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Our kids read The Beano. Of course, so do I … a couple of years ago, I noticed that “Fatty“, of Bash Street Kids fame, had been re-named “Freddy“. And as the Daily Telegraph reports, “Sensitivity Readers” have now been busy bowdlerising Dahl. Among the usual po-faced excisions, the word “fat” has been removed fromContinue reading “Censor-itivity Readers”

In 2023, most business travel is entirely un-necessary. Much of it is blokes flying abroad to sit in a room and have a PowerPoint read to them by people they already know, and have already met in person.  It made sense to do this. In the 1990s. (Just as it used to make sense toContinue reading “Most flying is un-necessary”

FYI 1: Irish Gaelic football is divided into county teams and club teams. In any county, there will be lots of club teams. As an amateur organisation, GAA rules require that all players who play for a club or county must actually be from that club or county area – there is no transfer market.Continue reading “Does the GAA have a bias problem?”

“For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity. Because the only possible spiritual development is in the sense of depth. The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude.” – Samuel Beckett. Years ago, I started a bandContinue reading “Teamwork is opposed to art”

We’re going to get our cat chipped, and I mentioned, casually, to our little ones that it would be a good time to get them chipped as well, so we could keep an eye on them. Cue massive and sustained uproar from the back seat of the car lol.  I had to confirm that IContinue reading “Blu Tack”

Aged 15, in RE class at school, our teacher asked whether we considered the world to be primarily friendly, or unfriendly. The class split roughly into friendly and unfriendly camps. When the teacher asked me what I thought, I remember saying “neither“, and that the world largely was “indifferent“. I’ve always had that view. AsContinue reading “Pour vivre heureux, vivons cachés”

That, ladies and gentlemen, was the jaw-dropping title of a recent BBC podcast. There is a species of pop-cultural revisionism, put about by arrogant white millennial women who are very lightly-informed about pop and rock before they were born, that “strong women in pop” started in the 1990s with so-called “girl-power” bands etc.  (Big MamaContinue reading “Is Taylor Swift Our Greatest Living Poet?”

Nor did anybody else. Everything in italics was produced, in a few seconds, by ChatGPT: Joy Division – overview: Joy Division was a post-punk band that was formed in Manchester, England in 1976. The band consisted of Ian Curtis (vocals), Bernard Sumner (guitar), Peter Hook (bass), and Stephen Morris (drums). Joy Division was known forContinue reading “I didn’t write these:”

Note how there is such an assault on ICE engines in cars, while ICE engines in ‘planes are not subject to any compulsory end date, despite being responsible for way more pollution – even though cars are way more important to most people than ‘planes are. If I gave you a choice – you canContinue reading “Planely biased”