The Wailers changed their look *a bit* after their early recordings

Oh bloody hell, I'm going to have to watch it now, aren't I? www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

This sounds hyperbolic, but if the (metaphorical) guillotines ever end up getting dragged out, I swear it'll be because of people's sense that they're constantly being ripped off for more by people who already have wealth beyond imagining.

[unimpressed face]

Well this was all great fun until it descended into my timeline being full of people saying that Leicester is the biggest UK city they've never been to, and it's a bit personal now, to be frank.

Well, it took all week, but I am delighted to see that we have gone from "unhinged Midlands discourse" to "unhinged Northern discourse". Excited to see where we can get to next week.

Nuancing this opinion on the difficulty of Ghost of Yotei by noting that the Oni boss battle is a right bastard, and finally beating it without weeping, or simply bottling it and lowering the difficulty level is going on my end of year appraisal as one of my Achievements of 2026's.

THREAD. A while ago my parents' cat Bridget went missing. As the worrying weeks dragged on my dad devised a way to distract himself: he began to paint Bridget's adventures, imagining her travelling through time & inhabiting art's most iconic scenes. What he produced (& how quickly) was phenomenal...

A Congolese colleague of mine just texted to say that she thinks Thomas Tuchel looks like a cross between Prince William and Alain de Botton, and she's not wrong, is she?

DRC seem quite good at this "defence" thing, wonder if England should consider trying it

Germany and the Netherlands right now

Despite their joyful natural rhythm on the ball, England lack a certain tactical nous.

If Starfire will forgive me I want to use this as a jumping off point because I think we are about to see some very weird and very wild geopolitical shit, and it's all because the fossil industry has been pounding cases of cope for nearly a decade. 1/X

the joke going round is that Ukraine requested these be donated to Russia instead

Three really tidy goals in this game

Conclusion from a good thread on the subject.

Reckon there's going to be some pretty awful Norman Tebbit-esque discourse in the Netherlands today after that game. (for those not ancient enough to know what this is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket... ; I hadn't realised that he'd walked back from this later in life)

The regional discourse on UK Bluesky has definitely got more unhinged as the day as gone on. Reckon you're all still suffering the effects of the heat.

The Economist comparing AI to mRNA vaccines, without mentioning that the backlash to those vaccines was based on entirely made-up stuff, whereas the backlash to AI is based on e.g. what the AI companies say and do (at least in part, will not deny some of it is vibes-based).

Important point, this (which I maybe don’t bring out enough)… … the reason air con now makes sense from a grid pov is because the grid is changing so fast. Partly we’re adding a lot of solar (correlates with air con need) and partly because we’re planning for a much bigger winter peak in demand

Hydration break

Happy 70th birthday to the legendary Freddie McGregor. Here's a classic 7" Freddie recorded at Studio 1 in 1976. He was still just 20 years old when this came out. Later versions he did were re-titled I'm A Revolutionist... youtu.be/8pveImrxJaE?... #reggae #reggaesky #vinylsky #vinyl #musicsky

Festival evacuated because of an impending storm. Thoughts and prayers with the people who took their drugs shortly before the evacuation was announced, and are now buzzing their tits off in a quiet park in north Brussels.

Just over 30 years ago, I changed planes in Oman. I boggled at the screen when it announced it was 48 degrees outside, and remember the wall of heat when I stepped off the plane. It seemed extraordinary and alien to my young self. Seems likely I'll experience that temperature at home in my lifetime.

Reckon my family have eaten their own weight in cold watermelon.

Most popular histories will tell you that it was the interminable food discourse. However, more recent academic research indicates that the Aircon Spat of June 2026 may have been the ultimate cause of the Great Anglophone Bluesky Schism.

Heat wave advice in Belgium: eat chips with some salt on them.

Me, on the arrival of morning, to the mosquito somewhere in my bedroom who has plagued me this past night.

So who's being Jesse Owens this time around? Trump to attend World Cup final and present trophy - www.bbc.com/sport/footba...

Hydration break

This England, on the other hand, this feels rather more familiar.

HYDRATION BREAK

John Terry and Gianni Infantino keep popping up in the same camera shot.

Since we're all doing "what I did immediately after the referendum", here's mine: (a) listened to Dark Side of the Moon as therapy (b) applied for Dutch nationality (c) [relatedly] started working on my Dutch

Nazi alert (They’ve just taken the photo off the listing, you’ll have to go to the video or 360 tour) www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/1...

The chase in THE FRENCH CONNECTION was filmed through real Brooklyn traffic with no permits, director William Friedkin crouched in the back seat working the camera. The white car that smashes into the Pontiac wasn't planned. It was a genuine collision, and Friedkin kept it in.

This seems to me to be exactly the sort of messaging that needs to be hammered away at re Reform.

I hate to break it to the European diplomat quoted in @politico.eu this morning, but increasing the return rate will make no difference to the far right. They will just move on to demanding forced remigration. It’s not like there aren’t hundreds of examples of this already.

Yeah, it might not be just the team colours though.

Damning conclusion to a good thread

1. Replied "you can't go out in that" when my daughter came to show me her new and excessively short crop-top 2. Confidently told my (Dutch) son not to worry about the Japanese scoring with a header from a corner 5 seconds before exactly that happened.

This, in my view, is the greatest cover version of all time. Johnny Cash. Hurt.

I for one am going to enjoy the way he stares bitterly at his successors at the Cenotaph, royal events and the like.

There is no way back to rebuilding trust in politics that doesn't run through the idea of community and local government. That's the essence of the revolutionary idea in Manchesterism but needs a lot of work to flesh it out and isn't going to deliver quick results.

"The Americans can't get the slime out of their capital's monument pool and will arrest you for touching it," sounds like the sort of lie they'd tell us in the Soviet Union so we'd stop bitching about bread lines.

Hydration break

Was a fun game of rugby. Plenty of mistakes from both sides, particularly in the first half. Behind for the first time in the game and with a man in the bin, Saints found a way to get the game by the scruff of the neck and not let go. A fair result on the day and over the season.

So now if you're iran, all you have to do is keep saying "give us everything we want and we'll open the strait," knowing that the strait being closed is intolerable to the US but being unable to strike lebanon is intolerable to Israel, and just see what happens

Train from Richmond: a brilliant mixture of overdressed people heading for Ascot and badly dressed people heading for Twickenham.

To Twickenham, there to watch the Premiership final.