Every word speaks the brutal truth. The Year After Al-Aqsa Flood | Black Agenda Report

Dear President Biden…

Following on from our expensive old and new door catastrophes, our washing machine has given up. Another £169.

ANOTHER DOOR CLOSES

Our twenty year old fridge door failed. It refused to stay closed anymore. Hinges had gone. After a couple of weeks battling with adhesive magnetic door locks designed for something else, I did the most manly thing I could think of. I called an engineer. The NEFF man arrived and did the job in a matter of minutes for £172. It’s been an expensive couple of months fixing doors, old and new.

PALACE MATCH REPORT

Watched the United game (on my laptop) yesterday, having missed the Southampton and Barnsley games. A big improvement on the Liverpool debacle, especially in the first half. Dalot playing as a LB, DM and playmaker/midfield general all at once was as unexpected as it was impressive. Eriksen starting, to maintain the creative link he made with Mainoo against Barnsley we’re told, was also unexpected, but it too somehow worked. Drifting left to cover Dalot rather undid his link with Mainoo, though.

I can’t opt-out of LinkedIn’s new AI data gathering exercise, and neither can I delete my account, because I can’t login (got a new phone, 2fa linked to old phone, fucked). Hopefully their AI will be richer and more fully rounded as a result of my content.

DIGITAL LEADER

Hoping we found a good solution to help big kid’s Digital Leader application. He found it difficult to focus and get his head around answering the questions in a sensible (let alone helpful) way. Instead, I recorded him speaking about the devices and tech he uses, how he helps his little brother and his parents to play games, and how using new apps like Duolingo has helped him to learn Spanish (when previously he hated Spanish lessons).

I don’t understand why they have seized (now mouldy) courgettes as evidence but then again I don’t understand how they can justify arresting us for wanting to make soup.

IMPOSSIBLE DEMANDS

Starmer is cynically setting up the NHS to fail in order to present private healthcare as the fix. Starmer: a man way of his depth when dealing with the NHS https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/13/starmer-a-man-way-of-of-his-depth-when-dealing-with-the-nhs/ Starmer’s speech on the NHS yesterday offered view of a man unprepared for office who sends out incompetent messages to those who now work in the organisation he leads and who has no comprehension of the economic environment in which he must manage healthcare.

DEATH CULT

OBR: We have to kill old people and starve the children of the poor in order to keep funding our expensive wars and ensure the rich get richer. Labour: Let’s get to it! The Office for Budget Responsibility’s forecast for the national debt is a worthless exercise by economically illiterate fantasists https://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2024/09/13/the-office-for-budget-responsibilitys-forecast-for-the-national-debt-is-a-worthless-exercise-by-economically-illiterate-fantasists/ The Office for Budget Responsibility has forecast that UK debt will rise to 300% of GDP in 50 years because they think it impossible that taxes can rise above current levels, even though state spending will reach 60% of GDP in their opinion.

Bunk beds built.

This morning, and quite possibly this afternoon, I will mostly be assembling a flat pack ‘shorty’ bunk bed ensemble for the kids.

Big kid is applying to be a Digital Leader at school. In his application he wrote, ‘I want to be a Digital Leader because computing has inspired me to do what I do best. Which is computing.’ And, ‘I would be a goodgreat Digital Leader because I have infinet gigabyts of space."

Scored this bag of Akash Gold at the local Tesco Express. Light and fluffy indeed. Chilli sans carne was amazing. Big kid gave the rice 11/10.

Strong Irish backbone to this England team. Pickford (born Logan), Maguire, Rice, Grealish and Kane. Carsley should have said he won’t sing the English national anthem because he’s Irish.

FUNNY OLD GAME

In the good old days, football was a simple game. You had eleven players and a substitute numbered 1 to 12, no shirt advertising, a referee and two linesmen, a manager, a trainer, a physio, a scout or two, tea ladies, drinking culture, long hair and perms, the club chairman, a board of directors, a club secretary, a groundsman, a stadium in the beating heart of the town or city, fans, standing room only, electric atmospheres, matches on Saturday at three o’clock, live coverage on the radio, match reports in the Pink Final after the game, and highlights on Match of the Day at 10:30 the same night.

Achievement unlocked.

Handed my four year old a slice of ham for his lunch. “Yay! Pink chicken!” Now we know what he meant yesterday when he turned his nose up at spicy chicken and said “I like pink chicken!”

I started reading the Kindle sample for this, but immediately felt anxious that I should spend the remaining weeks of my life doing something more fun, productive, insightful, useful, anything but this… I had been planning to write about my impressions and such from listening to Four Thousand Weeks but I’m going to buy the book so that I can go through and make notes. While there was nothing that stood out as deeply profound, it was full of thought provoking points that made me want to go away and think a.

Noel plays his guitar as if he’s scared it will break, and Oasis’s funkless, sexless plod is always carefully pitched below the velocity at which fluid dynamics dictate that you might spill your lager. I like some Oasis stuff, the early stuff. I like some woke stuff. This quote and picture are true enough and funny, though.

Dead duck. An unpleasant walk in the midday sun by the canal yesterday. A few abandoned Lime Bikes (one with its front wheel missing). Depressing.

Emptying my Feedbin and stumbled across this epic from Christmas Day 2022. The one where Matthew moves out of Sawtell because it’s too posh and goes to live sober in a homeless shelter in Melbourne with a Croatian who speaks no English (or does he?). Reading Sunday 9 April 2023 | The Zero Room

TV SHOW OF INTEREST

Finally got around to watching the pilot episode of Person of Interest last night. Took a little while to get going and I almost gave up. Not a comedy at all, but I couldn’t help feeling it was somehow a little like Minority Report meet Police Squad!, and not in a bad way. Only another 102 episodes to go… Academics in Europe are continuing to work with Chinese counterparts on “clearly problematic” artificial intelligence #AI research in areas like biometric surveillance, cybersecurity, and military fields, a new analysis has found.

SPUDS UP!

We harvested the last three of eleven potato bags at the weekend. A decent crop, and very tasty. Highlights were regular watering and earthing up (using homegrown compost) with my kids, and big kid’s tenth birthday party where his friends got to (among other fun activities) harvest the first three bags and take home a potato bag each.​ Fond memories of going potato picking with my mum in the Lincolnshire Wolds in the early 1970s.

Well, the super secure new lock on our super expensive new front door failed catastrophically today. I couldn’t get my key out of the lock. We couldn’t lock the door. The local locksmith arrived within fifteen minutes, diagnosed the problem (“you need a new lock, £180”) and proceeded to spend the best part of an hour removing the broken extra secure lock (finally, reminiscent of the birth of my second son, “it’s out, I’ll have to charge a bit extra…").