James

I feel it's time to give the fans what they *really* want: a LotR musical about Tom Bombadil.

#MedievalSky #EarlyModern

If you're working on any aspect of the life-cycle (eg birth, marriage, baptism, leaving home, death, childbearing, etc) and want to present at the Life Cycles Seminar at IHR I'd be keen to hear from you! Echo chambers are never good, so it's always worth casting the net.

A man with a spectacular 1970s mullet, wearing big wellies and a v-neck jumper over a T-shirt, looks at camera as he stands on a boat which is itself standing on the muddy bottom of an empty canal. He is holding up an enormous wooden plug on a long chunky chain

Today is the 47th anniversary of this clearly unimprovable photo, from a story so absurd that it shouldn’t be true, but is: the day a team of workers from British Waterways pulled the plug out of the Chesterfield Canal, and all the water emptied out

Record shop’s silent disco blocked due to risk of noise complaints Plan opposed by Metropolitan Police after confusion around previous amplified events

Record shop’s silent disco blocked due to risk of noise complaints.
www.hackneycitizen.co.uk/2025/07/21/s...

Now there’s a recipe for a wild Friday night 🤭

I've not (deliberately) grown any tomatoes this year and am definitely regretting it! I had some lovely ones last year and made some delicious chutney with the unripe green ones at the end of the season. Definitely going to grow some next year!

I am very protective of them. Any slugs or snails seen within our postcode get sent to the moon

A pint of lager on a garden table, with the garden behind.

A pumpkin plant. Behind it a small orange pumpkin is growing.

A tiny tomato seedling in a pot, surrounded by some garden canes. I doubt it'll come to much because it's very late to have germinated, but nothing ventured nothing gained!

Enjoying a refreshing homemade lager after a busy evening in the garden.

Mowed the lawn for the first time since May, tidied up my pumpkins, and even discovered a little self-seeded tomato plant!

I suspect they’re better at covering their tracks and so no-one’s realised they need to be made to pay yet…

tvos app text: Are you sure you want to exit HISTORY? Ok Cancel

yes i am sure

This is absolutely the book that radicalised Napoleon and Old Major

The thing that makes this particularly funny / sad is that actual dictators would settle for nothing less than actual gold and the finest quality (or gratuitous photoshop). Like all things with him, it's all imitation.

To be fair, 100% of the time that works...until the routine is broken for 1 day and then it's like it never existed

Of course, AI doesn’t actually exist. Genuine Artificial Intelligence has not been achieved. Literally nothing currently labelled as AI is actually AI.

That’s not to say there’s not some very clever tech out there, but AI is just a label to make you look cooler than you really are.

In the 2020s, data processing and machine learning / recognition tech which has been in use for 20+ years is suddenly called AI…

Text-to-speech is not AI.
Predictive text is not AI.
Ctrl+F in a PDF is not AI.
Realtime data scanning is not AI.

It’s just very clever programming with excellent PR.

Another example of why AI is a bubble:

In the 1990s, companies which had existed for decades and had nothing to do with websites added [dot com] to the end of their name, and saw their value skyrocket.

This reminds me of something I saw the other day about teenagers - they simultaneously need to put their phones down and go outside, and also stop hanging around in groups in parks because their mere existence is intimidating. 🙃

Good article, laying out the facts clearly. Note:

“While the mother behind the original complaint assumed the M&S employee was trans, there is no evidence as yet that this is even the case. [The mother only claimed] the staff member was “obviously” trans because she was “at least 6ft 2in tall”.”

It’s like those meme accounts showing an image of a bleak looking block of flats with a caption like “This is what communism looks like” but it’s actually poor person housing in the USA

Tiramisu is the one which is the most dangerous to me

The silhouette of a man with a photography tripod. The tripod’s left leg duplicates so that it emerges beside both his left and right leg (logically, following the line down from the top, it should only emerge behind his right foot)

In the foreground: gravestones, which makes sense as just out of view in this screenshot is a church. In the background: weird pointy things. They sort of look like buildings, but also a bit like a continuation of the gravestones.

A satellite-esque image of the Gulf of Mexico, but with an odd green smudge instead of Cuba. It’s sort of right if you squint, but the Bahamas are non-existent, Florida is short and stubby, and everything seems crammed uncomfortably together.

Why does this image look AI generated..? 🤨

So this allotment story is absolutely blowing up everywhere and the government will prob U-turn soon due to UNEXPECTED VIRALITY IN THE BAGGING AREA.

But because I'm a sad git I spent 5mins chasing the aggregated Nottinghamshire Live story back through the Telegraph and the Express and found....

I once made this mistake with a grain scoop I bought online for homebrewing.

I expected something roughly cup-sized.

I recieved something big enough to wear as a hat.

A Fish Falls From the Sky and Sparks a Brush Fire in British Columbia

A fish falls from the sky and sparks a brush fire in British Columbia.
www.nytimes.com/2025/08/02/w...

Plus, attitudes in C16th London were very different to mid-C17th East Anglia, or late-C17th New England. It's always very tempting and very dangerous to generalise!

Oh absolutely - the challenge with witchcraft is the multiple layers it works on simultaneously. In terms of sentencing, English law treated it as a civil crime vs continental religious crime. But that's not to say those making & investigating the accusations didn't see it otherwise!

So on the continent you get burnings due to heresy, whilst in England you get hangings due to theft / murder / GBH etc.

In England it was really seen as a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. So the continent (& Sc) saw it as evidence of heresy due to pacts with the devil, and punished accordingly, whilst English courts were more concerned that someone had been murdered/robbed/otherwise harmed.

Did People Once Drink Beer Every Day? | Larsblog Personal blog of Lars Marius Garshol.

Did people ever drink beer against thirst every day? Yes, they bloody well did. Never let anyone tell you anything else.

Did they do it because they thought water wasn't safe? Well, that's more complicated.

Full story here www.garshol.priv.no/blog/433.html