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

People have sometimes confronted Stiff Little Fingers with confessions. After hearing the music of SLF, they’ve said, they became open to new thoughts. They started to question their own traditions and received bigotry. They listened to lyrics like ‘Wasted Life’ and ‘Suspect Device’ and they made a decision to step away from paramilitary organisations. Thus, some killings were avoided. Given that each murder in Northern Ireland created a multiple in terms of tit-for-tat reactions, it’s fair to suggest that scores of people in Northern Ireland owe their lives to a bunch of scratchy, shouty tunes.

Currently reading: Trouble Songs by Stuart Bailie 📚

I narrowly avoided going a-over-t walking the hound this morning. Several times.

I can feel that my back muscles have had a workout just keeping me right end up!

Liam Rosenior has been given a six and half month contract at Chelsea.

The last manager who was at Chelsea for that long was a guy called Dave Sexton.

He left in 1974

⚽ #ChelseaFC #cfc

I sometimes wonder whether, in 100 years time, Bob Dylan might mostly be remembered as the guy about whom Joan Baez wrote this song.

BBC Soul Music - Diamonds and Rust

I don’t think it’s likely, but it’s a terrific song.

I really, really hope Nizaar is right but I’ll believe it when it see it!

Rosenior is a long-term appointment for Chelsea - Nizaar Kinsella

Liam Rosenior is under contract until 2032 after signing a six-and-a-half-year deal.

The 41-year-old is seen as anything but a stopgap and is regarded as a long-term replacement for former manager Enzo Maresca, having joined from sister club Strasbourg in France.

It reflects the stability Chelsea believe they need, with long contracts not only for players but also for staff.

If I was in charge of picking the word of the year for one of the dictionary organizations, then the word for last year would have been ‘parasocial’

It’s not a new word, and I don’t particularly like it, but I seem to be hearing it every couple of days.