The weather is still rubbish here in the Shire.

But it feels like it’s rubbish Spring weather, rather than rubbish Winter weather, so that’s good.

These are the podcast episodes that I particularly enjoyed in January.

Episodes I’ve enjoyed previously are on the podcast pages for 2025, for 2024, 2023, and for 2022

January

Revisionist History - Blue Seattle with Cameron Crowe | Development Hell - Leon Russell: “why do you keep making these shitty movies?”. Elvis Presley: “last thing I remember….I was driving a truck”. Great podcast in which Cameron Crowe talks about and plays the demo’s from his unmade Elvis film

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Give Ireland Back to the Irish - Give Ireland back to the Irish was number one in Ireland and Spain. It was written after McCartney had hear John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s The Luck of the Irish. imho, the Oko/Lennon song is better

Short History of…..Venice - Venice was never conquered by so-called “barbarians”, so the Venetians “viewed themselves very much as a kind of a Rome unfallen”

The Rest is Entertainment - David Walliams, Podcasts on Netflix & National Treasures - “I must say to all those armchair media analysts who always thought they understood talent pay and that the BBC had spent years overpaying Gary Lineker. I wonder, do they think he’s getting paid less by Netflix than he was paid in a year by the BBC? the answer might shock you…… if you’re an idiot”

Little Atoms 969 - Natalie Haynes' No Friend To This House - the Golden Fleece was really a Golden Sheepskin. Bad news for the Golden Ram.

Witness History - Diary of life in a favela - Carolina Maria de Jesus wrote a best selling diary of her life in a favela in Sao Paulo, called ‘Beyond all pity’ in the UK. Her neighbours were angry about what she said about them, and threw stones at the family when they moved out. She was originally from Sacramento, Minas Gerais

Word in your ear - How Springsteen went “six deep”, fictional rock hacks and who’s more conservative than Liam Gallagher - “you can’t have a snappy conversation with Bruce Springsteen, because, Lord, he was born a rambling man”

The Penguin Podcast: episode 6 – books to screen with Robert Harris - Harris says that having a film made of one of his books is a bit like becoming a grandparent - you get a lot of credit with none of the responsibility

The Hated and the Dead - Nayib Bukele in El Salvador - H.L. Mencken’s said that “The average man does not want to be free. He simply wants to be safe”. Ricardo Avelar explains how this idea is being pushed to extremes in El Salvador

Little Atoms 904 - Jon Savage’s The Secret Public - David Bowie was seen as a one-hit wonder until he hit with Starman, which came out a few months after he declared he was gay. Until then being gay would have been seen as death to a career in pop.

The Rest Is Politics: Leading: 169. Jimmy Wales: Wikipedia vs. Musk, AI, and the Battle for Truth - Jimmy says he tests LLM’s by asking about his wife, who has some profile on the internet, but not an exhaustive one. The LLM typically comes up with things that are very plausible but not true. Possibly the least plausible bit of information has been that she is married to Peter Mandelson

Short History of the Pinkerton Detective Agency - Alan Pinkerton was incolved with Chartism in the UK, then in the Underground Railroad in the US before working to suppress trade unions in later life

You’re dead to me - The Bloomsbury Group - according to Dorothy Parker, the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles, and loved in triangles”

Betwixt the sheets - Real Wives of Dictators | Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s Wife - i didn’t know that Nadya’s suicide followed a public row with her husband, during which she threw something at him

Short history of….the partition of India

Evil Genius with Russell Kane -Serge Gainsbourg - the fictitious Melody Nelson came from Sunderland. Gainsbourg liked the sound of the word ‘Sunderland’

Origin Story: Socialism: The Finale – What’s Left? - “George Orwell was the patron saint of socialists who find other socialists annoying”

The Louis Theroux Podcast: S6 EP8: Jimmy Carr discusses the secret to his comedy, being a late bloomer, and controversial stand-up gigs - Jimmy Carr justifies playing in the Riyadh comedy festival because he likes Saudi Arabia’s ‘direction of travel’

Short History of….. Shakespeare - Shakespeare’s father was a ‘family friend ' of Robert Catesby, the leader of the Gunpowder Plot

Talk ’90s to me: Stay Another Day – The story of East 17’s accidental Christmas classic with Tony Mortimer - Tony Mortimer says that at least some of the lines in the song are about the death of his brother

Americana Music Live with Drew Holcomb and Malcolm Gladwell | Revisionist History - “people in Memphis have a hatred of Nashville baked into their childhoods”

McCartney: A Life in Lyrics - Band on the Run -McCartney on the first WINGS tour “we only had 11 songs…so we had to repeat some of them”

We saw the Henry Girls at Salisbury Rugby Club tonight. Wonderful music. They are on in Hammersmith tonight - wish I could go to that too

youtu.be/QaPAY8Kn9…

Leon Russell: why do you keep making these shitty movies

Elvis Presley: last thing I remember….I was driving a truck

Great podcast in which Cameron Crowe talks about and plays the demo’s from his unmade Elvis film

Revisionist History - Blue Seattle with Cameron Crowe | Development Hell

The podcast has inspired Retirement Project #8 - re-watch all of Elvis' films

Had to run an errands, and took the opportunity to see whether a bit of my running route is navigable in trainers. I think it is

This bit is close to where Constable did his painting

Well done Keir Starmer

“I will never forget their courage, their bravery and the sacrifice that they made for their country. There are many also who were injured, some with life-changing injuries”

“I consider President Trump’s remarks to be insulting and frankly appalling, and I’m not surprised they caused such hurt to the loved ones of those who were killed or injured”

Starmer rebukes Trump over ‘frankly appalling’ remarks on Nato troops in Afghanistan

Lord Byron was allegedly mad, bad and dangerous to know

DJT sometimes seems a little mad, often bad, and just plain dangerous

Retirement project #7 - A pint in every pub in Salisbury, although not necessarily in one day

• Anchor & Hope
• The Avon Brewery
• The Bell and Crown Inn
• The Bishops Mill
• The Bridge Tap
• Caboose
• The Castle Inn
• The Chapter House
• The Coach & Horses
• The other Coach and Horses
• Dark Revs
• Deacons
• The Devizes Inn
• The Duck
• The Dust Hole
• The Duke of York
• The Five Bells
• The George & Dragon
• The Greyfisher
• The Halfway House
• The Haunch of Venison
• Hettie Bells
• The Huntsman’s Tavern
• The King’s Head Inn (Wetherspoon)
• The Market Tavern
• The New Inn
• The Old Ale & Coffee House
• The Old Mill
• The Ox Row Inn
• The Pheasant Inn
• The Rai d’Or
• The Red Lion Hotel
• The Rose and Crown
• The Royal Oak
• The Salisbury Arms
• The Victoria Inn
• The Village Freehouse
• The Wig and Quill
• The Winchester Gate
• The Wyndham Arms
• The one that’s opening where the old Cadena was

I’m not sure whether to include the Rugby Club or the Conservative Club

Chelsea FC and GD Gafanha Basquetebol are playing at the same time tonight. Kid #2 is playing for Gafanha. It’s going to be a severe test of my multi-tasking capability

“Like a 1970s rust-belt serial killer, Nigel Farage is painstakingly assembling around him the political corpses of Boris Johnson’s final, terrible cabinet”

Marina Hyde - not just good at podcasts

Mystic Nigel has seen the future: a country run by his cabinet of taxidermied Tories - Marina Hyde

I ♥️ the NHS…..but I like to have as little to do with it as possible.

I’m watching the Traitors and they keep referring to ‘Traitorous’ behaviour. This sets my teeth on edge a little bit because I’d normally say ‘treacherous’.

However I think ‘traitorous’ is actually better because it emphasizes the behaviour relates to a role in the game rather than something personal.

Still sets my teeth on edge though.

Watching: The Traitors Season 4 🍿

• I enjoyed it. I wouldn’t have got through 3 seasons otherwise

• it was very grim, in various ways

• I read the books, probably at the time they came out in paperback. The time elapsed since then seems to me to be just right to watch a TV adaptation….given my increasingly rubbish memory

• it turns out that I can do horror films….as long as I’m watching on a 5" tablet

• perhaps I could have a go at Stranger Things

• King’s protagonists are typically middle-class white guys about the same age as he is. Consequently, they’ve aged as he has, and as I lave. Like Bill Hodges we must now both be Grumpy Old Men

• I shall miss Holly Gibney and Bill Hodges

• I think the only thing I’ve seen Brendan Gleeson in before was Harry Potter. He is on my a-bit-rubbish-in-Harry-Potter list (along with Snape, Hagrid and both Dumbledores)…but he was great in this

• Morris and Alba are wonderfully scuzzy villains

• the bits inside Brady’s head were well done. The show would have struggled had they not been

• there seemed to be a few loose ends. Did the young bloke go back to Harvard? Did the other young bloke get prosecuted? What happened to Hodge’s relationship with his ex-wife? But I quite like loose ends. As Rabbi Lionel Blue used to say….it’s a bit like life.

• it was nice to hear the Cramps on the soundtrack

Watched: Mr. Mercedes Season 1 🍿

I think I might start copying Donald Trump by signing off my posts with “thank you for your attention in this matter”.

Thank you for your attention in this matter.

It’s very dark in the Shire this morning. I’m starting to think that winter solstice is a scam

Rosenior then unleashed a tactical decision of such breathtaking lunacy that nearby pigeons briefly stopped to reassess their life choices. He removed Garnacho for Andrey Santos in a move apparently designed to test whether football could still function without logic. It smacked of trying to hold on to our one goal advantage. A very risky strategy indeed! The effect was instant and almost apocalyptic. Brentford attacked with the fury of a thousand suns in pursuit of an equaliser they were destined to score in every other dimension.

I don’t know who Dave M is, but I do enjoy his match reports

Dave’s Ramblings – Brentford

“Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich” was a question just now on The Chase.

It’s “a notorious, complex tax avoidance strategy used by multinationals (like Apple, Google, Facebook, and Starbucks, according to sources like FreshBooks and the Guardian)”

The road in the background is called Endless Street. On a foggy day like today it’s a good name for it

Watched: Two Distant Strangers 🍿

Unsettling very short Groundhog Day style film about racism and police brutality. Also features a nifty dog treat dispenser.

From Radar Trends to Watch: January 2026 – O’Reilly :

• Trains were canceled after an AI-edited image of a bridge collapse was posted on social media. - Trains cancelled over fake bridge collapse image - BBC News

• Virtual kidnapping is a thing. Nobody is kidnapped, but doctored images from social media are used to “prove” that a person is in captivity. - FBI warns of virtual kidnapping scams using altered social media photos

• There’s an easy way to jailbreak LLMs. Write poetry. Writing a prompt as poetry seems to evade the defenses of most language models. - Adversarial Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models

You know you’re in a post-lunch slump when it takes you a couple of minutes to realise that you’ve done:

convertto-json

…..when you should’ve done

convertfrom-json

According to The Rest is Entertainment, Amazon have paid $40 million for a documentary about Melania Trump.

It must be a great show.

youtu.be/xWYzm8_yh…

Watching Kid #2’s first game in 18 months. Very stressed 🏀

The new Christy Moore doc is available worldwide: Cartlann Christy Moore | Player | Irish Television Channel, Súil Eile