bimbotic, buxotic, bustiferous
doofi as the plural of doofus
Growing up, I always thought life as an adult would look a lot like this (assuming, of course, that one managed to dodge the ever-present dangers of amnesia and quicksand). I don't know where it all went wrong. (@fem_mb)
90s-00s-era movies taught me that mathy geniuses write problems on mirrors and windows. If you write on a mirror or window you will probably get a Nobel Prize. (@snackowska)
There’s a lot of “I love you, Dad” in American films, isn’t there? (@swansonian. Usually after Dad has bullied son throughout Acts I and II.)
People don’t speak like that. Every sentence is designed to elicit a zinger or exposition point in response. the editing is frenetic. Intercutting from different locations, colour/black and white, mad angles that make no sense. The whole film is a montage. V/o ‘You’re being followed by the FBI’. <Shows him being followed by the FBI.> V/o ‘people are going through your trash!’ <Shows people going through his trash.> Manic cutting between different timelines and B&W is not clever and sophisticated. It’s incomprehensible and stupid. And pointless. (Adam Rutherford on Oppenheimer. He adds that the post-bomb scene goes on too long, and there are too many characters who look alike. On Feynman playing the bongos: “It’s not cute, you’re an annoying jerk.”)
People used to bully me to watch The Apprentice. “You’d love the clever editing!” I hate "clever" editing. Plus I hear that we see what is passing through Oppenheimer’s mind. I hate that too.
Don’t ever mention Great Falls, Idaho – not even in your sleep! (Smooth as Silk, 1946. About two sisters trying to make it in New York.)
It's the worst thing ever when you open a script and read the words 'strong female lead'. That makes me roll my eyes. I’m already out. I’m bored. Those roles are written as incredibly stoic, you spend the whole time acting tough and saying tough things. (Emily Blunt quoted in the Daily Telegraph)
Why do the plots of cash-in Hollywood prequels to children's literary classics always involve a messianic prophecy? (@AlexPaknadel)
Vanilla Sky director Cameron Crowe has complained that his ending wasn’t vague enough. (Heraldweekly.com. There was a similar vogue for incomprehensible endings in the 60s. I used to try and work it out, only to be told sneeringly: You’re not supposed to know what it means. Or which bit is a dream sequence.)
One of the dancers in Weird Al's "Fat" music video was a guy who was simply delivering pizza to the studio. (@MondongoFacts. And others on this template.)
Suckered into watching another Stephen Poliakoff. It’s like they have a York Notes commentary track switched on. (@Grindrod)
Most Netflix shows have a gay scene. Also, when portraying families, they portray the man as dumb and needing help while the woman is the clever one who saves the situation. (@dan_geezy)
Cape wearing TV demons and their interminable plotting and scheming in obviously styrofoam underground lairs. (@misfitpoise)
Everything they wear is always so damn dark. Historical dramas portray everyone in the past dressing like they’re bikers. Contemporary art always shows a multitude of colorful clothing, even the lower classes had colorful clothing. (@ForestandFlame, 2020)
History films:
1. WW2 German officials are ALWAYS in an impatient bad mood
2. Victorian Men between 50-70 disapprove of EVERYTHING
3. Victorian women between 50-70 have a permanent cold and are always in a dithering panic
4. In WWI the only instrument was an echoey slow piano
(@ChrisFarrelly)
I told a friend I was compiling a list of drama cliches and he said, “I want your report on my desk in the morning”. His office was empty when I got there but I noticed a framed picture of him standing by a yacht with the boat's name plainly visible, so now I have access to all his computer files. (@brooligan)
Following this conversation, no doubt you both got up from your table in the restaurant, leaving your meal barely touched and having thrown a few random dollar bills on the table. (@PuckstownLane)
Back in the office, a feisty woman storms into your meeting, followed by a bleating secretary: "I tried to stop her Mr Smith really..." "Never mind, Miss Jones, shut the door when you go out." CUT to Miss Jones listening with her ear pressed to the intercom. (@richmondie)
The worst parodies are where people have never watched/read the thing they are parodying and everything they know about it is from other parodies. (@americanwombat)
About once a year I seem to read an article about how horror films are "no longer about naked girls being chased through woods by a man with a knife" while struggling to think of a single commercially or critically successful horror film from the last 30 years with that set-up. (@SSheil)
Even the other German agents do not know the true identity of the chief. They know he is part of the network, but he claims to be "taking orders" from the chief. He, of course, is actually the chief. (Imdb on British Intelligence, 1941)
I am watching the worst programme in the world ever… it’s called Harrow it’s on Disney+ and it’s tragically bad. It’s about an edgy pathologist who has family issues and doesn’t play by the rules... it features every cliche with added Aussie whimsy! It’s magnificent. (@MatofKilburnia)
May I wearily point out that there were other women in history besides queens and consorts, because I’ve lost count of the recent historical dramas about sad-but-defiant-royal-women-whose-husbands-are-jerks. (@greg_jenner)
Remember in old movies where a newspaper editor would say "We got pictures of the senator having cocktails with a showgirl in a nightclub. He's through!"? (B.A.Richardson)
Look, these are the rules. When elves are on screen, wafting ethereally about, you have soaring, beautiful voices or perhaps strings. When it’s hobbits gambolling through their settlements... then it’s a tin whistle, or maybe a fiddle. When it’s dwarves, hefting axes inside a hollowed-out mountain, you get lusty Wagnerian singing, ideally in German. Which is odd, because these dwarves are Scottish... The elves sound incredibly, preposterously English, like Lord Haw-Haw or Jacob Rees-Mogg... It’s just so damn reverent. Not just the elves, because they can’t help it, but everything. Nobody is sexy. When it isn’t aweing you with celestial lights and a thousand people singing “ahhhh”, the threat of twee hangs extremely heavy. No humour is risked except for the unthreatening and frankly excruciating pseudo-humour of dwarves being peeved. Hugo Rifkind, The Times Sept 2022 (And Lenny Henry, as a hobbit, is Irish... I wasn’t the only one who asked why the various groups weren’t given American regional accents.)
“What are you doing here?”
“Why wouldn’t I be here?”
“Isn’t this your day off?”
“Didn’t you get my text?”
(@DavidFMVaughn)
American audiences won't watch a movie about racism unless the racists are in some way redeemed in the end, no matter how silly or contrived. (@mekkaokereke)
Though some UK actors do good American accents, UK TV often uses broad Southern and Southwestern American regional accents for dumb or villainous Americans, New York accents for smart Americans, and Western Canadian accents for sympathetic Americans (often real Canadians.) (@IanThal)
My favorite kind of movie is where some English person gets all upset and goes "I really MUST protest!" (@stonedhouse4)
Watched Smokey and the Bandit last night. Those late 70s/early 80s US road movie comedies were absolutely massive, but now seem largely forgotten. See also: Convoy, Every Which Way but Loose, The Cannonball Run. Any more? Ingredients: Trucks, country music, flared denim, comedy pets on the passenger seat, more trucks, bar fights, Deep South sheriffs saying "sonofabitch", nudie suits, more trucks, more country music, "Breaker breaker, got ourselves a..." etc, cars flying into ravines. More trucks. (@Bob_Fischer)
Not one but TWO remakes of the original Wizard of Oz in the making - one a "modern reimagining", the other one a "fresh take". (@EduardHabsburg)
More here, and links to the rest.
I have just finished Lonelyheart 4122, my first Colin Watson mystery featuring Miss Teatime (written in 1967). Watson's "Flaxborough Chronicles" span the 70s. "Four of the books were adapted for television in 1977, and starred Anton Rodgers as Detective Inspector Purbright and Christopher Timothy as his Detective Sergeant, Sydney Love," says Wikipedia. (Brenda Bruce, pictured, played Miss Teatime.)
The premise is interesting. Miss Lucilla Teatime (an elegant lady in her 50s) finds that London is getting too hot for her, reasons unspecified. She picks on Flaxborough, a fictional town in Lincolnshire, as a sphere of operations, and books a room in the best hotel. Meanwhile, two local ladies have gone missing after joining an introduction agency.
As the detectives investigate the agency, Miss Teatime signs up. It is clear as soon as she meets the overpoweringly naval "Commander Jack Trelawney" that the impression of riches she gave the agency was the attraction.
The writing is good, and at times even poetic. Watson keeps a sharp lookout for class markers. The detectives peer into the house abandoned by one of the missing women, and see:
A stair-post, shiny brown lino, an oak hall stand – all neat, clean and rather depressing... cold, bulgy leather suite... a kitchen, that looked designed for the preparation of tinned salmon sandwiches and bedtime Horlicks and nothing else.
Sargeant Love is hauled away from his high tea:
A feast of buttered haddock, wholemeal scones, tinned oranges, Carnation milk and Eccles cakes.
At the dénouement, Miss T is ushered into this interior:
They entered a long, low-beamed room, thickly carpeted in blue, with yellow cushioned light wood furniture, an enormous television set and, in the three deep window recesses, earthenware bowls of cactus and succulents. The walls were of pale grey rough cast plaster. On that facing the windows hung a Gauguin reproduction.
The owners could afford to do up their thatched cottage, but chose a rather downmarket, Sunday Supplement style.
On the final page, the publishers explain:
It’s easy to guess why Colin Watson’s novels have been overlooked in recent decades – they’re 20th century police procedurals of a gentler pace than is fashionable today. It is just as easy to pinpoint now what makes them timeless. They are each and every one a genuine mystery; beautifully written; and full of wry, satirical but ultimately kind-hearted humour.
By "gentler pace" they mean "slower pace". But, as my examples show, this book at least is hardly "timeless". It is set firmly in a time and a place. Published in 1967, it must have been written in 1966, just before weekend hippies in headbands and Oxford Street beads invaded even backwaters like Flaxborough.
Lonelyheart 4122 is an enjoyable read, and we get Miss Teatime's joke very quickly: despite her respectable and attractive exterior, she is a hard-drinking, cheroot-smoking babe with a line in scatological humour. And it wears thin.
By "wry and satirical" the publishers probably mean "Watson takes the mickey out of the romantic platitudes peddled by matrimonial agencies" – this is one of the best bits. Plus, of course the digs at the tastes of the classes who are not quite quite. But the publishers don't want to put readers off, so they insist that the satire is "ultimately kind-hearted". It didn't come across that way to me. I was "ultimately" put off by the occasional repulsive details, and Miss T's unfunny references to bodily functions. Censorship was abolished in the UK in 1968, and there was a general feeling of "Whoopee! We can be rude now!" "Pee, po, belly, bum, drawers," as the Flanders and Swann song put it.
More on mysteries here, and links to the rest.
2. Do not broaden your male central character by making him like post-1950 jazz.
3. Gawd blimey oh Reilly, guv, nobody shall talk in dialect, begorrah.
4. Give your detective a very dull, mainstream car.
5. Your single central character's orphaned, rebellious nephew/niece can be packed off to boarding school.
6. Your central character is a bit of a computer whiz, instead of leaving this stuff to a 20+ ex-Borstal boy or girl. Take the opportunity to educate your audience about saving their files in a folder on their hard disk and thence in the Cloud. "Still keeping 30 tabs open instead of using bookmarks, Sarge?"
7. Substitute a row of asterisks for sex scenes. *****
8. Never let your central character quote poetry to themselves. ("Those words of Keats came into her mind...")
9. Be as snobbish as you like about food and interior decor – the info will prove invaluable to future historians.
10. Whatever you do, don't try to be "timeless": be as specific as possible about this years's clothes, debates, psychological theories and intellectual fads. They'll prove invaluable to future comedians.
(I'd junk the interior monologue and tragic back stories, too. Your hero can claim he's too shallow to be depressed. Adopt the "I am a camera" mode of narration. Any autistic character must not be diagnosed with, and then cured of, PTSD. Plots must not be powered by historic witchcraft persecutions. Nobody "grows" or learns lessons. The book isn't an excuse to display your knowledge of Lebanese cuisine or Icelandic poetry. But I'd like a complicated booby trap as the murder weapon.)
Here are Knox's rules from the 1920s:
The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
No Chinaman must figure in the story.
No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The detective must not himself commit the crime.
The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
Some words assume a phenomenon is bad. We can’t possibly give up cattle farming. Why? Because if we did the land would be covered in SCRUB (pictured). If you call it “native woodland” the argument isn’t nearly so compelling. Why must we pull down these Victorian terraces? Because they are SLUMS, not because they’re standing in the way of a lucrative development.
Likewise people gorge junk food and guzzle gas, and consume mediocre mass culture. These words are the opposite of neutral – they are all loaded.
Or you call their argument a "bizarre fixation". "Obsession" is also a giveaway.
You dub your opponents "zealots".
And if you use the word "disgusting", you've lost my sympathy – and possibly the argument.
No True Scotsman
"No Scotsman will be seen in public without a kilt!"
"I've often seen Scottish men wearing trousers."
"No TRUE Scotsman will be seen in public without a kilt!'
No true artist would ask for payment. The satisfaction of creating the art itself is payment enough.
Real journalists are agents of people, not power. (John Pilger, paraphrase)
"Real women are incapable of violence" is 100% patriarchy y'all. (@AmyDentata)
Real men lead women to Christ not their bedrooms.
You only find true freedom in the Catholic church because true freedom is freedom from doubt. (The Jesuits)
A says “avocados cure cancer – but big pharma won’t let it be published!”. B patiently explains scientific method and points out that the promising (no more) avocado results have been published. C says: "But if I or a loved one was dying I’d try 'unicorn’s milk or dragon’s brains'."
Consolation prize? It’s a Wonderful Life – American dream goes bust – Jimmy Stewart works hard all his life and doesn't make it – oh but look how he’s improved other’s lives – just a bit. Pundit say: "That's what we meant all along!"
“Jesus wasn’t single, the church is his bride” is one of the most contrived takes I’ve heard in a while. I shouldn’t be surprised, but here we are. (@thomaslhorrocks)
Be yourself – I mean "Discard early indoctrination, unhelpful behaviour patterns you've been taught. They aren't YOU."
You've never had a partner, so you get sent to a psychotherapist. After a few years, the therapist lets fall that the process is intended to produce "an integrated personality", and presumably they'd apply the same method whatever the "presenting problem", which is never the real problem, of course. Isn't this rather dishonest?
nuance II: I am going to use this word with several different meanings, but I'm not going to tell you which, and will swap retrospectively if the going gets tough.
nuance III: A call for more “nuance” may be like the astrology apologist’s last-ditch defence: “Won’t you even admit there might be something in it?” Does it even mean that two contradictory statements can co-exist? Or does it mean “so generalised as to be undisprovable”?
nuance IV: I am just going to restate the proposition you don’t agree with in a kinder, gentler way.
nuanced, subtle: indirect, oblique, nonverbal, euphemistic, subtextual, deep, carefully hidden (Or perhaps “sees both sides, foresees knock-on effects, aware of pros and cons”. Or "You may feel differently when you hear about my feelings and back story.")
nuanced, subtle II: fudged, deliberately ambiguous, obfuscation, misdirection, dogwhistle, subtext, hints, leaves the door open for a quick retreat. Could be taken either way (so I can’t lose). Statements that can be neither falsified nor confirmed (so we can carry on waffling until the cows come home, or the end of time, whichever is sooner). I daren’t come right out and say it because it’s probably illegal, or I might be attacked. Deniable in case the argument doesn’t go my way. Ultimately, “nuanced” means “slippery as a blob of mercury”. Or even “snide”.
Update, 2021: “Nuanced” is being used to mean “but this cloud has a silver lining”. Perhaps they just mean “contradictory”, or even “paradoxical”.
Archbishop Wake in 1718, when speaking of the 39 Articles, wrote: We have left every one to interpret them in his own sense; and they are indeed so generally framed, that they may, without an equivocation, have more senses than one fairly put upon them. (@RyanNDanker)
More tips on what to say when losing the argument here.
All this and much much more in my book on euphemisms and their opposite, Boo & Hooray.
Do all modern architects go to 'whaling shed' school? (NJ, pictured)
The marionettes are weary and starting to snip their strings. (Eliza Mondegreen)
They have the same lies that they repeat as if on shuffle. (@scepticalPhil)
Absolutely nothing has changed in Ireland except the curtains. (@faintlyfalling)
Some bearers of bad news insert footholds and guardrails. (Eliza Mondegreen)
I am not your addle-pated great-aunt from East Nowhere! (Jessica Fletcher)
Global Britain has become Globule Britain. (@PercyBlakeney63)
What's "neo-intellectual", and what exactly is wrong with it? (@DaRealWulfshady)
People with a PhD in meaningless word salad and histrionics. (@thotcrimimale)
There’s a faint downwelling light. (Monkey Cage on the deep ocean.)
The press looked down on pop and up at rock. Mike Batt
Crime Horror Sci-fi. Nearly all the food groups. (Zoë @Z303)
Looking for an ego gap in a crowded online marketplace. (Jo Bartosch)
Onwards and upwards, or even sideways. (James Braxton)
Edward Leigh MP, whose political ideas were formed in the late Pleistocene... (Brynley Heaven)
In such a short time the city went from iconic London to Bladerunner. (Clinton Harris)
Without a shimmer of a shadow of doubt. (Judge Charles Falconer)
Actor Alfred Burke’s early career consisted of playing “third bandit from the right”. (TV Times)
Flat-earth nonsense from people whose heads seem to button up at the back. (@JamesUnfettered)
I think the bulb's gone in the Enlightenment. (@mcdonnelljp)
I’m not sure why you think sub-par jokes get your porous point across better. (Via Twitter)
Without wishing to come across as Joan of Snark... (Guardian)
The gumbo of influences that shaped the Crescent City. (Aerial America)
The Ministry of Fuel and Power, known to all as the Ministry of Fools in Power. (LW)
He’s so dense that light bends round him. (Malcolm Tucker, The Thick of It)
It's flat, nasal, horrible and unmelodic, and if that's what the kids like nowadays they have ears made from jute. (@fliceverett)
This is farewell. This is the dot at the end of the sentence. (Siegfried and Roy’s manager, Bernie Yumans, when the duo retired)
The feminism is very much, ‘I just learned about feminism on Tuesday’, but I still loved the film. (Wendy Lee on Barbie)
A nice design. On the other tentacle, I've always admired those old UFOs designed by the aliens to look like 1950s lamp-shades. (Michael Frederick Green)
When you miss the exit for pseudoscience and are well on your way to conspiracy land. (@jonathanstea)
Deploying hifalutin and wildly dishonest language to cover for ideas that wouldn't pass Argumentation and Persuasion 101. (@elizamondegreen)
I’m not telling anyone how to live their life here, but if I failed this badly at writing a sentence then I’d probably give up words altogether and start communicating exclusively via handbells and eyebrow movements. (@TakeThatDarwin)
The creationist-to-actual-Nazi pipeline is about half a foot long and has both a moving walkway and helpful signage posted every two inches. (@TakeThatDarwin)
I have enough trouble with Latin without you adding even more noodles to the soup, young man! (@JaneJago1)
The state school I went to was very left wing and didn't like competition of any kind, or the idea of teaching children beyond the three things you can do with mud today.
I may have tipped too pretentious on this one and fallen off the Cliff of Insufferability. (@ingelramdecoucy)
Starting to notice lots of situations where humans hallucinate answers instead of just admitting that they don’t know. (@kareem_carr)
I’ve seen a lot of fusion breakthrough claims in my day. It's a long way to Tipperary yet, folks. (@jordanbpeterson)
I’m sick of this skip-to-the-end thinking. That if you disagree with one thing you agree with something else. (Doozer McDooze)
I'm only about a quarter of the way through my list of things to be cross about today. And I started early. (@latsot)
Mostly these days one just has to speed-fume. (@OpheliaBenson)
If I’m eating fried rice with onions in it I will go full needle in a haystack on that bitch and pick every single one of them out. (@mxcxsxn227)
Old-school left-wingers who cared about stuff like poor people are now relegated to the bargain rail at the back of the shop. (@Matt_H_UK)
Britain’s Next PM, the Channel 4 debate: That the UK is bound for hell in a hand-assisted vehicle, there is little doubt. All that remains is to discover which of these escapees from Pandora’s box will taxi us there; a more wretched collection of dissemblers, idiots, narcissists and people who have mistakenly taken drugs is difficult to imagine under one studio roof, but here we are. An asbestos-clad Krishnan Guru-Murthy meets the contenders before an audience drawn from across this broken isle. God actually help us. (AJC, Guardian June 2019 Ali Caterall admitted on Twitter he never expected the paragraph to go in exactly as written.)
My removal is the greatest stitch-up since the Bayeux Tapestry. (Boris Johnson)
I am not unfamiliar with the "French intellectual." To the extent that I wonder if they grow them in vats. (Allan Brewster)
Liz waters everything except the grass every day with carefully saved washing-up water. Anything that dies despite such cosseting has failed the audition and will not be in the show next year. (Roger Bridgman)
Watching Dune. It's very pretty but I have never encountered anything that takes itself quite this seriously and I've met North Korean officials. (@DmitryOpines)
There’s a kind of perverted shop-window country-house Catholicism a la Evelyn Waugh which makes more of the performance while funking the challenge posed by Christian ethics. (Jonathan Keates)
I could spot a Nazi at a hundred yards in a snowstorm, even if he was dressed in white and hiding behind a hill. (Iain Maclean, TJ's War)
Studying the Lithuanian language is like taking a walk in the Lithuanian forest. It all starts out 'Ooh look at that lovely Indo-European root!'; but before long you've been poisoned by toxic mushrooms, gored by an elk and driven mad by forest gods. (@DrFrancisYoung)
I'm not sure how you affirm an individual's "critical thinking" when they believe any old junk they find down the back of the internet that affirms their prejudices. (Heather Ann Williams)
[Anti-vaxxers] should be careful to not bump their heads on the stalactites when they return to their natural homes. (@BobKerns)
There are few things in life [more disappointing] than going to someone's house, being offered a cup of tea, saying "Oh, yes, thank you", and then being handed a cup of warm aftershave with milk in it. And having to drink it, out of politeness. (Gareth Hughes on Earl Grey Tea)
Some will feel superior for "getting it" and others will slam the book shut with a cluster of cartoon question marks above their heads. (Amazon commenter on John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig. Sounds unreadable – I mean “hallucinatory and pointillistic”.)
Fifteen years of Peppy Helpfulness – I can't fawn like that any more. (Says an exhausted shop worker.)
Fans of harmonic men's groups will get a kick out of the title tune, crooned by an unknown gaggle of gentlemen. (imdb)
Having managed to cremate my lunch, I haven't got the energy to start again, so it's takeaway delivery time. (Tiffer Gilliard)
The problem isn't that FB can't deal with it: it's that the human and algorithmic systems that *could* have been built to deal with it were, instead, implemented as an opaque thicket that profitably fails to deal with it while providing deniability. (Nigel Heffernan)
Don't get started on Matalan’s boys vs girls school uniform. Boys get almost armour-plated fabric where girls have to wear trousers with all the structural integrity of a fairy’s wing. (@SianEldridge)
It is always useful when a parent or relative knows how they want to be interred and tells you about it. Too many people don't tell anybody, and then the bereaved survivors are left to puzzle out (or fight about) whether Auntie wanted it fully hymnal or whether she would want Cousin Sherman to speak. (Brenda W. Clough)
Dehumanising rhetoric was always the tool of identitarianism; its orientation on the political spectrum is irrelevant. These people have not learnt anything from 20th C history. I fear America is about to retake that module. (@tryingattimes)
The establishment, marking their own homework. (Daniel Ribot, in the context of getting someone who doesn’t think racism is a problem to chair an inquiry into racism in the UK.)
I look for serious reforming ideas from Starmer, not just sound-bleats about levelling up or a new tomorrow. (Jonathan Keates)
More here, and links to the rest.
Characters repeatedly “flit”, “flutter” and “float”... We encounter “forbidden fruits”, “love nests”, “wreaking havoc”, “unspoken tension”, “wildly inappropriate” and “rampant promiscuity”. (Times on Capote’s Women by Lawrence Leamer)
Oneiric: a word that looks impressive in a book review in one of the quality papers. Nobody knows what it means. See also: lambent, limpid, plangent. (@AodhBC)
What I don't recommend is the ghastly decision to shoehorn into the text otiose references to her personal and family life. Insofar as they give any insight into her as a person they serve mostly to irritate. She runs up hills, mountain bikes up mountains, does spin classes at dawn, cycles everywhere, collects eight kinds of mushrooms out in the woods, has a modest cottage in Hay on Wye and is a kind of ordinary person with knobs on... Where these acknowledgments stray into description, it is usually to note character traits in which prisoners aren't taken, focuses are laser-like and people work through illnesses, which is exhausting and boring, made even more difficult by almost all these folk seeming to work for a different acronym. (David Aaronovitch)
Instead of brevity and glorious poetic imagery, we are offered cliché (“gossamer summer”, “sugary snow”). (Times review of After Sappho)
In life, there are some certainties. Tributes always flood in (they never trickle), lucre is always filthy, virtues are always extolled, rises are always meteoric, gauntlets are always run. (Victor Lewis-Smith on That’s Life)
Here’s a straightforward, largely well paced and sympathetic account of the life, marred by a slight weakness for banalities of the ‘As he waved goodbye to England, he could not have known that in five years he would be back’ type. Of Chandler, drunk, calling his wife, threatening suicide, Williams tells us: ‘It must have been awful for her.’ Really? (Sam Leith in the Spectator on a biography of Raymond Chandler. A Mysterious Something in the Light, Tom Williams)
When dancer Isadora Duncan was planning her autobiography with writer Sewell Stokes she mused: “Memoirs always have ‘a little old woman in rusty black’ in them somewhere.” In the end Stokes wrote the book for her.
Goodness, though, the clichés in this book. Not just any old clichés, but a whole glossary of posh ones. Penny Junor depicts Camilla’s world as a place where friends “get on famously”, are a “tower of strength”, “go the extra mile” and support each other “through thick and thin”. When “things go pear-shaped” and there’s “trouble on the home front”, they have “monumental rows”, “call each other every name under the sun”, and sometimes resort to “cloak and dagger antics”. These off-the-shelf expressions save a writer from having to think freshly. (Ysenda Maxtone Graham on Penny Junor’s The Duchess in the Times, 2017.)
Reading a music book that is using all the worst hyperbolic terms for noise/drone music — “teeth-rattling”, “ear piercing” – alongside such dreaded rock prose cliches as “seminal”, “sophomore”, “albeit shot through with their trademark...”. (@Andr6wMale)
More here, and links to the rest.
John Brown’s statue sits alone in the forest. (Grand Tour of Scotland’s Rivers, BBC. JB is quite clearly standing alone in the forest.)
The artwork seen in The Titanic, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the one with five prostitutes in a brothel, actually sits in New York City's Museum of Modern Art. (@jonawill15)
This sits at the heart of our investigation. (Policeman on Donal Macintyre’s Murder Files. Lies.)
The West Wing Building sits alongside Pusey House, one of the city's finest Gothic buildings. (Stands.)
There’s a paradox facing major cities in the US: office buildings are sitting empty while housing is in short supply. (Bloomberg.com. Standing or lying empty.)
He and his wife Helen didn’t change the room for six years – they even kept the Greek nudes carved out of MDF that lined their four-poster bed. Twenty years later, those two statues now sit outside the ornate shed that is a tortoise sanctuary the Ruffs built in their garden over lockdown. (Guardian 2020. The statues, pictured, are quite clearly standing beside the tortoise sanctuary. And they probably flanked the bed, ie stood on either side of it.)
Thousands of Fossils Sit Forgotten in Museum Drawers. (Lie.)
The cliffside home nestled above the beach. (ahsweetmysteryblog.wordpress.com. Houses, cottages and villages are far too often “nestled” in valleys and hollows. Surely a house on a cliff “perches”.)
Death threats don’t sit on the right side of history. (Alex Massie. Could they stand?)
The footage sat in a basement for 50 years. (Lay? Languished? Skulked?)
A great white whale sculpture now sits in the location where the remains of a prehistoric cetacean were found. (@atlasobscura. In the pic it is clearly lying – how would a whale sit?)
Stanley Spencer’s Resurrection sits above the altar at Sandham memorial chapel, Burghclere. (@ahistoryinart, hangs.)
The statue, which sits on a façade of Oriel College. (Cecil Rhodes stands.)
A massive tower block that’s been sitting derelict for years now. (Feldore McHugh. Buildings stand, but oddly they “lie” derelict.)
The gilt bronze effigy of Lady Margaret Beaufort, who died on 29 June 1509, which sits above her black marble tomb in the Lady Chapel in @wabbey. (@NathenAmin. It’s a tomb effigy. It’s lying down. )
VERBS OF MOTION
My neighborhood is a test site for self-driving cars and I hate it. It’s so creepy seeing a little flotilla of empty vehicles trundling around. (@evan_sruthan. It's usually enemy tanks that trundle.)
A doctor notes that patients are always “rushed” to hospital, and that there’s an air of haste about any media medical report. Another forum member objects to being called brave: It seems that no-one has cancer without "fighting" it, sometimes they win the battle and sometimes they finally lose the heroic struggle blah blah.
If you’re “pulled from the water” there’s not much hope for you. But if you’re “pulled from the rubble after a week” you’re probably miraculously alive.
The bones of an adult woolly mammoth that roamed the earth at least 10,000 years ago have been discovered in the shallows of a north Siberian lake. (Reuters. Mammoths always “roam”.)
During a strike of criminal barristers: So, he wants defendants and witnesses dragged to court for a hearing that will not go ahead? (@HannahQuirk1)
You may talk vaguely about driving a coach and six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of Parliament. (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol)
The thinking is that odd politics-scale-thinking where each small development is commemorated with a sanctimonious event. (TO on Hillary Clinton’s autobiography)
Part of their training is clearly about how to sugar-coat when they are challenged about their practice. (BL on practitioners of ABA, a brutal training programme for autistic children.)
Rupert Everett on being gay in Hollywood: People say: ‘Why were you so self-destructive?’ Well I might’ve been self-destructive, but I also hit a brick wall at every turn.
The British had an insidious way of undermining the authority of the Nawab, which was tenuous at best anyway, by surrounding him with men who had the same character flaws. (rumachak.wordpress.com)
The narcissist requires an unwarranted amount of admiration from others and throws temper tantrums when criticized or rejected. This includes shallow verbal insults thrown at the other person. (LLJ)
“I’m not like those girly girls, daddy!” (Writer Athena Andreadis on writers like Daphne du Maurier, Mary Renault...)
I worked in the NHS in the 1990s and it was common practice, rather than make a senior manager redundant, to move them somewhere they weren't particularly needed or wanted. (Guardian agony page)
I was suffering from the apparently common delusion that I was younger, fitter and more fertile than virtually anyone else of my age. (BW)
Everybody thinks they belong in the group ten years below them. (Katharine Whitehorn)
“Remember: Dikes are safe at present,” a bulletin from the Portland Housing Authority read on May 30, 1948. “You will be warned if necessary. You will have time to leave. Don’t get excited.” People were not warned in time and the city was flooded as the dikes fully gave way. Fifteen people died in the floods. (Gizmodo.com. When they tell you to stay put, grab everybody and get out NOW.)
Corporate culture in 80s Japan. People slept in the office, got there extra early, left extra late... whether the work justified it or not. Spending HOURS pretending to be overwhelmed with work was preferable to just... doing the work you had and going home. (@Iron_Spike)
Some people have the idea that a 'strong, feisty' woman is someone who is strong and feisty with everyone other than them, and to them, she is deferential and meek. (LW. And they put quite a lot of pressure on you to be strong and feisty with other people – “I won’t patronise you by offering to help”, “It’s about getting what you want.” Sometimes because they want to watch you bullying other people.)
You’re allowed to be strong. But not too strong. You’re allowed to be intelligent. But not too intelligent. Educated. But not too educated. Etc. (NS)
We were using “snowflake” in activist circles at university a decade ago to describe people who joined our groups for their own self-promotion and melted away when it wasn't all about them. (JBH)
She was always on the lookout for slights, never answering a question actually asked but rather responding to some implied criticism which she thought lay behind it. (Martin Edwards)
There's this episode of 30 Rock where Liz's scumbag ex becomes a minor celebrity for doing a good deed. But his basic nastiness turns people off and his Z List status fades, so he becomes idiotically desperate to claw back attention. (@dimwittedly)
They tend to become attached quickly and/or intensely, developing feelings and expectations that are not warranted by the history or context of the relationship. Since they tend to be ingratiating and submissive, people with dependent personality disorder tend to be in relationships in which they are emotionally or physically abused. (Wikipedia. And the other party may push and push your boundaries.)
Hence the phenomenon of the “Mary Child” a known classroom trope amongst parents of school-age children. A well-spoken, socially confident and “attractive” kid of well-spoken, socially confident parents. Gets chosen for things. Is advantaged, gets given advantages. (@MxBadgerNorth. In the context of who plays what in the nativity play.)
But he belonged to a class of men, I could see at a glance, who never say a rude thing to your face, and never think a kind one either before your countenance or behind your back. (The Female Detective, 1864)
One of my personal horrors is running into someone I sort of know and like in public and not understanding the signals they’re sending out that they’d like to get going now please. (@anne_theriault)
Some of the more batty policies seem like bargaining chips rather than real ideas "all right, we'll bin the nutty one we were never going to do and which would've been a disaster, what's your compromise?" (@abstex)
X seems to have a tendency toward dishonesty even in situations where there is no rational reason for it. (NYT. Why did you tell them a pack of lies when the truth would have done? Because the lies were more convincing!)
The Amalasuntha Moment: when critical mass of the elite abandon its posts/retire rather than face consequences of the actions they implemented. (Byzantine Ambassador @byzantinepower)
More here, and links to the rest.
Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher
First met when attending a lecture
Do you find, said Miss M,
That death and mayhem
Pursue you? Said Jessie, You betcha!
Miss Silver worked out where to find them,
That’s why she was sitting behind them.
It’s no problem, said Maud,
I’ve no time to be bored,
More corpses? Well, I never mind them.
Ariadne, have you met Hercule?
He’s a gent it’s not easy to fool
If a rodent he smells
He consults the grey cells
And the criminal’s plot will unspool.
When a railway left-luggage clerk
Finds a trunk that a traveller parked
Full of torsos and limbs, he
Just calls Peter Wimsey –
Not for long is the mystery dark.
A gentle voice murmuring “Oh so?”
It must be our friend Mr Moto
He’s so small and polite
But he wins every fight
Without even seeming to do so.
Reggie Fortune’s a doc and a sleuth
He goes ferreting after the truth
But with evidence lacking
He sends villains packing
In a way that is rather uncouth.
It’s well-known that Justice is blind
And on days when the Fates are unkind
You may find you need a
Leg-up from one Reeder:
The tec with the criminal mind.
Mr Campion, mild-mannered and meek
Thinks crime just a bit of a cheek
But he is no mug
And his friend Mr Lugg
Won’t leave him for long up the creek.
In Oxford, of learning the seat
Female dons suffer mayhem complete
That is, until Harriet
Arrives in her chariot
The solution’s not Gaudy, but neat
More limericks here.
More mysteries here.
Lost 1,000-year-old Hebrew Bible found on dusty Cairo synagogue shelf.
“Grainy footage” is a cliché, right up there with tapes that “languish” in “dusty vaults”. (Rob Chapman, author of Ad Lib: Repeat to Fade)
Queen Victoria by Sir Alfred Gilbert, produced for her Golden Jubilee in 1887, now living in a dusty corner of Winchester's Great Hall. (@lukecoring)
According to media articles, archaeologists are surprised, stunned, bewildered, shocked. But why can we never be pleased or happy? Just because we didn't know something was there doesn't mean we aren't excited to see it. (@Anarchaeologist)
Baffled. That's what we usually are, according to the media. (@AndreCosto)
No, BBC Breakfast, documents in archives are not ‘discovered’ by researchers. The archivists already know they’re there. (@CAPittard)
‘Exceptional' 15th-Century Ming Dynasty bowl unearthed at US yard sale. (If the owner wanted to sell it, why did they bury it?)
This week, as the water drained out, a safe, discarded iphone, hoover, trolleys, dozens of tyres, office chair, PC, and tens of thousands of plastic bags were unearthed. (Canalrivertrust.org.uk. The objects were unwatered – how about “came to light”? or “were revealed”?)
And if the object is mended and cleaned before going on display, please avoid the words "painstaking" and "former glory".
Monsoon clouds “dump” unprecedented amounts of rain. (Week 2021, shed)
Phosphorus hurled out by volcanic plumes could interact with the clouds of sulphuric acid in Venus’s atmosphere to form phosphine. (The Week, 2021, ejected, expelled)
Heavy and slow-moving thundery showers triggered flooding. (The Week. I think it’s safe to say that showers caused flooding.)
Heavy snow and freezing rain is set to batter the UK this week. (The Week. Storms batter the country, waves batter the coast, but snow and freezing rain? Afflict? Hit? Affect? Strike?)
Peat bogs and waterspouts don’t take in, ingest, or inhale, they suck or gulp. Volcanoes and geysers don’t emit or exhale but belch, spew or burp. I usually prefer Anglo-Saxon over French or Latin, but these verbs are getting stale.
The south-facing wall sucks up the last of the sun’s rays. (Springwatch. Couldn’t it absorb them?)
Meanwhile, it sucks down Amazon adverts from the cloud. (Steven Poole, Guardian 2013, draws down)
Climate-heating carbon dioxide will be sucked from the air using trees, peat, rock chips and charcoal in major new trials across the UK. (Guardian, May 2021)
Does the world need millions of machines sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the air to beat the climate crisis? (Guardian, Sept 2021)
This environmental catastrophe involves sucking millions of tons of small fish out of the sea and crushing them into fish oil and dry feed for farmed fish, pigs and chicken. (Isabel Oakeshott, Sunday Times, 2014, extracting)
Powerful waterspouts suck water up from the sea. (Youtube)
The author skilfully avoids the situation that is too frequently found with academic writing – the application of overly dense, convoluted rhetoric that can sadly suck the life and intrigue out of fascinating subjects. (Andy Paciorek, Fortean Times. Apt – think of vampires.)
In space everything hurtles.
Hurtle toward the far reaches of the universe with the space Vikings of the future! (Poster for Riders to the Stars, 1954)
A black hole with a mass 20 million times that of our sun is hurtling through space at a million miles an hour after being ejected from its galaxy. (Times April 2023)
As the Sun and its surrounding planets hurtle through the galaxy, this bubble buffets against the interstellar medium like an invisible shield, keeping out the majority of harmful cosmic rays and other material. (Bbc.com, speed, move)
'Out-of-control' piece of a Chinese rocket is hurtling back to Earth and no-one knows where it will land. (gloucestershirelive.co.uk, plummeting, falling)
The test sent 1,500 pieces of debris hurtling through space. (The Week, zooming)
OK, you can hurtle at high speeds.
Nasa has announced plans to send a spacecraft hurtling into an asteroid at 15,000mph to change its path in the US space agency’s first “planetary defence” test. (Time magazine)
More than 1,500 pieces of debris were hurtling towards them at up to 17,500mph. (The Week)
More here, and links to the rest.
Goats are sure-footed.
Neo-Nazis are surprisingly dapper.
Terrible parents, once gone, are not bad but flawed.
Curating when you’re selecting or editing, styling when you’re tidying or rearranging.
Backwaters and fishing villages are sleepy.
Rights are enshrined in law.
Summer of holiday chaos looms as BA scraps flights
Young women used to be saddled with a kid, or four kids, in the days before the pill.
When writing about cave art, don’t forget the “dim, flickering light of tallow lamps”.
Why is every department in the NHS called a pathway now? (@DerylLynn)
Please ban the phrase “Costa del [place in Ireland]”. (@roqueandrolle)
Are there ever any theatrical reimaginings that aren't bold? (@AlexaCoghlan)
Fought and died for my country... promised my dying mother... sacrificed my marriage... greatest achievement... mother would have been proud... (Marcel Berlins)
Open the news pages today and you’ll struggle to find a policy that isn’t a flagship policy, a ruling that isn’t a landmark ruling, a speech that isn’t a landmark speech, a criticism that isn’t damning, a negotiation that isn’t frantic, a blow that isn’t devastating, a large company that isn’t a giant or a majority that isn’t vast. (Andy Bodie, Guardian, 2014. Or a feature that isn’t key or core.)
His tale is one of “hedonistic pleasure”, “dilettantes” and “love nests”. (Robin Ince on a book detailing Diana’s last day.)
Spanish Stonehenge revealed after brutal drought dries reservoir. It was thought to be condemned to the history books... (Daily Mail. Severe drought, confined to the history books.)
As the excellent Caravanistan travel website notes sardonically, all writing about the region should... include the following words: crossroads, journey, Soviet, ancient, adventures, misadventures, nomad, steppe and Marco Polo... The reader ploughs through potted histories... her pen nib all too often turns to lead. Life in the Soviet Union was no “bed of roses”; Stalin did not wear “kid gloves”; Tajikistan is “as poor as a church mouse”. (The Times on a book about the Stans, 2019)
In grad school, I used to rewrite jargony sentences with their easier to understand synonyms, which made me realize how often some of those sentences were just nonsense. (@kelly_j_baker)
In grad school, I learned to rewrite my sentences to add jargon so the very senior male medievalist wouldn't give me a C-, or worse, say - "I'm not grading this because I don't want to depress you." I learned to sound how he wanted me to sound. I hated it. (@Lollardfish)
A fluent writer, he is fond of a zippy anecdote. Yet he can strain for effect, favouring pushful adjectives (“remarkable”, “unprecedented”) and overegging his plaudits: William Hazlitt is “the hardest-hitting writer the political left has ever known”, Scott’s Waverley launched a “worldwide craze for historical fiction”, and Nash’s designs for Regent’s Park and Regent Street were masterpieces without which “modern London is inconceivable”... Dabs of colour are applied predictably: clubs are “ritzy”, dinners “gargantuan”, appetites “ravenous”, letters “impassioned”, aristocrats “debauched”, meetings “convivial”, necklines “plunging” and breasts “voluptuous”. And he claims that society was “literally soaked in opium”. (Henry Hitchings on Robert Morrison’s The Regency Revolution)
In book reviews, according to Twitter, "magisterial" means I'll be bored and "lyrical" means there won't be any jokes. The following descriptors are also off-putting: Stirring, poignant, whimsical, romp, liminal, poetical for a novel, heartfelt, breathtaking, voice of a generation, rip-roaring, urgent, triumph of the human spirit, ominous, jaunty, sweeping, beguiling.
I have a joke about literary fiction. Well, less of a joke, more of a 'compelling meditation on love and loss, couched in prose of pellucid beauty'. (@jonathancoe)
What one word puts you off a book? I’ll start: experimental, powerful, definitive, must-read, page-turner, heart-breaking, the next..., urgent, searing, timely, could not be more relevant, essential, This essential powerful tautly evocative debut, heart-stopping (@fliceverett)
More here, and links to the rest.
Once upon a time, a town-dweller was staying in a country cottage. At the end of the day, he decided to walk to the nearby pub. Night had fallen, but it was a short distance along a lane. About halfway to the pub, he was joined by a – something. It was like an animal, but none he could recognise. It was about the size of a pig, but black, as far as he could make out in the starlight. It seemed to wish him no harm, but it stayed closely by him, padding along and occasionally bumping against his legs. It made quiet, distressful snuffling sounds, almost as if it was crying.
He walked on by the side of his terrible companion, until he saw the lights of the pub up ahead. He broke into a run, and the Thing fell back and faded into the shadows. He fell into the pub and leaned on the bar, shuddering and calling for a double brandy.
"What's up?" asked the landlady, bringing the drink. He described the horrible entity that had followed him down the lane.
"Oh, that's just the Hellymental," said the landlady. "You don't need to be frightened of that. You're staying at Willow Cottage down the lane, aren't you? You see the man that lived there was a wicked man, a wizard. He was in league with the devil, so they said. Anyway, after he died, all his wickedness was gathered up into this Hellymental - but that's all it is. It doesn't harm anybody."
The man spent the night at the inn, and the next day he packed his suitcase and went back to London.
INVENTIONS AND INNOVATIONS
Take a door wedge on holiday to put under the legs of wobbly café tables. (@elsie_em)
Drop the onshore wind farm ban.
Grow tea in the Scottish Highlands.
Harvest nurdles from beaches and reuse.
Grow pumpkins.
Tax aviation fuel, says Mark Miodownik.
Teach philosophy in schools.
Set up a Single Person’s union.
Install drain nets to stop plastic reaching the sea.
Invent a ship that hoovers up plastic waste.
Make Anne Reid a Dame.
TV programme: The Choir Inspector
Subject religions to equality laws.
Ban inappropriate fancy dress.
Ban dancing en pointe.
Ban carpets in pubs.
Build park-less flats for non-drivers.
Ban facial tattoos.
Introduce queueing in pubs, with numbered tickets.
Limit the size of cruise ships.
Build storm drains in desert areas that collect water from flash floods and melting snow and pipe it somewhere it’s needed. (Wasn't Col. Gaddafi working on a scheme?)
Melt down "copper" coins and make them into something useful.
Use electric cargo bikes: they're 90% less polluting.
End mowing of road verges to create huge wildlife habitat, says UK study (Guardian)Number job applicants, to disguise gender and “foreign” names. (Being done, needs to spread.)
Enable land line phones to send and receive text messages (they'll probably disappear before this happens).
Provide transgender people with separate prison units, hospital wards, changing rooms and toilets. (A domestic violence refuge is on the cards.)
Rewild grouse moors: if you want to eat grouse you can farm them.
Turn highline park walks back into elevated railways, restore all Els and build more.
Let American workers sit instead of making them stand unnecessarily.
Ban super-strength alcohol and improve obesity, domestic violence and public disorder.
Leave leaves to fertilise the ground and provide cover for mammals and insects. Scrap all leaf blowers.
Adopt a countrywide standard system of colour-coding bin bags.
Supply milk in frozen cubes. (Via Twitter. You could always freeze it yourself in an ice tray.)
Manufacture all-in-one duvets – integral cover, wash the whole thing.
An outdoor composting toilet is the latest middle-class must-have! (They don't sound all that convenient.)
In clothes shops, abolish separate areas for men and women. If the shops won't provide single-sex changing rooms, why are they still segregating the clothes?
Keep those blunt dressmaking shears – use them to cut frozen pizzas or bread slices so they fit in the oven/toaster.
Institute Aunts’ Day, Spinsters' Pride, Water Day (Apparently the success and prominence of days, weeks and months depend on sponsorship and the selling of merch.)
Repurpose shopping centres, department stores and high streets. Must we sit here and watch them rot or be demolished?
Let women inherit titles formerly passed down the male line. (We’d get more sensible people in the House of Lords.)
Allow girls at schools with mixed toilets to "leave the room" in groups in the middle of class. Or else they could organise shifts: girls 10-10.30, boys 10.30-11 etc. You could install CCTV, and panic buttons. Parents could sponsor Davlavs in the playground. But it would be so much simpler to go back to single-sex toilets.
Make scientific papers more accessible. Writers should give a condensed version on youtube. Writers of popular science books should use a personal version of Twitter (or get me to edit).
Provide showers and lockers in workplaces for the increasing numbers who cycle to work.
Repeal the 1824 Vagrancy Act that criminalises begging and rough sleeping.
Reuse and retrofit buildings instead of knocking them down and building new ones – reduces pollution.
Make drivers pay a carbon tax from which non-drivers are exempt.
Ban alcohol on planes. Shut bars at airports – or make them stick to normal licensing hours.
Mine landfill for plastic, gold, rare earth minerals.
3D print lost buildings (Glasgow Art School, St Peter’s Seminary)
Employ moderators for comment sections and social media. And give moderators training, a qualification and a professional association.
Set up a Court of Law for Ideas. Before proceedings start, the judge rules that reality exists, and that anyone using the epistemology defence will automatically lose their case.
Single-use plastics, what CAN we do?
Bring back drinking-water taps in every public loo.
Persuade organists to follow the congregation, not the other way round – and turn down the volume.
MORE CLEVER IDEAS
I'd build identical apartments – one for each MP and Lord, assigned at the beginning of "term". Randomly. I'd make them a bit of a step up from a Travelodge, maybe with on-site restaurants, etc. A proper Westminster village. If they want more luxury, they can pay for it themselves. (@BonehouseWasps)
And bedrooms for those MPs who want to stay overnight. No more claiming expenses for a second home. (@GillUpNorth)
And remove all bars from Parliament buildings and forbid alcohol on the premises.
The government plans to issue guidelines on working from home safely: Find a suitable area, with a suitable table, and invest in an adjustable office chair with arms. (And learn to touchtype.)
Firms are considering “spokes and hub” offices post-pandemic, with offices in suburbs and a head office in town.Study suggests most firms could continue with staff working a four-day week (Headline, Jan 5 2021)
As people stay at home, there’s less gum on pavements.
“We anticipate never going back to five days a week in the office. That seems very old-fashioned now,” says boss of Unilever.
Covid led to huge London property exodus, says Hamptons (Guardian hed Dec 2020)
Better connectivity to allow more people to work from home (Penny Mordaunt)
The Centre for Cities suggests moving public sector staff into offices in disused shops. FE colleges, swimming pools, sports halls, libraries, yoga studios, care homes nurseries and health centres should return to the heart of towns. (Janice Turner, Times 2020-12-06)
It’d be pretty cool if we had a centralised UCAS like system for apprentices, then regional Oxbridge-type colleges for apprentices where you could live and socialise and take other courses in languages, philosophy, maths, etc (@danwaterfield)
Protein from gorse bushes could feed millions of people, says expert. (Guardian 2022-01-11)
In Australia, orange farmers are donating orange peel to sheep farmers. The sheep will eat it, and the mice won’t.
Perforated lasagne sheets you can break tidily to adapt to the width of your dish are overdue for invention. (@LucyHunterB)
Just your regular reminder that most cities in North America have so much surface parking and underdeveloped land that they could double their available housing without demolishing a single building — and could potentially do it in years, not decades. (@AlexSteffen)
New job, old goats. Melissa Jeuken is the new goat herder of Howth Head, Co Dublin. She is managing a herd of Old Irish Goats in a groundbreaking conservation grazing project to reduce gorse cover in an area plagued by wildfires. (@philipbromwell)
The way meat is harvested en masse is unethical and contributes to Global Warming. Instead of farms for Sheep Cows Pigs etc there should be large parks where the animals roam free. During the months of January and July anyone would be able to hunt up to the animals. (@Addy20943225)
Increasingly, if it could be done by machine, it would be, and with the Internet providing global real-time communications, if it could be done remotely cheaper elsewhere, it would be. China is running out of peasants on the farm to become industrial workers. The prevailing trend for a long time in the world economy has been the progressive replacement of labour by capital. There are still decent paying jobs: I suggest people look at skilled trades, like auto mechanic, electrician, or plumber. It can't get outsourced. The issue there is status. It's manual labour and therefore Blue Collar. (DM, via Facebook. He adds that people get degrees to increase their status.)
Southwark council has unveiled a new Streets For People strategy. Some really interesting ideas – they want to:
Make all pavements 2.4m min. or 4m in town centres
Plant 20,000 trees
Put a place to rest (e.g. a bench) every 100m on all streets (@joncstone)
(Those wide pavements will need pavement cleaners armed with brooms and soapy water.)
Any pedestrianised shopping area should provide: free mobility scooters, wheelchairs, Uber trikes, rickshaws, horsedrawn fiacres, and a fairground watercourse with coracles or gondolas.
DISINVENT
One day we'll blown down huge tower blocks in cities that block the view of the Eiffel Tower.
First class on trains. (Abolishing first class was suggested for some packed commuter routes in the south, said the Telegraph in 2017: “First class compartments will disappear from crowded commuter trains", the Transport Secretary has pledged, as he said passengers should no longer be “segregated”.)
According to George Monbiot, European countries are restricting cattle and sheep farming to preserve the environment.
Abseiling landscapers have recently replaced the entirely dead planted façades of the Atlas building in Old Street. You'd have thought they would have learned by now. (@russellcurtis. If you want green walls, why not just plant some ivy or Virginia creeper?)
During Vatican II, Bishop Garcia Martinez urged the Catholic Church to move on from the veneration of dubious relics: "reverenter sepeliantur et deinceps nulla mentio fiat". "Let them be reverently buried and then let them not be mentioned." (@Robin_C_Douglas. In 2023 Pope Francis said that maybe not all visions of the Virgin Mary are the real thing.)
About to lecture in a modern, purpose-built education room without a light switch. The lights are on a sensor. So when we're in the room the lights are permanently on with no option to reduce numbers of bulbs, dim or turn them off. Honestly, who designs this crap? (@jpwarchaeology. See also toilets where the light goes out and you have to wave your arms about to turn it on again.)
LET’S NEVER REVIVE
80s ski-wear in custard, turquoise, pink and purple. Likewise mountaineering gear and backpacks in jade and pink. (Though apparently it makes hikers visible to friends and rescue parties.)
The combination of a van, a motorhome and a boat – perfect for motorists who like to go out into the open waters. Just 21 examples of the Boaterhome were built in the 1980s. (@aut0mob)
More here, and links to the rest.
