Category: links
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Zero people share 4 or 3 of my favourite films.
A surprising number share 2 of them.
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Alone - The Cure
Alone
On Thursday 26th September 2024 The Cure released the single Alone 🎵
Birds fall from the sky, broken voices call us home and youthful dreams are dashed against the transience of life in the band’s first new song in 16 years
(from 🔗 The Guardian)
The lyrics of the song “seem to be based on Dregs, an 1899 work by the Decadent poet Ernest Dowson”.
Alone on Apple Music
Official video on YouTubeThe Cure - Alone (Lyrics)
This is the end
Of every song that we sing
The fire burned out to ash
And the stars
Grown dim with tearsCold and afraid
The ghosts of all that we’ve been
We toast with bitter dregs
To our emptinessAnd the birds
Falling out of our skies
And the words
Falling out of our minds
And here is to love
To all the love
Falling out of our livesHopes and dreams are gone
The end of every songAnd it all stops
We were always sure
That we would never change
And it all stops
We were always sure
That we would stay the same
But it all stops
And we close our eyes
To sleep To dream
A boy and girl
Who dream the world is nothing
But a dream…Where did it go?
Where did it go?
Broken voiced lament
To call us homeThis is the end
Of every song we sing
AloneErnest Dowson - Dregs
The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof,
(This is the end of every song man sings!)
The golden wine is drunk, the dregs remain,
Bitter as wormwood and as salt as pain;
And health and hope have gone the way of love
Into the drear oblivion of lost things.
Ghosts go along with us until the end;
This was a mistress, this, perhaps, a friend.
With pale, indifferent eyes, we sit and wait
For the dropt curtain and the closing gate:
This is the end of all the songs man sings.📖 more
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🔗 Ajax beat Panathinaikos after 34-penalty shootout ⚽
Ajax beat Panathinaikos 13-12 on penalties after an epic shootout featuring 34 spot-kicks to reach the Europa League qualifying play-off round.
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My brother has made the news! 👏🔗:
‘Once in a lifetime’ comet spotted from Derbyshire garage roof - BBC News
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Now listening: Any Woman’s Blues - Bessie Smith
Playlist:
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🔗 Some thoughts on International Women’s Day
Speaking truth to the power of the patriarchy is unimaginably difficult, even as I live a life of relative privilege. In the past, I’ve experienced deep levels of discomfort at writing one small truth because there’s the worry that I’ll be branded a troublemaker, a man hater, a difficult woman to work with. All of which heightens my respect for those women across global history who’ve had to fight like lions for the barest modicum of political and/or cultural change.
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Implement a genuine progress index in place of GDP
At the moment, every attempt to create a greener and fairer country is hampered by the way we measure progress. So my third big policy is to dethrone our use of GDP as a general indicator of how well we are doing, and replace it with more appropriate measures.
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Sunak leads a government that has introduced the most draconian anti-protest laws in our democratic history. These laws are deployed exclusively against official enemies: environmental campaigners, republicans, feminists, Muslims. If you belong to one of these groups and you block a road, you might go to prison. If you are a farmer and you block a road, the prime minister might join you.
The protest the prime minister attended displayed the banners of No Farmers, No Food, a group convened by a notorious conspiracy theorist, James Melville.
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TIL
🔗 Why mead is made for Valentine’s Day
mead, a drink that newlyweds used to be given for a month after their nuptials to promote fertility (hence the term “honeymoon”)
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Linkblog 🔗: John Cage: Organ playing 639-year-long piece changes chord 🎵
The longest - and slowest - music composition in existence had a big day on Monday - it changed chord for the first time in two years.
Crowds gathered at a church in Germany to witness the rare moment, which is part of an artistic feat by avant-garde composer, John Cage.
The experimental piece, entitled As Slow as Possible, began in 2001. Being played on a specially-built organ, it is not set to finish playing until the year 2640. -
The most influential television comedy of the 21st century is coming to an end. Tonight, the first episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s 12th and final season will air, kicking off a 10-week run that will apparently wrap up Larry David’s revolutionary improvised sitcom with a definitive conclusion.
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From ESPN CricInfo 🔗🏏
Neither Rehan nor Bashir was born when Anderson made his Test debut at Lord's in May 2003, while his own Test cap number - 613 - is a full 100 caps shy of the 713 cap that Bashir will receive before the start of play on Friday. At the age of 41, Anderson is about to enter his 22nd year as an international cricketer, but Stokes had no qualms about bringing him back into the fray.
HT @CricketCaptain
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Linkblog 🔗: Colin Ward: Everyday Anarchy - a Community crowdfunding project in Norwich by Patrick Bernard
An audio documentary to celebrate the life and work of the British anarchist Colin Ward and to mark the centenary of his birth in 2024.
This is a unique opportunity to tell the story of a rich and overlooked tradition in British thought – and a radical alternative to mainstream politics – which found its greatest advocate in the figure of Colin Ward.
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My Year in Chess ♟️🔗
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Linkblog 🔗: X isn’t an airport, but we’re announcing our departure - Freedom News
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Linkblog 🔗: Seaweed was common food in Europe for thousands of years, researchers find
Study discovers telltale signs on human teeth from Spain to Lithuania, spanning period from 6400 BC to 12th century AD
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Linkblog 🔗: James Webb telescope makes ‘JuMBO’ discovery of planet-like objects in Orion
Some fascinating images and discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope
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the BBC’s most downloaded weekly podcast globally. I’m proud of that.
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🔗📸 Best of the iPhone photography awards 2023 – in pictures
Some interesting photographs, almost all taken with various iPhone Pro models.
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Linkblog 🔗: Don’t Network: The Avant-Garde after Networks [2018]
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Linkblog 🔗: At last, Hyperion recordings are streamable. We pick some of the standouts 🎵
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Linkblog 🔗: The BBC on Mastodon: experimenting with distributed and decentralised social media
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Linkblog 🔗: David Harewood on Blackface - a shocking, deeply moving piece of television
A little discomfort is a price worth paying to see Harewood, Lester, Linton and Olusoga speak truth to power on the same channel that was once broadcasting minstrels into their living rooms.
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The Ashes 2023: After victory by England Women in the ODI yesterday, inflicting Australia’s first ODI series defeat in a decade and drawing their Ashes series, today is the start of the Men’s 4th Ashes Test at Old Trafford
[England] are once again ordering a drink in the last chance saloon, hoping not to have to turn water into wine
🏏
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Linkblog 🔗: Earth review – Chris Packham steps confidently into David Attenborough’s shoes
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Linkblog 🔗: Here comes the next phase of Brexit – and it will be bad for our diet, health and wealth
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🔗 Hard act to swallow: gull caught on film eating squirrel whole
It is a jaw-dropping scene worthy of a Hitchcock film
Wow!
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🔗 ‘Am I still any good? Have I still got it?’: PJ Harvey on doubt, desire and deepest, darkest Dorset
Harvey didn’t intend to make a new album: it crept up on her …
Looking forward to the release of this album next week 🎵
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🔗 ‘A nuclear reactor of music’: the story of Simple Minds’ classic album Empires and Dance 🎵
Sustaining an overpowering and unrelenting mood, music, voice and words perfectly in lockstep, Empires and Dance is a Mitteleuropean psychodrama.
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🔗 Pompeii fresco depicts what might be the precursor of pizza
Archaeologists have discovered a fresco in the ancient Roman city of Pompeii that may depict the ancestor of the Italian pizza.
More details from The History Blog: Still life with pizza found at Pompeii
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Linkblog 🔗: Pagan Fires Burning: The New Wave of Dark Folk from the UK and Ireland 🎵
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🔗 Multicultural Man: On technology
As regular readers of this column know, I don’t think there is an anthropic solution to anthropogenic climate change
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Linkblog 🔗: Upcoming anarchist books in 2023
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🔗 Tim Dowling: is this a hangover – or just what being 60 feels like?
Is this what it’s like from now on?
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🔗 Extreme websites peddle conspiracies, but what about the mainstream outlets that do it too?
Taking on misinformation in a real way would require scrutinising our biggest media institutions – but it would mean picking a fight with sharks, rather than minnows, even if it would take us far closer to the actual truth.
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Linkblog 🔗: Kavus Torabi and Richard Wileman – Heaven’s Sun 🎵
From the shimmering guitars that introduce Particles of Light, you’re immediately on notice that there is something distinctly ‘other’ about this collaboration between the Prince of Gong, Kavus Torabi, and Karda Estra’s uncanny composer and solo artist, Richard Wileman.
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Old review – M Night Shyamalan’s fast-ageing beach horror is top notch hokum 🎥 🔗
Old is a bit like Alex Garland’s The Beach, but with a dab of Twilight Zone creepiness and an ensemble cast that Agatha Christie might have imagined. Most of all, I found myself thinking that this could have come from the original series of Star Trek – and that at any moment, William Shatner might beam down among the panicky, deteriorating beach-dwellers, phaser at the ready. Sadly for them, however, these existentially stricken vacationers are on their own.
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Obligatory anti-monarchy rant - Freedom News 🔗
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Linkblog 🔗: Mark Stewart, Pop Group frontman and revered countercultural musician, dies aged 62 🎵
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Linkblog 🔗: Jason deCaires Taylor
Museums are places of conservation, education, and about protecting something sacred. We need to assign those same values to our oceans.
Dived (😊) further into this after seeing the BBC video How Grenada’s Underwater Sculpture Park was created
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Dry Cleaning at Tramshed Cardiff last night supported by THUS LOVE and Dehd 🎵
THUS LOVE
Dehd
Dry Cleaning
🔗 Dry Cleaning review – left-field art rockers are a deadpan delight - from a gig a couple of days ago
The post-punk band led with impassive cool by hypnotic frontwoman Florence Shaw are a genuinely radical band
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Felt this earthquake last night. Epicentre was less than 20 miles from us. My first thought was that a nearby tree had fallen and hit the house - even went outside to check 🙁
🔗 Earthquake: Cardiff, Brynmawr and valleys feel tremors
The British Geological Survey (BGS) said the 3.7 magnitude quake happened at 23:59 GMT on Friday. The epicentre was just north of Brynmawr, Blaenau Gwent, and west of Crickhowell, Powys.
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Linkblog 🔗: Athens museum unveils design for major renovation
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🔗 Gravestone-encircled ‘Hardy Tree’ falls in London
Couple of my photos from January 2020 📸
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Linkblog 🔗: Terry Hall: lead singer of the Specials dies aged 63
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Linkblog 🔗: The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis review – a classic laid bare
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Linkblog 🔗: Exarcheia, the subway station, and public space
What is crucial to understand is that this is all a question of politics: of who gets to shape our city – a handful of bureaucrats and capitalist investors, or the vast majority of a district’s inhabitants
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Linkblog 🔗: The country’s going to the dogs, but at least the police have cleared the M25
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I get a box of vegetables delivered weekly from Riverford Organic Farmers. Included with each box is a printed newsletter from the founder Guy Singh-Watson. I found this week’s, about plastic food packaging, very informative:
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Linkblog 🔗: Oldest known written sentence discovered – on a head-lice comb
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Linkblog 🔗: Low’s Mimi Parker was a voice of hope and healing in indie rock 🎵
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Linkblog 🔗: What is Mastodon, and will it replace Twitter? - New Statesman
Mastodon is not “Twitter but good”
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Linkblog 🔗: Philologist Irene Vallejo: ‘Alexander the Great’s library was the first step towards the internet’
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Linkblog 🔗: Feeding Of The Five Thousand 29-10-2022 🎵
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Linkblog 🔗: TS Eliot’s Waste Land was a barren place. But at least a spirit of optimism still prevailed | Kenan Malik
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Linkblog 🔗: Dry Cleaning: ‘We bond over food a lot. It’s a big part of the band’
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Linkblog 🔗: Arctic Monkeys: The Car review | The Guardian 🎵
aching songs of soured dreams […] It’s impossible not to feel immersed in such imagery. The Car is an enormously tactile record, full of strange textures …
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Linkblog 🔗: Dry Cleaning: Stumpwork review | The Guardian 🎵
deadpan chat, funk and hypnotic soundscapes […] Florence Shaw’s low-key narration framed by powerful sounds
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Linkblog 🔗: The Umlauts - Another Fact - review at The Quietus 🎵
the multilingual group unleash a ceremonial and an exhilarating doom
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Linkblog 🔗: Why DH Lawrence still gets under our skin
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Linkblog 🔗: The Rise of the Pawns - Existential Comics
I’m telling you man, they are just using us as pawns in some kind of game.
♟️
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Linkblog 🔗: The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem by Matthew Hollis – genesis of a masterpiece
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Linkblog 🔗: The vision of Ralph Vaughan Williams
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Linkblog 🔗: Hilary Mantel knew how corrosive deference to monarchy can be – and why we must resist | Nesrine Malik
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Linkblog 🔗: Restoring the Old Way of Warming: Heating People, not Places - LOW-TECH MAGAZINE
via @cblgh@merveilles.town
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Linkblog 🔗: Ian McEwan’s long look back
British politics does not offer much more cause for optimism. Liz Truss becoming prime minister is “such a disaster”, he says. “She’s intellectually so vapid. I think her world-view is so tiny, so shrivelled, so ungenerous, so dry… Or maybe she’s just a highly ambitious politician who’s playing a very cynical game.” He sees an opportunity for Keir Starmer’s Labour – “I admire him in many ways” – but for McEwan, an ardent Remainer who wrote a satirical novella, The Cockroach, about Brexit, the Labour leader remains “tied to the Tories” until he “admits Brexit was a colossal error”.
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Linkblog 🔗: Jean-Luc Godard: a genius who tore up rule book without troubling to read it
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Linkblog 🔗: There’s more to spritz than Aperol
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Linkblog 🔗: Exposed by Caroline Vout review – the real Greek and Roman body
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Linkblog 🔗: Lawns: Are they worth it anymore? - The Washington Post
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Linkblog 🔗: An ode to the Great British music festival - New Statesman
From Green Man to Glastonbury, the best festivals are UK festivals
Short article including a nice appreciation of the Green Man Festival 😄
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I think my brain’s been manipulated by Stranger Things and that’s what I think all our childhoods were actually like … I’ve seen so much 80s nostalgia that I can’t remember what’s real and what isn’t
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Sam Northeast: Glamorgan batter hits 410 - third highest score in County Championship history 🏏🔗
His score is the highest in the Championship since Brian Lara’s 501 not out for Warwickshire in 1994 and the best of the 21st century
Glamorgan declared on 795-5 …
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Linkblog 🔗: Oldest house in Wales found in Cardiff
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Linkblog 🔗: Country diary: We should open our eyes to the wonder of wasps
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Never seen anything like this before: How a fake ‘IPL’ cricket league ran for Russian punters 🏏🔗
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Linkblog 🔗: Long gone, but speaking clearly to our age – Shelley, the poet of moral and political corruption
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Linkblog 🔗: Portable Magic by Emma Smith review – a love letter to reading
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Linkblog 🔗: ‘It’s dopamine’: why we love to track our watching and reading habits
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Linkblog 🔗: The love song of TS Eliot: intense letters reveal the passion behind the pen
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DBC Pierre: ‘You can be shut down from life because of one mistake’ 🔗
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Best so far 😊
I solved today’s Redactle (#20) in 14 guesses with an accuracy of 85.71%. Played at www.redactle.com
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Poem of the week: Welcome to Donetsk by Anastasia Taylor-Lind 🔗
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TS Eliot’s The Waste Land issues weather warning for our times 🔗
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Plague poems, defiant wit and penis puns: why John Donne is a poet for our times 🔗
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Cloudalists: Our New Cloud-based Ruling Class - Project Syndicate op-ed 🔗
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Mentioned on the BBC today: Ukraine: Spam website set up to reach millions of Russians - but they didn’t give the site, which is mail2ru.org 🔗
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Roman boat that sank in Mediterranean 1,700 years ago gives up its treasures 🔗
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Beat Poet Elise Cowen’s Time-Traveling Love Letters to Emily Dickinson 🔗
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Neolithic chalk drum hailed as most important prehistoric art found in 100 years 🔗
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More than 18,000 pot sherds document life in ancient Egypt 🔗
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Three ladies dancing, two couples cuddling, one piper piping in ancient feast mosaic 🔗
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Family owners put Blackwell’s bookshops up for sale 🔗
This is a shame. Blackwell’s is usually my first port of call when trying to avoid Amazon. Their online service has been extremely comprehensive and efficient for me for years.
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Update to my Micro.blog Navigation List plug-in
I have just updated my Micro.blog Navigation List plug-in to version 1.0.6
Prior to this version a link to the list page was automatically added to the site’s main navigation menu. This is no longer the case.
So, if you do want the link to appear in your site’s main menu when the plug-in has been installed see the instructions in the GitHub README.
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A visit to King’s Quoit, the Neolithic burial chamber overlooking Manorbier beach, Pembrokeshire. September 2021. More photos in this album on Flickr 📷
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Handwriting my Website with a Digital Amanuensis - Chris Aldrich 🔗
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Doors guitarist Robby Krieger: ‘The music will outlast the crazy Jim stuff’ 🔗
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Disrupt Texts’ assault on Shakespeare and other classics: Money, ignorance and social backwardness 🔗
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Just found out about and starting to populate my profile at @dave’s BingeWorthy. Struggling trying to remember everything I’ve watched though 😊📺🔗
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Rescued from obscurity: UK archaeologist who restored Sicily’s glories 🔗
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Mice and elephants - what really matters in the decarbonisation of transport 🔗
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How Ancient Rome hit the charts 🔗🎵
Composer and academic Mary Ann Tedstone Glover has brought the music of the Roman empire back to life.
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Steven Gerrard: Aston Villa name Rangers boss as new manager ⚽ 🔗
The former Liverpool captain, 41, leaves the Scottish champions having guided them to a first league title in 10 years last season. Gerrard replaces Dean Smith, who was sacked on Sunday after a run of five successive defeats.
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Atlas maps Hogwarts, Jurassic Park & made-up places 🔗
So where actually is Batman’s Gotham City? Or The Simpsons' Springfield. Do you know where Jurassic Park is? Hogwarts even? One man thinks he does.
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Dipping my toes back into Dave Winer’s world by trying out Drummer.
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I’m quite enjoying browsing through some of the Project Apollo Archive albums on Flickr. 🔗
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The Concert by Edna St Vincent Millay 🔗
Poem of the week in The Guardian
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Spirited Away 🔗 – by George Monbiot
How the counterculture fell prey to the far-right’s conspiracy theories.
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Hemingway films 🎥 🔗
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🔗 Star Trek versus Imperialist Doctrine by Yanis Varoufakis
America’s liberal imperialist doctrine has been responsible for appalling carnage in places like Vietnam, Iraq, and Central America. But America has also produced a liberal anti-imperialist doctrine that remains ensconced in a TV series that has been captivating US audiences since 1966.
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At the start of play today CricViz gave England a 97% chance of winning the 3rd Test against India. By the end of play it was down to 81%. Pujara, Kohli and Rohit Sharma all played a good and patient game. Days 4 and 5 of the match could get interesting. 🏏
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🏏 stats:
2021 England v India at Lord’s - the first time in a home test that both England openers have been out for 0. That’s in the 531 home test matches since 1880. 🤯
As a bonus, in checking this I’ve just discovered the HowSTAT! 🔗 website.
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The women redefining the sound of UK Jazz 🔗
I’m looking forward to seeing Emma-Jean Thackray at the Green Man Festival next week, been listening to her album Yellow quite a lot recently 🎵
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In defence of Extinction Rebellion 🔗
The pundits of the various leftist movements have spent thousands of words telling us how much better their red climate movement would have been (more working class!, more intersectional!, more militant!) than XR if only they’d got round to doing it.
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Distracted from distraction by distraction
I’ve just read this article in by Oliver Burkeman The Guardian:
It is an edited extract from his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It, published on 26th August 2021.
I recognise and certainly experience a lot of the symptoms of being distracted that he is pointing out.
Social media is engineered to constantly adapt to our interests. No wonder the rest of reality seems unable to compete
We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time, we give in to distraction willingly
When we succumb to distraction, we’re motivated by the desire to flee something painful about our experience of the present
What we think of as distractions aren’t the cause of our being distracted. They’re just the places we go to seek relief
The title of this post comes from Burnt Norton the first of T.S.Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration -
Aberdare morning walk (link to Strava route details) 🔗 🚶♂️
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The official #Mastodon app for iOS is now on the App Store.
First impressions pretty good!
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Lockdown reawakened my childhood love of chess. Now I can’t do anything else 🔗
The alert I get when an opponent has made their move gives me the shot of excitement I used to get from social media notifications
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Clothes just undone—not that there were many,
— Cavafy Bot (@cavafybot) July 18, 2021
for an exquisite July was blazing.
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Ancestors by Alice Roberts review – a story of movement and migration 🔗 📚
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Compulsory worship of national symbols is the sure sign of a culture in decline - Article by Nesrine Malik, The Guardian 🔗
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Should Feminists Read Baudelaire? BBC Radio 3 - Sunday Feature 🔗
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The CricViz app has improved to become a great way to follow live cricket scores - I’m currently keeping an eye on the first match of the IPL and the opening matches of the English County Championship. 🔗🏏
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Ryley Walker: ‘Going two days sober was impossible since I was a kid’ 🔗 🎵
… the first sound you hear on Course in Fable is exalting major chords, before burrowing into fiddly prog shifts in time signatures.
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Interesting and informative podcast series from the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and Keats-Shelley House. John Keats’ Bright Star 1820: read by heart with analysis is one of the highlights for me. 📚🔗
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Laundromat and on Bandcamp 🔗 — Three EPs. Blue, Green Red. Electronic and relaxed. Laundromat is Brighton based recording artist Toby Hayes. I know nothing more but am enjoying listening to the music. 🎵
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Michael Rosen blog post on Reading for Pleasure 📚 🔗
A child
A book
A read
A chat.This is the way
the mind grows.Not with a test
but a tale.He’s writing for teachers and children but I think a lot of his points are applicable to all readers.
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The Great British Art Tour: why is Keats at Guy’s hospital? 🔗
The Romantic poet John Keats died 200 years ago today at the young age of 25. He has long since been celebrated for works such as Ode to a Nightingale and To…
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John Keats: five poets on his best poems, 200 years since his death 🔗
Ode to a Nightingale (1819) My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains…
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For the Ishiguro household, 5 October 2017 was a big day. After weeks of discussion, the author’s wife, Lorna, had finally decided to change her hair colour.…
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‘It shook me to my core’: 50 years of Carole King’s Tapestry 🔗
James Taylor: The singer-songwriter genre was named around 1970, give or take, and was said to apply to me and, among others Joni Mitchell, Cat Stevens and…
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Great news - India vs England TV coverage: Channel 4 seals rights 🔗 🏏
It means the first Test in Chennai starting in the early hours of Friday morning will be the first live Test cricket on free-to-air TV in the UK since the iconic Ashes series in 2005, which was also on Channel 4.
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‘Healthy and positive’ communities: Facebook and the restriction of political content 🔗
Recently Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that he and his team are working on stopping political content from circulating within the platform in order,…
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The Dig: Will Gompertz film review 🔗
It’s late summer in England, 1939. The sight and sound of RAF planes flying overhead is an ominous reminder that war looms.
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Facebook is banning leftwing users like me - and it’s going largely unnoticed | Akin Olla 🔗
In response to the fascist riot at the US Capitol, Facebook engaged in a flurry of dangerous and misguided corporate authoritarianism. I, along with a number…
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Some falsehoods about the pandemic are so dangerous that they should be banned. By George Monbiot.
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Antiquarium of Pompeii reopens 🔗
The Antiquarium of Pompeii reopened today after an extensive refurbishment and decades of closure. You’d think a site like Pompeii which under normal global…
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There’s no need to peel ginger | Waste not 🔗
I used to peel my ginger badly, trimming off chunks of skin until I was left with a hexagonal prism and throwing a good third of the original unpeeled knob in the bin.
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Why are the Labour party turning their back on the Green Industrial Revolution? … 🔗
Labour’s ‘Green Recovery’ report actually represents a quivering withdrawal from Labour’s bold 2019 manifesto pledge to deliver a Green Industrial Revolution.
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Mary Wollstonecraft finally honoured with statue after 200 years. 🔗
It shows a silvery naked everywoman figure emerging free and defiantly from a swirling mingle of female forms and, thanks to a 10-year slog of fundraising, is the world’s only memorial sculpture to a woman known as the “mother of feminism”
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John Keats was born #OnThisDay, 31st October 1795. And on 31st October 1820 the 25 year old poet also first set foot on Italian soil after 35 days at sea and 10 in quarantine. Keats-Shelley Memorial Association podcast 🔗
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Jeremy Corbyn has been a champion of decency and an ally to all movements fighting racism, colonialism, and exploitation.
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The Weaponisation of Labour Antisemitism 🔗 — David Graeber
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Without Trace - George Monbiot 🔗
If you are not incandescent with rage, you haven’t grasped the scale of what has been done to us.
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The State of It – George Monbiot 🔗
The Conservative promise to shrink the state was always a con. But it has seldom been as big a lie as it is today. Johnson grabs powers back from Parliament with both fists …
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Earliest frescoes in Venice found during mosaic restoration 🔗
They also offer a rare glimpse into the artistic development of the lagoon before it was completely dominated by Venice.
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What has been made into a commodity cannot easily be brought back to being a luxury. That’s the luxury trap. And it’s not the first time we’ve fallen for it.
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From standup to stanzas: Frank Skinner’s terrific guide to poetry 🔗
Now embarking on its second series, the podcast is a terrific listen: bursting with enthusiasm for its chosen poems and constantly amusing about Skinner’s relationship with them.
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How the Indian Premier League clean bowled English T20 cricket 🔗🏏
Two hundred million people watched the IPL season opener in Abu Dhabi … more than the Super Bowl audience and not too far off the Champions League final.
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Why Radiohead are the Blackest white band of our times 🔗
Radiohead released Kid A 20 years ago today. It pointed a new direction for rock music – and mirrored radical Black art by imagining new spaces to live in amid a hostile world
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Baking won’t get me through a Covid winter but a bossy, breathless Melvyn Bragg just might 🔗
In Our Time, I often think, is like going to an amazing free university at the top of Enid Blyton’s Magic Faraway Tree
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France divided over calls for Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine to be reburied in Panthéon 🔗
The Guardian -
Clive James: ‘The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life’ 🔗 — Excerpt: What makes great poetry? An exclusive extract from the late critic’s final book The Fire of Joy celebrates the poems he loved most. 📚
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‘He returned to what he really was’: Clive James’s daughter on his poetic farewell 🔗 — Excerpt: Ten months before his death last year at the age of 80, Clive James underwent an eight-hour operation to remove a tumour on his face. Already very frail – he had been suffering from leukaemia for a decade – afterwards it took him almost a week to emerge fully into consciousness.
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Every time I read Meera Sodha’s column in The Guardian I find things I must cook. My latest quick reminder list:
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A Pizza Express Neptune Pizza 🔗 — Excerpt: I’m sure Pizza Express won’t mind my singing their praises. I watch my cheese intake, so despite my liking a nice chunk of Cheshire, I very rarely have any. I also like a pizza but again don’t have too many.
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David Graeber, anthropologist and author of Bullshit Jobs, dies aged 59 🔗 — Excerpt: David Graeber, anthropologist and anarchist author of bestselling books on bureaucracy and economics including Bullshit Jobs: A Theory and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, has died aged 59.
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Why Can’t My Camera Capture the Wildfire Sky? 🔗 — Your Phone Wasn’t Built for the Apocalypse
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Addressing The Claims In JK Rowling’s Justification For Transphobia 🔗 — Excerpt: Recently JK Rowling, author of Harry Potter, tweeted some transphobic statements and dogwhistles on Twitter that I have addressed here. After a few days silence she wrote a lengthy post trying to justify her position on her website.
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Yanis Varoufakis: capitalism isn’t working. Here’s an alternative 🔗 — Excerpt: When Margaret Thatcher coined “Tina” – her 1980s dictum that “There is no alternative” – I was incensed because, deep down, I felt she had a point: the left had neither a credible nor a desirable alternative to capitalism.
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How maps in the media make us more negative about migrants 🔗 — Excerpt: It’s like one of those optical illusions: it looks like one face at first, but it’s actually two. Once you see the second face, you can never unsee it. In this case, the illusion is how we view migration – it’s the maps we see so frequently that visualise migration for us.
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Delicious breakfast this morning, bookmarked for cooking again - 🔗 Vegan Mushroom Bacon Breakfast Toast
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Greece is the word for white wines 🔗 — Excerpt: Diamantakis Diamantopetra White, Crete, Greece 2019 (from £16.95, nywines.co.uk; mrandmrsfinewine.co.uk; woodwinters.com) There are some beautiful red wines made in Greece. Some great sweet wines, too. Even retsina can have its pine-scented moment.
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Autonomy Online: A Case For The IndieWeb 🔗 — Excerpt: There is an alternative to corporate bubbles online — it’s called the IndieWeb. Build your own personal websites, control your online presence, and learn on your own terms.
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Italy in a bowl: 10 simple, delicious summer pasta recipes – chosen by chefs 🔗 — Excerpt: Pasta with pesto alla Genovese is definitely a favourite dish of mine. I really enjoy the simplicity of using just a few ingredients but it is still so tasty and has a deep flavour.
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Field of Streams - Green Man Festival 🔗 — Summary: Green Man has announced plans for a virtual festival this month to replace this year’s edition of the event. Eels, Pictish Trail, Stella Donelly, Father John Misty, and Adwaith will all play exclusive sets. 🎵
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Sir Roger Norrington Interview with Bruce Duffie 🔗 — Excerpt: Sir Roger Arthur Carver Norrington was born in Oxford March 16, 1934, and comes from a musical University family. He was a talented boy soprano, studying the violin from the age of ten and singing from the age of seventeen.
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How to make the most of past-their-best aubergines – recipe 🔗 — Excerpt: India is a country that’s close to my heart, and I feel fortunate to have been able to spend more than a year of my life there, travelling, surfing, learning yoga, meditating and, most recently, fundraising for the charity Action Against Hunger.
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Why Autonomy News? – Autonomy News 🔗 — Excerpt: The Autonomy News collective plans to produce original articles like this one on a fairly regular basis, as well as reposting content from elsewhere. In our first article we examine the current historical moment, and why there is a need for a site like this.
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Casa do Frango’s Portuguese summer spread – recipes 🔗 — Excerpt: Chargrilled spicy cauliflower with coriander yoghurt.
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A waste-free Middle Eastern runner bean meze recipe 🔗 — Excerpt: At 14, I worked on a pig farm for £1.50 an hour. Although my main role was mucking out the pig pens, I’d also tend to the farmer’s crops of potatoes, pumpkins and runner beans. The quantity of beans, in particular, that we harvested each season seemed almost magical.
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New Research Reveals Origin of Stonehenge Stones 🔗 — Excerpt: A new study has revealed the origins of Stonehenge’s sarsen stones, solving a mystery that has been speculated on for centuries.
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The scramble for Edtech — just another data mining operation? 🔗 — Excerpt: …students aren’t really the customers, they are the product.
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Chris Frantz: Remain in Love 🔗 — Excerpt: David Byrne overwhelms the image of Talking Heads. With his herky-jerky mannerisms, loopy persona and arch lyrics – not to mention his command of the songwriting credits through much of their catalogue – he eclipsed the efforts of every other member of the band. 🎵📚
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Goan Fish Curry with Fragrant Rice 🔗 — Excerpt: Method Prep time: 10 min Cooking time: 30 min Step 1 Put a saucepan with 500ml of salted water on to boil. Wash the rice in a sieve under cold running water. Lightly crush the cardamom pods, just enough to reveal the seeds.
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Meera Sodha’s vegan recipe for Sri Lankan cucumber cashew curry 🔗 — Excerpt: It’s possible that I could count on my fingers and toes how many Brits have cooked a cucumber before.
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Flickr Blog - Why today’s Explore is important. 🔗 — Excerpt: Today we’re populating Flickr’s Explore page with a curated selection of photos of the Black Lives Matter movement and the fight for equality.
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A historic walk around Aberdare town centre 🔗 — Excerpt: Many of us visit Aberdare to shop and for social purposes, but how well do we know it and observe as we walk around? This post reveals some of the history of Aberdare Town Centre, including relics and buildings you can still see today.
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Further Delay to Cricket Season Announced 🔗 — Excerpt: The England & Wales Cricket Board have today confirmed a further delay to the start of the professional domestic cricket season. 🏏
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I’m an NHS doctor – and I’ve had enough of people clapping for me 🔗 — Excerpt: I work for the NHS as a doctor. I don’t work “on the frontline” because there isn’t one; I’m not in the army and we aren’t engaged in military combat. But I do work as a consultant on a ward where we have had Covid-19, and colleagues of mine have been very unwell.
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Track 18 May 2020 at 14:30 - Walking Track - ViewRanger 🔗 – 5 mile circular route.
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The best Japanese film of every year – from 1925 to now 🔗 — Excerpt: It’s a foolish endeavour to try to determine the best film, year by year, of any filmmaking nation, let alone one with so extraordinary a cinematic history as Japan. 🎥
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Track 14 May 2020 at 14:45 - Walking Track - ViewRanger 🔗 – afternoon walk.
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Covid-19 surveillance tech explained: 6 ways governments are monitoring the virus – and you 🔗 — Excerpt: Governments across the world face the same dilemma: how to contain the spread of Covid-19 while at the same time re-opening their shuttered societies. The stakes are immense. Open up too early and the death toll could sky-rocket, putting health systems under enormous strain.
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Brace yourself for the most dangerous idea yet: most people are pretty decent 🔗 — Excerpt: Right now, more than ever, we need a hopeful view of human nature. While we’re right to keep our physical distance from those around us to stop the spread of the virus, we also need to believe that it’s these same people who will get us through it. We need to trust them.
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ECB announces further delay to the professional cricket season. No professional cricket will be played in England and Wales until at least 1 July – ECB 🔗 🏏
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Rachel Roddy’s recipe for piadina flatbread 🔗 — Excerpt: No 17 on my plan of things to do when things change: take the 7.25am train from Roma Termini to Ravenna, walk out of the station in search of the first place that will serve me a piadina romagnola, then eat the warm fold as I walk towards Piazza Del Popolo. Until then, I will make them at home.
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Easy as 1,2,3: chefs on the 50 most simple, delicious three-ingredient recipes 🔗 — Excerpt: Most easy recipes are not easy. Achieving simplicity is never actually that simple, but in the kitchen it is usually also contingent on a well-trained hand and a very well-stocked pantry. This makes the genuinely easy three-ingredient recipe a holy grail of sorts.
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Radical Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate review – fleet-footed and inspiriting 🔗 — Excerpt: In 1798, William Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at the cottage of his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Nether Stowey in Somerset.
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Chard dressed with lemon and Parmesan 🔗 — Excerpt: Method Prep time: 15 min Cooking time: 10 min The leaves and stalks generally need to be cooked separately, so to prepare, wash the chard thoroughly and strip the leaves away from the stalks. Slice the stalks into ½ cm long pieces.
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Radiohead’s Ed O’Brien: ‘Humanity has only really learned from disaster’ 🔗 — Excerpt: Ed O’Brien believed Radiohead’s turbulent years were behind him. It was 2001 and the guitarist and “band mum” had tamed egos, anchored stressful tours and clung tight as his bandmates swerved into electronic music. Now, the five-piece had nothing to prove, and he had slipped underwater.
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Dark Sky Blog 🔗 – Dark Sky has joined Apple.
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Coronavirus in context: a guide to help you understand the pandemic 🔗 — Excerpt: The coronavirus has grown into a pandemic with far-reaching and long-lasting consequences. We see it as our task to help you understand this worldwide development by providing context for the news in a carefully considered, factual and constructive way.
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Cricket has lost the role it had in 1939 but it’s still far more than a game 🔗 — Excerpt: Sport means nothing if it is not about passion and connection and nowhere is that more sharply defined than in football, as we have witnessed since coronavirus ripped it from our lives in recent weeks and days.
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My walk across desolate Venice 🔗 — Excerpt: Gregory Dowling: So, as I anticipated in my last post, yesterday I had the opportunity to take a long walk across Venice, since I had to go to the university to act as Chairman of a “commissione di laurea”, sitting in front of a computer and connecting telematically with the students…
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Poet’s corners: a car-free tour of inspiring Wordsworth sites 🔗 — Excerpt: William Wordsworth was born in Cumbria 250 years ago, on 7 April 1770. Inspired by nature and a sense of place, he was an environmentalist as well as a poet, so it’s fitting to visit the places he celebrated in as eco-friendly a way as possible.
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Anna Jones’ squash and crispy kale pizza recipe 🔗 — Excerpt: Pizza is a big part of my life. It’s both my and my four-year-old’s favourite food, so a lot of our meals revolve around it, and happily so. We are lucky enough to live in a part of London where there are good sourdough pizza places every 10 steps. In pizza terms, we are spoilt rotten.
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Whipped feta, potato stew: Anna Jones’ recipes from Greece 🔗 — Excerpt: One of the things I need to remedy is is not having spent enough time in Greece. I’ve been there only twice (both times to the islands), but I find myself daydreaming about being there more than any other place. I think that’s why I cook so much Greek food.
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England beat Wales 33-30 in a thrilling Six Nations encounter 🔗 🏉
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A Quietus Interview 🎵 🔗 — Excerpt: Duncan Seaman talks to Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayres of Cornershop about keeping busy, Brexit and their ace new album England Is A Garden.
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I was looking forward to watching the India v England 🏏 semi-final this morning but … Women’s T20 World Cup: England out but India into final after washout 🔗
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“Que sais-je?” - Michel de Montaigne, philosopher, was born #onthisday 1533 bbc.in/2uDemjc 🔗
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Klaus Thomsen, Coffee Collective on The Idealists podcast 🔗 — Excerpt: To evade the so-called coffee paradox, four coffee enthusiasts set out to form the Coffee Collective in 2007 in Copenhagen. Hear how co-founder Klaus Thomsen built a sustainable business with a mission to create the best coffee experiences in the world while bringing better returns to the farmers.
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I’ve been reading articles at The Correspondent for a few months now. Episode 13 of The Idealists podcast has an interview with the founding editor – Rob Wijnberg, The Correspondent. Some refreshing views on news and journalism. 🔗
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Walking in London - Finding poetry, politics and more - a Flickr album 📷 🔗
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Andy Gill: Gang of Four’s genius guitarist who burned a route out of punk 🔗 — Excerpt: Britain’s late 70s provincial punk scenes were seldom places for the faint-hearted, but few were as starkly polarised as that in Leeds.
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Tate Modern - Kara Walker: Fons Americanus - review 🔗
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Shelley in London: Poland Street 🔗 — Excerpt: Soho is my favourite part of London. I love walking from Oxford Circus to Leicester Square, dipping into Covent Garden.
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A visit to St Pancras Old Church: Mary Wollstonecraft, Sir John Soane and Edward Carpue 🔗 — Excerpt: Although I visit the British Library from time to time I always find myself too exhausted or too worried about getting stuck with rush hour crowds to spend an hour or so at St Pancras Old Church.
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Mary in St Pancras 🔗 — Excerpt: And then outside, to try to find Mary’s memorial. It is doubtful how much she would have recognised: some items (especially gravestones) have moved, and many (especially tombs) post-date her death, viz the Burdett-Coutts memorial sundial, the image to the left.
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Mary in Somers Town 🔗 — Excerpt: A few days ago I went exploring, with Chihiro Umegaki, the Japanese historian mentioned earlier, and the Swedish performance designer Asa Norling. (Åsa had read the Scandinavian letters, and commented that Mary hadn’t much liked the Swedes.
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Cardiff Bay to Penarth - a Flickr album 📷 🔗
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Doors drummer, John Densmore: ‘It took me years to forgive Jim Morrison’ 🔗 — Excerpt: It took the Doors’ drummer, John Densmore, three years to visit the grave of his bandmate Jim Morrison after he was found dead in a Paris bathtub in 1971. He didn’t even go to the funeral. “Did I hate Jim?” Densmore pauses, although he is not obviously alarmed by the question. “No.
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How to make the perfect broccoli and stilton soup 🔗 — Excerpt: So entrenched is broccoli and stilton in my canon of classic soups – well up there with the likes of tomato, minestrone and chicken broth – that I’m slightly taken aback not to find it in Lindsey Bareham’s comprehensive collection A Celebration of Soup, or indeed in any of the other books I
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The best movies of 2019 that you haven’t seen 🔗 — Excerpt: This quite extraordinary film from the 28-year-old Russian director Kantemir Balagov was a prize-winner in Cannes; in the UK it had three showings at the London film festival and then went straight to the streaming platform Mubi. Everyone should see it.
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The (Quiet) Death of a Legendary Parisian Bookstore 🔗 — Excerpt: When it was announced that the legendary bookshop Le Pont Traversé would definitely close down on the 31st of December in Paris, many French TV stations put in phone calls and tried to convince Josée Comte-Béalu to do a filmed interview. She refused every single one of them.
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Meera Sodha’s Christmas recipe for vegan achari brussels sprout curry — link 🔗
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Divine inspiration: rescuing run-down churches – a photo essay — link to The Guardian 🔗
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Anna Karina: an actor of easy charm and grace whose presence radiated from the screen — link to The Guardian 🔗 🎥
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Fascism: I sometimes fear… — link to a poem by Michael Rosen 🔗
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Labour’s Manifesto is fit for purpose. So, why are the middle classes so hostile to it? – link at The New Statesman 🔗
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Some really interesting photographs in this collection.
In the remains of a bombed-out Soviet darkroom, hundreds of rolls of film were discovered rotting among the rubble by the photojournalist Samuel Eder earlier this year.
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Brilliant live performance by Fat White Family at The Tramshed, Cardiff on Wednesday 22nd November. 🎵
Interesting recent interview with the band – link 🔗
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How to measure a year of reading 📚 - this sums it up nicely
Tom Gauld in The Guardian – link 🔗
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William Blake, poet and printmaker, was born #OnThisDay 1757 BBC In Our Time
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How Utopia shaped the world — link on bbc.com 🔗
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Media misrepresentations of the Labour party are being used strategically to create left wing folk devils and moral panic – link from Politics and Insights 🔗
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Listening to Thanks for the Dance, the album of Leonard Cohen’s final songs. 🎵
What is immediately striking about Thanks for the Dance is how organic these meticulously constructed songs sound, given that five of them were assembled from the barest musical sketches and four others from lyrics Leonard had recited, but not put to music. It sounds, above all, like a labour of love, and one that is entirely faithful to Cohen’s abiding spirit.
Adam Cohen on Leonard: ‘It was daunting finishing my dad’s last music' – link 🔗
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Doh! How does Homer get on at the British Museum? ★★★★★ — link 🔗
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He may be an anarchist who has voted only once in his life, but the comics legend Alan Moore is calling on his fans to oppose the “rapacious, smirking rightwing parasites” currently in government and join him in voting Labour.
Alan Moore drops anarchism to champion Labour against Tory ‘parasites’ – link 🔗
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Off to see Steve Hillage and Gong at The Tramshed, Cardiff tonight. Flying teapots and electric Camembert: the story of Gong, prog’s trippiest band – link 🔗 🎵
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Simon Armitage: ‘Nature has come back to the centre of poetry’ — link 🔗
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4000 year old Babylonian stews from cuneiform tablets – link 🔗
A short video of the attempt to recreate them is on YouTube.
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There’s a really good explanation of a Green New Deal for the UK on the Labour for a Green New Deal website, with a number of detailed policy documents packed with information. Also nice to see that the site itself is well designed. The Green New Deal Explained – link 🔗
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Helen of Troy: the Greek epics are not just about war – they’re about women — link 🔗
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Waters Close Over Venice — link 🔗
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Politics and social media
An interesting article on The Correspondent about social media and politicians - If a politician can say something in 280 characters, perhaps they shouldn’t say it at all.
I’m not sure that I agree with the conclusion that politicians should not engage with social media but there are certainly a number of valid examples of how it (or at least Twitter) can and has been misused.
The comments on the article are also interesting, comparing social media to newspaper headlines, soundbites and a TL;DR culture. I have more sympathy with some of those points of view.
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The Great NHS Heist, a documentary film that I supported on GoFundMe, is being released online on 30th November.
The Great NHS Heist is a powerful account of how the nation’s proudest achievement, the National Health Service, has been fundamentally reshaped and undermined by successive governments in preparation for privatisation. The evidence of the heist is presented with a stark warning of the risks ahead through interviews with health care professionals, patients and experts in England and America.
A trailer is also available on YouTube.
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Baudelaire’s unknown extra verse to erotic poem revealed — link 🔗 📚
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Not again! England beat New Zealand in super over to win T20 series 3-2. Haven’t watched it yet but sounds like Chris Jordan’s performance was crucial - link 🔗🏏
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Forward Arts Foundation in conversation with Fiona Benson — link 🔗
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Currently reading: Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson 📚
Purchased after reading this review in The Guardian.
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A New Financial Order - Aaron Bastani Meets Yanis Varoufakis – link 🔗
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How to make cinnamon buns — link 🔗
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Caroline Lucas & Yanis Varoufakis search for what went wrong with democracy — link 🔗
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Top 10 books about Europe — link 🔗
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Wildcat and the Egghead: The life of Donald Rooum — link 🔗
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Rachel Roddy’s recipe for potato, onion and tomato gratin — link 🔗
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Rachel Roddy’s recipe for Bolognese rice cake — link 🔗
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Yotam Ottolenghi’s recipes for butternut squash — link 🔗
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Ne Travaillez Jamais! ca. 1965-66 - Situationniste Blog 🔗
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A secondhand book is a glimpse into the lives of other readers 📚🔗
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Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born on this day in 1792 - BBC In Our Time - The Later Romantics
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England win the ICC Cricket World Cup final. Unbelievable and dramatic game of cricket - I’ve been glued to it all day. So pleased that England won, but it was such a close, hard fought game that neither side really deserved to lose. A great end to the tournament. 🏏
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Very impressed with this update to NewsBlur on iOS
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🔖 Less whaling in Moby Dick! - Tom Gauld on fan petitions – cartoon
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A crowdfunding appeal is bringing readers, authors and publishers together to help keep the copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover used by the judge in the landmark obscenity trial in the UK. 📚
Donate via gofundme http://gf.me/u/szmpa8
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Informative and interesting article on The Quietus - 🔖 The Strange World Of…Gong - including a selection of videos. And I’m going to see Gong at the The Globe, Cardiff on Thursday 😀 🎵
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🔖 A couple of simple tofu ideas I may try this weekend, both from BBC Food:
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Trying a BrewDog Electric India - relatively light and less “aggressive” than a lot of BrewDog beers. Very nice 🍺.
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🔖 Cooking Sunday roast causes indoor pollution ‘worse than Delhi’
During the day of cooking, PM2.5 levels in the house rose to 200 micrograms per cubic metre for one hour, more than the 143 micrograms per cubic metre averaged in Delhi, the sixth most polluted city in the world, and far higher than the central London average of 15 micrograms per cubic metre.
[…] The levels breached World Health Organization guidelines of 10 micrograms per cubic metre for eight-and-a-half-hours. The simple act of making toast sent PM2.5 levels up to 30 micrograms per cubic metre.
While gas flames and charred food churned out fine soot particles, others came from animal fat, cooking oils, and grime in the oven and and on pots and pans used in making the meal. Still more came from tiny particles of skin that the cooks and their guests shed from their clothes.
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🔖 Welsh National Opera’s Un Ballo in Maschera - terrific gory fun with pirates, witchcraft and murder. Just seen this and definitely agree with the review.
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🔖 Stunningly preserved fresco of Narcissus discovered in Pompeii
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Milk!
... a strange battle has emerged, between an industry trying to replace something it says we don’t need in the first place, and dairy, a business that for a century sold itself as the foundation of a healthy diet, while ignoring the fact that most of the world does just fine without it.
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🔖 Don’t trust Daily Mail website, Microsoft browser warns users
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🔖 Recipe to try: Rachel Roddy’s rocket, leek and potato soup
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🔖 There is no leftwing justification for Brexit. We must fight it to the last.
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🔖 The new rules of Christmas dinner: don’t ask for Yorkshire puddings and always wear a party hat
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🔖 Google+ to shut down early after privacy flaw affects over 50m users
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An important epidemiological study :) 🔖 Turncoat Game of Thrones characters most likely to survive, researchers say.
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🔖 Anna Jones’ vegetarian Christmas squash and chestnut tart recipe
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Blimey! Alerts on my phone were going crazy!
Aston Villa 5-5 Nottingham Forest – Tammy Abraham scores four in 10-goal draw ⚽
Value for money, but unfortunately Villa had two goals disallowed in the final few minutes :(
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Half-Life at 20 🔖 Why it is the most important shooter ever made
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🔖 The fresco “Leda and the Swan” - Parco Archeologico di Pompei
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Sharing a track from ViewRanger
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HT @lohang@mastodon.social 🔖 War, censorship, and the invention of “fake news”
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Flooding in Venice 🔖 Acqua alta is a big nuisance
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🔖 Venice under water as Italy hit by fierce wind and heavy rain
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🔖 David Byrne: ‘My agent says I’m having a Leonard Cohen moment’
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I will be tempted 🎮 – Sega Mega Drive returns
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🔖 Why the ultimate breakfast of champions might just be wine and cheese
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Blue Monday is a great song by New Order – just eating an equally brilliant cheese of the same name 🧀
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What?? – Facebook hires Nick Clegg as head of global affairs
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Tom Gauld on buying a novel in the digital age – cartoon 📚
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Mentioned this in a previous post, but just seen this in The Guardian, which has a little more detail – Never mind GDP – make free time the measure of UK wellbeing
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Sian Berry, the Green Party’s co-leader, made some really good points on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning - Free time should be measure of UK’s well-being
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I enjoy a Macallan malt, but maybe quite not this much – Bottle of whisky sold for world record £848,000 – the label does look very good though…
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The Facebook account breach extends way beyond the site itself. The compromise of access tokens means the FB SSO (Single Sign-On) mechanism was also vulnerable, meaning users' accounts on third-party sites implementing the FB SSO system may have also been compromised.
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Cooked rakott kelkáposzta – Hungarian layered savoy cabbage casserole – last night, using Quorn mince in place of the meat, adding a few chopped mushrooms and chopped roasted carrots and using some smoked paprika in addition to the sweet. I’m not usually a huge fan of Quorn, but it did work very well in this recipe.
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Interesting ‘earliest’ stories in the news this week 🔖 Earliest animal fossils are identified, pushing back the age of earth’s first animals by millions of years, and 🔖 World’s oldest brewery found, meaning beer is also a lot older than was thought.
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Good luck to NASA! – Can Mars rover beat the dust to trundle on again?
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Alastair Cook’s final Test innings for England is just starting now at The Oval - England’s most capped Test player and highest Test run scorer 🏏
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I have got to try and make this – Manousheh: the Lebanese breakfast pizza that stole my heart
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Bats in libraries
Some impressive interiors in this collection of The world’s most beautiful libraries. This caption also intrigued me –
one of only two libraries in the world that houses bats to protect the books against insects
so I had to investigate further
the bats, which are less than inch long, roost during the day behind “elaborate rococo bookcases” and come out at night to hunt insects which otherwise would feast on the libraries’ books. The price of this natural insect control is paid in scat; the bats […] leave a thin layer of droppings over everything. So each morning the floors have to be thoroughly cleaned and the furniture has to be covered at night.
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Fantastic result from Glamorgan CC as they chase down 195 to defeat Surrey in the Vitality Blast T20 🏏
Wagg finishes 46 not out, Carlson 58.
Pleasant surprise for a Tuesday evening’s viewing!
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Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights – in charts 📚
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Cartoon – Tom Gauld on The Odyssey
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Good article by Owen Jones in The Guardian today – 🔖 Protest against what Donald Trump represents, not who he is
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He was high-brow, low-brow, every-brow! 🔖 the genius of Leonard Bernstein 🎵
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Nice little quiz, in a format I haven’t seen used before – NHS at 70: how well do you know the health service?
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I’ve heard of Cyberpunk and Steampunk before – and read books that fall into those categories – however, Solarpunk is a subgenre of science fiction that is new to me. 📚
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🔖 Daša Drndić – ‘unflinching’ Croatian novelist, dies aged 71. 📚
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Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
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David Attenborough - World Music Collector ― Fascinating documentary from BBC Radio 3 featuring some great music from around the world recorded by Attenborough over 50 years ago.
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Is Japanese knotweed driving you wild? Don’t curse it – cook it. I never imagined this was edible, we’ve got major invasions of it around us!
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Supporting The Great NHS Heist Documentary via @gofundme
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Enjoying my first listen to Sweet Thursday – the new Herman Dune album released today. 🎵
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An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord's 'The Society of the Spectacle'
From Hyperallergic: An Illustrated Guide to Guy Debord’s ‘The Society of the Spectacle’
Guy Debord’s (1931–1994) best-known work, La société du spectacle (The Society of the Spectacle) (1967), is a polemical and prescient indictment of our image-saturated consumer culture. The book examines the “Spectacle,” Debord’s term for the everyday manifestation of capitalist-driven phenomena; advertising, television, film, and celebrity.
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🔖 No More Than a Litre of Wine a Day
French 1950s Health and Sobriety posters. Interesting article with lots of images.
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Microblogging and fragmentation by Riccardo Mori
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Going to be interesting to find out if Amazon’s remake of Utopia is anywhere close to the quality of the original – Paradise found: Utopia’s remake is a welcome dose of TV justice 📺
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Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece review ― Astonishing, ravishing, sublime – exhibition at the British Museum which I’d really like to try and get to see.
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s remains rediscovered in wine cellar 📚
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I used to enjoy a Mr Kipling Cherry Bakewell. Not so sure I will now – What is Britain eating?
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Checked in at Coast just outside Saundersfoot. Brilliant food is an understatement. Exceptional!
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Robotic bees 🐝 on Mars! – Planet of the apis
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Now I’ve just got to investigate Ursula K Le Guin’s electronica album and the associated book Always Coming Home
‘Deeply weird and enjoyable’
🎵📚
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‘People have lost the ability to even know what a joke is. It’s very Orwellian’
Looking forward to seeing them in just over a fortnight. 🎵
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Google and Facebook data – Despite myself, I’m quite impressed with the data that Google holds on me, as detailed in Are you ready? This is all the data Facebook and Google have on you. The timeline locations and ‘My Activity’ sections of the data seem particularly comprehensive! In comparison, for me, the download of my Facebook data seems relatively superficial.
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Trying the experiment of turning off all the retweets from people I follow on Twitter using the method detailed at lifehacker. Interested to see what impact that has on the noise in my Twitter timeline.
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Interesting article by Blake Morrison - Up in smoke: should an author’s dying wishes be obeyed? 📚
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Yes! Aston Villa 4-1 Wolves ⚽️
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Still think St. Austell Proper Job is one of the best bottled beers you can buy. 🍺
An authentic IPA brewed with Cornish spring water and a single malt made from Cornish grown Maris Otter Pale barley.
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Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the first book in English arguing for the equality of woman and men, must finally have her statue – more info at maryonthegreen.org
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Bobby Klein’s best photograph: Jim Morrison has a beer for breakfast.
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Edna St Vincent Millay is one of my favourite poets - just noticed and appreciated this article, published on the anniversary of her birth, February 22nd 1892: Edna St Vincent Millay’s poetry has been eclipsed by her personal life – let’s change that 📚
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Villa beat the Blues to win the local derby and go up to second place in the Championship Aston Villa 2-0 Birmingham City ⚽️
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Watching Hairy Bikers' Mediterranean Adventure Episode 6/6 Mainland Spain. Some great looking food, especially the tapas, plus some flamenco. How have I missed the rest of this series - going to have to download! 📺
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Wow - sixth consecutive win for Villa. A brilliant sporting Saturday! ⚽️
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Great to have a Micro.blog page for posts about rugby in time for the 2018 Six Nations opening weekend. First game kicks off in about an hour from now - Wales vs Scotland in Cardiff. Can’t wait! 🏉
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Legend of the Fall – Mark E Smith kept swinging to the end 🎵
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New Face in Hell 🎵 – Mark E Smith, lead singer with The Fall, dies aged 60. So many hours of my life spent listening to The Fall, from the late 70s, recording their sessions from the John Peel Show, to seeing them at the Green Man festival a couple of years ago (pictured here). Favourite albums Live at the Witch Trials and Grotesque.
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Ursula K Le Guin, sci-fi and fantasy author, dies aged 88. The Dispossessed has always been one of my favourite utopian novels. 📚
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Xylouris White – Only Love 🎵
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Quite ridiculous! - A new trend to ‘coordinate’ the look of your library by turning the spines to face inward
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I used to sporadically keep a record of the books I was reading on a Tumblr blog at imnowreading.tumblr.com - am going to try and resurrect this using the emoji tagging on Micro.blog.
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Just noticed that there were updates to Apple AirPort firmware released in December - AirPort Base Station Firmware Update 7.7.9 and 7.6.9. Seem to be addressing the KRACK vulnerability.
Currently working my way around updating 16 devices :(
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Interesting brief survey of the history, themes and current state of dystopian fiction in this BBC Books and Authors podcast 📚
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Accidental Tech Podcast 255: The Thermal Paste Lottery @atpfm filled my flight home from Rome almost perfectly.
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There’s a nice compilation of 2017 ‘Albums of the Year’ lists at albumoftheyear.org. I always enjoy reading through these to see which of the albums I’ve heard - or even, these days, which artists I’ve even heard of.
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The first Christmas card designed by John Callcott Horsley in 1843.
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Average wine glass capacity has increased from 66ml in the 1700s to 417ml in the 2000s, with the mean wine glass size in 2016-17 even higher at 449ml. 🔖 Size does matter: wine glasses are seven times larger than they used to be
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Many years ago I used to cook Sarah Brown’s Red Dragon Pie from her Vegetarian Kitchen book. I will probably be trying out this Proper Vegetarian Fiery Chilli Welsh Red Dragon Pie version on Sunday.
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To cook ― The perfect panforte
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Bitcoin energy consumption ― Bitcoin Mining Now Consuming More Electricity Than 159 Countries Including Ireland & Most Countries In Africa – if correct, these figures are staggering.
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Posting from newly released MarsEdit 4. Great work @danielpunkass!
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Bookmark ― an interesting short article about the Welsh artist Augustus John by Colin Ward.
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🔖 Ramen noodles with fresh greens and chilli miso www.theguardian.com
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Going to have to try and get tickets to An Evening with King Crimson at St David’s Hall, Cardiff, even though it’s not until October 2018.
With three drummers, Pat Mastelotto, Gavin Harrison and Jeremy Stacey, as well as the return of multi-instrumentalist Bill Rieflin on keyboards, guitarist and original founding member, Robert Fripp states that this “double quartet formation” is likely to make more noise than ever before.
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🔖 Illuminating India ― photography 1857–2017
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Preston North End 0-2 Aston Villa
Season looking good so far. Consolidating a play-off place!
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🔖 Sustainability taken a step too far? ― Goblet of fire: how spat-out wine is being turned into spirits.
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🔖 Instant gratification and total convenience and delivery ― How the sandwich consumed Britain
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🚫 Buy Nothing Day - Friday November 24th 2017 – #BuyNothingDay
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What Other Pains will WoW Classic Bring? – this bought back a lot of memories of playing World of Warcraft when it first launched!
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🔖 The system is failing ― Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web. (ht @adamprocter)
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🔖 Keeping in mind for Xmas ― Joe Trivelli’s Italian Christmas recipes
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🔖 It’s true, wind turbines are monstrous ― But I have learned to love them ― Alice O’Keeffe
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Heading to Cardiff to see the outstanding Syd Arthur @sydarthurband at Clwb Ifor Bach tonight.
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Checked in at The Whitebrook. Restaurant with rooms — www.thewhitebrook.co.uk
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The Chronikler
🔖 Bookmark ― The Chronikler – “a thought provoking trip through both the main avenues and back alleyways of Middle Eastern and Western societies”
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Testing OwnYourSwarm by Aaron Parecki @aaronpk. Seems to work faultlessly and nice to see it feeds photographs through to Micro.blog.
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The Russian Revolution: then and now photographs
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🔖 WPA2 security vulnerability ― ‘All wifi networks’ are vulnerable to hacking, security expert discovers
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Early Bird tickets booked ― Merthyr Rising Festival 2018 - Music, arts, and ideas at the birthplace of the red flag.
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🎶 Listening to ― Ruins / Adfeilion by The Gentle Good
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Farewell to The Matrix ― Physicists find we’re not living in a computer simulation
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🎶 Listening to ― american dream by LCD Soundsystem on Apple Music
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🔖 Bookmark ― Tim Roth: touching evil in Michael Haneke’s Funny Games
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The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life
The new sleep science – An adult sleeping only 6.75 hours a night would be predicted to live only to their early 60s without medical intervention. I’m not long for this world …
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🔖 Bookmark ― iPhone 8 Plus Camera Review: India — Austin Mann (ht @moridin)
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🎶 Listening to ― Golden Eagle by Holly Macve on Apple Music
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🔖 Bookmark ― Natan Dvir — some interesting photographs.
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🔖 Bookmark ― Wine, protest and Macron: why southern French wine producers are so angry
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Cooked these tonight ― Aloo Paratha (Indian Potato Stuffed Flatbread) ― Delicious!
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🔖Bookmark ― Mary Shelley review – sturdy literary biopic fails to resurrect spirit of author ― but I do still want to see this.
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Superduper! by @dnanian saves the day again for me. My work 2011 iMac, rendered almost unusable by what looks like a failing GPU, now successfully mirrored to a healthier machine.
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Impressed by this ethical business initiative: The Brewdog Unicorn Fund ― Giving away 20% of our profits, every single year. Forever.
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🔖Bookmark ― Giant toddler peers over US-Mexico border wall
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🔖Bookmark ― Brew period: the craft beer labels that are works of art
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Really like the Safari Extension in MarsEdit 4 Public Beta - got mine configured to create a Markdown link from a web page url and title and place it in a new Quick Post.
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🔖Bookmarking ― A nice bit of squirrel: should we chow down a diet of invasive species?
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BBQ Toolbox - It’s a barbecue … in a toolbox - from @whatsamadder on Twitter, always a Wednesday pleasure!
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Even on holiday, not thinking about work, the death of Flash makes me happy: Adobe is ending development and support for Flash in 2020
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Just started reading the first of Peter F. Hamilton’s Chronicle of the Fallers Series - two massive volumes bought for holiday reading. I feel myself being dragged in …
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Wine glasses have increased in size from a capacity of 65ml 300 years ago to 450ml today - 🔖 Bigger wine glasses make us drink too much
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Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis review – one of the greatest political memoirs ever?
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Skeleton mosaic found in Turkey - "Be cheerful and live your life"
via Instagram bit.ly/26zvVte -
fin de Spectacle? - another edition of Spectacular Times found and displayed online at http://t.co/iQBoEVjP - http://t.co/DDl9h1wh
