Stsrmer's Britain - feral packs of Morris dancers roaming the streets in broad daylight, police powerless to stop them because of Woke

I gave up national and international news in November 2024. Can confirm!

You wrote a novel using AI? Cool. It's like that time I ran a marathon using a Ford Focus.

actually made me feel patriotic

lol, lmao

It’s very Bluesky that the tone this morning is of sour disapproval of April Fool’s Day. Bring on the stupid ads and silly news stories, I say. Let’s have more San Serriffe and spaghetti on trees.

NEW: Introducing the Bodleian Whispering Service. Too busy to read? Our expert librarians can now quietly narrate books, articles, and selected manuscripts directly to you in our reading rooms. Please note: whispering remains subject to standard library noise regulations.

Remember my old bot that posted every rejected parliament petition? I've resurrected it on both Bluesky and Mastodon. Let the chaos begin.

Designed to look like books, these ceramic objects are actually flasks or hand warmers. They are thought to have been filled with hot water or coal to warm the hands of the wearer on a cold winter's day. They functioned as a sort of ceramic hot water bottle. The perfect gift for book lovers!

Really looking forward to this - not a new, or indeed, entirely unknown story, but the Cutteslowe walls (not unique, either), are a fascinating example of the challenges inherent in the development of housing in Britain between the two world wars. #Skystorians

Monty the donkey led the traditional Palm Sunday procession to Christ Church Cathedral today, marking Jesus’s entrance to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover, riding a donkey. ‘All glory, laud and honour’ and ‘Ride on’ were sung by the Cathedral Choir and Frideswide Voices while walking up St Aldates.

What's the opposite of clickbait

Which sent me down a rabbit hole You can get Greek and Hebrew alphabetti spaghetti, I am delighted to find I couldn't find other alphabets: eg Arabic, Thai, Hindu, Sinhalese - is that just my searching skills being found wanting?

Is it Llanfair­pwllgwyngyll­gogery­chwyrn­drobwll­llan­tysilio­gogo­goch nation.cymru/culture/mass...

I love weeding beyond reasonable reason. I'm very professional and responsible about it but libraries thrive when the right books are on the shelves for that library. Libraries these days have some brilliant options for responsible disposal, too, where books are released to an appropriate new life.

Books hold a special place in the human psyche as previously very rare and expensive items which were repositories of knowledge at a time when knowledge was hard to obtain, but I'm sorry to inform you that most books printed in the last hundred years are, as physical objects, mass produced trash.

Seeing people online getting very weird about the ways people repurpose and recycle old books again and this is a gentle reminder that nobody is ever going to sit down and read that 1930's encyclopedia, it's either becoming decor or going in the skip. Please be normal about this.

On Tuesday, activists from ‘Raise the Colours’ erected flags along Abingdon Road in broad daylight. We ask who is behind it – and why the campaign is so controversial. oxfordclarion.uk/raise-the-co...

"the good news is that we have found a relatively cheap and easy way to prevent the cast from going through puberty. the bad news is that not everybody in this room is going to like it".

🙏🏽 with gratitude to @sampopewriter.bsky.social for technical advice and inspiration, when we both had much more important things to do a sonnet for Ozzy

Just showing this to our cats and saying this is the kind of boost you get from going to Oxford University

"Of course, Oxford and Paris are not the same. One of them is a city where there has been repeated vandalism to traffic-calming features, hostility to city centre emissions controls, 15-minute city debates, controversial school streets, and a well-publicised ‘bikelash’. The other is Oxford." 🤭👏

Bike rides: a thread. Kidical Mass, the family bike ride, returns on 10 May, with feeder rides from across Oxford. Organisers @cycloxoxford.bsky.social are looking for marshals - contact directly if you're interested. We wrote about the joy of the last one below...

Absolutely no interest in hearing from people whose biggest problem in life is that they might have to look at a windmill or a solar panel.

🗓 Save the date! 🚲 Kidical Mass is coming back to Oxford 📌 Sunday 10th May from 2pm, Gloucester Green. Thank you to @cycloxoxford.bsky.social for organising. I really enjoyed last year's. www.cyclox.org/index.php/ev...

My excellent colleague @katiedd.bsky.social has just published this remarkable investigation into rampant book banning in a Greater Manchester secondary school library. 193 books including The Da Vinci Code, Twilight, White Teeth and 1984 Graphic Novel www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/scho...

There’s an office in London that contains something critical to the security of the global internet — a bunch of swinging pendulums. www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/ins...

THE GREAT BRITISH SEWING BEE: oh my this is fun, oh what larks THE GREAT BRITISH REAPING BEE: well this is a spot of bother and make no mistake, what on earth

Radical extremist cleric issues angry new fatwa -->

Oxford Brookes is working with the NHS on a project to retrofit buildings to protect patients from the effects of extreme heat due to climate change. Extreme heat is linked to higher morbidity and mortality rates among vulnerable groups. www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brooke...

A good moment to dig out this piece on Len Deighton as possibly the first person to write a novel using a word processor (albeit with an assistant to actually operate it, 1968 still being the era of the unsung literary typist) slate.com/culture/2013...

I don't understand why a literary festival should dignify this nonsense with a debate. No, civil war is not coming to the UK. Only cranks and people actively trying to incite one think it is coming. Are we also going to debate whether the Moon is really made of cheese?

This tickled me (posted by Rhoda Bracewell on the other place)

Chiltern Railways is to be renationalised in September. The Government has confirmed 20 September as the date for bringing services from London Marylebone to Oxford, Bicester and Banbury into public ownership. GWR is also expected to transfer this year, but no date has been set.

We are incredibly grateful to College alumnus Professor Eddie Williams (1962, Modern Languages) for his donation of an early edition of the Mabinogion to the Fellows’ Library. 🔎Read more: https://www.jesus.ox.ac.uk/college-gifted-early-edition-of-mabinogion/ 📸Oxford Conservation Consortium

There's a story every day trying to talk about why the Green Party is no longer "Green." Protecting our environment means lower bills, warmer homes, unionised jobs. Every day our membership rises & we're winning. People are increasingly connecting the dots. Join.greenparty.org.uk

It’s the result of massive bot activity, downloading data at a scale which our infrastructure has found challenging. We have been finding this across all our metadata resources in recent months.

Ghouls (I assume the Oxford Mail’s photos are of an empty Radcliffe Square but there’s no way I’m clicking through)

To know which is all round better I'd need to see how much water the author uses to create the passage vs what the AI uses.

Today, we're publishing Don't Steal This Book - a (mostly) empty book from almost 10,000 authors, protesting the theft of their work by AI companies. 🧵 1/3

Send us your leaflets! We'd love to know what claims candidates are making while standing for public office. Are the parties' claims consistent across wards? Are they achievable? Do they even relate to the council for which they are standing? We'll write it if you send us the leaflets. Email in bio.

I imagine Zeno would be very relaxed about the Trolley Problem.

Who owns the Golden Cross opposite the Clarendon Centre? That will look even sadder by contrast.

The current trans discourse makes this mad shit so much less funny than it otherwise would be to look back in retrospect on (3/n)

Don't be fooled by the appearances! At first glance, these look like early printed books, but it is an ingenious chest of drawers. Has anyone seen this elsewhere?

can we go one day in this country without a new moral panic about the youth

A new series of Stori'r Iaith, the S4C programme that explores the history of the Welsh language, starts today. Ep 1 was filmed at Jesus and features several of Oxford's Celtic scholars. Watch the programme live at 9PM or on catch-up: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0n1q6c0. Subtitles available.

Students could go to the Library* earlier and stay later, if a new licensing application is approved. Current opening hours are 4pm to midnight, the application requests 11am to 2am on weekends. Consultation is open until 27 March. *the venue in question is, of course, the pub on the Cowley Road.

Don’t get solar panels for the environment. Don’t get solar panels looking for quick savings. Get solar panels to protect family from warmongering capitalist and the fascist governments who are going to continuously jack your energy bills through the roof forever if you don’t.

The one task which can apparently never be automated is reminding AI not to tell lies.