“You may not like it but this is what peak viewing performance looks like”

Good thread, this, on (largely American) bad takes on Norway/Haaland, though on the contrary this particular post, with its excellent take (linked) that Haaland is essentially a Hindu-style avatar of Thor, is pretty much the only correct explanation.

Fifty years ago today -a few balls from the infamous Saturday evening session in the 3rd Test between England and West Indies, Old Trafford, July 10th 1976. The guts shown by 45-year-old Brian Close, with almost no protection, still stands out, refusing to be bowed despite clear pain from the blows

Excellent Reddit trolling (the joke is intentional, yes): "With Morocco gone, England is the only Muslim country remaining in the World Cup" 👏🏾

It’s nice that we’re getting a borrow of the Bayeux Tapestry, but it would be amazing if they displayed it at the Cartoon Museum.

Probably the one position that the RCP has continued to hold as they have migrated rightwards across the ideological spectrum is that humour is ideologically suspect.

Scenes from the Morocco-France game in west London

I have been persuaded to come out to Westbourne Park for France-Morocco and, well, I’m glad I did.

It falls into my unified theory of transatlantic culture which is that Britain presents as a ‘serious’ country - formality, tradition etc - but is deeply unserious, and the US presents as flippant and ‘fun’ - Mickey Mouse, Ronald McDonald - but is in fact very humorless ….

Reminds me how weird it is that for the biggest online retailer there is a whole swathe of products you just won't touch because they might burn your house down. Like a socket strip should be the obvious thing to buy online, and yet...

It was obvious that this byelection would attract all sorts of fringe characters (every high-profile one does) but I wasn't expecting the king of the cranks himself to turn up.

I think I’ve reasoned through my main issue with the tradition of the British joke candidate, and it’s that they don’t actually satirise anything, it’s always this excruciating wacky stuff, oh ho we will make custard the national currency. It’s like being trapped in a lift with Colin Hunt.

Big fan of Erling Haaland just being a big ol' tourist youtu.be/KIwcSp99PoY?...

The Chancellor's message to Farage failing to back out of a by-election against a mildly comedic bin-alien

Want to get rid of all your money in the stupidest way possible? Why not get into a pointless border dispute with your neighbours and post abusive songs about them on YouTube?

One of these is obvious in retrospect and the other… I would never have got to the answer (I had to look up both)

Because Farage's financial affairs don't just look dodgy, they look ridiculous and that's what makes a scandal stick. Important to stress that that's the ridiculous thing, not a man with a bin on his head.

Important for mainstream politicians not to get caught up in commentating on the circus, though. They just need to be answering questions about it with metronomic regularity, "Never mind that, the real question is why Nigel Farage took money from a convicted fraudster who calls him Daddy?"

There’s only one thing you can rely on in life, and that’s that in any one of a dozen Reddit threads about the Goodyear blimp flying over London, at least one person will have commented: “and the lights read: ‘Ice Cube’s a pimp’” 🎶🙏🏾 (link in alt)

2 yrs ago when I left Virgin Media to switch to full fibre the call handler tried to convince me I already had it. No amount of ‘I can see the coax coming into my house’ would convince them. We agreed to disagree. Back then I wondered how many people would fall for it… www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

PPF is always good but this episode was especially thought-provoking on my morning walk today. Ivan Krastev makes the point that perhaps “young people not voting” is a rational response to c21 voting bloc maths (and that’s just one nugget among a dozen or so).

Obviously the right decision (Danny Dyer flights of fancy aside) and in fact the boss move by Count Binface would be to withdraw on the grounds that participating in the by-election would damage his credibility.

They should do a debate

i repost this every time i see chotiner straight up murder someone and it never does any numbers but you know what? i’m right

Before everyone goes nuts over this (and yes, the BBC does give Farage too much of a free ride) this is a holding slide for an online stream. They haven’t cut the channel to this, it’s doing a time filling interview on the subject.

Any questions? Keeping in mind that I already explained about my hat.

Hearing that Matt Goodwin used to deliver pizza to Clacton.

Quite the afternoon for two emblematic populist politicians in Europe. Marine Le Pen will find out in the next hour if she can stand in next year's presidential election. And Nigel Farage will give a statement on “my future in public life” at 3pm CET.

For context, this is from an anime about a guy with magical hands that causes dough to ferment faster who goes on a quest to create a unique Japanese national bread. Wait, no, the context doesn't help there. Anyway, it ran for *69* episodes.

Every lifelong football fan I've ever met is like "I think players are supposed to serve their suspension" and every adult convert is like "the Archon of Constantinople's epistle on the Pentacostine rites of the eucharist clearly states handballs are mandatory."

It’s like when the politics guys do a music thread but on a massive scale

Literally nobody else looks this good in a brown suit

Unbeatable AI book spam. I will never receive a better one than this.

red cards are carceral thinking and bribing fifa is working toward a model of rehabilitation

The Fermata, which is the book in question, is absolutely excellent, and it's easy to see how it could have slipped in with a bunch of other books. Although if you knew this was going to be your project, you should probably have weeded out *all* of Nicholson Baker's books beforehand 👀

I miss Dot Cotton

Apparently my most centrist opinion is that getting through the day after pulling an all nighter *is* in fact an important life skill

People getting mad at this, a textbook *good* political answer, what exactly do you want from your politicians?

I would be very interested in a comparative study of percentages for stutter penalties scored vs all other approaches. I have a hunch the stutter penalties are marginally worse, but some are scored, and some hoofed penalties aren't. Given the amount of data in football now it must have been done.

"Which one's in charge?" "Well actually sir, you see, it's very interesting. Under the Belgian constitution there's no hierarchy between the heads of government"

Like, not to be a prick about it, but we sig test every assertion we put in an article, and that should be industry standard.

Should start a podcast called There's No Such Thing as a Two Point Poll Lead, which is just me sobbing every week about the number of pollsters reporting non-statistically significant differences as meaningful.

Honestly coming to the conclusion that some people are so used to grifter/influencer/Trump-ish bullshit culture, in which much of what they read or see is entirely made up, that they are unable to comprehend that some opinions are actually grounded in real knowledge, experience or understanding.

George taking the divorce badly

Definitely concerning that the WHO is getting behind medicine without evidence, seemingly for political reasons

maybe the north was our friends in the north that we made along the way, send tweet