Is anything happening in Britain other than the pandemic?
Why yes, and thank you for asking.
A fake Rembrandt has been hiding in the basement of a museum. It’s a small picture of an old man with a beard, looking unhappy (the man, not the beard). When it was first stashed down there, the man was young, clean-shaven, and hopeful looking.
The painting was given to the museum in 1951 and spotted as a fake in 1981 by the world’s leading authority on the subject, the Rembrandt Research Project.
Then a new curator came along and the picture just bugged her. It looked too Rembrandtish to write off.
It’s now been analyzed by dendochronologists. Those are people who, um, analyze dendos. Or possibly dendons. In time–that’s the chronology part.
Oh, never mind. You don’t need to know what they do and I don’t either. What matters is that they’ve figured out that the wood the old man’s painted on came from the same tree as an acknowledged Rembrandt. So it was, at least, likely to have been from his workshop. And may be by the master himself.
It’s a pity it couldn’t have happened when the man was young and optimistic, but at least it’s happening.
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A seven-year-old with cerebral palsy climbed Ben Nevis, Britain’s highest mountain, raising over £17,000 for the National Health Service and a disability charity.
When he was born, his parents were told he’d never walk, sit up, or talk, never mind raise money for the NHS.
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It was always going to be hard to make importing sewage sludge for farm fertilizer sound appealing, but it’s being imported anyway. It’s happening quietly, though, so no one has to take on the job of explaining why it’s a good idea.
Why is it a good idea? Well, its use on farmland is effectively banned in the Netherlands, and the Dutch water authorities had problems incinerating it. And the stuff has to go somewhere, so they looked across the channel and saw Britain and said, “Hmmm. Betcha they’d pay good money for it.”
Only in Dutch.
The sludge could contain E coli and salmonella, persistent organic pollutants, heavy metals (not the musical kind–no one’s complained about it causing noise pollution), and microplastics. And it could be a source of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Other than that, it’s nice stuff and does return nutrients and carbon to the soil.
Yum.
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The rapper, singer, and songwriter Stormzy has donated £500,000 to fund scholarships for kids from disadvantaged backgrounds. They’ll go fifty students of any age–and not just university students.
The plan is to give £10 million over ten years to groups fighting racial inequality in Britain.
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The street artist Banksy donated we don’t know how much for a refugee rescue boat, the Louise Michel, which is now sailing the Mediterannean. Last I heard, it had picked 219 people out of the water and the deck became so crowded that the boat was effectively stranded. The most vulnerable 49 (along with a man who died before being picked up) were transferred “to safety” (I’m not clear where), and the remainder were put aboard another rescue ship.
Finding a port willing to accept refugees is a serious problem. Plucking them out of the water is, relatively speaking, the simple part.
The International Organization for Migration says more than 7,600 people have been picked up at sea and forced back to Libya–a policy of both the Libyan coastguard and European Union states. Another 500 are known to have died in 2020, trying to make the crossing, although the actual number is likely to be higher. Libya has been accused of mistreating refugees at sea and of selling them to militias.
Banksy explained why he wanted to get involved when he wrote to Pia Klemp, who’d captained several rescue boats: “I’ve made some work about the migrant crisis, obviously I can’t keep the money. Could you use it to buy a new boat or something?”
Klemp initially thought someone was putting her on, but they soon settled down and worked together. She summed up the arrangement this way: “Banksy won’t pretend that he knows better than us how to run a ship, and we won’t pretend to be artists.”
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Local governments in Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole have proposed, in their wisdom, fining homeless people £100 for sleeping in doorways or leaving their belongings in the street. If they don’t pay up, that can go up to £1,000.
Which of course they have. That’s why they’re living on the street.
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Emma Cownie and Doug Jacquier have clued me into–
Guys, I don’t know how to break this to you, but it seems the royal family are actually lizards. Shapeshifting lizards.
I know. I couldn’t have imagined it either. And it’s not just the royal family. The whole world, it turns out, is run by lizards. It explains a lot, doesn’t it?
This isn’t new news, but then this isn’t a newspaper, I’m not a reporter, and I only just found out about it. It rose from the depths of the conspirosphere in April, when a former broadcaster, David Icke, did a TV interview in which he left the road way, way behind.
This wasn’t the first time he’d talked about it. You can find him here, explaining everything to us. “Much of it,” he says, “is backed up by hard factual information.”
And the rest of it? Oh, hell, who cares?
Okay, I confess: I haven’t listened to the interviews, relying on the writeups instead. How much time do you think I have here?
Icke’s life moved from sports to broadcasting through the Green Party and alternative medicine to spiritualism to–well, he did predict that the world will end in 1997. As far as I can tell, he was wrong. He’s been accused of antisemitism, which he denies, but he also says that whoever wrote The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an antisemitic forgery) ”knew the game plan.”
I’m working from WikiWhatsia here. I normally hold out for something marginally more reliable, but with a topic like this, why quibble?
The lizards are from the Draco constellation and have been breeding with humans. And the scientific method is bollocks and climate change is a hoax.
Um, yeah, I think he’d broken with the Green Party by the time he announced that.
Anyway, it all gets complicated. Have a good time. It could almost make a person go back to the pandemic for a little rest.
Sewage….have people become so anally retentive that we have to import the stuff?
In my student days,there was work for Dagenham council bagging up dried sewage residue which was sold as compost for the garden. It rejoiced in the name of Dagfert.
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In theory, it should be fine. The problem lies in how well processed it is (see: e-coli etc.) and in concentrating heavy metals, plastics, etc. Sitting as we do at the top of the food chain, we will concentrate all the bad stuff we’ve allowed to enter it. But I like the name Dagfert.
As to why we have to import it–um. No comment.
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Did the they also sell Dagwood as an alternative to coal?
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Groan.
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I think the cartoonist might have raised copyright issues…
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Any minute spent away from the pandemic is worthwhile, whatever the news.
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Good point.
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Do snakes resemble lizards enough to count as part of this revolutionary population? We have lots and lots of snakes ruling everything over here in the USA.
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Only if they can shapeshift so that they appear to be human when necessary.
Sorry.
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So nice of the Dutch to send you their uitwerpselen dressed up as fertiliser. Brings a whole new meaning to a soft Brexit.
Meanwhile, apparently this is what’s happening in the real world of 5G (Great Gobs of Guff for Gullible Gits). Keep up your supplies of tinfoil. http://themillenniumreport.com/2020/03/coronavirus-hoax-fake-virus-pandemic-fabricated-to-cover-up-global-outbreak-of-5g-syndrome/
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The 5G people are still at it, aren’t they? It might’ve been Mark Twain who said something along the lines of a lie being able to circle the globe while the truth is still putting on its boots. (Emphasis on “something along the lines of.”)
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The golden rule of quotes is to attribute them to Mark Twain. Of course he never said this (and neither did Jonathon Swift or Winston Churchill and a seemingly endless list of quotable people this expression is attributed to) but who’s going to bother to check? As Abraham Lincoln once said, don’t believe everything you read on the internet.
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Don’t mess around, Doug. Lincoln did say that. He knew what was coming. He also knew that Yogi Berra said, “I didn’t say half the things I said.” And if you don’t know Yogi Berra, you should. He’d be right up your alley.
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:-) (and yes, I know of Yogi Bera; I was one of those weird kids in Australia who grew up playing baseball)
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He transcends sport.
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Fining the homeless for – erhmm – being homeless seems to be the modern answer to debtors’ prisons.
How do you pronounce David Icke’s last name ? That might be a clue.
The Lizards in World Control theory is a lie fomented by the Cats, who really ARE taking over the world.
But if a Lizard shows up and eats Donald Trump, I won’t be sorry.
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I’m not sure how to pronounce his name. This is England, working with the English language. Spelling isn’t necessarily a good guide, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of leeway. Nominative determinism, anyone?
The cats really are taking over? Can we rush this along, please? We’re not doing a good job.
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Eye-k. I remember him as a sports commentator before he got into herpetology. It was good to see him joining forces with Jeremy Corbyn’s brother Piers at the anti-mask rally, last week, hadn’t realised he’s a virologist too. It’s quite staggering how many people believe their twaddle. Sigh.
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The English language never fails to amaze me. You wouldn’t think you’d have space to go wrong when you’re working with only four letters. I did hear about Piers Corbyn, along with, I thought, some mention of a hefty fine. (I was in the car listening to the radio, which isn’t always a good way to concentrate.) If true, I expect his family’s the reason the price went so high.
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Agreed, I don’t think they fined Icke, which seems unfair, but they were probably worried about being turned into lizards.
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Yes, I’d give that some thought before I pissed them off.
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Harold Ickes was Secretary of the Interior under FDR and newsreels of the time pronounced it “Ick-ees.” But that may have been a political comment from a time when the media was less invasive. is son was Deputy Chief of Staff under Clinton, but I never happened to hear him mentioned. Your politician sounded “Ick-ee” to.; That’s why I asked.
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I always heard it pronounced Ick-ees by my very pro-FDR parents, for whatever that bit of information is worth.
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“The International Organization for Migration says more than 7,600 people have been picked up at sea and forced back to Libya–a policy of both the Libyan coastguard and European Union states.”
Hmm, interesting. Is this the same EU that complained about the US policy on returning South/Central American refugees to Mexico? Nah. Must be a different EU.
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As far as I’ve been able to unpick this, it’s not the EU itself but some of its member nations. If you think the US’s federal/state division is murky, you should try the EU’s.
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I think David Icke has the box set of V! But then again, he long ago proved himself to be a lunatic. A pity, as he wasn’t bad as a sports reporter before someone fried his brain.
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I was thinking Dr. Who and a few old Star Trek episodes had crossed in the mail somehow. It’d be genuinely interesting to know what happened inside his head to start all this up.
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Plenty of source material for him! I doubt that he would recognise that he needs psychiatric help so I don’t think that analysis will ever be made.
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I’m sure you’re right.
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We always complain that between the pandemic and our elections, other newsworthy items aren’t getting any attention, I guess I’ll renew my subscription here.
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Thank you, Dan. This place would be a lot less fun without your comments.
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I think I’m related to some shape shifting lizards.
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Really? They’re running the world, you know. Maybe you could have a word with them and see if they couldn’t do a better job of it. Please?
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They’re all incompetent.
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Years ago I heard Dubya (former POTUS. G.W. Bush) was suspected of being one of these lizard people. Supposedly there’s a video where his face or eye does some weird reptilian-like thing. Then there’s a case like Billy Corgan, frontman of Smashing Pumpkins, who claims he saw a man transform or something. I’ve visited the “interesting” side of YouTube a couple of times; we humans sure can be quite creative.
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I think the dividing line between creative and nuts is whether you know that you’re creating or think you’re just proclaiming the truth. The lizard thing is wild, but I’m very much afraid these people–at least some of them–believe it. So yes, we can be quite creative. And totally insane.
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I do wish the news could be told like this. I might listen to it.
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Well, it does help that I get to pick and choose, since I’m not really the news and don’t have to cover the important stuff unless I (a) want to and/or (b) think I can poke fun at it.
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Keep it up. I should send you American news for you to ridicule.
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Feel free. I do follow it, at least to some extent–it’s home, after all–but I do seem to have made a commitment to write about Britain here. At least mostly. I break my promise on that fairly regularly.
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I wish I could say that it explains so much if we’re lizards, but I can’t and, of course, we aren’t.
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Well, another comment did raise the possibility that the lizard story’s being spread by cats to distract us from their plans to take over the world.
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Now, that does make sense.
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It does, it does.
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I have some sewerage sludge, Ill sell it to the highest bidder… I don’t think we produce as much as The Netherlands though…
I remember seeing David Icke in Wogan as a child… he would only wear turquoise and claimed to be the second coming of the messiah, this was before his “the royal family are lizards phase”
Don’t Scientologists believe a similar thing? Only with far more terrifying backing than David Icke
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I don’t know what the Scientologists believe, only that they charge for it. Someone tried to talk to me seriously about it once, but my ears sealed themselves shut–a protective and involuntary measure that they usually perform only in the presence of numbers. In other words, I managed not to learn a thing. Are you impressed or what?
Turquoise? At least you could see him coming.
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It was a turquoise shell suit too…luckily he was easy to avoid!!
I am impressed by your lack of learning about Scientology…I watched a program about it once when I was inexplicably intrigued by cults
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Oh, I have a lot of lack of learning to be impressed by. We’ve barely touched the surface of my shallowness.
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Marvellous!!
I find that it is important to not learn about a lot of things…so much stuff just fills your brain up!
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And these days knowing things really gets in the way of a political career. Not that I ever wanted one, but if I had……………….
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It takes years of study at the finest educational establishments In the country to know little enough to rule these days…
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We’ve gone through the looking glass, haven’t we?
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We really have…
It comes to something when I genuinely think I might do a better job at running the country :/
My only policy is based on biscuits for everyone!
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Hmm. I’m not sure, Sam. We’ve got to consider the details. Free? Not free but still subsidized? Unlimited numbers? Home made or commercial? What’s the most effective way to distribute them? What do we do about diabetics. It’s not right that they just get left out, so are we limiting this to biscuits only or are substitutions available.
If that isn’t enough complications, I could go on. I’m on a village committee that can take any question and spend 40 minutes on it. I’m learning so much from them.
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There is a lot to consider…
My initial thoughts are we should get Jimmy Carr and the google man to pay for them as a sort of back tax arrangement…
There would be a choice of course, and I think we could give people with medical exemptions the choice to substitute them for savoury biscuits as long as they promised not to dunk them in tea…
(Due to a quirk of autocorrect my phone just tried to correct “tea” to “Rwanda” we definitely can’t have people dunking biscuits in Rwanda!)
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It substituted Rwanda for tea? That (a) is bizarre and (b) led me to ask Lord Google if Rwanda grows tea. It does: “✓ Most tea produced in Rwanda is black tea, white tea, green tea, authentic tea and organic tea. However spicy tea can be produced on order by major tea producers. ✓Rwanda tea is planted on hillsides at high altitude (between 1,900 and 2,500 m), and on well drained marshes at an altitude of between 1,550 and 1,800 m.” (I don’t know what the check marks are about.) So maybe your phone’s onto something.
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Hmm it is exactly Thea sorts of phone shenanigans that led me to write about time travelling otters…
I wonder what Lutra would think about dipping biscuits in Rwanda…
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I expect it’s a writing crisis when they try to convince you that you need a new phone.
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Ha! Their cunning ploy won’t fool me, I like this sort of randomness 😁
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Also…I am never changing this phone, it knows the word apocalump 😁
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That is a very smart smart phone. Not to mention a wise one.
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It absolutely is :)
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I think the Piers Corbyn fine was £10,000, for being the organiser for a gathering of people at an event in contravention of safe distancing rules.
A relevant tweet I saw was ‘I wonder if I might get fined £10,000 for organising a gathering of around 1500 people, on a single site of around 4 hectares, into smaller groups in close proximity numbering around 30. I’m a school headteacher.’
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Good point. Ditto what’s-his-ass who demanded that the House of Commons come back together.
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Hm. Shapeshifting lizards. I like it. I can actually see the resemblance in Agent Orange and his sidekick Tricky Will who were last seen getting on an airplane full of thugs. Oh, gosh – they WERE the thugs.
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It does explain a lot.
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A Swedish city once dumped chicken manure in a park to deter visitors ( ) so perhaps the farmers in the UK are trying to keep tourists away. :)
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Well, farmers and walkers aren’t always the best of friends, and walkers do have the right to walk on established paths. So they might be aiming at them. But a park? I thought the point of a park was to lure visitors, not run them off.
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This was back in April. The city of Lund was due to have an annual festival but Covid-19 had changed everything. So, to deter people from gathering and spreading the virus, they came up with the chicken manure plan.
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Damn, that’s a simple solution. Don’t threaten to fine or arrest anyone, just spread chicken manure. Genius!
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When I mentioned David Icke to my husband, he remarked “Obviously he had a breakdown” which made me feel bad about laughing at him….but there are a number of these people whom you suspect have mental health issues (Gemma O’Doherty in Ireland is another) who you’d feel sorry for and say needed help for it it wasn’t for the fact that a lot of what they say can harm other people (not wearing masks, saying the Pandemic is a hoax etc) and actively stoking racism in Britain and Ireland.
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Truly. It’s sort of like dealing with someone out in the street, ranting and carrying a gun. Yes, they may be completely nuts and you could try talking to them and settling the situation down, but you’ve got to think about the gun.
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I once worked for a lime and fertiliser company, and they sometimes used sugar beet sludge on the fields to make the soil less acidic – better than sewage!
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That just sounds like good farming.
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Cheaper than lime too.
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I’m not sure that a government run by lizards would be any worse than ether one we have
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It might be a considerable improvement.
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