This might be the craziest thing I read/learned today: China quietly mobilized 1,000s of fishing boats to form massive 200 mile long floating barriers www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

We presume that 'Mughal' is the real issue.

Anyone for andouillette ? 😆

If only the important Robert Schuman Centre would become active on Bluesky in this, Europe's time of trial through treachery. bsky.app/profile/eui-...

The canny shopper: bought for pence quasi-new from a major online retailer, delivered by Prime of a Saturday. No obvious damage, except a suggestion that someone might have opened it at pp 244-5 and then turned tail.

Does your adorable child keep bumping into furniture? Does he read a lot?

My live event? I don't like the sound of that. Don't like that at all, whatever it might mean. I think that too will be a 'no'.

Sir Tony Blair KG disappoints.

Such a difference one letter makes: Ava and Ave.

Sir Tristram is having a huge Schiaparelli exhibition in the V&A, starting in March: why wasn't I told?

Whistleblower Cafe on S Anne St in Dublin is looking for a GM who will foster a "culture of 'informed hospitality'-where staff are as comfortable discussing literature and politics as they are pulling a perfect espresso shot". www.ziprecruiter.ie/jobs/4887993...

Nature can be extraordinary.

"We're looking at a decade lost with catastrophic consequences to local businesses," he added. Business, business, business.

Down in Daingean Uí Chúis, as they call their town.

"The mistake people make is taking him at his own measure. You should assess what he says in objective terms: most of it is just pedestrian nitpicking."

I would like to know how colonial figures did not die of dehydration in greater numbers. Thick wool uniforms & drinking only small amounts of water. & probably more alcohol. Living in a warm climate myself & spending plenty of time in the tropics, it is a continuous question at the back of my mind.

"High Fried Oil": how he pronounces the name of the grand old hymn tune, and will not be told.

"There will be a new pop-up food poisoning stall at the formers' market today. Get there early for the best selection. Try the sweet & sour: you won't forget it."

Chemistry textbook or edition of Piers Plowman.

You would now have to admire senior scholars in the hollowed out disciplines of political science and American constitutional law for keeping going keeping going. How long can they last? How long did the alchemists? How long the medieval manuscript copyists?

"And what will you do when you leave school?" I asked my niece last night. "Law, I think," she said lightly. "I like the corporate attire."

"We do death unusually well in this country." The speaker seemed pleased with himself and seemed to believe this nonsense last evening; his insight prompted much muttered agreement. "Pints?"

'Ironically' when no irony has been committed; 'no pun intended' when there's no pun in sight.

"No, that is very clearly not a dress shirt. It's not even white."

I learned tonight to my surprise that Physical Education is a subject for the Leaving Certificate. To my greater surprise I learned that, besides football, tennis and the like, Irish step-dancing is one of the sports that's accepted.

And they’re off. The annual mass escape from Dublin Castle, commemorating the real jailbreak of 1592 by Red Hugh O’Donnell & the O’Neill Brothers. Competitors will cover 62km through the night, across the mountains to Glenmalure Valley. That’s if they make it, unlike Art O’Neill, who died en route.

Huh, so turns out that the manufacturing of non-consensual and child porn was integral to the whole operation? Who'd have thunk it?

If the Bois de Vincennes in Paris, France has an area of 995 hectares, how then is the Phoenix Park in Dublin, Ierland the

Bermuda, the Bahamas and Clipperton Island must surely be threats to America.

One always feels for an ordinary person who replies approvingly to a grandee's post in the hope of a public pat on the head, only for them to be told they don't know what they're talking about. Much asymmetry here.

“Turn again Whittington, thrice Lord Mayor of London!" Spotted in the wild this morning atop the Whittington Stone #Caturday

The next thing will be one of the Tory newspapers in England formally going over to Reform and announcing it in a self-important front page editorial. "We're backing Britain!"

Simon Communities of Ireland (a major Irish non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting people who are experiencing homelessness or are at risk of becoming homeless; a network of independent local Communities across Ireland) leaves X (13.184 followers) Bluesky: @simoncommunity.bsky.social

Even here it's the same: ordinary people are denounced for satisfying Godwin's law in what they post so unsophisticatedly, but the grandees of Bluesky are treated as insightful geniuses (and likely to follow back in return for a repost) when those grandees post *exactly the same thing* (afterwards).

He will be aghast when they tell him it has shrunk.

Winter tree in rain Douglas, Cork 🇮🇪 #photography #nature #landscape #winter #tree #EastCoastKin #speirghorm #PhotoHour 🐕 🚶 📷 📱 📸 🌳 🌌 🥶

"Centrist" CSU member Manfred Weber

This new practice of turning on subtitles on American films as well as foreign ones is doing the self-esteem no end of good: the merest entertainment for ordinary people now feels like watching improving art-house foreign films. The urge to boast about watching the trash has to be suppressed.

Long gone are the days when boys were willing to stand on burning decks. I wrote a piece about the #poem where that well known first line, beloved of seventies comedians, actually came from, and what the boy was standing there for.

"This is not who we are."

Odd things, cat trees: I rarely see cats in real garden trees (though they might well see me). Indeed, a cat in a tree seems so often to precede a call to the fire brigade.

Even a thousand points of light can be extinguished.

A complaisant city upon a hill.

Richard Wagner's overture to Tannhauser can be quite disturbing when played well. (It can also be disturbing when played badly, but for different reasons.).

"When did you realise he was a tenured IR scholar?" "It was when he called it 'the Mossad' instead of Mossad." "You should be in intelligence."

By the great Edrich Siebert (London 1903 - Maidenhead 1984), whose real name was Stanley Smith Masters. We know his work from popular films.

Emerging intermittently and unpredictably from total Bluesky silence and issuing a stream of posts in a few minutes like a numbers station coming to life while never touching a reply might suggest someone formally meeting a particular job requirement, but not. All that is thought melts into AI.

These days many of us act as if and even perhaps believe that we are something other than we are. ("But I'm really a ...") The late Quentin Crisp had a paragraph about this. Something like civil servants or some other sort of drudges believing that deep down they were ballet dancers or some such.

"You know your traditional good deed for the day? Not nitpicking can fulfil your obligation."