I hosted a great discussion of it all here too:

The year is 2025. It's never cold enough to put the heating on but always too damp to dry anything on the line. The future smells of damp laundry. Welcome.

Science Teachers! If you’re interested in using ”non-fiction November“ to get your students reading a bit more, “Why Don’t Things Fall Up?” is one of the few non-fiction titles on this “Year 10 recommended reading list”. It‘s a book that brings school science together into a coherent story

If I see one more stupid Rosalind Franklin take I'm going to lose my mind. Thank god for @matthewcobb.bsky.social and @nccomfort.bsky.social. www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Very sad to hear about Jim Watson’s death. If you think he was always a racist you are wrong. He refused to support genes/IQ research in the 70s. He boycotted Greece because of the military coup in 1967 and he called for a boycott of meetings in Chicago after the police riot of 1968. 1/2

basically all downhill on the name front since Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur

Is there a crossword person in your life? Would you like to get them a unique gift? PERHAPS FOR CHRISTMAS? Well maybe a bespoke quiz or cryptic crossword would fit the bill, on any theme, of any size, by the author of [counts on fingers] more than 900 published crosswords, i.e. Me. Give me a shout!

SELF IS WATCHING YOU ALL.

I say "back on my bullshit" quite a lot. Please revisit the distant day when I first climbed aboard my bullshit.

This, by the way, is when I first started writing about it. The TLS, 2014. A great deal, for me, followed from this. richarddsmyth.com/2017/07/07/t...

Back on track.

This stuff is just fucking gibberish, isn't it. 13% of green voters want to bring back the stocks. OK then. Thanks.

I urge you all from the bottom of my heart to stop caring so much about what people call you.

If you can spare a few quid for a young man trying to do good stuff in impossible circumstances, drop Rodney here a line.

A strange and beautiful little book has come to me from @uniformbooks.bsky.social.

Plunging back into the ecosystem of nature writing for a forthcoming essay and my goodness how it's changed since I first started writing about it HAHAHAHA just kidding it's exactly the same except everone's called Merlin

Enchanted by the publishing micro-genre "Christmas novelisations of TV soaps but also it's wartime for some reason".

Morning.

Joe's face when he saw Nick had voted for him. #CelebrityTraitors

A last shout for my Apollo piece on the demolition of the East Wing and the coming Trump ballroom, the third of a loose trilogy of pieces on Trump and classical architecture ...

Happy lungs-filled-with-metal-and-carbon day to all who celebrate 😞 (To be fair this is not the worst one I've seen, largely because it's windy and maybe because🎆on a weekday so we'll see another spike at the weekend)

Great charity-shop find for anyone who's read A Walk In The Woods.

lol

UK publication day for this wrist-spraining beauty! Appropriately, I’m travelling to Cambridge, where I’m doing a book launch talk at the LMB tomorrow afternoon.

Another horrifying @unep.org emissions gap report; another brilliant cover image ❤️

Someone should write a novel about this. www.amazon.co.uk/Woodcock-Ric...

[peers learnedly over stack of old books, a true scholar, steeped in lore] actually George it was Gerard, not Gerald

Someone should write a book on this.

Keeping quiet on the school discipline discourse so as not to out myself as a secret fascist.

It’s fascinating comparing the front page coverage of the Huntingdon train attack (below) with how the British press treated another case 30 years ago. I’m referring to the 1995 Netto supermarket attack in Birmingham in which a man stabbed 10 people, killing one of them.

Anyway, we need some joy, so here's the Egyptian foreign minister being given a Lego Pyramid by the Danish foreign minister.

THE FIRST ORDER IS IN. THE CHRISTMAS RUSH HAS BEGUN.

This New Yorker documentary about the 1988 UK government ban on broadcasting the voices of Sinn Féin and I.R.A. leaders is pretty good but they show *that clip from The Day Today with no explanation and no indicator that it is satire. www.newyorker.com/video/watch/...

This could be an Irish woman

Is there a crossword person in your life? Would you like to get them a unique gift? PERHAPS FOR CHRISTMAS? Well maybe a bespoke quiz or cryptic crossword would fit the bill, on any theme, of any size, by the author of [counts on fingers] more than 900 published crosswords, i.e. Me. Give me a shout!

The White House briefing room. Four Hs. Three of them are upside down. And it’s been that way since 2007.

I've got a bit more tolerant - or at least a bit more polite - as I've got older but it still staggers me that newspapers can report people saying things like this as if they aren't absolutely batshit mental.

Oh good, another thing that can quite simply fuck off.

A new [non]uniformbook: done Colin Sackett “Concatenation of lettering… an enchaining of individual letters which eliminates the discrete entity of the word they construct… aka scriptura continua” —Michael Hampton “riddledwithtypos” —Anon. uniformbooks.co.uk/done.php

Similar concept to a game played here called Ponking Pirates (no tittering) in which small pirate figures are placed on a seesaw and fired across a room by player 1. Player 2 must try and catch them in a bowl of water. Spectators within the area of play are completely ignored and play continues

Named after Leigh Catt apparently. Notorious hanging judge, but loved inventing games. Great with children.

A sentimental invention of Sir Walter Scott I'm afraid.

This is how wars start.

Brings to mind the old west country game of door-settee, usually played in the sitting room. One player tries to make the other touch the door, who tries to make them touch the settee. The game originated surprisingly not in Dorset, but Wiltshire.

For centuries the Bretons believed this was how babies were made.

just realised it would be gorros-porros in Catalan, which is satisfyingly sminky pinky

Looks like we got ourselves a revisionist.

Here in Yorkshire we of course use rhubarb, hence 'barb-tats', as famously referenced in the traditional song "On Ilkley Moor".

In Lincs, we'd get Michaelmas Friday off school to go to the pick-your-own-leek farm (every village had one) and work the fields. Whoever picked the largest leek was crowned "Maester Allium" using a bonnet woven from leek fronds. We'd then club them to death to give harvest thanks. Happy days.

A live chicken was used right up to the 17th century, I believe, when the Freiherren of Wessenberg outlawed the practice on the grounds that it was stupid.