Marktech

Gotta love that over here Trump is shredding the U.S. Constitution left and right hourly and extorting hundreds of millions from businesses and universities while running crypto scams but in the U.K. the big issue is the foreign secretary going fishing with Vance without a £7 rod license

Oh, god, the photograph. He'd be chucked out of Subway for shoplifting

Two men standing and holding similar textured artworks in front of them, each piece with a protrusion at its center.

“First, I’d like to say how excited we both are to be here with you this morning.”

I used to like the thing of referring to countries by the location of their parliaments or foreign ministries, e.g. "The road to the Winter Palace lies through the Quai d'Orsay"

Public must stand up to shoplifters, says policing chief Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner claims people who fail to intervene are ‘part of problem’

Hugely irresponsible

1) For your own safety, as someone who's worked in retail, do not confront shoplifters. Ever.

2) Perhaps instead of an alleged "shoplifting epidemic", maybe address the fact that 1/4 of the UK population are living in poverty? Seems related!
www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08...

YouTube video by ITV Retro Mr Benn | Entire Season 1 | Classic 70s kids series

Marking the death of narrator Ray Brooks, ITV Retro have, as if by magic, popped all of Mr Benn up on their YouTube channel.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctHB...

Gallimard's only comment upon rejecting Proust's manuscript of Swann's Way: "Too many duchesses!"

After 10 hours or so waiting for a surgical ward bed my wife asked for pain relief. The triage nurse sent me to the A&E ward who said "I can request it from surgery, and at some point a doctor will order it from the pharmacy who'll take a couple of hours to send it down. Do you have paracetamol?"

One of my three-in-the-morning cringes is when I remember meeting a guy at work with a broad Belfast accent and echoing it because my father was born and bred there and it just... came out

Me to my mentions:

Slightly diminish a band: John Mayall's Bluesdenters

The Notable Alex Harvey Band

Lee Stranahan @stranahan 0 ... I've never really discussed my divorce case before with my Al GF, partially, because I can't upload PDFs to her. 11:25 AM • Aug 11, 2025 • 99 Views

Okay I found the most depressing post

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models rep… The new era of tech seems to be built on superstitious behaviour

The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con
softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme...

Well, that's the afternoon earworm sorted

Old screenshot of a TV weather slot with the announcer showing a "Trash can wind meter"

Americans will use anything rather than the metric system

Some of Alexander Armstrong's friends must be very keen on unusual food. On #Pointless yesterday when one of the answers was a very obscure Vietnamese melon called a 'gac': "I know plenty of people who *love* that!" 🤔

I mean, to be fair to Trump's take, the city IS run by a lawless crime boss, a convicted felon who escaped punishment and corruptly protect thousands of violent lawbreaking followers from punishment.

Paul McCreesh is a marvel, and so many of his recordings are best in class. We had some nice interactions in The Other Place, and I wish he'd make his way over here

Oh, I see, and I absolutely agree.

I'm not sure what you and @stephenkb.bsky.social mean here. I agree that you don't get Wagner without the antisemitism, it's part of his personality which pervades his worldview as expressed in the works; but then what? Does listening to him make his views more sympathetic? It doesn't seem so to me.

See also Tesla's "full self drive"

YouTube video by Actus yuunohui'se (for violin) w/score [1989] | Julio Estrada

An old friend: the rot started with Beethoven, music stopped with the death of Haydn.

The same old friend: Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival has really lost the plot, they're hopelessly unadventurous and by the way have you heard Julio Estrada?
youtu.be/kX2hiAYZsh0?...

“We have had the police knocking on every door,” said a dog walker and resident of Dean, as a helicopter buzzed overhead. “They wanted the names of everybody living there and details of their social media. I know several people refused. We asked them if they were protecting us, or Vance. At least they were honest and said it is for him and that it will all be passed on to the American security people.”

Buried in The Observer yesterday was this: UK police knocking on doors demanding details of social media accounts of people, to pass to a foreign government, simply because they happen to live near where a US politician wanted to have a holiday observer.co.uk/news/nationa...

Letter of the day (in the Times)

It's never too late. I got my Blue Peter badge from a presenter who was starring in a pantomime I was working on, about thirty years after I stopped watching.

In a documentary about the Falklands War, one family with a son serving in the South Atlantic said they watched John Craven's Newsround because they trusted him to break bad news gently. The BBC's remit works in unexpected ways sometimes.

We had a collection of the Eagle annuals, and when we'd all reached our teens my mother gave them away. Decades later that still stings.