Nominate your candidates to be the next BBC Director-General here. I'll start.

In today's news, the BBC director resigns because he's just an overpromoted sugar-water marketing guy (srsly, he was a marketing VP for Pepsi) who's too stupid to realise that the culture secretary is playing him like a violin because the government wants to appease the orange fuckhead in DC. #BBC

Oh FFS. Maybe this time the BBC should hire a DG who has made an actual programme at some point in their life rather than just being (literally) a former Pepsi marketer and who actually has the guts to stand up for the corporation and its independence even when the inevitable mistakes happen?

Apparently the word he gave was "Bully". Our survey said.. (bwa-bwaaah)

Hey! Calling all Wonder Women! We all are sisters…pulling together with one spirit. 50 years ago today the first episode of the series Wonder Woman aired.

The local Billa has a new security guard who is diligently checking everyone leaving for suspicious chicken and tuna. Other than that you can shoplift all you want, they don't care. #cat

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...

"The King has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 3 November 2025 to declare that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor shall no longer be entitled to .. enjoy the style .. of 'Royal Highness' and the titular dignity of 'Prince'." Pictured: the Great Seal of the Realm.

A European satellite launched by a European operator to support not just European research but research worldwide with openly available high-res radar data and also to monitor AIS signals from shipping in remote areas to watch for things like oil spills and illegal fishing. This is how it should be.

I75% of Austrians in a recent survey expressed their support for mandatory military service. However, only around a third of Austrians said that they would definitely or probably be willing to take up arms in defence of the country. In other words - people who wouldn't be drafted favour the draft.

The past is another country and.. yeah, that's fine, the past should stay there, thanks. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfU6...

Google Gemini is very coy and reluctant when asked for pictures of public figures but when prompted for "The White House with tacky neon signs" without even mentioning any names it certainly gets the hint.

Every newspaper today: MAN CHARGED WITH ATTEMPTED MURDER AFTER TRAIN KNIFE ATTACK oh and don't mention the other guy who was arrested but then released because it turned out he had nothing at all to do with it other than being black

Read to the very bottom, then you get the reason why he’s banned.

Japan's "Mundane Halloween" costume contest is back! Each year website DailyPortalZ holds a contest where people dress up as something super duper ordinary. Here's a thread of some of my favorites from the 2025 contest! #MundaneHalloween

Remember the veil between the dead and the living is at its thinnest tonight so it’s your perfect opportunity to call Cilla Black a cunt.

Happy Halloween, fellow Gen Xers.

Don't underestimate what a huge deal today's statement is. Charles has told Andrew to fuck off and pay his own way but in the meantime he's temporarily allowed a small allowance and a home in rural Norfolk presumably without Uber privileges. All his titles formally withdrawn. Utter defenestration.

Voting can be dangerous in the Netherlands, according to NOS: The Barneveldse Krant reports that a man was slightly injured when he got his hand trapped in a ballot box. It took half an hour to release him.

I could tell it was the CDA leader speaking without even needing a caption because he looked like a televangelist, holding the mic in both hands and looking very sincere while surrounded by a bunch of too-clean-looking Christian types. Looked like an evangelical youth camp with an average age of 40.

The leader of the VVD is making a speech and my Dutch isn't great but I'm pretty sure she's saying "lol, isn't it hilarious how many of our supporters will vote for us out of sheer dumb habit regardless of how much of a shitshow we are?". #verkiezingen2025

Interesting that there is a 50+ Party in NL. At least in the UK more or less every party is the Over-50s party.

How you can tell that the exit poll results really were kept top secret until the polls closed: as they're revealed you can hear the gasps and "ooh!"s from elsewhere in the studio. #verkiezingen2025

The NOS election studio is decorated with giant red coloured pencils. Looks like they borrowed them from the children's TV department.

TIL that the Dutch for "exit poll" is "exitpoll".

Watching the NOS election coverage - they're going around all the party headquarters to read the mood before the exit poll (4 minutes!) is announced and the PVV office seems to be completely empty. Weird, far righters usually love cheering and flag-waving for the cameras.

You keep telling yourself that.

The copy of Der Spiegel I'm working my way through has 120 pages, most of which are copy, and a print circulation of over 650,000. This rather puts the lie to the idea that good print journalism is no longer a sustainable business model.

Adverts should be representative of traditional British families

'Viewer discretion: the following sitcom from 1976 is reflective of attitudes in 2020s England'

President Steinmeier of Germany made an official visit to Austria last week and he was taken to see the Brenner base tunnel. He was visibly confused by a major infrastructure project that wasn‘t an autobahn, and kept asking “But where do the autos go?“.

Just saw a video of the President of Germany's 25-vehicle motorcade from this week's state visit. I presume President Van der Bellen (of Austria) took the bus and had already been there for half an hour when the motorcade arrived.

The Waffle House order cyphersystem is terrifying. The average tech bro who considers cooking food to be "unskilled labour" would be a gibbering wreck by halfway through this video (which is to their disadvantage, as Waffle House is going to be one of the few sources of post-apocalyptic employment.)

Clearly I'm neither in the UK nor Switzerland - someone just made a quiet and unobtrusive phone call that lasted about 15 seconds in the quiet carriage and nobody even tutted or pointed passively-aggressively at the sign.

The local hearing aid place has a sign advertising new hearing aids "with the power of AI" and all I can think of is a Naughty AI Hearing Aid Python sketch. "Do you waaaant to come back to my ples, bouncybouncy?"

look I really think the Naz Restaurant should get its sign fixed

I don't think any of Philip Pullman's books ever mention Australians - probably because their daemons would all be either deadly poisonous or enormous bad-tempered flightless birds. '"Back in a minute", muttered Bruce's spider daemon as she dropped silently into the senior priest's left boot.'

Sam: Oh Mr Frodo! Mr Frodo's awake! Divers hobbits: pillow fight, tickling, playing "hunt the carrot"

Updating my LEGO White House

Absolutely the best reason to own a folding phone

"Look, they said we had to find "creative" ways to top up licence fee income..."

Habsburg Comix should be a thing. Ferdinand I's parents both had the same four grandparents and he suffered as a result. He was amiable but dim, and when told that the angry mob marching on the palace in 1848 were starting a revolution his confused reply was "But are they allowed to do that?". 1/3

Got full marks on the Austrian citizenship test. But the test itself shouldn't be sneezed at - I'm pretty sure quite a few Austrians don't know the precise responsibilities of the Rechnungshof or the full consequences of the Revolution of 1848. It was only easy for me as I'm a politics nerd.

"Oh, my appointment should only take 10 minutes, I'm sure it'll be fine if I just park right outside..."

1980, when British people had far lower expectations of their food. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fsml...

absolute workhorse of a reaction image from over 100 years ago

the us-east-1 AWS outage is the world's biggest cautionary tale about people who thought "eh, just take the defaults".

As a native English speaker in the German speaking world, a tourism poster saying "Slovenia, so nah" looks like the most apathetic advertising campaign in history.

EXPLOSION DE LA CRIMINOULITÉ EN FRANCE