Interesting point in this, at least for politics nerds like myself
Famously, JFK performed better in the Presidential debates than Nixon, according to TV viewers, but less well according to radio listeners
Danny Finkelstein says that a recent study suggests that this is entirely explained by radio listeners being more rural, more conservative and more likely to vote for Nixon in the first place
It’s clearly not the main point of my friend Tom’s podcast, but #TodayILearned that ‘Kosovo’ is derived from ‘Kosovo Polje’ which means ‘the field of blackbirds’….which I quite like
The Hated and the Dead podcast: Kosovo Serbs - podtail.com/en/podcas…
Fiona Wilson for PM!
“Fictional Labour frontbencher better known than real ones, survey finds Fiona Wilson was known to 47% of respondents, with 15% feeling ‘favourable’ towards her” - www.standard.co.uk/news/poli…
Today’s newly-acquired superpower is remembering that, in vim, ‘*’ jumps you to the next occurrence of the word the cursor is on. Super useful for jumping between a function and calls to that function.
Chiming podcasts and the importance of any other business
I like it when un-related things chime.
In this instance, it’s two podcast episodes that I listened to last week
The first tells of a minutes secretary, ‘the lowest form of life’, taking minutes at a constituency Labour Party meeting. They get to Any Other Business….and the sitting MP says he’s quitting. The minutes secretary, a young Neil Kinnock, breaks his pencil lead in surprise, but goes on to become the MP, and much later, the Leader of the Labour Party
‘Neil Kinnock FULL DISCLOSURE WITH JAMES O’BRIEN’ - podtail.com/podcast/f…
The second is about a journalist, Giovanna Chirri, who is covering a Vatican committee meeting of some kind, in Latin. They get to the end of the meeting, and Pope Benedict has some AOB….he is going to abdicate. He’s the first Pope for 500 years to do so. The journalist, after checking she hasn’t misunderstood the Latin, has the world exclusive and consequently becomes something of a celebrity herself 🎙️
‘I told the world Pope Benedict XVI was resigning’ - www.bbc.co.uk/programme…
Achievemt unlocked. Wetherspoons breakfast and Toby Carvery, on the same day
If you keep believing your dreams can come true
April 2024 Micro.Blog photo challenge, Day 5: Serene
I took this a couple of weeks ago
All around is chaos and flood, but Daffodil is serenely doing his thing, blooming away
#TodayILearned that the first known use of the word ‘celebrity’ was by Geoffrey Chaucer, translating someone I didn’t catch the name of 🎙️
This isn’t perfect, in that it doesn’t cope with the ‘nd’ in ‘2nd’, bit it’s good enough
A vim mapping to insert the day and date as a header for notes, journals etc
map <Leader>m :put =strftime('%A %dth %B %Y')<cr>:s/ 0/ /<cr>kJi## <Esc>
I don’t really play vinyl any more, but the card it came in gives me a big hit of nostalgia #mbapr Micro.blog photo challenge
#TodayILearned that to comment out the currently selected text in VS Code you can do Ctrl + /
Neil Young is on Spotify.
I bought this as a CD, but the thing wouldn’t play. When I got Spotify, he had withdrawn his music, for which I certainly don’t blame him.
Anyway, it’s nice to get to hear it now.
Neil Young - Greatest Hits open.spotify.com/album/2hN…
Liz Truss and Brian Clough
I’ve always enjoyed unusual political metaphors - for a while I collected and tweeted a #BrexitMetaphorOfTheDay, possibly the only thing I enjoyed about that whole thing.
Anyway, in this article Liz Truss is compared to both Brian Clough and Jeremy Corbyn…which I think is rather good
www.theguardian.com/politics/…
The thing I find slightly tricky with non-fiction audio books is that it’s easy to lose track of headings, sub-heading and changes of direction 📖🎙️
I rather half-heartedly collect old postcards of Salisbury and Stonehenge
There are a few different cards, none of which I’ve ever bought, of the 1906 railway crash at Salisbury station, in which 28 people died
I can’t conceive of anyone selling or buying postcards of a similar disaster today, really…it seems to me very much an example of “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”
#TodayILearned that the first Beatle’s concert in the United States was at Boneyard Bocce Ball Club in Benton, Illinois.
The first Beatles concert in the US was somewhere else
Good podcast: The Hated and the Dead
The blurb says: “Kissinger said that ninety percent of politicians give the other ten percent a bad name. Each week, a guest and I discuss the life and legacy of one politician from recent times. Some are well-known, others obscure; all have left an indelible mark on our world, and often for the worse. Join me, Tom Leeman, in a journey through the corruptible and the controversial.”
I’d say: My young friend Tom interviews academics, politicians and journalists about figures from political history. It’s similar in tone to the BBC’s In Our TIme…but for me it’s more interesting
Link: The Hated and the Dead - Listen on Spotify - Linktree
‘Angertainment’ is a great, and useful, word
‘It got vile very quickly’: how Alex Jones turned a tragedy into a battleground
I don’t think I’m going to move off of pinboard, but raindrop.io looks neat
Annual-ish tweet/toot/post to say I think it’s amazing that Oxford and Cambridge have both reached the Boat Race final again
I have chips on both shoulders
Harry Houdini and the Barrel of Tetley's
#TodayILearned that, when he was in Leeds, Houdini was sponsored by Tetley’s Bitter to perform his ‘escaping from a locked milk churn full of water’ trick with the milk churn instead filled with beer
The trick depended on air being trapped in the domed lid of the churn, and in that instance the air was largely replaced with CO2 and alcohol fumes
The escape failed and Houdini was rescued by his assistant
Timewatch, 2000-2001: The Houdini Myth: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m001xqqn via @bbciplayer
Also www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/opin…
#TodayILearned that the Galway Girl in Steve Earle’s song, but not in Ed Sheeran’s song, is called Joyce Redmond, and she plays the bodhrán on the Steve Earle one 🎵
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galway_Girl_(Steve_Earle_song)