Kat Steiner🔸

Greg Davies: Great task, well done. Didn‘t eat a thing.

Persephone: Thank you.

Alex Horne: Ah. Well. Let’s take another look at that pomegranate.

Happy to report that a week of leave for a play gave me enough time away from my constant emails and other work demands got this written and submitted! Such a slog and definitely done rather than perfect but there we are.

For those not pathologically online, Aimee Carty is a shockingly young Irish woman who went viral with a lovely song "2 days into college" in 2024, and I'm thrilled for her to be getting a bigger audience. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aimee_C...

Trying out #TheWalshSisters and it seems fun (although as an only child, utterly baffling) but they've cast a Brit as an American (Sam Anderson is sweet but the accent is POOR), and an American as the Irish dad (it's Aidan Quinn so I almost forgive it). Gorgeous Aimee Carty soundtrack though.

Thankfully not!

Extremely awkward experience of reading a novel by someone you vaguely know, published with a vanity press, and it being beyond terrible (no editing at all, seemingly, horribly repetitive, confusing, nasty story). 😬

Potatoes are nutritionally complete! I tell myself when I'm on my third jacket potato lunch of the week.

I've been unemployed for a few months. I now set myself pretend jobs to prevent the rot setting in. My son thinks this guy is funny, which is a good enough excuse to make something. Any requests?

It's correctly pronounced "Char-well" but obviously there's no way to know that from just looking at it.

Big bonus points for the final ep of #SilentWitness for a) pretty shots of Oxford, and b) pronouncing Cherwell correctly.

All the lies and denials in #DirtyBusiness remind me of when a student in my year reported that she couldn't sleep in her uni room right above the building gate because it beeped every time anyone used it, and the staff emailed back "It does not beep. It does not make a noise. There is no problem."

Cased Set of Six Victorian Cast Silver 'Frog Band' Menu Holders, Samuel Jacob, London, 1899

When I notice it's gross. Less often than once a week.

Any advice on getting dark hair to look grey on stage? Dry shampoo completely failed me (wouldn't stick and just shakes off everywhere). Happy to go grey for the week if that's easiest, but draw the line at bleaching it.

don't go to the shoe shop to buy plates or vice-versa. one of the most valuable things I've learned in therapy. plus! under the line: 17 free or not-expensive things that have brought me disproportionate joy this month

I wrote about one of the most useful things I've ever learned in therapy. It can actually change your life - certainly did mine.

naomialderman.substack.com/p/dont-go-to...

I think also, people are used to computers not telling them something has succeeded when it's failed - we've all grown up in a world of error messages and warnings and popups saying "we couldn't complete this action". Having a computer explicitly say "I've done X" while not having done it is new.

It's related to having high blood pressure? But not sure if too much salt leads to high blood pressure, or just that once you have high blood pressure you're told to go on a low salt diet. I have chronically low blood pressure so I love that I can eat as much salt as I like.

I guess Birmingham's pretty big, but I'd expect there to be a limited number of inspectors who investigate murders!

Do they always have new police officers for every case? It's a bit weird meeting new ones every time.

But fundamentally, this shows why first past the post isn’t fit for purpose. If the government doesn’t introduce proportional voting, a far right party could win the next general election outright on a minority of the vote.

This is certainly a disadvantage to mandatory bike helmet rules (and would you want to share a helmet that came with the bike hire? As someone who got lice as a teen from shared horse riding helmets, I would suggest not).

I love watching old dramas and spotting the actors who became famous!

Back on Twitter, saying this inevitably led to huge pile-ons from defensive people complaining about librarians "gatekeeping". It was so tiresome.

Baby Ozzy attending his first committee meeting aged four months. A small astonished ball of fluff on the table, surrounded by dons.

Ozzy at one year old. Suave, immaculate gentleman cat with massive quantities of fur and amber eyes.

Ozymandias, King of Kings, is one year old today.
He successfully overcame FIP to become the luxuriantly-furred and mighty hunter that he is today, and we are very proud of him.

Happy Birthday, Ozzy!

Photo of a pan pizza. Text says “Worse than you remember, or your money back.” And the Pizza Hut logo

Incredible ad in my digest email from The Onion

List of databases

Help page

It's PsycINFO in Ovid, but then PsycInfo in Ovid's help so 🤷‍♀️

Yes, and it's so incongruous when the whole thing is super high tech and scientific now!

I've literally never watched it before this series!

The latest series of #SilentWitness is set in Birmingham, and they filmed the digging up of a body in Sutton Park! I recognised it from the first shots of trees, before it even showed the lake. Something about the quality of the light is set so deep in my bones, such a joy to revisit.

yes I think I have to write something about 'failing quietly' vs 'failing loudly'

when the electricity in your house goes out, that is failing loudly. you know at once.

when an AI fails, it mostly fails quietly. the bad incorrect answer gives no warning that it is different to the good useful one