And Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, turned to his neighbour in the Governor’s House at Port Mahon and said “If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.”

The Ghost Story, Alfred Bestall, 1930 #Christmasghoststories

Choo choo 🚉

For the holidays, Truthdig asked me to talk about the weird sensation of watching Hallmark gradually go woke(r) over the last five years just as one party is trying to turn the real world into it at gunpoint.

The semiotics of recent discourse has broken my brain to the point where I clocked Waters, and thought in dismay before even looking left-to-right at the other two that he’d been palling around with Epstein

Bluesky appears to have missed the memo here - you are supposed to show mercy to the incarcerated and believe in their rehabilitation

Personally “intifada” is not the word in that particular chant I most object to, and I suspect this will not be an uncommon view among Australians

“Agencies look at thousands and thousands of people who are associates of, or otherwise on the periphery of, various investigations. They cannot surveil them all continuously over a long period. They have to prioritise, and they should prioritise.” www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

I am tired of Australian media gaslighting us into the notion that ‘Gravy Day’ is some kind of national tradition. I’d never even heard of the song until a few years ago. Paul Kelly’s manager has paid somebody off.

This rather awkward sentence unwittingly reveals a truth that generally goes unspoken: Israel is the most dangerous place in the Western world to be a Jew. It is the country in which you are most likely to be violently killed for being Jewish.

At the time it was Telltale’s The Walking Dead: Season 2. That is now edged out by The Last of Us, but only just.

Allowing the state to deny a firearms license based not just on criminal record but on intelligence *is* a broader surveillance power!

Sincerely one of the funniest things the WSJ has ever written or done. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anth...

Master and Commander flopped in 2003 but is now hailed as a masterpiece. Discover why this epic is earning renewed respect.

Have to say I'm not really enjoying the media's obsessive horse race optics coverage of Albo in the aftermath of a brutal massacre

I don’t need my financial institution to do a Spotify Wrapped thanks

#Invertefest inspiration: Les coléoptères ( #Beetles ) Plate 38 from 'Fantaisies decoratives' by Jules-Auguste Habert-Dys (France, 1850-1930), Paris, 1887. #ArtNouveau

I know that journalists think their profession is the most important and influential thing in the world, but it isn’t, and the loud whining of the Murdoch press does not actually influence the priorities and resourcing allocations of the security services

War and Remembrance (1978) by Herman Wouk

I’d presume the actual answer, rather than the one that leaps readily to hand for the drips and the Pilgerites happy to beat a familiar drum, is that terror “watchlists” have tens of thousands of people on them and unless you want to live in a police state, some inevitably slip through the net

A journo asked about this at the very first presser the morning after the shooting (and Minns rightfully cut them off mid-question). It is a real issue that journos are still spending all their time at the agenda-driven conspiracy swamp of X. www.news.com.au/lifestyle/re...

Interesting that there was a historical forerunner to the phrase “keyboard warrior”

I cannot stress enough how little interest Australians have in hearing American opinion on gun control. A black hole of interest. -273 Celsius interest.

Responding to the murders of 15 people with barely-restrained glee that it allows you to say “I told you so” to people who annoy you? You just may be a Bad Person!

This Guardian graphic/timeline really underlines Ahmed’s heroism: he intercepted the gunman just as he was closing the distance, with a shotgun, to the park full of people sheltering in place www.theguardian.com/australia-ne...

This is more or less the driving ethos of the Avery & Carter series

tesla owners admitting without shame they don’t know how to drive anymore

If only Australia were protected by journalists we would be so much safer

Time was I’d assume this was a News Ltd question but these days it could just as easily be Fairfax

100% guarantee that the people who regularly say this also rail against the supposed surveillance state, expansion of police powers etc

Poster for Air France by Victor Vasarely, 1959

Black Inc needs to decide whether it thinks the US "has no intention of defending the region" or whether it's going to drag us into a war with China

#FrogFriday 🐸: J. Martin Pollock “I AM AT THE ZOO BRING ME A FLY.” 1923 Lithograph in colours, backed on linen, 40 x 25 in. (102 x 64 cm) London Underground / London Zoo www.christies.com/en/lot/lot-5...

I'm straight and so were all my friends at the time, but in the mid-2000s we loved going here because it was about the only nightclub in Perth free of the aggro-masculine-FIFO-meth vibe that was present everywhere else in Northbridge

Gmail: I think this email with a PDF attached from an editor you’ve worked with for eight years is dangerous spam Also Gmail:

Listen up: we only care about TWO things

There is a type of person who insists that it’s not annoying or inconvenient to wear a mask, and, like, come on. You can argue it’s worth the trade-off but you’re doing your cause no favours by flatly asserting, contrary to overwhelming general opinion, that it’s not inconvenient

Massive win for Australia to be explicitly described as Britain’s successor state

Pro tip in the age of AI: believe this sort of thing when you see it reported at mainstream outlets, not on somebody’s Substack

Honestly the best thing about Letterboxd is its extremely slick and attractive UI, and I dearly wish its administrators would make a book app to usurp Goodreads

No, this is wrong, stop reposting this absurd and miscalculated meme. It assumes Cratchit is working a 40 hour work week (he isn't) and that straight line inflation extrapolations over centuries are valid (they're not) and fails to understand both Victorian class and household finance.

This is also the case with whatever Chinese knockoff you buy from Temu btw

The global economy is actually quite comparable to weather phenomenon, in the sense that it has millions of influencing factors (some of them powerful men, many not)

Overlook, 2015, by Adrian Tomine adrian-tomine.com/Prints.html

The GOP counterpoint appears to be that drug smugglers are killing Americans, which is specious and clashes with their ostensible values about freedom and personal responsibility. Nobody’s going around injecting opioids into unwilling people at the Boston Marathon or the World Trade Center.

I actually don’t think ordinary Australians give a toss about this or even notice when it’s done by lower-profile politicians, other than contributing to a broader dislike and mistrust of politicians generally

just watched a few dozen videos from the TikTok account of the people who own a caracal cat which very clearly should not be a pet and wants to kill them (every video is like this)

Just been reminded of this heartwarming picture of a rabbit and an eagle. Morning all