Podcast episodes that I enjoyed in February - Micky Flanagan, moshing, Independence Day UK, the best single of all time, Dylan, Comic Relief, Jay-Z, Ken Dodd, Chaplin, Mengele, New Order, Flat Earth, Hattie Jacques etc
BBC - Micky Flanagan: What Chance Change? - episode 1, the 1970s - Micky Flanagan talking about class. He talks to a sociologist (I think) who says something like ‘school is an interruption to working class culture’
Decoder Ring - What’s Really Going On Inside a Mosh Pit? The etiquette, science, and enduring appeal of a concertgoing ritual - the word ‘mosh’ possibly derives from someone mishearing Bad Brains saying ‘mash it down’
BBC - Independence Day UK - this is something of a curiosity. A 1996 “audio drama ‘midquel’ of the film Independence Day”. It’s fun to listen to both for the story, and to hear the radio personalities and sounds of the time
Word in your Ear - Alexis Petridis - esteemed music critic Alexis Petridis says that Steppin' Out by Joe Jackson is the best single of all time. I can’t see it myself.
Word in Your Ear discussing ‘Pledging My Time - Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members’ with author Ray Padgett - Bob Dylan is asked why he signs autographs left-handed. Answers “if I signed right-handed they’d analyze my handwriting and find out all about me”
BBC - Whats so funny about….Comic Relief - the highest rate of donation during Comic Relief isn’t when the comedians are on, it’s when there’s a musical interlude. I guess people can more easily listen to music and donate at the same time. The highest ever rate of donation was while Adele sung Somebody Like You
‘Fresh Air’ celebrates 50 years of hip-hop: Jay-Z - I like to hear successful people crediting their school teachers, both because its good that teachers get a bit of credit, and because it implicitly recognizes the luck involved in the person’s success. The happenstance of the right person having the right teacher at the right time. Here Jay-Z recognizes the impact that his English teacher, Miss Lowden, had on his life.
Sodajerker on Songwriting - Keven Rowland - the main guy from Dexys Midnight Runners talking about songs. He says he writes down the point he’s trying to get across at the bottom of the page before he writes the words for a song.
Revisionist History Guns Part 1: The Sudden Celebrity of Sir John Knight - part of the reason that Americans have guns is because, in 1686, a guy called Sir John Knight took his gun to a church in Bristol, although he seems to have left it at the door. On the podcast they say it’s a Common Law thing.
BBC Mastertapes - Paul McCartney - McCartney says part of the attraction of relocating to Kintyre was that it made it impossible for him to get to business meetings arising from the breakup of the Beatles
How Tickled Am I? - Ken Dodd - BBC - I regret not going to see Ken Dodd. At the time of typing this show isn’t available…but hopefully it will reappear at some stage
Dan Snow’s History Hit - Charlie Chaplin - Chaplin had his first real success as a ‘drunk act’. He sat in a box in the theatre and interrupted and interacted with the performers. His biographer, Paul Duncan, compares it to the old guys, Waldorf and Statler, in the Muppets
On the trail of a Nazi war criminal - History Extra podcast - Josef Mengele was, for a time, listed under his real name in the phone book in the Argentine town in which he lived
BBC book club - Philip Pullman - Northern Lights - I’d either forgotten, or I never knew, that the title of Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy comes from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. “Unless the Almighty Maker them ordain/ His dark materials to create more worlds,”
Will Hodgkinson on 70s Singalong Pop - Word in your Ear - Middle of the Road, who had hits with Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep and Soley Soley, were for a time Sophia Loren’s backing band. The story goes that she started listening to their music after going to complain about the noise
Midnight Meets - Stephen Morris - “[Blue Monday] was great for DJ’s because it was so long they could put it on, then go to the toilet. So it worked on many levels”
Little Atoms 847 - Anna Funder’s Wifedom - interesting and persuasive suggestion that Animal Farm was, to a greater or lesser extent, a joint work by Orwell and Eileen O’Shaughnessy
Did our ancestors really think the world was flat? History Extra with James Hannam - Aristotle proved the earth was shaped like a ball, not like a disc, or any other flat thing
BBC Great Lives - Sophie Scott on Hattie Jacques - Hattie Jacques was nicknamed ‘Hattie’ either because she liked hats, or because in blackface she was supposed to resemble Hattie McDowell
Full Disclosure - Polly Toynbee - Ms Toynbee says something like “Ever since Ancient Greece people have been in love with the idea of democracy, but they have despised the people that do it”
Word in your ear - Robbie Robertson, Billy Connolly, Bridge Over Troubled Water and the “fake history” of Punk - Michael Parkinson’s last interview with Muhammad Ali didn’t go well. Parkinson’s dad was a big fan of Ali, and agreed it was a poor interview. Parkinson asks his father what he thinks he should have done differently….“you should’ve thumped him”
There’s more, much, more at
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
