Sixteen years later, still the funniest piece of writing on the internet. I revisit it every year the way some people rewatch It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown or reread A Christmas Carol. You’re either ready to reap this freaky-assed harvest or you’re not.

every corporate decision comes down to money and clearly the economics for abc/disney outweighed the threats from the fascist government

Trailers before FACE OFF 8 One Battle After Another I Swear Roofman Good Fortune

I don't know if this STAR WARS trailer release date was planned or bumped up because of last week's festivities. But boycotts don't count if they're painless. Disney knows what it has to do to make it right. Until then, gotta make 'em feel it.

We REALLY ought to be talking more about the US military murdering people. A veteran I can tell you these are unlawful orders and this is a crime.

Keir Starmer’s spokesperson asked for the PM's response to Nigel Farage’s plan to deport hundreds of thousands of people living and working completely legally in the UK, replies that he thinks it is “unworkable” and “unfunded”. So his objection is that they’ve got their sums wrong

Retrospectively removing indefinite leave to remain would be immoral and economically damaging. It would tear families apart. Attacking it as ‘potentially illegal’ is completely beside the point. Argue with the (awful) idea. Don’t try ’well, actually you can’t do that’.

The thing is "digital ID" as a category is absolutely freaking enormous. It could mean *all sorts* of things, which are all quite different to one another, but it cannot usefully include every single technology imaginary that is being bandied around in think tank papers and op eds

Whoever is DMing me, I am not age verified so cannot see it...

You know why ethnic minorities in the UK always feel second-class as if they're never safe in this country and could be asked to leave at any time? This is why:

Ha, just one more post. I got my national insurance number due to an usherette job in Belfast where my manager had to complete the form explaining why my foreign self had to be hired. We did it together and I watched him say the job had no specialist needs and I certainly didn't bring any

I’m in Vienna right now. A city which went from being the intellectual and cultural capital of the world to a “provincial backwater” (to quote Brian Barry) in a couple of decades due to nationalism, anti-semitism and fascism which drove away the leading scholars and artists it didn’t murder.

Anyway. Beginning the week with disheartening political posts not super fun

Waaaay back in the previous millennium I had a barmaid job in an unpleasant little town outside London where once an older drinker decided to step to me for taking an English job. I laughed at him and offered to swap places at which point he got a bit more gracious but then he started in on all the

The people who interpreted Brexit as telling all the foreigners to fuck off are winning and I'm wondering how many more personal insults I can take before I decide to go over a border again

If you're a Lib Dem prepared to countenance ID cards, look at these two headlines side-by-side and give your head a wobble. And then think about the impact on the Trans community. They won't be about accessing services, they'll be about identifying certain segments of the population. #LDConf

Oxford has been around since 1096. Imagine tossing almost a thousand years of academic reputation into the garbage, setting it on fire, and then pissing it out over a useless fucking plagiarism machine what loses billions of dollars a year telling people to kill themselves.

Can’t help noticing that Reform’s scaremongering discredited figure for the cost of migration to the UK economy is almost exactly the excess amount that our taxes will have to bear due to the COVID overspend exposed in that ITV documentary last night. Who do you really think cost us c£200bn?

we have gone from a world in which we were told not to cite wikipedia because it was unreliable to a world where wikipedia might be the only reliable source left on the internet and we all owe a lot to the pedantic nerds who got us there

Any journalist quoting this absurd, invented £234 billion number cited by Farage/Reform should make absolutely clear that it has been withdrawn by *its own authors* (the Centre for Policy Studies) after they admitted it contained several major errors (1/3)

Doesn’t matter how developed you think you are as a writer, this positive, constructive group will help you become even better. Give it a try.

Daniel Day-Lewis shooting the iconic motorcycle chase after Magua at the end of The Last Of The Mohicans.

Even in a world where Woody Allen was not a predator, the idea of a bitter, obnoxious old man writing a Mary Sue novel about society's failure to recognize his wisdom would get a big fucking no thank you from me.

This Day in Labor History: September 21, 1908. The Industrial Workers of the World met for its 4th annual convention in Chicago. This convention would reshape the struggling nascent organization, moving it clearly from an intellectuals’ movement to a workers’ movement. Let's talk about it!

I have a half-baked theory that you can divide sitcoms into three broad formulas: The Single Monster (Fawlty Towers, Keeping Up Appearances, The Office); The Unhealthy Dependency (Steptoe and Son, Peep Show, The Likely Lads) and The Ensemble (Friends, Cheers, The Green Wing).

I love the Winter Olympics let’s all get frostbite and fall down a mountain

They should make an international franchise out of Murder She Wrote called Murder She Translated, where Jessica Fletcher's various translators in different countries also happen to solve crimes in their spare time

I did the previous one, which was a lot of fun. The thousand-point question was which movie made the compere laugh so hard he soiled himself, which two teams (of men who presumably also did the same thing on a date, because yes he was on a date) actually got correct

Sounds like a right...Kant.

Media execs have fallen prey to a propaganda and harassment campaign that has completely divorced them from what people actually want right now. Both their insular information environments (group chats, podcasts) and ambient noise (Twitter reactionaries) have put them in a very stupid bubble.

'Rhys always stressed that the left-out and the high rollers live cheek-by-jowl.' Sophie Oliver on the importance of dress – and illusion – to Jean Rhys

Dutch Baby, that princely, puffy Yorkshire pudding of a breakfast pancake, is #RecipeOfTheDay, I’m pleased to be able to report! www.nigella.com/recipes/dutc...

This. It’s very alarming that these baseline protocols seem to have fallen away and there’s this amnesiac fumbling to re-make a basic liberal consensus from whole cloth.

More than 3,300 new houses were built in Dublin city last year. Just 155 were bought by households

Lot of people dunking on this, but it's good to see Mark Zuckerberg getting back to the thing that first made him passionate about coding: rating girls online.

It is so damn obvious the trans sports issue is a drummed up nonsense moral panic masquerading as “common sense” - but if you look deeper for two seconds you see how the whole point of sex segregated sports is to defund women athletics & to build and propagandize the western idea of women as weak.

Is the Australian TV show LOVE MY WAY accessible anywhere in the UK?

Your reminder that legislation to curb the rights of trans people to use restrooms or do anything else means everyone's behaviour, clothing etc will be opened up to intrusive and unwanted scrutiny and potential challenge in our daily lives. This is not a 'them' issue. Trans rights are human rights.

Top 10 TV Comedies for @cairdiul.bsky.social Top Cat Bewitched Spaced Fawlty Towers Frasier (up to s7) Porridge The Simpsons (up to s10) Ghosts The Office (remember when Gervais wasn't a monster?) [empty slot for the one I've inevitably forgotten]

10 favourite TV comedies: Taxi Frasier (pre Niles/Daphne romance) Steptoe and Son Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads Nightingales I Woke Up One Morning Rising Damp One Foot In The Grave Ripping Yarns Black Books

10 favourite TV comedies Porridge Parks & Rec Fawlty Towers Community The Simpsons Ted Lasso Frasier Yes Minister Red Dwarf The Day Today

10 Favourite TV Comedies Nightingales Detectorists The League of Gentlemen Ted Lasso It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia The Thick Of It Toast Of London Green Wing Spaced Friday Night Dinner

10 Favorite TV Comedies Barney Miller Blackadder (esp. 3&4) Fawlty Towers Get Smart Ghosts (UK edition) The Golden Girls The Good Place The Odd Couple Soap Yes, Minister (including Prime) honorary mention: Square Pegs

10 Favourite TV Comedies Better Off Ted Bewitched Colin from Accounts Community Don't Trust the Bitch in Apartment 23 I Love Lucy London Irish Mom Mum My Name Is Earl

THE LADY FROM THE SEA at the Bridge is one astounding night of theatre, featuring only the second swimming pool I've ever seen in a set, and with a rock solid cast all the way down. Alicia Vikander did some unusually raw work despite the trouble with her mic pack and Andrew Lincoln (or should I say

Radical Harmony, the new Neo-Impressionists special exhibit at the National Gallery is really good. A Van Gogh new to me, the extraordinary Chahut by Seurat, and some portraits of women who were really loved by their husbands But it also made clear pointillism was a precursor to photography

Which level of hell is the street preachers wearing body cameras

I walked into the pub and A Forest started playing and this should happen to me more often