Marvellous news. ‘The job of a lifetime’: Line of Duty to return for seventh season
England and Scotland….both got ex-Chelsea guys as managers. Both top of their groups. Just saying.
⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc
I thought Riot Women was great. There was a lot going on, but as Rabbi Lionel Blue used to say…isn’t that a bit like life?
Watched: Riot Women Season 1 🍿
It’s very Beckham-esque the way that Rashford only needs half a yard to whip a cross over
It is, clearly, coming home. ⚽
Some nice quotes in the Cramps article in Vintage Rock magazine this month
“There’s a million sides to Ivy and I just love all of them,” cooed Lux.
And Ivy wrote this in the notes for Lux’s funeral - Lux was"creature from another world, with one foot already out of this dimension,”
AI just described the image on my last post as a “child-like drawing”
I mean….it is very child-like, in fact most children over the age of 3 could do an awful lot better, but AI is normally so polite ! 😡😡
Scored my first own goal for a few weeks.
I can’t think of another sport where own goals are a feature. Players of basketball, cricket, rugby, golf, netball, baseball and ice hockey will never have quite that feeling.
I’m getting attached photos through from Bluesky in my micro.blog feed now :)
(You can’t see too many photos of the Chelsea ’60s/’70s team)
Thoughts on Don’t Look Now at Salisbury Playhouse
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it’s very tense and very dark
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it’s well worth seeing
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you can’t quite get the “drowning in beauty” in Venice thing in the theatre
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I’d be interested to see the film
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I’ve been to Fowey, it was very sunny and cheerful. I can’t imagine the gothic and gloomy Daphne du Maurier living there
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….perhaps I need to go in the off-season
Thoughts on going to a silent disco in Salisbury Cathedral
- the Big Church is a surprisingly good venue for a silent disco
- after a few minutes it didn’t seem particularly weird to be dancing and drinking amongst the tombs of Bishops
- it did, though, cross my mind that it was odd to be wandering around on my way to the loo, mildly sozzled, within a few yards of the Magna Carta
- this probably reflects my low-church agnosticism, and reverence for all things lefty
- the privacy of the headphones has a disinhibiting effect. It does have a dance-like-nobody’s-watching feel
- I’m #TeamGreenChannel (pop), rather than Blue (rock and indie) or Red (‘urban’), apart from the reggae
- but it was great being able to switch when there was a boring song
- it was fun being able to watch people doing the Macarena, while listening to something else
- although I do actually love the Macarena
- it’s not at all silent
- part of the fun was listening to people singing along
- especially on the big anthem-y songs. Hundreds of people singing along to Oasis, unaccompanied, was fab
I didn’t get round to getting a poppy this year so I chipped in a few quid here
Pic is Klatschmohn by Christian Rohlfs from Wikimedia
BBC ‘100% fake news’, says Donald Trump’s press secretary
Explains why they keep telling me that the Arsenal are at the top of the table ⚽
I looked up Dead Christ in the Tomb, and I’m entirely with Anna
In 1867 the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky and his second wife. Anna, honeymooned in Basel. There, in the city’s Kunstmuseum, the newlyweds saw a painting that made a big impression on them both. Anna, who was pregnant, could hardly bear to look at it. But Fyodor was so transfixed that his wife, observing that “his agitated face had a kind of dread in it”, eventually led him away.
The painting that had such a “crushing impact” on Dostoevsky (who went on to write about it in his novel The Idiot) was Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ in the Tomb a lifesize depiction of Christ’s battered
By Katherine Harvey in last Saturday’s Times
🚌 #TodayILearned that Ctrl-Shift-G, G (the ctrl and shift and G keys all together, then G on its own) lands you in the Commit message box in VS Code
Tend to agree
What makes these unit tests so bad ? Two things: 1) LLMs write way too many unit tests and 2) the tests are extremely frequently just verifying what the code does, not validating what the code should do.
John Cleese on the telly just now said that another prominent actress, who had been starring in an Ayckbourn play, was offered the role of Sybil but turned it down because she didn’t think it was funny. I wonder who it was?
[When he settled in London, Voltaire’s] only major problem seems to have been getting used to the local sense of humour. Instead of being subtly witty, Londoners talked surreal nonsense.
Plus ça change!
Currently reading: 1000 Years of Annoying the French by Stephen Clarke 📚
Podcast episodes I enjoyed this month - The Tower of London, Trevor Noah, accents, Paul McCartney, Harry Worth, Mother Shipton, Hitler, Bush vs. Broccoli, Spotify, Steve Rosenburg, Steve Coogan, Shane MacGowan, Karl Marx, Glen Matlock, Apollo13, Hun
These are the podcast episodes that I particularly enjoyed last month.
Episodes I’ve enjoyed previously are on the podcast pages for this year, for 2024, 2023, and for 2022 | mattypenny
Dan Snow’s History Hit - The Tower of London - the three lions of the the England shirt are probably based on three leopards that were in tthe Tower. Also….it does seem like the Krays might have been the last people imprisoned in the Tower, before they were (in)famous
The Louis Theroux Podcast: S3 EP3: Trevor Noah on growing up during Apartheid, landing ‘The Daily Show’, and being friends with Bill Gates - Trevor Noah speaks highly of the 1970s UK comedy ‘Mind Your Language’
Little Atoms 873 - Rob Drummond’s You’re All Talk - there is very little regionality to Australian-English accents, probably because English is relatively recent there, and had little time to develop before the spread of TV and radio. My accent is unusual in English-English because of its ‘roticity’ - I pronounce the ‘r’s in arm and car
McCartney: A Life in Lyrics Too Many People - McCartney says that there was some discussion of the band carrying on as the Three-tles immediately after Lennon left. I think i remember they referred to themselves as the Three-tles at the time of the Anthology series
How tickled am I? - Harry Worth - Harry was advised to ditch his ventriloquist act and concentrate on stand-up by Laurel and Hardy
After dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Mother Shipton: Tudor Prophetess of England’s Doom - Mother Shipton is like a Yorkshire Nostradamus, although the history is sketchy. The first written record of her existence is from 100 years after her death
Did Michael Keogh Save Hitler? - it seems that he did…. although one of the contributors says that an Irishman wouldn’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. In any case he had an interesting life
George H.W. Bush and broccoli: The president’s war against a vegetable. - George Bush Senior didn’t like broccoli. He said that it probably killed the dinosaurs.
A Very Australian Scandal - Sir Eugene Goosens was the inspiration behind the Sydney Opera House but he was forced to leave Australia after a scandal involving importing pornography and occult material. The architect of the building, Jørn Utzon, didn’t attend the opening ceremony as he had fallen out with the politicians involved. BBC reporter Trevor Philpott said “It was a score of towering shells. It was a cluster of seagulls spreading concrete wings. It was a huddle of sailing boats with billowing concrete sails. And it was an unmitigated bitch to build.”
The rest is entertainment - Do actors really lose the weight and are you paid for playing dead? - to earn the UK minimum wage from Spotify you need to have 567,000 monthly streams. The closest to that figure that the podcast guys could find was Alison Moyet
BBC Media Show - Steve Rosenberg, Zanny Minton Beddoes, new Victoria Beckham documentary and the ethics of secret filming - BBC Russia correspondent says Russian newspapers are a lot more free to discuss problems in Russia than the TV is. Putin doesn’t really care about the newspapers
The Louis Theroux Podcast: S6 EP1: Steve Coogan on falling out of love with Alan Partridge, playing Jimmy Savile, and sobriety - the weirdness of playing Jimmy Savile was increased by Coogan having a flat in the old TV Centre, and then travelling to act on a set which was a replica of the old TV Centre
BBC How tickled am I - Norman Evans - Norman Evans earned £1,500 per week as a pantomime dame in the 1940s or 1950s…..mind you a good pantomime dame would be well worth it
A drink to Shane MacGowan, Spinal Tap rebooted and lunch with Randy Newman …Word Podcast 287 - “Pop music occasionally throws up someone of outrageous intelligence. Shane MacGowan was one of them”
Word In Your Ear - Pauline Murray’s kids have finally found out what Mum did in the Punk Wars Ep. 584 - Murray says that if you asked people to stop spitting, then the spitting typically increased. I tend to forget about the spitting of those days, and the violence
Word In Your Ear - Glen Matlock and the ‘Sliding Doors moment’ that sparked the punk rock fuse Ep. 583 - the Sex Pistols got banned from most of the venues on, I thin, the No Future tour. They still had to traipse across the country and turn up at each venue to stand any chance of getting paid
Origin Story: Karl Marx – Part One – The Fighter - In the Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote that “Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common”. He did talk rubbish, sometimes.
A Short History of ….Apollo 13 - I confess i use the Short History podcasts to get to sleep. The production is mellow, but they are all interesting enough that if i dont drift off I enjoy learning something. This episode however kept me wide awake. It was far too exciting
The Hated and the Dead - Hun Sen - Cambodia was one of the greatest victims of the Cold War [between the Soviet Union and the West] and it could be one of the greatest victims of a second Cold War [between China and the West]
Angela Barnes Cold War Secrets - Barnes interviews Anna Funder, author of ‘Stasiland’, who says that 1 in 7 East Germans was a Stasi informant
I liked Carry-On. A couple of years back I sat down to watch Die Hard with Kid #2….and we were both a bit disappointed to be honest. It wasn’t as good as I remembered it. In a way this is more like the Die Hard that I remembered than the actual Die Hard was.
Watched: Carry-On 🍿
There’s a nice bit about Brief Encounter in the Grauniad today
Brief Encounter at 80: why we’re still falling for David Lean’s 1945 romance
I didn’t know that the Kardomah cafés were a real thing Wikipedia
