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• Post #1935393

  The red button / blue button conundrum everywhere is symptomatic of something that the trolley problem also suffers from, a kind of ethical blanching. It doesn't represent any instantiable scenario without the addition of facts which are morally determining in almost every theory. Usually the exception is the author's favourite theory, where all the elements are present, and everyone else is stupid. It relies on us going along with this idea that there are kind of ethical atoms, that...

• Post #1935392

  Does anyone have an out-of-band to ask if vla22 at wandering.shop is the real Verity?

• Post #1935391

  Kid goes on week-long school trip. Is only one to retrieve food from class extra snack cupboard at end of trip. Teacher tells kid they were about to throw it all out, no one else had remembered. Kid comes home with whole class's snack stash.

• Post #1935390

  There's a point near the end of Peter Gabriel's Solsbury Hill video where the acid clearly hits. See if you can spot it, too, 😄 . https://youtu.be/_OO2PuGz-H8

• Post #1935389

  Snooker has some odd, complex rules. So in this "longest frame ever" I was half expecting a gong to go off after an hour and the ref to pull out jousting lances from under the table, and for the frame to be decided by combat, judged by the Lord Mayor of Sheffield, the Lord Lieutenant of Yorkshire, and the prioress of Kirklees. If Barry Hearn wants to get in touch, he knows where to find me or, better still, medical attention. #snooker #snookerWorldChampionship

• Post #1935388

  TIL, using book-books (codexes) for important texts was a Christian innovation and was there from the start (it's even mentioned in biblical epistles). Books existed at the time, but were used for things we'd use note books or journals for today, note taking, accounts, etc. Everything important was done on a scroll. But not Christian texts: they were all books right from the start. Translating cultures, it was all basically a series of scribbled-in "notepads" passed around and...

• Post #1935387

  When you see someone you love peacefully sleeping it can be difficult to think of your own consciousness as anything but a curse. Like, all a body wants is for everything to be nominal. Occasionally, various things deplete, and maintenance or replenishment is required, and an unfortunate state is entered into, akin to defecation, when we must replenish various things which are out of range. I'm not saying that's true. The mind seriously objects, but it would be the body's Luciferia...

• Post #1935386

  Picked up an old Taggart DVD at the charity bookcase at Tesco. Whenever I watch the old ones with Mark McManus in, I'm reminded of my old dad's generation, the people he knew, the general way society we moved in was like. It's really striking, and there's nothing like it elsewhere. It's a world that's still a kind of inscrutable, inaccessible mystery to me, in some way, the more so the longer I was in it. It's very odd: we're not Scottish, there's no connect...

• Post #1094651

  The first few seconds of the first transatlantic telephone conversation, where the two feted posh old chaps discuss familiar Zoom-junk matters. https://archive.org/details/first-official-transatlantic-telephone-conversation

• Post #1094650

  This is where I stumbled on that recording. An excellent essay about (and not about) a historic telephone pole in New Jersey in the Public Domain Review. https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/last-pole/

• Post #1094649

  They call themselves the Football Association, but they haven't a single football on their executive.

• Post #1094648

  I'm sorry, I'm genuinely close to hysterics at this point.

• Post #1094647

  Imagine how different things might be if Reginald Pole had got that one extra vote in 1550.

• Post #1064772

  I've tried, and again failed to get excited about rockets. I can't shake off the aesthetic feeling that it's all a missile circus.

• Post #1064771

  Not now, Madonna! I was walking around our mid-refurbishment Tesco thinking about how remarkably many of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances are struggling right now; folk who've not obviously struggled with mental health before, making dark jokes about illness and industrial accidents, taking sudden time off to "catch up with things", asides about meaningless and losing interest, about not needing to save. It seems near universal. Then Madonna's "The Power of Goodb...

• Post #1064770

  This story about the police leaving a bag containing weapons outside the Mayor of London's house is bizarre. It had a f@cking sub-machine gun in it. Now, I'm not a police officer, so don't deal with this stuff every day, but surely at some point when you get into the car and check you've got your radio, your lunchbox, your high-viz, your helmet, you think "Wait, didn't I have sub-machine gun earlier?"

• Post #1064769

  "French tanker Leroy Jenkins through Strait of Hormuz" is the sort of line to torment footnote writers and readers in centuries to come, 😀 .

• Post #1064768

  It's odd now that Easter Sunday has become the day everything's shut. A couple of decades ago it was Good Friday. Now that's like a normal trading day (maybe with Sunday hours), but Easter Sunday has become like Christmas Day.

• Post #1064767

  The copious warnings the Beeb are plastering on their news site because the orange-one said "Fuck", a feed which regularly reports on the worst of humanity, reminds me of the epigraph to Daisies: This film is dedicated to all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle.

• Post #1064766

  Endeavour Ep. 1 there's a doctor near the start who says digoxin is from Deadly Nightshade. I spent the whole episode thinking he was a fake doctor(*), but it turned out it was just the writers not doing their research. I was caught off-guard because there's a Midsummer Murders episode where someone forages Hemlock Waterdropwort claiming it was parsley and I cursed the writers for being so slapdash, and it turned out that was the plot! (*) atropine, scopolamine and hycoscyamine are fro...

• Post #1064765

  I bet the Northern Hemisphere completely dominates the Southern in number of "hottest days of the year so far".

• Post #1064764

  On seeing "Abnormal Load Escort Vehicle"s flanking a green Fiat Punto. Kid: "Maybe it's someone really important. Like ... The Queen of Norway or ... Helen Mirren".

• Post #1064763

  There will never be a car quite like a Mark II Ford Granada. If I were ever to have become rich and famous, that's how I'd have turned up to the ball, in a silver Mark II Granada Ghia, in too much eyeliner, driven by a furry.