap to buy my “Stupid Stories for Tough Times“ at full price, get yourselves over to Bradford Waterstones and purchase it for a pound (find the sale trolley by the Foreign Travel section)

I don’t know who needs to know this, as the youngsters say, but if you use Charlie Brown artwork for an unwitty political meme, I will block you.

Say what you like about R3, there’s never any danger of missing out on your Wagner

Presenter just now confidently saying only Marc-André Hamelin could play this piece, which seems a bit disrespectful to other pianists

There's a coincidence... Bluesky is full of arguments about personally loathsome artists, and here's R3 playing Wagner yet again

Hooray! www.patreon.com/posts/hooray...

Good point, well made

Hang on, didn’t we hear this literally this morning?

There are no rules about who you should or should not read.

Okay, so I’m slow… but I have just realised the title of this 1977 Len Deighton novel is a sly dig at John le Carré’s “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” from 1974

For the record, I will never read the Secret Seven or Bobby Brewster books ever again either

Just a reminder that a "novella" is a completely arbitrary and useless concept. Any work of fiction, of whatever length, that can be published as a separate volume is a novel. Orbital is a novel. So are The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Of Mice and Men, Silas Marner, Candide, Puckoon, etc, etc.

I sometimes think about what Raymond Chandler said of one of Hemingway's later works, when his glory days were over: "The champ has lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can't be sure. But when he can no longer throw the hard high one, he throws his heart instead."

Dario Fo at 100: a deliriously funny playwright with a deadly serious purpose

A cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz. See more from this week’s issue: newyorkermag.visitlink.me/tGiw5i

Aquarius: Today you will anger the gods. You're always angering the gods. The gods are getting tired of it. Cut it the fuck out.

A recent books cartoon for @theguardian.com

My latest acquisition - a volume of mid-Victorian plays including this opus by the great John Maddison Morton, which has possibly the best title in the world

#BOTD 1943. Remembering singer-songwriter, musician, author, poet and wit Vivian Stanshall. (d.1995) #BonzoDogDooDahBand

Aquarius: Probably nothing to worry about but, we just thought you'd want to know the creature draws near. Ever nearer, actually, it says here. The handwriting is sort of— well, I shouldn't editorialize. But uh. Yeah. Creature's comin'.

That scene where he shouts "You can't handle the truth!", but it's Major Bloodnok

Still less terrifying than the Jabberwock

Georgia Mann is always talking about Bert Furst but never plays anything by him

HOW OLD CARY GRANT

Completely unimportant things that nevertheless really annoy me, part 3749: R3's tendency to ignore the major role of orchestrators and arrangers in certain pieces of music, even the most famous examples such as Rhapsody in Blue (Ferde Grofé) or the Ravel orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition

Roderick Williams - so good they named him twice

Use not his name in vain