Can I invite you, on this sad day, to listen to this? One of the most joyful, ecstatic, weird and utterly wonderful bits of music ever made. Sonny Rollins live at Montreux in 1974! With bagpipes! www.youtube.com/watch?v=53f8...

From RussInCheshire With Love

Pick a Bond villain from the pictures you already have on your phone.

Pick a Bond villain from the photos you already have in your phone.

I was explaining the sex pistols bill grundy interview to my kids the other day, so we watched it and man, I had *fully* forgotten that one of their entourage was wearing a swastika armband.

He means "No Paul (Mc)Cartney" to complain about copyright issues

I mean the actual Beatles got shut down for being too loud so I'm not sure if Mr. Dolly Birds & E. Coli is entirely believable here

Purple Haze was actually written about a bout of delirium Jimi suffered after eating a plate of mince laced with listeria from Mr Love

Of course he did

This made it into my most recent book, but I once had a used copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in which someone completely unmoved by his sorrows annotated, “Get a job!”

The gig? You know about that. 60 years since this. Happy birthday to the horrible, brilliant Bob Dylan. May you stay forever pissed off. 🙏 youtu.be/YgMZcq2Y2U8?...

Particularly hot weather, such as today in Spring, brings about the unique phenomenon of straight couples, where the woman is wearing her best summer dress and her boyfriend is in the ever-reliable 't-shirt & gym shorts', which has the effect of making her look like his glamorous care staff.

Palk! At the Disco.

I have read 81 of the books on the list and am the most miserable man I know. Coincidence?

Some welcome coverage from the Daily Nation (apologies for the screengrab) - as I say here, time is of the essence in finding out what happened to my sister, and we've faced nothing but obstruction so far:

100% of this list were books. Stop and think about that for a minute in your ivory tower, Marie Antoinette

Give a man a Palk and he will eat for a day, teach a man to hunt Palk and you feed him for a lifetime

The popular legacy of Bourdieu seems to be that a lot of people think, “Other people’s tastes are fake and just about social signalling and cultural capital. Not mine though.”

Also, extremely popular book genres include ‘military operation gone wrong’, ‘horrific unsolved murders’, and ‘childhood of heartbreaking abuse and privation’.

I liked this one, which is ‘Charlie Brown had hoes’ level of not true.

‘What if you did a list of shit books that morons might like?’

In which we learn that a list of best books, ranked in order of excellence, should have been less elitist. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/m...

I started this marvellous novel a while ago, got interrupted, and restarted it last week. Finished it this morning on the back step. Will be thinking about Lydia, Joyce, Pan and, yes, Betty for a long time. Loved your surprising way with words and images @regretteruane.bsky.social

We badly need to orient away from forms of self-proclaimed antiracism that effectively amount to uncritically declaring yourself in support of one minority group and in hostility to another.

Trembling at the prospect of the weirdly sexual racism we'll see about a black woman playing Betty Boop

what if the conversation was about how hard it is to find a public toilet in the first place, and when you do find it you often have to pay - with coins you're unlikely to have - and then once you're in it's like the toilet out of fucking Trainspotting

Augustus Pablo 📷 Peter Simon

Just saw this on insta

#fridayreads by James Joyce 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

WAYLON! Forgive me for being tardy here: this is a really great podcast about the best novel ever written, hosted by just the right people. Do take a listen, in case it turns out to be your thing. Mystery and recalcitrance.

LRB article on Len Deighton discussing the difference between Harry Palmer and Bond and somehow chooses "eggs"

Very proud to be on this list

Larkin’s enormous cock is just Gibbons’s elephantine balls for schoolboys

Do you have a minute to talk about our lord and saviour Palk

Can’t get your head around the Guardian’s 100? Try Salt’s top 10 comic novels

It’s like an utterance from the Council of Elrond.

That was my favourite line too, it's very "have you found Jesus yet?". Converts asking each other how they found Palk: "oh you were Racist Weetabix? I was Larkin's enormous cock"

“If you have not yet found Palk…”

I'm reading Vanity Fair

Very proud to be on this list

Salt’s top 10 comic fiction titles to read in 2027 Ten novels that prove the form is alive – from a Brexit-era apocalyptic farce to a Belfast literary annexation, with new books from Tibor Fischer, Rob Palk, Bill Broady, Guy Ware, Rosemary Jenkinson and more.

I’m glad you asked that Rob, a very perceptive question! Here are some things that stand out to me —

So what do you guys think of AI then

Going over Animal Lovers for the reissue and I keep adding semicolons till I'm worried it now reads like Gibbon

Thinking about the Duke of Wellington owning an enormous nude sculpture of Napoleon

Omfg