Michael Brooke

"Withering sarcasm" and "playful banter" are one and the same thing as far as the British are concerned. As demonstrated by pretty much any random conversation between me and my wife (and indeed me and my daughter).

Surely it was withering sarcasm? I'd be amazed if pretty much any British person wrote something like that with a straight face. And the "withering sarcasm" theory ties in with the tone of the other emails as well.

To be fair, there are three proper crossings (the third being round the corner) within easy walking distance, and I can appreciate that they've been more conveniently sited in terms of balancing traffic and pedestrian needs. It's just that there's a quicker method for more daredevil types.

My regular walk to Tesco involves crossing a busy road. Do I (a) walk several hundred yards down the road and cross at the lights? (b) walk several hundred yards up the road and cross at the lights? (c) gleefully indulge in a thrilling traffic-dodging run straight across?

Take a wild guess.

How would they have known? And if they did know, given the story's obvious importance in the immediate wake of the 2008 crash, why did the news not emerge till now?

Starmer *was* warned that Mandelson was risky, but that particular subject didn't come up.

Starmer wasn't even an MP when the Mandelson-Epstein shenanigans were going on. And if Gordon Brown didn't know about them until just now, as he's just claimed, there's precious little chance that Starmer did.

The cover of the Vinegar Syndrope release of 'Piotr Szulkin's Apocalypse Tetralogy', featuring a helmeted individual whose face has been replaced by a spiral, and the entire artwork has been covered with 21 yellow silhouettes of rats.

See also the way that the perfectly adequate, long-extant "tetralogy" has been supplanted by the grotesque "quadrilogy". I had nothing to do with this box set being correctly titled, but I was thrilled when my contributor copy arrived.

This was one of the harder ones to record a commentary for because all the info I had going in was (a) that it was Norstein's first solo film as director, and (b) that he thought it was "complete rubbish", a comment made when he was trying to persuade his biographer Clare Kitson not to watch it.

Thanks for the warning!

I *can't* upgrade to Tahoe, or past Sequoia 15.1.1, because the subtitling software that I use daily won't work beyond that, and its sole developer died a couple of years ago. There'll be a time whereby I have no choice to upgrade, but I'm putting it off as long as I can.

It’s obvious why they’d still be angry about that—but then voting for the party with the most obviously inflationary policies (as they’ve duly turned out to be in practice) is perhaps not the most rational way of responding.

But that’s the problem with an essentially binary political system.

His eventual resignation was far from honourable, as he jumped rather than be pushed, in the form of a three-month suspension from Parliament for lying (which would almost certainly have triggered a by-election—aka special election—that he might well have lost), but at least the system worked.

In Britain, it's a longstanding convention that if you mislead the House of Commons, you issue a retraction ASAP, and if you knowingly lie, you resign. Boris Johnson tried to undermine that by repeatedly lying to the Commons and almost daring his colleagues to sanction him—but they ultimately did.

Ooh, that's *very* tempting!

Or that the Biden administration recovered from that inflation more rapidly and impressively than just about any other major western economy.

Had Trump done nothing and just let that recovery carry on, the US would be in a fair bit better shape than it currently is, and he'd have taken the credit.

And some local celebrities deliberately holiday in places where they're unknown, just to switch their anonymity back on. I was once on the Zlín Film Festival jury with a local TV star, and she told me that she did precisely that; she's head-turningly famous in the Czech Republic, but nowhere else.

Well, there are different kinds of fame, revolving around whether you can walk down the street unmolested. Bear Grylls might struggle, but Thomas Pynchon should manage it easily; the number of authenticated photos of him is still in single figures.

Because the people who are in a position to stop him are abject, grovelling cowards who have totally abdicated the responsibilities handed down to them by the original framers of the US Constitution.

We all know who they are, and by their individual names, and historians will not be kind to them.

What they're doing is claiming that "Trump was slagging off NATO as a whole; he didn't mean *our* brave boys".

Even though he blatantly did. If he'd meant to exclude British soldiers, he'd have said so.

I genuinely don't think it's heretical!

"Contrarian"=arsehole
"Edgy"=arseholish
"Heretical opinion"=expression of arseholery

There may be a handful of exceptions to that general rule, but I believe it holds firm 99% of the time.

The image I frequently reach for to sum up how blissfully happy my marriage is involves us both sitting on the sofa watching a serious news programme, someone will accidentally let slip an innuendo, and my wife will turn to me and say "I can't believe you thought that. You absolutely disgust me."

I hope there's at least one penguin on the board. After those tariffs, it's only fair.

(Besides, a penguin won't get arrested for war crimes if he sets foot in the vast majority of countries, unlike at least two actual "Board of Peace" members.)

Since Starmer had only just unequivocally stood with Denmark against the US (which was by no means expected; he normally tries to strike a fence-sitting "balance" where Trump is concerned), there's no conceivable reason why she'd have meant anything other than that she regarded the UK as friends.

Jason Robards as Al Capone in The St Valentine’s Day Massacre, expressing the hope that his enemies will rot in hell for a million years—although he’s saying it in his native Italian, hence a subtitle transcription reading “Marciscono all’inferno per un milione d’anni!”

Not translate, because if it wasn’t subtitled for its original audiences then I shouldn’t do that either, but I love expanding things like “(CURSES IN ITALIAN)” to the attached. Even if you can’t read Italian, Al Capone (Jason Robards) is obviously not best pleased.

Sometimes it’s just a question of reworking them into a uniform house style, while others need really extensive input from me. And I try never to feature the dreaded “(SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE)”, I at least try to identify the language, and if it’s written in the Roman alphabet I transcribe it.

In my case, because I was producing various DVDs and Blu-rays for Arrow and was trying to save money, so I started subtitling them myself. And then one thing led to another and it became a big chunk of my day job; since mid-2017, I’ve overseen at least 95% of the Indicator label’s output.

So she's both "low-IQ" and a master criminal?

Something's not adding up here.

“That would be an ecumenical matter” might also work.

Might.

And the racist white guy then coerced a Latina woman to hand over hers.

Almost certainly, because I suspect he’d have mentioned this if he’d been aware.