"Kids eat free all day every day with every £5 spent in the café", says the Pausa café at Dunelm. Except none of the kids' meals listed were actually available, nor most of the snacks/drinks, so obviously my kids begged for (expensive) cake instead.

Week 26 (plus an extra couple days) of my stitch-the-news daily news diary included: A giraffe A Richter scale chart A set of imbalanced scales An athlete The Empire State Building A National Park patch A diamond ring A broken ferris wheel

Yeah, my view of this comes largely from reading Iain M Banks' novels. It just feels obvious that it's your business and you should be allowed to do it if you want, possibly multiple times in your life. Of course, the Culture's seamless biotech would help a lot with that.

The NHS is 78 today so here's a little story about my Grandma and her brother Derek that spans what the UK was like before and after the NHS

As an artist you have to be able to see your own work from the POV of the foyer, even though you came in the back way, and know it’s a shambles. And you mustn’t compare your own work to the work of others in your field, where you only ever enter through the foyer. >>

Everybody's talking about making more time for reading, & the problem isn't that I don't have _time_ to read, it's that I can't turn off the other responsibilities for long enough to _focus_. It's very rare that Elder is somewhere safe/happy enough that I can just ignore my phone for a time.

Denny's Gandalf's Gobble Melt (2012-2012): Part of the themed promotional menu for "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," this sandwich featured turkey breast & stuffing topped with melted Swiss cheese, on grilled potato bread with a cranberry honey mustard spread and side of fries and gravy

Looks like Mayor Z's pied a terre tax is not collapsing the real estate market or causing the wealthy to flee Manhattan after all. Indeed, the opposite. Who could have possibly imagined this scenario? www.realtor.com/news/trends/...

Politicians have been talking about boosting apprenticeships and non-university routes to training and employment, and cutting back on the funding available. FE is in an absolutely dire state. Obvious potential win there, but always swerved.

VENUS (Palindrome-Haiku) Pure Venus, asleep, slid off a daffodil’s peels — a sun ever up.

This is why we can't have nice things.

Your morning image

Okay, but it would feel a tad nicer if it weren’t for the fact that Labour is the one that went after trans rights.

"Not ALL the single ladies" - Nuancé

📢 The third reading of the Representation of the People Bill has been announced for 14 July! This means we have just under two weeks to convince as many MPs as possible to back the amendment for a review of the UK's broken voting system. Email your MP today: actionnetwork.org/letters/ask-...

Last night (3rd July) between 10.50-11.30 my electric cargo bike was stolen. Black Pakyak E+ with a baby carrier. First time I’d taken it to town 🥹 . I parked it on the Plain roundabout near the Cape of Good Hope pub. Secured it with a Diamond grade lock. If you saw anything please let me know.

There is no complete theory of our current moment without understanding that the most dangerous form of being Extremely Online is expressed by our elites. It's not the kids on their phones, its their congressional representatives and the Atlantic columnists complaining about kids on their phones.

start with the printer, it knows what it did

Black eggs perfec t size to put baby in to nap! inside very soft and comfort baby sleep soundly put baby in eggs. no problems ever in eggs because good shape and support for baby neck weak of big baby head. can trust black eggs for giveing good love to baby. friend mysterious black eggs.

Worth a rewatch because of how good it is

Thought they'd save it for the semis.

The goose was not valued.

first ethical millionaire

there are pausas de hidratacion everywhere for those with eyes to see

Astaire's tailoring is so good in Daddy Long Legs (1955). It's said that he used to dance, jump, and twirl in his tailor's fitting room to make sure the his jacket's collar never lifted off his neck. To me, he embodied American elegance.

subject: changes to your torment nexus subscription

Oxfordshire’s entrants for the ‘UK Town of Culture 2028‘ title have submitted postcards for the latest stage in the competition and… let’s just say that if you’re trying to convince judges about your arty little town, maybe lay off the ChatGPT a bit. A short thread:

You EXCOMMUNICATE Miette like the heretic? Oh! Oh! Jail for Mother Church! Jail for Ten Thousand Years!

Oh no

I am this cat

Know that libraries count things. How many people have cards, how many times a book or DVD or CD is checked out, etc. And then we take those numbers to our internal staff and say "look, people want this" to justify purchases, and then to local govts to say "look, we need to stay open".

Interregnum still ongoing, symptoms still morbid

What if the deep state is just a lot of career public servants taking a deep breath and quietly saying: I'm sorry sir, but that would illegal.

Everyone’s enjoying the excommunication drama but there are also lessons for pro-democracy political actors. Decades of accommodating and appeasing this sect did not work and only emboldened them. You have to go whole hog. When you have power, break the back of the reactionaries. Shut them out

I love the Catholic drama but I want a lot of people to see that and apply it to their own social circles where they have power. Bigots especially focused purposely confrontational bigots? Aren’t confused , and they ain’t stupid They are boundary testing . Set the boundary

I once saw someone lavishing excessive fondness on a child in Northumberland. That's it. That's the Alnwick dote.

I had dealings with CARE lobbyists back in the early 2000s when I worked for an LGBT organisation. They (and their pal Jeremy Balfour of the Evangelical Alliance and later Tory MSP) did things like turning up for a meeting between LGBT+ groups and MSPs "because they had an interest in the issues".

I'll summarize this: Mamdani asked NYers to keep air conditioning at 78 degrees. A wave criticism hit online. A MSNBC broadcast pointed out the US Department of Energy recommends that 78 degree figure. Immediately after, the US Department of Energy deleted 6,000 web pages related to energy saving.

If anyone's curious, this is from an email I wrote a couple of years ago trying to dissuade a large business from doing yet another active travel reward points system

Incredible moment where Fox News puts up a graphic with all the reasons it opposes the DSA and why people should be afraid of them

Google Maps thinks there's no way to travel between Cheltenham and Gloucester by public transport?! When you try to select the train stations, it's like "ah, you want to drive to the train station *car park", we got you."

This line from widow's bay can be used in so many circumstances.

I write for literal children and they never ask this. Adults are indeed wild.

People only ever use the first half of the quote: it's actually "my country, right or wrong: if right, to be kept right, and if wrong, to be set right".

i do not see a one star review of my art and think 'art is subjective so that is wrong'. i think 'art is subjective so that is the truth.' because it is. the subjective nature of art does not just mean everyone is wrong, it also means everyone is right. every takedown of my work is correct