Onboard Navvy

If you want to get a true state of british journalism, imagine hepatologists being shocked to discover that livers secrete bile.

In a better world that hi viz will be court-mandated, to let us know from a distance where the greasy banter is.

Emily's laptop cover has snoopy all over it, the heartless cow.

And how fucking DARE you bring Snoopy into this, you MONSTER.

"Sorry Em, I'm afraid the network has refused to option another season of Shit Columbo"

Steve may have been stealing a little valor there, the media not being backwards in coming forwards with flooding their own zone with shit.

more here bsky.app/profile/oliv...

Don't even get me started on Dawn.

That's what I recollected, however vaguely. It turned up in Hype and Glory. I wasn't misremembering the greasiness though.

This is basically at the level of Paula Vennels explaining to sub postmasters that she was truly sorry that mistakes were made, but there was every indication that the horizon it system was robust.

I remember William Goldman heavily implying (in one of his books that isn't the good one) that the original ending of American Beauty was NOT 'Our everyman exercises self-discipline'. Come to think of it, it was more eh-chaps-nudge-in-the-ribs than implication, as such.

Well I know that NOW

Think a powder extinguisher is better for a log fire. That sort of smothering fluid I'm picturing is perfect for a rogue chip pan, mind.

Ian Dunt will recognise his own.

Interacting with centrists on Bluesky is the closest you’ll ever feel to that bit during the cathar heresy where the Vatican dispatched a squad of their top debaters to the public squares of the heretical towns only to get publicly humiliated by local cathars on every defense they made of the system

Happy to extend a hand across the water. As it were.

Even for someone as sexually vanilla as me, the image has me sucking a thoughtful tooth.

"Why, Herr Liebgegengewichtsblide, you look soaked from the rain... please, come over here and warm up."

An illustration to the Will Self story 'Between the Conceits' from 'Grey Area' - 8 white stylized figures are defined negatively against a background of dark figures.

The first paragraphs of Between the Conceits: There are only 8 people in London and I fortunately I am one of them. Of course, when I make that statement I don't mean to be taken literally - heaven forbid! And what would be worse still, I shouldn't want you to think that I'm a snob of any kind. To discriminate between people on the basis of birth is inimical to me. I simply couldn't engage in that sort of conceit. I can declare with some authority that there simply isn't a snobbish bone in my entire body. If there was I would feel confident that the good egalitarian tissue encasing it would tense up, like the lining of a chomping mouth, and spit the slimy thing out without more ado. There you have it in a nutshell: I should sooner be filleted than have it thought by you that I wish to elevate myself in some spurious unmerited fashion. But all of this being noted, the fact does remain that there are only 8 people in London.

The final paragraphs of Between the Conceits: I'm sorry? Yes, yes, that's right, that's what I was leading up to. When it gets too claustrophobic at home, when Mother's rasping snore gets to me, and the old-woman smell of flannel, medicaments and cabbage is making me retch, I come here and engage someone like yourself in conversation. Someone bright, enquiring and interested. And then I do tell them - tell them everything. What's that? Yes, of course, you are perceptive; naturally I can do this with impunity, because you'll never remember anything I've told you. It will depart from your tiny mind when we depart. For as I've told you from the outset, there really are only 8 people in London. And whereas I am fortunately one of them - you are emphatically not.

Brings this to mind.

Will Hutton • @williamnhutton•9h The Mandelson affair ranks as the greatest political scandal of the last sixty years. Betrayal of party, principle, government and country. McSweeney's emails and mobile (they spoke almost daily and who the cabinet must insist resigns) should be examined by the police. New lows.

Leads? Yeah, sure. I'll just check with the boys down at the crime lab. They've got four more detectives working on the case. They got us working in shifts!

A Mary Midgley quotation from the essay Philosophical Plumbing (1992): People think of philosophy as a special and rather grand subject cut off from others, something you could put on the mantelpiece. I think it is much more like plumbing-the sort of thinking that people do even in the most prudent, practical areas always has a whole system of thought under the surface which we are not aware of. Then suddenly we become aware of some bad smells, and we have to take up the floorboards and look at the concepts of even the most ordinary piece of thinking. The great philosophers of the past didn't spend their time looking at entities in the sky. They noticed how badly things were going wrong, and made suggestions about how they could be dealt with.

As far as I'm concerned, EVERY day is Mary Midgley day.

Let's not say that there were no signs.

The first paragraphs of the magnificent Gene-Juggling (1979) by the magnificent Mary Midgley: Genes cannot be selfish or unselfish, any more than atoms can be jealous, elephants abstract or biscuits teleological. This should not need mentioning, but Richard Dawkins's book The Selfish Gene has succeeded in confusing a number of people about it, including Mr J. L. Mackie.1 What Mackie welcomes in Dawkins is a new, biological-looking kind of support for philosophic egoism. If this support came from Dawkins's producing important new facts, or good new interpretations of old facts, about animal life, this could be very interesting. Dawkins, however, simply has a weak- ness for the old game of Brocken-spectre moralizing—the one where the player strikes attitudes on a peak at sunrise, gazes awe-struck at his gigantic shadow on the clouds, and reports his observations as cosmic truths

Mary Midgley, looking through her lorgnette over her cloud in heaven mutters half to herself: "I fucking told you so"

'Prepared cups of coffee'. Who the fuck was she stalking, John Cage?

I Love that! Useful, too. Thank you.

Obviously they've each found their ideal partner in symbiosis (I know it's not the right word, but can't think of one that means two parasites feeding off each other).

Something that long in the service of rebuttal would at least be evidence of application. This is just a man with a substack padding out the count with phrases like "The background music played sombre and tragic strings" and "For the most part the authors of my beloved tomes tended to be long dead."

'Rant and innuendo' sound intriguing: this is just waffle. "What would happen to society if all the advocates for the marginalised were 'cancelled' I wondered?" gives you the flavour in a sentence. And you can read it without feeling too queasy, unlike a lot of other sentences there.

But my god you're right about that article: two pounds of shite in a ten pound bag.

Reminds me when Nature 'published an article' about how wikipedia was better than Britannica (a couple of decades ago, a headline about wiki had some weight). Everyone was agog, decline of west. civ. etc, and then saw it was from their 'news' section. Always had one eye on the attention harvesting.

'Beyond Atlantis' has definitely elbowed itself into the 'Every time I'm rewatching this, I know it won't be the last time' club. Mordrid not far off.