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This story about the police leaving a bag containing weapons outside the Mayor of London's house is bizarre. It had a f@cking sub-machine gun in it.

Now, I'm not a police officer, so don't deal with this stuff every day, but surely at some point when you get into the car and check you've got your radio, your lunchbox, your high-viz, your helmet, you think "Wait, didn't I have sub-machine gun earlier?"

Kid goes on week-long school trip.

Is only one to retrieve food from class extra snack cupboard at end of trip.

Teacher tells kid they were about to throw it all out, no one else had remembered.

Kid comes home with whole class's snack stash.

When you see someone you love peacefully sleeping it can be difficult to think of your own consciousness as anything but a curse.

Like, all a body wants is for everything to be nominal. Occasionally, various things deplete, and maintenance or replenishment is required, and an unfortunate state is entered into, akin to defecation, when we must replenish various things which are out of range.

I'm not saying that's true. The mind seriously objects, but it would be the body's Luciferian manifesto, were it to rebel.

That's something we don't admit in ourselves. We see time spent asleep as a necessary waste, or in the service of awareness. But when we see someone peacefully sleeping, everything humming along in range, we feel its value per se, and empathy circumvents our ego's self-deceit.

Snooker has some odd, complex rules. So in this "longest frame ever" I was half expecting a gong to go off after an hour and the ref to pull out jousting lances from under the table, and for the frame to be decided by combat, judged by the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, and the prioress of Kirklees.

If Barry Hearn wants to get in touch, he knows where to find me or, better still, medical attention.

#snooker #snookerWorldChampionship

On seeing "Abnormal Load Escort Vehicle"s flanking a green Fiat Punto.

Kid: "Maybe it's someone really important. Like ... The Queen of Norway or ... Helen Mirren".

"French tanker Leroy Jenkins through Strait of Hormuz"

is the sort of line to torment footnote writers and readers in centuries to come, 😀 .

TIL, using book-books (codexes) for important texts was a Christian innovation and was there from the start (it's even mentioned in biblical epistles). Books existed at the time, but were used for things we'd use note books or journals for today, note taking, accounts, etc. Everything important was done on a scroll. But not Christian texts: they were all books right from the start. Translating cultures, it was all basically a series of scribbled-in "notepads" passed around and copied. No one is quite sure why (there are, of course, many theories, or the direction of causation).

My favourite (the one I'm most convinced by) is that it was just aesthetic, functioning as a differentiator and in-group signifier.

I'm sorry, I'm genuinely close to hysterics at this point.

This is where I stumbled on that recording. An excellent essay about (and not about) a historic telephone pole in New Jersey in the Public Domain Review.

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/last-pole/

The first few seconds of the first transatlantic telephone conversation, where the two feted posh old chaps discuss familiar Zoom-junk matters.

https://archive.org/details/first-official-transatlantic-telephone-conversation

There will never be a car quite like a Mark II Ford Granada. If I were ever to have become rich and famous, that's how I'd have turned up to the ball, in a silver Mark II Granada Ghia, in too much eyeliner, driven by a furry.

I bet the Northern Hemisphere completely dominates the Southern in number of "hottest days of the year so far".

Endeavour Ep. 1 there's a doctor near the start who says digoxin is from Deadly Nightshade. I spent the whole episode thinking he was a fake doctor(*), but it turned out it was just the writers not doing their research.

I was caught off-guard because there's a Midsummer Murders episode where someone forages Hemlock Waterdropwort claiming it was parsley and I cursed the writers for being so slapdash, and it turned out that was the plot!

(*) atropine, scopolamine and hycoscyamine are from Belladonna, but digoxin is from foxgloves.

The copious warnings the Beeb are plastering on their news site because the orange-one said "Fuck", a feed which regularly reports on the worst of humanity, reminds me of the epigraph to Daisies:

This film is dedicated to all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle.

It's odd now that Easter Sunday has become the day everything's shut. A couple of decades ago it was Good Friday. Now that's like a normal trading day (maybe with Sunday hours), but Easter Sunday has become like Christmas Day.

I've tried, and again failed to get excited about rockets. I can't shake off the aesthetic feeling that it's all a missile circus.

They call themselves the Football Association, but they haven't a single football on their executive.

There's a point near the end of Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill video where the acid clearly hits. See if you can spot it, too, 😄 .

https://youtu.be/_OO2PuGz-H8

Picked up an old Taggart DVD at the charity bookcase at Tesco. Whenever I watch the old ones with Mark McManus in, I'm reminded of my old dad's generation, the people he knew, the general way society we moved in was like.

It's really striking, and there's nothing like it elsewhere. It's a world that's still a kind of inscrutable, inaccessible mystery to me, in some way, the more so the longer I was in it.

It's very odd: we're not Scottish, there's no connection to Glasgow at all.

The best thing I can come up with is that maybe there's some kind of commonality to working class Protestantism that Taggart really caught the essence of. There's quite a few clues in each episode that Maryhill CID is Gers not Hoops, but it's hard to put a handle on things like style of dress and mannerisms that work on a subliminal level (though I always assumed Jackie was from the other side of the tracks: who knows why with these things?)

Does anyone have an out-of-band to ask if vla22 at wandering.shop is the real Verity?

The red button / blue button conundrum everywhere is symptomatic of something that the trolley problem also suffers from, a kind of ethical blanching.

It doesn't represent any instantiable scenario without the addition of facts which are morally determining in almost every theory.

Usually the exception is the author's favourite theory, where all the elements are present, and everyone else is stupid.

It relies on us going along with this idea that there are kind of ethical atoms, that situations can be reliably and universally boiled down into orthogonal components, which hasn't been shown.

So my final answer is that not only is this a stupid question that I refuse to answer, my refusal to answer is an ethical one.

Not now, Madonna!

I was walking around our mid-refurbishment Tesco thinking about how remarkably many of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances are struggling right now; folk who've not obviously struggled with mental health before, making dark jokes about illness and industrial accidents, taking sudden time off to "catch up with things", asides about meaningless and losing interest, about not needing to save. It seems near universal.

Then Madonna's "The Power of Goodbye" comes on, through the currently somehow incomplete speaker system, echoing and muffled, like The Caretaker's /An Empty Bliss Beyond This World/.

There's nothing left to try / There's no place left to hide /.../ There's nothing left to lose / There's no more heart to bruise // There's no greater power than the power of goodbye.

Something like /Love Shack/ or /Come On Eileen/ might have helped more!

Imagine how different things might be if Reginald Pole had got that one extra vote in 1550.