Sabine

Oh how very kind of them. Still telling my kid, who’s lived in the UK since he was 4 months old, to apply for British citizenship as a matter of priority.

Amazing, thanks!

Aha, hadn’t tried Brother yet, thank you! I do hate printers.😩

@katebevan.com Hi Kate, wondering if you or any of your techy friends have any tips re home printers that will work with an ASUS laptop running Windows 11 on Snapdragon? Having problems finding ARM compatible machines (for my dad). Thank you!

‘Have you heard of Zohran Mamdani?, asks my dad.
‘Of course!’
‘I knew his dad, met him a few times in Dar es Salaam’, he says, and pulls this book off a shelf.

Summary of French PM Lecornu’s post-resignation address just now: ‘I can’t work with these clowns’.

A most excellent pedagogical opportunity for the captive audience you were!😅

Ja, und dann wird Grok ins Umerziehungslager geschickt…

Reading Atwood’s The Testaments. Check in on Bluesky and see someone’s posted a State Dpt tweet about moral virtue and steadfast faith in God being necessary preconditions of freedom. The book has seeped into real life.

Yes, drives home the madness of most of the world / media seemingly giving Trump a free pass for his insane posts - I like it too.

Ooh, thank you for alerting me to this!

Christ! And I can still hear Terry Gross‘s beautiful voice from my time in the US 20 years ago saying, ‚This is Fresh Air‘, not All Things Considered!

A black and white drawing of a man balancing acrobatically on a stool on one hand while a bird perches on each one of his feet, a duck perches on his outstretched hand, and another stands by the stool.

Chanced upon an exhibition of Quentin Blake drawings at the weekend. This one is ‘Balancing with the Birds’.

Omg.😳 Reinforces my belief that we are living in an Armando Iannucci script.

It’s like we‘re living in an Armando Iannucci script.

Zohran Mamdani saw a cat do a big stretch without saying “big stretch” on at least four occasions: source

Il est cinq heures, Paris s’éveille

Heard on Radio 4: ‘A man has been jailed for three years for robbing a post office in Bradford, armed with a banana.’😳🧐

Brutal!😳😄

G7 leaders are paralysed by their fear of upsetting Donald Trump | Rafael Behr Tyranny is contagious – and western governments’ reluctance to name the threat is helping it spread, says Guardian columnist Rafael Behr

Halfway through this, on how Western leaders need to call out Trump’s authoritarianism, there was an ad with a clip of a nice lady making berry pavlova. I admit to clicking on it, as a brief escape from a terrifying reality. Excellent as ever by @rafaelbehr.bsky.social.

With the EU (rather than UK)?

Probably thinking they’d come up with a clever pun, the Austrian rail company chooses ‘Railaxed’ as the name of their magazine…🧐 Always run it past a native speaker! 🚅🪓

How do I find the entrance to your flat? Got a little picture of a fox outside- you’ll know it when you see it. #foxoftheday

‘L’État, c’est moi.’

Still haunted by this snippet from ABC News during the recent floods in Queensland. 😳🕷️🕷️🕷️😱 (The apostrophe mistake is pretty unpleasant too.)

You guys are really through the looking-glass over there; so frightening. They’re crass, cruel, they don’t care, and they’re running the place, unimpeded.

Oh Emmanuelle, such horror! I hope you all stay safe. So many of us want this barbarity to end; it is just so awful.

It’s been only four months. Four months! And we’re supposed to put up with four years of this? At this rate, that’s more than enough time to make the US completely unrecognisable. Just terrifying.

Cartoon script: comic strip for Prospect magazine, by Stephen Collins: [Scene is a suburban house. We hear a conversation coming from inside it, with the voice of the MAN who owns the house] 1 MAN: …You only installed it two years ago! 2 [Interior scene now, we can see the MAN is talking to the GLAZIER who has come to inspect a very oddly-placed window in the man’s wall] GLAZIER: Yeah I can see there’s been a bit of movement in the casing… 3 MAN: A bit of *movement in the casing*? 4 MAN: It used to be in the bloody middle! [The window, we see, is strangely positioned right next to the wall] 5 GLAZIER: Well, you went for the budget line mate. MAN: What? 6 MAN: Your budget windows *move across the wall*? GLAZIER: If you get comfortable with fascism, yeah. MAN: *What*? 7 GLAZIER: Look mate, we told you up front: Premium triple-glazed, Standard UPVC, and our budget line: ‘Overton’. 8 GLAZIER: Which can move to the left or right depending on the political acceptability of fringe views at any given time. 9 MAN: And what’ll it cost to put it back? GLAZIER: Pffff 10 GLAZIER: Maybe a third World War?

for @prospectmagazine.co.uk

Am no fan of this grass-coloured carpet the neighbours have put out, but the local fox seems to like it, so who am I to quibble? #foxoftheday