I've got a suggestion for a name for the Peace Council on Gaza, it's "Absolute Shower of Shite"

I thought that was a picture of me for a second! I thought who the fuck sent him that? It's not me, by the way.

From Derek Raymond's 1970 Dystopian novel A State of Denmark. How many people wake up in the morning at the moment with these thoughts?

Powerful and well thought through article on the mining of human attention. www.theguardian.com/books/2026/j...

BREAKING: The President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola, just delivered the strongest rebuke of Donald Trump we’ve seen yet regarding Greenland. Wow.

Turville is an omnipresent representation of southern England village life TV eg the most recent episode of Midsomer Murders. Here it is in a lovely music video. youtu.be/xFWGrNR_mog?...

Everything's awful so I think it's time to start #MidsomerMurdersMonday. It's on itv3 now and Prunella Scales and Cheryl Campbell are hamming it up beautifully

Geraldine secretly leads the resistance. David and Owen are enthusiastic collaborators. And Jim dies tragically when a Gestapo officer demands he declares his loyalty to The Fuhrer: "no, no, no, no..." Bang!

Dr. Gladys West, the pioneering mathematician whose work laid the foundation for modern GPS technology, has died. She was 95.

“If any of these do break, it’s likely game over for one very good reason: there is no one in the Trump administration able to put them right.”

If anyone actually takes medical advice from Donald Trump they should probably have a net thrown over them and be put somewhere safe.

Sshh! Don't tell them that!

I'm definitely giving this a watch. I have zero memory of it, but it can only be amazing! Tartan Asia??

Pulled a few dvds out of things you don't see around any more. Better Off Dead is a cracking early John Cusack film.

The other is of Peter O'Toole in Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell. I saw him in it twice: when it first opened and he played him as a hilarious, happy drunk and then 20 years later when he returned to the part & played it as a melancholy alcoholic. Same words, totally different play: absolute genius actor.

Two VHSs I couldn't part with. Doc Savage was really hard to get back in the day, this was an American import.

I've bought a DVD player, I haven't had one for ages. My dvds of course are in this old foot locker under an amplifier under a television because I never thought I'd need them again.

Worthing Fish Bar. Here's how you get your top grade hygiene rating. Keep it simple with easily cleanable surfaces and good staff and keep it clean.

He's going to be fucking furious when he learns about Florence Nightingale.

Just checking my calendar and found a reminder.

Had an amusing convo with @notupmytrousersyoudont.com about wanky blokes in the 90’s declaring themselves to be DJ’s with the chutzpah of a brain surgeon. I used to DJ 😂 But I was more a ‘selector’. Anyway here’s my latest set. Dancing joy. No beat matching shit. open.spotify.com/playlist/55q...

I've just found out from an early episode of the excellent @warmovietheatre.bsky.social that The Vicar of Dibley was filmed in the same village (Turville) as the 1942 home front invasion classic Went The Day Well. This feels like a missed opportunity for an incredible remake.

It's not the naked greed or even the ideology that scares me most about a UK under Farage and Reform, it's the eternally dangerous three pillars of disaster: arrogance, incompetence and mendacity. Maybe pillars is the wrong word, what's the opposite of a pillar?

The enemy of my former friend who now might be an enemy is worth looking into, especially if he's a big guy.

I bet after Henry Ford, (the guy who paid for the Nuremberg rallies and had his hunger marching workers shot) died, America thought "Phew, at least that'll never happen again"

Finished painting the stairs. What a rare pleasure to have a DIY job that's as quick and easy as I anticipated. Didn't change the colour, just going over them as they were a bit scraped and chipped from lumping furniture up and down. Easier than cleaning them in fact, I might do this more regularly.

Bluesky going to work over on Twitter

That's a bummer, just when they might finally get some use out of it.

Day off, 🌧️, Drinking tea, listening to music, reading.

Men in Victorian/Edwardian formal wear generally look silly. Apart from Winston Churchill, here in 1912 looking, as they said at the time, cool as fuck.

Extract from Derek Raymond's 1970 dystopian novel A State of Denmark. The protagonist, living in Italy receives just one English newspaper, because there is only one now. It's been enshittified in a very familiar manner but he stays on X, I mean resuscribes, for what I suspect is a familiar reason.

Painted half my stairs. Yes, half of them, you're not dealing with a fool here. I can jump down the last half.

From the Met Office, but I think it applies to more than the weather.

30 pages in and this already seems like he had a crystal ball: "Raymond's skill is to make all too plausible the transition from complacent democracy to dictatorship, in a country preoccupied by consumerism and susceptible to media spin"

“Aristotle said a bunch of stuff that was wrong. Galileo & Newton fixed things up. Then Einstein broke everything again. Now, we’ve basically got it all worked out, except for small stuff, big stuff, hot stuff, cold stuff, heavy stuff, dark stuff, turbulence & the concept of time” - Zach Winersmith

The African Queen! I haven't seen this since I was about 10.

Ordered a brown Parka off Vinted which I thought might enhance my cool in the eyes of others while out walking, but now I look at it again, it has a bit of a serial killer living in the woods vibe.

did a cat write this

One of the things I'm most proud of in our laboratory is the diversity of our workforce. We've had people from all over the world, gay, straight, trans, neurodiverse, if you can contribute to producing accurate and timely results, welcome aboard. We'd even hire Farage, but I doubt he'd cut it.

Every right thinking country on the planet needs to send some soldiers to Greenland. Exercise, camping trip, anything. What the hell, get China on board.

Ruby Wax breaks my heart a little here on Alan Rickman. I knew they were friends but not that they were quite this close. www.theguardian.com/film/2026/ja...

Short thread on how to sell anything to me:

One of the neighbours just saw me cleaning piano keys with Polish vodka, except they can't see the piano keys from outside. Trying to explain would just make it worse.

It must have already been said, but I suspect the set of ICE agents in the USA who won't take their masks off lies well within the set of people in the USA who "couldn't" wear them during Covid.

This was great. Victorian, and yet the 1980s somehow bleeds through. I watched it on a big projector screen and it scales up admirably.

The diggers that stand between plucky Worthing and the deep blue sea. Caged like scrapyard dogs.

Care for your spirit and have a healthy 2026!

If it's not a good sunrise, this man will be furious.