In a week of controversy, I hesitate to post this in case it sparks a pineapple-on-pizza level of division and rancour.
Chilli is better with broccoli in it
Happy 'Boys from the County Hell's day to all those celebrating it today
On the first day of March it was raining
It was raining worse than anything that I have ever seen
I drank ten pints of beer and I cursed all the people there
I wish that all this rain would stop falling down on me
And it’s lend me ten pounds, I’ll buy you a drink
And mother wake me early in the morning
The Pogues (or possibly Pogue Mahone when this originally came out, I don’t remember) - The Boys from the County Hell
I’ve got a rail trip coming up, and I can’t decide who to take along with me
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Wifedom by Anna Funder
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Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers
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Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
They’ll be coming along in audio book form….I can’t afford two train tickets.
Pet hate: the phrase ‘pension pot’
#TodayILearned that 'Bouncing Babies' by the Teardrop Explodes has been streamed 516,716 times, but 'I can't get Bouncing Babies by the Teardrop Explodes' by The Freshies has only been streamed 24,393 times
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/139254/2025/16772316772303-3.jpg" width=“300” height=“300” alt=“A vinyl record label featuring the text “bouncing babies” and “The Teardrop Explodes” with a yellow triangle design.">
#TodayILearned that in VS Code there is a command called “View: Toggle Locked Scrolling Across Editors” which sync’s the scrolling between two windows (or are they called panes). Anyway it’s v handy for comparing two chunks of code #VsCode
I finished Ghosts over the weekend. Lovely show. I was simultaneously touched and slightly disappointed at the ending.
I’ll probably give it a couple of years and then watch the American version
Best performance this year but not quite good enough
Rashford looks good
⚽ #AvlChe
I tried out the instance of Deepseek that’s being hosted by Nvidia
It’s still reluctant to answer questions about Tiananmen Square
Unshortening a shortened URL with powershell....as of February 2025 anyway
There are a bunch of pages on the internet giving code to expand shortened URLs, but none of the ones I tried seem to work.
I suspect this might be because it’s changed over time….but this seems to work…atm!
((Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing –Uri 'https://bit.ly/3D0xStd').baseresponse).RequestMessage.RequestUri.AbsoluteUri
Correctly gives:
https://newsthump.com/2025/02/16/master-negotiator-donald-trump-to-end-ukraine-war-by-simply-giving-russia-everything-it-wants/
David Hepworth in this week’s Radio Times
What makes 2025 a unique year is what won’t be happening. Nobody is currently making or even planning a James Bond film. It’s said the rights holders can’t agree on the gender, let alone the identity of the next actor to play 007. But the reason nobody is in a rush to regale cinema-goers with a further tale of how the fate of poor suffering humanity is in the hands of a sinister cadre of power-crazed tyrants flipping a coin to see who gets Mars, is this: it’s all come true and we all know it.
I’m looking forward to listening to this
Alan and Ray are the comedy writing partnership who created Hancock’s Half Hour and Steptoe and Son
You have to be very old, very British and very nerd-y to have known that. Guilty as charged, your honour.
On a lighter note, some poor soul has watched all 40 of the lowest-ranked films on Rotten Tomatoes
Splat’s entertainment: I watched Rotten Tomatoes’ 40 lowest-rated films to find out which was worst
Nazi photo of Salisbury Cathedral
I found this on archive.org.
It gives me the chills. It’s an unusual view of the Cathedral, which sets up a certain dissonance, but more significantly it was part of a pack created for the Nazi invasion of the UK.
I wonder who took it, and when.
I think the house in the foreground is Rangers House. It’s on one of my running routes
A new entry for The Meaning of Liff, IT Workers Edition
Fugglestone. Noun
The state of mind when your old password is still locked in your muscle memory, and one half of your brain realises the old one won’t work any more but the other half doesn’t yet realize that it’s got to remember the new one
#TodayILearned that Rose Madder isn’t just the name of a Stephen King book
Wikipedia says that
Rose madder (also known as madder) is a red paint made from the pigment madder lake, a traditional lake pigment extracted from the common madder plant Rubia tinctorum
If I had a pound for every time I had to look up how to do Ctrl-Alt-Del on a remote machine I’d be slightly more wealthy
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/139254/2025/img-20250211-1140462.jpg" width=“347” height=“600” alt=“The image features the words “Ctrl - Alt - End” written in a stylized, possibly hand-painted font.">
“I’ve been waiting for the collapse of capitalism my entire life. Now it’s here, I’m not sure I like it
AJP Taylor in the early 1970s, quoted by Will Hodgkinson…in between discussing the New Seekers, Slade etc
I’m trying to learn how to do cryptic crosswords….largely through the medium of cheating extensively.
I’d recommend these websites
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The Guardians Quick Cryptics - tells you which letters are correct
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Fifteensquared - answers, and equally importantly, explanations
Come back VAR….all is forgiven
⚽ #MunLei