If the US abandons the Five Eyes, it won’t be great that the rump of the intelligence alliance will sound like a bullied kid in the heyday of Grange Hill.

Wish I could remember what this was about. Still, the joke made me smile a bit all these years later.

Blondie's 'Dreaming' is hard to top. It does to me what the war does to boomers: makes me nostalgic for a time when I was barely a toddler and to which I contributed nothing. I also didn't live in New York. But - man! - imagine being a young adult and dancing to this there and then in the moment.

1/2 I've gained 10 followers today simply by being salty in a reply about a third party's bad English. For the record, I was being almost the opposite of a pedant, in that I highlighted - in a way people apparently liked - how they'd gone too far in the 'correct' direction and got it wrong but...

Aggregated UK betting odds on the question of whether Trump will complete his second term. At the moment - and just on the basis of punters' hunches - it still looks more likely than not that he will, but it's quite close, and 'no' is shortening. Gamblers are, I'd suggest, politically disinterested.

I asked this question yesterday and immediately deleted my post but feel brave enough to ask again: if Trump DOES somehow manage to obtain Greenland, how feasible would it be for a future (probably Democrat) president to return it? Could a contender even promise that now? Would US voters accept it?

Infuriating. All he needed to say to convey much the same sentiment, without the insulting attack on our intelligence with this nonsensical cliché, is that businesses *needn't worry* because the government is doing everything it can to avoid this. Might not be enough but at least it's not illogical.

One of the problems with using the 25th amendment to get rid of Trump is that, much as I’d like it to happen, if he were removed for reasons of his madness, where would you stop? Dozens of senior figures, including his vice president, have publicly endorsed his nonsense. Are they incapacitated too?

How is the UK surrendering its sovereignty of the Chagos Islands an argument for Trump to take Greenland? The UK is allowed to keep its military base. The US also has a base there courtesy of us. It hasn’t hitherto demanded sovereignty. Why is Greenland, where the Danes allow it bases, different?

1️⃣ He didn't say that. 2️⃣ He said it, but you misunderstood him. 3️⃣ He said what you understood, but he was just trolling. 4️⃣ He was serious but he's just negotiating, not going to do it. 5️⃣ He's going to do it for grand strategy reasons I've invented. 6️⃣ Look what you liberals made him do.

Millions of people walk among us who are looking at all this madness in the world, or worse, haven’t noticed it, and think Reform UK is the answer. That they - or at least the majority who claim to dislike Trump - can’t see that he and Farage have been shat from the same political arse is maddening.

1/2 Does Trump realise the British struck a deal with Mauritius, who it’s handing the sovereignty of Diego Garcia to, to retain its military base (and by extension, the US military base, one would assume if we’re still friends) on the atoll for at least 99 years? What’s the strategic risk? #r4today

What is *wrong* with the passage of time? Just been catching up on this evening’s edition of The Unbelievable Truth when I idly thought to myself that David Michell must have been doing this show for the best part of 10 years now. Ha! And then some. The pilot was in two-thousand and fucking six!

This photo from a 2018 article in the Los Angeles Magazine of a young Stephen Miller could be straight out of a grisly book on the worst high school massacre perpetrators. Just look at him! Pure evil in a wispy beard.

Should I change this to 'yes'? Just wondering if 'not earning very much freelance money in the last tax year' counts as a tax avoidance scheme.

Maybe this sort of nonsense is at the front of what's left of Truss's mind because she's trying to get through trojanuary.

There's an old man drinking in the pub I'm halfheartedly working at whose resemblance to the retired Morris dancer who later reveals himself to be Philip of Burgundy in the first series of Blackadder is maddeningly uncanny, given there's no one here I can tell and it's a very obscure reference.

I know the producers' overriding objective is to provide compelling TV but if I worked on #TheTraitors, I'd consider a subtler voting system whereby you could also abstain or vote for someone (other than yourself) you think is definitely a faithful, which would cancel out other votes.

Poland's flag on a pavement (left); Poland's flag on a pavement after a sloppy worker has replaced a manhole cover (right).

A LinkedIn contact who can NEVER post an update that doesn't include a high-definition photo of her very made-up self has just asked on there in a great big headline for her little story if "we are all addicted to attention", thereby seriously calling into question the validity of Betteridge's law.

‘Mountain of paperwork’ is a weird metaphor, isn’t it? Conventional tower blocks are a much better fit shape-wise, but in reality, something as low as a flat-roofed pub would convey a reasonable idea, given how thin sheets of paper are.

“We had boats landing there” - who’s “we”? And was it before the Danes arrived? I’m not convinced even any of the few Native Americans in the USA now had ancestors whose boats went to Greenland. But, as we all know, pulling apart his logic and astonishing historical ignorance is entirely futile.

I’m thinking of imposing 200% tariffs on my children if they continue putting clean clothes that they can’t be bothered to put away in the laundry.

Imagine not being awarded the Nobel Prize for, say, physics and then deciding you should switch your attention to antiphysics.

‘8 Wars PLUS’ sounds like the sort of naff cable channel Trump binge-watches on his toilet.

I’m not sure a territory being unable alone to defend itself against a much bigger military is a watertight justification for the US taking it, possibly with its own military, and suspect this is one of the reasons military alliances like Nato emerged, but then I don’t have Trump’s mega-brain, so 🤷‍♂️.

At least there will be very few old Reform tweets on Andrew Rosindell as he’s such a nonentity.

When you look up problematic MPs on Wikipedia, you can usually find a tiny handful of issues on which you’re on vaguely common ground; a few saving graces that make you think people aren’t all bad. Not so with Andrew Rosindell. There’s virtually no overlap, and I’m not even a radical on most things.

I know it’s not what I should be focused on but why is ‘blackmail’ so frequently misunderstood as a term?

1/2 One of the many frustrating things about Trump is commentators and analysts will point out, often in a quite self-satisfied way, that the ghastly man almost always indicates a long time in advance the dreadful things he plans to do; we should never be a surprised if we've been paying attention.

I suspect that when the history of this part of the 21st century is taught and students ask “But why?, for what?, there’ll be some of the usual answers about money, power, ideology and socio-economic currents, and one big glaring one that it was for nothing, on the whims of a few deranged men.

Is this about Nadhim Zahawi?

You might think this newsagent’s in North Finchley is huge. But it’s bigger than that. It’s large.

It wouldn’t really help with anything, I know, but I think we’d all enjoy it if Jim Naughtie returned to the Today programme and stumbled over Trump’s name like he did Jeremy Hunt’s. It’s further removed from the target word, of course, but Naughtie could ham up the coughing fit to make up for it.

It’s just occurred to my trivial little nerdy mind that Venezuela and North Yorkshire are more or less the same shape. Let’s hope Donald Trump doesn’t use this as justification to swoop in and seize the Archbishop of York, although, let’s be honest, stranger things have already happened this year.

This isn't even quite 56% of my Duolingo streak, so yeah. Hold on tight, though!

believe it or not the 1980s also had delayed trains, unemployment, industrial strife, turds in rivers, crime, riots, underperforming schools some things have improved and some things have got worse Britain isn’t perfect but I don’t trust the people talking it down for their own populist purposes

If this were true, there'd be no need for Nato. I mean, obviously this arsehole doesn't believe in Nato but most of its members' governments do, and it's no justification for this Burglar Bill "that's a nice Arctic island; I'll take that" position. His reference to "law" is also entirely specious.

I can categorically guarantee that if Farage isn’t bullshitting about a Labour defection to his fetid party next week, that MP/ex-MP will be someone we all already think is a complete ****. So I don’t think this will be in any way bad for Labour, I really don’t, parlous though things generally are.

Surely there will come a point when US tariffs - or the threat of them - lose their bite because the country has become such a rogue state, and one that’s in no way a reliable trading partner. Acquiescing risks accelerating that status, even if standing firm might cause short-term economic harm.

I've just noticed that the legendary* Steve Davis is two tables down from me at the Wetherspoons I'm half-heartedly working at. Makes sense, I suppose. The Masters is on just round the corner. *And I mean this; I loved Snooker as a primary school kid in the 80s and Davis was a low-key hero of mine.

Robert Jenrick is like someone who was planning to leave his wife for his mistress but got kicked out first and had to turn up at his mistress's house in the middle of the night with a suitcase pretending it was his decision

This is EXACTLY the antidote you need from the bleak news cycle. I promise you. And read the whole thing. I was in a state of near-constant lollery throughout. It just gets darker and darker as the story presses on and reaches its grim conclusion.

It’s important to remember that without Barbara and Margo, The Good Life would have just been Tom and Jerry.

I see Marti Pellow is now working for Haringey Council facilities.

Post the last photo in your phone you took with the intention of sharing it here with a witty caption but you couldn’t think of one that met your quality control threshold.

Must get my ears tested. Surely a very well-to-do woman I walked past just now wouldn’t actually have addressed her toddler as ‘killer’.

I'm pretty sure I'm the only person in history to do this but when I add a kiss ('x') to the end of a message, I'll always override autocorrect's attempt to capitalise it if what precedes it is a full stop, as it looks so inelegant that big. Why can't this be programmed into autocorrrect?

Unless I misheard while spluttering on my tea, Michael Gove has just implied on #r4today that Robert Jenrick is Nigel Farage’s natural successor. God, I hope he’s right, though, but only if he takes over before the next election.

Lol at Justin Webb’s intro on #r4today to a discussion on Jenrick’s defection with Chris Mason in which he implied the Conservative party is centre-right. Without Jenrick, it HAS moved leftwards a bit, I suppose, but it hasn’t been anywhere near the centre, at least on culture war issues, for years.