Happy Christmas from our understated front garden. I hope you have some rest, relaxation and smiles...

Happy Christmas Eve to all the readers: open.substack.com/pub/quantick...

If you choose to buy an SUV/4x4 to drive in the city, you have prioritised your own desires over the environment or the safety of others. That's fine - just ensure you fully understand what that says about you. Don't go around thinking you're a nice person.

This SNL sketch is absolutely amazing, but it is incredibly violent (you have been warned!) youtu.be/ug44G2FdWyU?...

Naturally, if you wish to be a pedant's pedant, you can point out they the shortest day of the year, by some margin, is the last Sunday in March. (In the UK)

When it comes to rights of free expression, some insist the biggest is the right to point, and sneer, to marginalise and other. Otherwise, what? They’d have to hold it in? The right to let their knee jerk wildly on instinct. The right to express a ‘common sense’ view that hurts people. Fuck that.

This is really sad news - some of the best output on the BBC. Given some of the voices who have airtime to express their views, it is hard to see this as anything other than steering the discorce in a particular way.

MAGA: Down with snowflakes and hurrah for FREE SPEECH! also MAGA: You can't come to America unless you show us your social media posts and prove that you've never said hurty words about our president...

Out and about today.

And more...

Thinking again of the scene at the end of the movie "Toys" where the general is kept safe and happy in his bed by having a circular conveyor of toy soldiers run by him that he can endlessly salute...

For fucks sake

Every year we make a free-to-download-and-print-off-yourself colouring-in Advent Calendar. This year’s heavily features Bigfoots. Please share! Download it for free here… www.worldofmoose.com/pages/2025-b...

The recycling begins...

It's Black Friday? If only advertisers had thought to send me dozens of similar emails. I'd never have known...

Boston's Mayor Wu playing with Yo-Yo Ma at Symphony Hall

It must be so deeply worrying for the US medical and scientific establishment at the moment. Like watching a car crash.

Cardboard advent calendars are so much better than chocolate advent calendars. I didn't even like chocolate advent calendars as a kid. Give me some fantastic artwork of a robin and I'll a small square of shite chocolate some other time, thanks.

I reckon you could dump me in a decade and I'd be able to work out the approximate date based on the veggie option on menus. 90s - lasagne 00s - nut roast 10s - risotto If I go to a good place I get choice paralysis because I've got so used to "Oh, the veggie option"

This isn't a daft idea to be honest, although the international sign up will be the kicker! However, from experience with Easter, holidays that always coincide with weekends still need folk to work...

It is genuinely staggering that there isn't mandatory software in cars/phones to prevent drivers from looking at their fucking phone screens and/or texting while driving. It's something I see every day from almost all drivers and it's a largely unacknowledged disgrace.

I've not moved to the right in my politics but I am getting a bit worried by how often I hear some of the Tory elder statesmen making more sense than nearly everyone else..

The irony is that some things don't need any editing to be awful.

Unless there's an unbreakably valid safety reason why not, all button-operated pedestrian crossings should activate the lights in pedestrians' favour instantly when pressed.

incredible photo that's definitely worth at least 1,000 words from Andrew Harnik of Getty

All I'm saying is, what if during a colossal cost of living fiasco, every supermarket entered an unprecedented pact to completely sack off ALL Christmas advertising, and instead put the collective £400m (more? Less? Who knows) into giving millions of households a free Christmas 'big shop'.

You should lose your licence after 6 points, rather than the current 12. You should also have to take your test again to get it back after the ban ends. We've got too many shit drivers on the roads, this might go some way to getting rid of them.

Genuinely brilliant from Private Eye.

I have the one on the left proudly on my wall. Buy one. You know you'll love it.

Damn. RIP the absolute titan of British acting that was Prunella Scales. I wrote this Fawlty Towers short story a while back as a tribute to her performance in it. Shared in her memory.

Emily was no help

I'm not sure if I truly prefer my pasta al dente or I'm just a bit impatient.

Lancet: Offline: Those one should not forgive (Makary and Bhattacharya) by Richard Horton bit.ly/3IPC0PD

One of my favorite anecdotes from THE PREHISTORY OF THE FAR SIDE: "That doesn't sound like the Jane Goodall we know."

Sad to hear of the death of Brian Patten. This poem, shared with me when I was at Uni, might seem a bit trite but really spoke to me, and got me to read some poetry, probably for the first time I didn't "need" to for study. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

I know it has been said many times by people more eloquent than me, but if you are anti-antifa, then aren't you, um, fa?

I recently spent the day with my Dad and didn't have to fix a single IT thing. Was surreal.

Some stats. 375 km in 3 days. Average speed a bit over 24 km/hr. About 11,500 calories burned - but I suspect the day 3 cake replaced most of them! 7 counties crossed.. Hundreds of birds - at one point there were 6 buzzards. Lots and lots of smiles...

Day 3, Melton Mowbray to home. Tail winds, but I took it slow the first half as I was meeting a friend for some lunch. So much to see... strava.app.link/6oS8GXeCVWb

Baffling that Reform are getting so much apparently positive attention. Just for the record, if you start a sentence with the words "Say what you like about Nigel..." my response will be "Yes, I will thank you" and not bother to listen to you about anything else. Probably ever.

Day 2, Cambridge to Melton Mowbray. Lots of wind, and when I finally turned out of it there was a diversion that added 10 km! Beautiful day. Places in the alt text. strava.app.link/tlXFz5zPTWb

Day 1 of my ride home from Essex. Picture from Southend, Battlesbridge, Finchingfield and Audley End. Now in Cambridge, about to eat all the food... strava.app.link/N3wtHDJjSWb

This is a really helpful framing. It reminds me that in healthcare, if we use AI for the heavy lifting of accessing information, we must have humans to assess and understand that information to then apply it - or not - in any given situation...

Sometimes Southend can be splendid...

There was this sign saying "No road studs" and I thought "That's inconvenient, where will we drive?"

Isn't part of the issue, at least, that fewer and fewer big groups owning more and more stuff, beholden only to the bottom line for shareholders, so they become fundamentally less interested in society, more and more focused on making every single penny, cent, grain, no matter the broader cost...

Dam been writing a book about this and she just TikToked it in 90 seconds.

New video on Jimmy Kimmel's suspension, the FCC and freedom of speech in America. www.bbc.co.uk/news/videos/...

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death my right to call you a raving xenophobic twat.