caught up with developing a bag of older film today. London, early 2025

baffled to realise that the UK apparently regulated against this in (checks notes) 1774. ahead of the trend!

The invention of queuing, 1917. (Jerry White, Zeppelin Nights: London in the First World War)

On Sunday gawky and glaiket, For life no carin’ a preen; On Monday lookin’ forsaket, Wi’ a misty weet in her een; On Tuesday as prim as a daisy, And sweet as a maiden can be; On Wednesday cap’rin’ and crazy, Wi’ an eldritch glint in her e’e… —Andrew Dodds, “March” #Scots #poem #poetry

iplayer currently has the 1935 version of The 39 Steps, which is great fun: plus, for fans of such things, contains an early appearance of "but there's only one bed / oh no" www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/epis...

Today, 28 February, is Scottish Archives Day. Here’s Edwin Morgan’s poem “Archives”, published in Centenary Selected Poems, @carcanet.bsky.social 2020 @edmorgantrust.bsky.social #archives #poetry #archives #ScottishArchivesDay www.carcanet.co.uk/cgi-bin/inde...

Something I stumbled across a while back: on the day it came out on general release, ~20% of all film showings in Edinburgh cinemas were of Trainspotting. You had a choice of 25, including one at 1.30am the next morning.

From the Caledonian Mercury, November 1763 - an early example of someone running to Scotland to get married underage after "the late Marriage act" (in 1753) stopped it in England

This article clears up a strange detail about the whole Mandelson arrest thing: they *told* him who gave them the information to arrest him? Apparently a screwup: "regarded by the force as a serious breach of protocol ... inadvertently revealing information" www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

How does he sleep at night?

With the Gorton and Denton by-election taking place tomorrow, we're sharing our article on an earlier Manchester by-election. How was a woman able to vote there in 1867, decades before women received the parliamentary franchise? Find out more here: historyofparliament.com/2025/03/14/l...

somewhere, a Lib Dem volunteer squints, sighs, and starts typing "ONLY TWO POINTS BEHIND THE TORIES"

Plums xkcd.com/3209/

spare a thought for the person who's about to get to the last page in the Labour Party crisis management manual and discover it reads "if nothing else has worked, call me - P."

spare a thought for the person who's about to get to the last page in the Labour Party crisis management manual and discover it reads "if nothing else has worked, call me - P."

Islands Matter: #Faroese & #Shetlandic #Folklore 26 Feb, free online via @insuhi.bsky.social Prof Jóan Pauli Joensen: “Water Beings in Faroese Folklore – Tradition & Change” & Prof Andrew Jennings: “From Fetlar to Foula – Norse Roots of Shetland Folklore” www.uhi.ac.uk/en/research-...

And to think we worried about people generating their *own* voluminous consultation responses with LLMs. Why just stop at one!

I wrote on the fall of Peter Mandelson for the next issue of the @lrb.co.uk Online early now: www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...

Local Cat Has Concerns

If you liked this experiment, I published a full piece today in the same vein: a text that gets 100 years older with every section, from a modern blog post to a medieval chronicle. It's a single story spanning 1000 years of English. See how far you get. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/how-far-ba...

a small contribution to yesterday's debate around which relatives of the monarch have been arrested in the past, and for what: apparently William IV, as a young man, may(?) have been arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

This has been the big Wikipedia debate for the last week or so - eventually closed with a decision to get rid of all ~700k links arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

This feels right up there with "the fleet is all lit up" in the annals of highly successful live commentary www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

Local building site inspector is working late

Hard to read this & not feel a certain visceral repulsion

*You might say, "retrofuturist curio," but I'm inclined to say that this diegetic prototype of 1968 was doing a really good futurist job *So good a job that it had to be cut out of Kubrick's movie because it was carrying too much techno-speculative freight

The surprisingly modern look of cyclist Gabrielle Etéogella, 1896. "Organizers were sent to Paris to recruit riders, who were provided with free travel to England, discounts on first class rail travel and free hotel accommodation.[5] Adverts may have also been placed for the racers –

You may be having a bad day but at least The Independent didn’t refer to you as the figurehead of the modern literacy crisis. If I got this review I would simply disappear into a puff of dust.

It pays to read the small print carefully lest you somehow get the wrong impression from a result of "Starmer: 44% definitely or probably would".

FOR THE RECORD: one year on, I lay out clearly how Elon Musk FRS has breached the @royalsociety.org’s code of conduct, why the Society’s failure to defend its values has been so damaging, & what they need do to recover their standing in the scientific community. occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2026/...

I have one of these inspiring quotes on the bookcase (thankyou @latriviata.bsky.social)

Stumbled across this the other day: an 1885 advertising pamphlet extolling how wonderful, economical, and easy to use the new "type-writer" was babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nn...

It’s day 4 of Love Data Week 💕 Confused about copyright or how to licence your research data? Don’t worry, today’s blog post by @christined.bsky.social from UCL Library Services Copyright team guides you through the essentials💡 Have a read 👉 buff.ly/N85GTdk #LoveData26 #UCL #Copyright #Data

😂

Going to get buried in everything else, no doubt, but this is promising: it's always been a bit baffling to me that the government of the day can effectively create as many peers as it wants but no-one can practically sack them again. Can't work out what the 1425 precedent is, though.

Apropos of nothing, the proposed Artemis III landing will require SpaceX to launch a lander (not yet built) into orbit (not yet achieved) and refuel it (not yet demonstrated) with an indeterminate number of tanker flights (as above). Anyway, that's all scheduled for 2024, uh, 25, ... 26? 27? Yeah.

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

@loweringthebar.bsky.social '1. The issue in this case is whether “gold pieces” as a form of wealth in a video game constitute property within the meaning of s. 4 of the Theft Act 1968.' (Answer: Yes.) R v Lakeman [2026] EWCA Crim 4 www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWC...

A thing I did not discover until today but somehow makes perfect sense: in the 60s local papers would report their own local record charts, by the same method as the national ones: ring up the shops (sometimes, shop) and ask what's selling well.

Hate-filled fake videos about London are everywhere. We've obtained a recording of a TikToker confessing to secretly filming Londoners in their homes for clicks. He says it's not political. He just wants to make money from far-right anger. Read what he says: www.londoncentric.media/p/london-tik...

Delighted to learn that the phrase "gung ho" was borrowed from Chinese by someone who did not check the meaning very carefully.

This is another reason why I think the information retrieval push, even pre-LLM, to shift from 10 Blue Links to retrieving contents, answering questions, etc. may be a mistake. We lose important things when we unmoor information from authorial & organizational grounding (and cites aren’t enough).

"Rob, you once spent a day following Peter Mandelson round Blackpool. Did you take any pictures that, even at the time, you thought might one day come in handy?"

the Spectator accidentally recycled a subhed from a previous day’s article about Tehran

Peter Mandelbrot. It’s just infinite scandals the more you zoom in.

I used to do a thought experiment with students. The Devil appears and offers you a deal: your 2.1 is now guaranteed, but you will never learn anything more in your life. How many people, I asked, do you think would take that deal? Typical answers were 60 to 75%. I think my students were right.

Today's pleasant discovery: the 1975 version of "Sara" had a better verse youtu.be/4OM_rsm04fk (Sleeping in the woods by a fire in the night / you fought for my soul going up against the odds / I was too young to know you were doing it right / but you did it with strength that belonged to the gods)

Today, 2 February, is Candlemas. As well as being a Christian holy day, it is one of the four Scottish Quarter Days, when rents were due. The Scots #poem “At Candlemas” by Marion Angus (1865–1946) is a typically unsentimental look at how swiftly youth turns to old age: