Dr Rick

I meant "leading" rather than "paying", as I'm certain you realised :).

I've been meaning to read something of yours, probably paying to everything of yours, for much too long, and that opening has indeed sold me this book.

Sold. Bought.

joyous, silly, and life-affirming. I don't think there's a single piece of negativity in their entire output, and, as a human who struggles with his own cynicism, I really value that.

Also, Bob Mortimer is a national treasure, the crown jewel of non-toxic masculinity.

I really think Vic and Bob deserve the same sort of treatment, as a situation-changing explosion of British comedy, as the Goons, Python, Comic Strip/Young Ones etc. They were completely new and different and incredibly funny, and in a landscape that was quite serious and political they were

I think you can argue that the internet has made access to information (other than very simple facts) harder. For anything with nuance that is politically weaponisable, the kind of lies that editors would have vetoed on old media are more widely spread than the truth, and old media has followed.

Can confirm. I was just past my 53rd birthday.

And then going from knowing the biology of sex determination being a bit fuzzy (bimodal distribution, shared traits, no one single definition etc) to *living* with the fallout from it and forced to be conscious of it every day IS A COMPLETE HEADFUCK.

My downstairs neighbour has an incredibly calm (especially for only about fifteen months) and almost completely silent husky. I suspect he's unique, though. And quite possibly an alien in disguise.

Noticed how you're now shitting yourself inside out routinely yet?

Does... does he want somebody to invent bridges?

Only in the introduction of Tim Minchin's _Prejudice_.

Perhaps I'm God, because I know exactly how many times (zero. It's zero.)

I think most Banks admirers would call this their favourite Culture novel, but not the best (though opinions vary widely on which the best is). I'm no different. Such an absolute joy.

If he actually thinks they're his children, he needs a great deal of help.
If, as seems likely, he's just expressing his love for them in a way you don't personally enjoy, then his "level of delusion" is rather less than yours seems to be.

Eating LeBron James would probably improve my current world ranking as a basketball player by one place, to be fair. (The "probably" is mostly down to chronic indigestion, he's quite large.)

If there's more than one, I'd be mildly surprised if that narrowed it down.

The fact that you're legitimising incredibly overt racism by even suggesting that her remarks weren't disgraceful is disappointing, even by your standards.

Added to the ever-growing list...

I see pieces like this a lot, often w/ a spin of lamenting cultural degeneration, but reading is a LABOR issue, it’s declined because so many people are working overtime or two jobs & employers expect after hours work. France has Earth’s highest reading rate b/c long lunch breaks & labor protections

Believe me, when we get that, we are truly happy. It means more than I can say.

At this point, I think the answer is "yes". I've regretfully given up 'phone and 'plane as being needlessly antediluvian even by my standards.

That strikes me as a clear-sighted and balanced piece.

The one things that pains me in the Wimsey books is that, in an early book, our normally-impeccably-dressed hero is matching his silk socks to his tie. I don't know if this was a Sayers invention or a thing for young blades of the 1920s, though.

They still haven't quite figured out that "we can't make money unless the law doesn't apply to us" means that you don't have an actual business model.

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet | Samanth Subramanian A colossal volcanic eruption in January 2022 ripped apart the underwater cables that connect Tonga to the world – and exposed the fragility of 21st-century life

“When I first learned about Tonga’s internet outage, I thought its citizens must have been hurled back to the 1990s. But in fact ...Tonga was plunged into the kind of isolation it hadn’t seen in more than a century.”

www.theguardian.com/news/2025/se...

I don't care whether they're workable or not. They're _nasty_ and _wrong_. That's the problem here.

Please turn this excellent joke into the actual essay because I for one would read it with glad cries

Not only are we not "locked in", I think a significant portion of us would find it very difficult to vote for Labour again this side of extensive and apologetic reform complete with a largely new slate of MP candidates. If they'd set out to appall, they could hardly have done better (worse...).

I'm guessing it takes a fortnight to run sufficient focus groups for them to decide it's not a vote-loser.

Is it morally the wrong thing to do? Yes.
Is it bad for the country and the economy? Also yes.
Will it harm UK students? Also yes.
Is it also a bad move politically that will disproportionately harm Labour's own constituencies? Also yes.

There is absolutely no reason to do this. Pure destruction.