Category Archives: News

Reality, reporting, and artificial intelligence: it’s the news from Britain

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If you follow nothing but the US news, you can be forgiven for thinking that reality’s out of fashion these days, but the British press, for all its faults, is still struggling to keep the real world in at least soft focus. So it was an embarrassment when the Times interviewed Bill de Blasio about Zohran Mamdani and–

Wait, though: Bill de Who? Blasio. The former mayor of New York. About the man who at the time was about to be elected the new mayor of New York and now has been. Only it turned out that the reporter wasn’t interviewing Bill de Blasio the former mayor but Bill DeBlasio a wine importer from Long Island.

Bill de Wine Merchant said some highly critical things about Mamdani. Bill de Mayor supported Mamdani and was furious to see his position misrepresented in the Times.

What happened? The reporter goofed. It’s a mistake anyone could make and we can all be grateful no one handed this guy the nuclear codes instead of what should’ve been a simple assignment.

Irrelevant photo: gladiolus, blooming out of season

As the wine importer explained it,  he hadn’t impersonated de Blasio.

“I’m Bill DeBlasio. I’ve always been Bill DeBlasio. . . . I never once said I was the mayor. He never addressed me as the mayor. So I just gave him my opinion.”

On the topic of how their names are spelled, Wine DeBlasio said, “Low-class Italians use a little d.” 

If we have to take sides, I’m guessing we know who we like.

Wine DeBlasio had been getting low-class de Blasio’s email for years, which he described as a decade of getting “brutal, vicious hate mail.” When security guards at a baseball game offered to introduce him to “the real Bill de Blasio,” the mayor de Blasio asked, “How bad is it having the same last name as me?” 

“Dude, you’re killing me,” Wine DeBlasio said.

With this, I guess, he got his own back.

 

Sexism and magic tricks 

Back in the dark days of 1991, the Magic Circle, which is described as an elite society of magicians, had a revelation: it was time to admit women.

I know, but you don’t want to rush into these things. I mean, what if actual women showed up at the meetings and distracted the men or, you know, disrupted things? What if they turned out not to be any good at this magic business–or worse, what if they turned out to be better? 

Anyway, once the society joined the modern world, one member, Raymond Lloyd, revealed that he was, in fact, a she and had become a magician only so she could–

Okay, the newspaper article I’m working with says “infiltrate” the society. I’d say “fuck with it.” Either way, it wasn’t a simple task. Lloyd was already working as an assistant to the magician Jenny Winstanley, who was sick to the teeth of the boys-only policy but was too recognizable to fool them herself. 

So Winstanley and Lloyd hatched a plot and Lloyd spent the next two years not only learning magic tricks but creating the character of Raymond, a young-looking 18-year-old. In the photo that goes with the article, Raymond looks like a young 14-year-old, and a short one, but nobody thought to question  either his age or sex. Lloyd wore a wig, a body suit, gloves (her hands, she thought, would be a giveaway), and a bit of facial fluff. He spoke in a croaky voice. Or maybe she did. It’s complicated. Why don’t we have have non-gendered pronouns? The Finnish don’t and they’ve reproduced successfully for a long time now. 

The gloves made sleight-of-hand tricks particularly difficult, but the real trick was convincing the men sitting in judgement on her act that they were looking at a very young man. But you know how it is. Magic is built on keeping people from noticing what you don’t want them to notice. They saw only what they expected to see. 

Lloyd was accepted as a member and when the society voted to accept women she and Winstanley went public about their best trick ever. 

And what happened? The Circle threw Lloyd out. 

She worked as a magician for another ten years before packing it in and moving to Spain. Winstanley died in a car crash in 2004. Then in early 2025, the Circle voted Lloyd back in and went on a hunt to let her know. She was, she said, inclined to pass up the honor–she hadn’t worked as a magician in years–but decided to accept it in Winstanley’s honor. 

The Circle is still 95% male but women no longer have to disguise themselves as 14-year-old boys to join. 

Who says the world isn’t making progress?

 

And from the world of artificial intelligence …

. . . comes just what you’ve been waiting for: deathbots. These are not bots that kill you–those are called drones, or sometimes self-driving cars–but programs that record the voices, speech patterns, and personalities of the dead, toss them in an electronic blender, bake at 350 F, and present them to the living so they can have a nice long chat with someone they miss.

I know. Bring an umbrella, friends, ‘cause it’s getting weird out there.

A project called Synthetic Pasts did some research on how this was working, using themselves, they said, as “our own test subjects. We uploaded our own videos, messages and voice notes, creating ‘digital doubles’ of ourselves.

“In some cases, we played the role of users preparing our own synthetic afterlives. In others, we acted as the bereaved trying to talk to a digital version of someone who has passed away.”

What did they learn?

The least creepy versions–that’s my judgement but I don’t think it’s too far off theirs–are basically archives, sorting the prospective dead person’s recorded memories (recorded while they’re still alive, in case that needs saying) into browsable categories. From there, though, it gets weirder.

Another version hosts a kind of electronic seance, prompting the prospective corpse to record memories so it can spit out its own version, complete with emojis, and not always emojis that match the emo.

How well does the bot handle the emotions this may call up in the living recipient those memories? 

Ummm. Yeah. Example:

Human: You were always so encouraging and supportive. I miss you.

Deathbot: I’m right here for you, always ready to offer encouragement and support whenever you need it. And I miss you too… Let’s take on today together, with positivity and strength.

So basically, a prefabricated motivational message. You could find the same thing in the greeting card department of your nearest stationery store.  If any are left where you live. And if one is, you might ask it to record its memories so we won’t have to mourn it when it closes.

As the experimenters point out, this is a business, complete with subscription fees and platforms that harvest users’ data–emotional and biometric–to keep engagement high. Loss, grief, and remembrance? Hell yes, let’s monetize ’em all. I’m sure Marx would’ve had something interesting to say about that if in his most irresponsible fever dreams he could’ve imagined such a thing.

The systems promise, eventually, to digitally resurrect the dead–their gestures, voices, personalities. If that becomes possible, the experimenters say it will change the experience of remembering, “smoothing away the ambiguity and contradiction. . . . 

“Our study suggests that while you can talk to the dead with AI, what you hear back reveals more about the technologies and platforms that profit from memory – and about ourselves – than about the ghosts they claim we can talk to.”

*

But AI isn’t just talking for the dead. For a small fee it’s available to speak for the living and to the government. 

Britain has a system called planning permission, which limits what can be built where. Or at least it’s intended to. It’s complicated and everyone hates it (yes, I have checked with everyone and every last woman, man, and magician agrees) but it’s also kept the country from turning into the sprawling mess that re the suburbs of Chicago. 

How does it work? Let’s say your neighbors want to turn their attic into an extra bedroom, which involves a slightly higher roof and a few windows. Or wants to add a multi-level parking ramp. Or turn the garage into a nightclub. Or a developer wants to build 700 new houses on a nearby field. The proposal can be perfectly rational or completely insane. You know what humans are like. You and your neighbors will be informed about it and have a chance to object. 

Objecting takes a bit of commitment, though. You have to take one word and staple it to another word, then tape both to a thought that’s at least marginally related to your objection. And your objection has to be related to the planning regulations, because “I don’t like it” won’t get you past the gatekeepers of modern British living.

So you need to understand the planning regulations,  at least a bit, which–

Would it be fair to say no one does? Probably not, but it wouldn’t be too much of an exaggeration. The article I’m stealing my information from calls the regulations labyrinthine. 

And here’s where we find not one but two AI services that offer to take your objection, dig out some backing from the planning regs, and turn it into a rational-sounding letter, complete with references to previous cases and decisions that–you know what AI is like–might never have been decided by any governmental body on this planet.

What will this do to the planning system? According to a lawyer who specializes in planning law, bring it to a grinding halt. The decisions are made by elected officials–sometimes very local ones–who know a little more about planning than I do about chemistry but not necessarily. 

“The danger,” the lawyer said, “is decisions are made on the wrong basis. Elected members making final decisions could easily believe AI-generated planning speeches . . . even if they are full of made-up case law and regulations.” 

Someone who campaigns for more homes to be built with community support said, “This will . . . lead to people finding obscure reasons” to object to planning applications. 

Meanwhile, the government is promoting AI as a way to clear the planning backlog and build 1.5 million homes by 2029.

***

I can’t blame artificial intelligence for my most recent fuckup, just a lapse in human intelligence. It was Fraggle who pointed out (thanks, Fraggle) that I posted a headline, midweek instead of Friday, with no content, in spite of which it got two likes. I may be at my most popular when I don’t say anything. 

Where was the content? she asked. In a dusty shoebox at the back of the closet, whence I have rescued it and poured it here, where it belongs. 

What happened? I hit Post when I should’ve hit Schedule. 

It’s been that kind of week. That’s the lovely thing about publishing: when you make a fool of yourself, you do it in public. Stick around to see what happens next. I’ll be as surprised as you.

Public consultations: it’s the news from Britain

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In a stunning leap into the modern world, the Wirral Council got rid of a 1935 bylaw that made it illegal to beat a carpet, sing wantonly, or sound a noisy trumpet along a stretch of the Merseyside coast. 

Is it possible to play a non-noisy trumpet? No offense to trumpet players, but I’m under the impression that they’re pretty much all tuned to the key of loud, although any quiet trumpet players out there are welcome to tell me I’m an ignorant git. I do not now play nor have I ever played the trumpet.

But back to the law change: It’s also now legal–or at least not illegal–to incite a dog to bark, make a violent outcry, or erect a “booth, tent, bathing machine, shed, stand, stall, show, exhibition, swing, roundabout or other like erection or thing.” 

What’s a bathing machine? It’s not a machine that throws itself into the bathtub. It’s a wheeled hut that could be pulled into the water, allowing victorian ladies to change into clothes that wouldn’t drown them but not have to walk across the beach in anything revealing. Why anyone bothered to ban them in non-victorian 1935 is beyond me.

Irrelevant photo: My phone tells me this is whitebeam. It’s sometimes right but it did once swear that a dahlia was a carnation, so don’t place any heavy bets on this, okay? What I can tell you definitively is that it’s a neighbor’s tree.

What inspired the changes? Bikes–or as they call them in Britain, push bikes. The old law made it illegal to ride one along what’s now a popular bike route, which left the council in the awkward position of wanting to post informational signs related to a common but technically illegal activity. 

Before 2011, local governments in England needed permission to get rid of out-of-date bylaws. Now all they have to do is hold a public consultation, which brings me, at long last, to today’s headline.

Maybe you know what public consultations are like, but in case you don’t, they work like this: You (the you here being a governmental body) open some online site up to the public, inviting them to comment, but no one knows about it unless the Anti-Bathing-Machine Society finds it and publicizes it to their members, in which case they all write in and make the case that the beach will fill up with bathing machines. You either read what they’ve written or you don’t. Either way, you’ve consulted, the rules have been followed, and you can repeal the law in peace. 

I’m sure London followed those procedures when it repealed a law against transporting horse carcasses in Hammersmith and Fulham. As did Whitstable, in Kent, when it repealed a law against drying clothes in parks. And so we stagger into the modern age, unencumbered by history. 

 

Consulting the not-public

Meanwhile, the House of Lords consulted itself (at least as far as I’ve been able to work it out) about whether to change its rules so that lords will no longer have to register nonfinancial interests that might influence their work. And guess what: it decided the rule was too burdensome and dropped it.

Does a nonfinancial interest  matter, though? Since we live in a society where money rules all, you wouldn’t expect it to, but it can involve anything from being the unpaid chair of a board to involvement in a thinktank or lobbying group. Tortoise Media found that some members of the Lords only participated in debate on topics they’d registered a nonfinancial interest in. 

And following the trail of a declared nonfinancial interests has, at times, led to undeclared financial interests coming to light.

 

Not consulting a proofreader

At the recent Conservative Party conference, attendees were given chocolate bars with a wrapper misspelling Britain–the place the party would like to take another run at governing.  I hate to defend the Conservatives, but they have company: the Scottish Labour Party misspelling Scottish in an election leaflet and the Reform Party misspelled the name of one of its two Members of Parliament, who went ahead and shared the leaflet on social media.

 

Consulting the wrong people

Whoever the organizers of the Great North Run, in Newcastle, consulted when they ordered participation medals and tee shirts for their race, they were the wrong people. The souvenirs proudly carried a map of the wrong city: Sunderland. 

Give them a few years and they’ll be collectors items.

 

Consulting more wrong people

The British aren’t–hmm, how do I say this diplomatically–famous for their food, and when a popular website, Good Food, ran a recipe for cacio e pepe, which you may have guessed is Italian (the language is a hint) it set off a storm. First mistake, the website said it was easy. It’s not. I can testify that the easy part is how easily it goes wrong. Second mistake, they got the ingredients wrong. 

Butter? No. No butter.

Parmesan? Nope. Pecorino romano. 

An Italian association of restaurants demanded a correction and, in case that wasn’t enough, took the issue up with the British embassy. But let’s not be too hard on the British about this. The New York Times got in the same kind of hot water by adding tomatoes to a carbonara sauce. 

 

Let’s drop the consultation theme

In Bavaria (that was in Germany last I looked), someone called the police about a wiseacre ringing their doorbell in the middle of the night and being nowhere around when they answered the door. You know how the game works: some teenager rings the bell, then runs giggling around the corner. Except that the ringing didn’t stop.

The police did show up and noticed not just that the bell was still ringing but that a motion-detection light hadn’t gone on, which led some clever devil to notice a slime trail crossing the doorbell sensors. A slug had set them off. Or–what do I know?–a snail.

The police claim to have explained territorial boundaries to the little beastie. I doubt it’ll help, but the story made the news in multiple countries, including Britain (making this almost legitimate blog fodder), for whatever that moment of fame is worth to the sleep-deprived.  

 *

Meanwhile, back in Britain, 210 teenage army recruits were put through the wrong training course when the army forgot to notify an outsourcing company, Capita, about a change in its requirements. By now, everyone will have been shuffled into the right course but the mistake will extend the length of their training. 

The Army’s struggled lately to recruit enough trainees to replace the soldiers who are leaving. It’s currently short more than 2,000 trained personnel. This is unlikely to help.

How Britain adds a group to its list of terrorist organizations

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To add a group to Britain’s list of proscribed organizations, first the Home Secretary has to declare it a terrorist organization–”one that engages in or promotes terrorism,” according to a government website–and then Parliament has to approve the addition. 

If you aspire to get your local birdwatchers group added to the list, those are the hoops you’ll have to jump through. As soon as those two things are done, it becomes illegal to belong to it or promote it. Or invite support for it. Or arrange or assist with a meeting that supports it. Or address a meeting that etc., presumably even if you stand up at the meeting and say, “Everybody stop this and go home.” Or publicly wear clothes that “arouse suspicion of membership or support.” Or display anything that arouses suspicion of etc. 

If this is starting to sound abusably wide-ranging, stay with me. We’ll get to that.

The maximum sentence for any of those things can be as high as 14 years. Plus a fine. 

 

Palestine Action

Not long ago, the British government added a group called Palestine Action to the list, so now anyone who’s a member or who “recklessly expresses” support for the group (I’m quoting from yet another government website there) is dicing with the possibility of a prison sentence. Two other organizations were added at the same time: the Maniacs Murder Cult and the Russian Imperial Movement.

Palestine Action describes itself as disruptive but nonviolent and targets companies involved in arms sales to Israel. They’ve occupied premises, destroyed property, gotten themselves arrested, and used spray paint. They’ve probably even gotten spray paint on their clothes. They haven’t killed, tried to kill, or threatened to kill anyone.

A demonstration in Barnstaple, Devon, against the genocide in Gaza.

The Russian Imperial movement is a white supremacist and monarchist organization that promotes a Russian imperial state and has been linked to a series of letter bombs and has a paramilitary training wing based in Russia.  

The Maniac Murder Cult is an international white supremacist, neo-Nazi organization that exists mostly online. It encourages acts of violence against homeless people, drug addicts and migrants. Its leader’s known as Commander Butcher and is facing charges in the US for allegedly telling an undercover federal agent to dress up as Santa Claus and hand out poisoned candy to non-white kids and students at Jewish schools. The disconnect between Jews and Christmas seems to have gone over his head. A fair number of non-religious Jews do celebrate it–my family did, although without the poison candy–but families who send their kids to specifically Jewish schools? They’re really not Santa’s target audience. 

What I’m saying here is that in addition to being allegedly homicidal, this guy needs career counseling. And jail time. 

That leaves Palestine Action as the odd one out on the list. 

 

Meanwhile, in what passes for the real world

Banning Palestine Action has led to more than 700 arrests, and here’s where we get to that business about the law being abusably wide-ranging. In Kent, a woman was arrested for holding a Palestinian flag and signs saying “Free Gaza” and “Israel is committing genocide.” She filmed the police telling her that the words free Gaza supported Palestine Action and that it was illegal “to express an opinion or belief supportive of a proscribed organization.”  

In Leeds, a man was arrested for carrying a cartoon from the magazine Private Eye. The text read:

PALESTINE ACTION EXPLAINED

Unacceptable Palestine Action 

Spraying military planes with paint 

Acceptable Palestine Action 

Shooting Palestinians queuing for food

“It’s a cartoon from Private Eye,” he told his arresting officer. “ I can show you. I’ve got the magazine in my bag,” 

By that  time, they were putting him in handcuffs. He was released on bail six hours later, but on the condition that he not attend any more Palestine Action rallies.

The rally where he was arrested hadn’t been organized by Palestine Action.

A few days later, charges were dropped. 

“If I go on another demo,” he asked the anti-terrorism officer who called to tell him that, “and I hold up that cartoon again, does that mean I will be arrested or not?” 

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “It’s done on a case-by-case basis.”

As indeed it is. The magazine’s editor hasn’t been arrested. Neither has the cartoonist. 

An 80-year-old woman was arrested at a rally in Wales and the police searched her house, removing a Palestinian flag, books on Palestine and on the climate crisis, iPads, drumsticks, and the belt for a samba drum. They brought in a geiger counter–or what a friend who walked in to feed the cats in the middle of the search thought was a geiger counter–and poked long cotton buds into jars of dry food. 

 

The phrase Palestine Action gets loose in the world

All that is why there was a demonstration in Parliament Square, in London, on August 9, where people showed up with blank signs and markers. Once more than 500 who were willing to be arrested had gathered, they made signs saying, “I support Palestine Action.” All 532 were duly arrested. Half of them were over 60. 

One of them, though, wasn’t holding a sign but wearing a tee shirt that read “Plasticine Action” and was designed to mimic the Palestine Action logo. I’m not sure if that makes it 531 arrests there or 533. Or if we stay with 532. 

As he waited to be booked, his arresting officer reappeared and told him, “I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.”

Plasticine Man–his name is Pickering–asked for the good news.

“I’m de-arresting you.”

“What’s the bad news?”

“It’s going to be really embarrassing for me.”

Pickering is now selling the tee shirts to raise money for Medical Aid for Palestine. It comes in your choice of 26 colors.  

As far as I know, I’m not risking arrest by linking to that.

Palestine Action has won the right to appeal its ban, but until the case is heard it’s still officially a terrorist organization. When I went to a local demonstration against the starvation of Gaza, I picked my way carefully through the English language before making a sign asking, “Are we allowed to say Gaza?”

As a naturalized citizen, I’m not in a position to risk arrest.

There have been no demonstrations asking to free the words Maniacs Murder Cult or  Russian Imperial Movement.

The starvation of Gaza continues. And the next planned demonstration against the ban on Palestine Action is asking people who get arrested to refuse to be processed on the street and released. If they’re taken to the police station, they’re entitled to a lawyer and can clog the jails.

*

Meanwhile, in the Protestant section of Belfast, Northern Ireland, vigilantes calling themselves Belfast Nightwatch First Division are patrolling the evening streets, challenging dark-skinned people to produce identity documents and explain what they’re doing in the eastern part of the city, threatening anyone whose responses don’t satisfy them.

One member was quoted as telling a Black man sitting on a bench, “Hey boy, I don’t want to catch you around our parks any more.”

Nightwatch First Division is not on  the list of terrorist organizations, although to be fair to a government that pisses me off with amazing regularity, it’s new and may or may not have any structure behind the name.

A neo-Nazi group called Blood and Honour (the phrase comes from the Hitler Youth) is also not on the list, although the government says it has “reasonable grounds to suspect” it’s involved in “terrorist activities through promoting and encouraging terrorism, seeking to recruit people for that purpose and making funds available for the purposes of its terrorist activities.”

It has frozen its assets.

The Home Office screws up yet again, and other news from Britain

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Britain’s Home Office–the scandal bedecked arm of government that’s supposed to deal with “crime, the police, drugs policy, immigration and passports, and counter terrorism” –could have a new scandal on its hands any day now: it’s lost track of an estimated 200,000 people who have the right to remain in the country. These are people who’ve lived in Britain for decades but who didn’t make their way into the computer system because they landed before the computer did. They got either a letter or a stamp on their passports confirming their right to remain in the country, and that was good enough. Until now. 

Now the Home Office wants them all digitized. So the paper documents? Pffft: they’re worthless. Everyone who has them has to go online and upgrade their documentation. 

Any time you hear the word upgrade, put on your flak jacket.

Okay, I admit, upgrade is my contribution to the discussion. The official language has to do with creating an online eVisa account. Either way, the Home Office says the process is going smoothly. From the bureaucracy’s point of view, that probably means it hasn’t caused the Home Office many problems. Users say they’ve had to fight their way through glitches. The an organization called 3 Million says the bigger problem is that the Home Office doesn’t know how to contact many of the people who rely on paper documents, so it hasn’t been able to tell them the documents they’ve been relying on are about to be worthless. 

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

Don't worry about the graphics here. They're almost all irrelevant to the text.

Irrelevant photo: a hydrangea

What happens to people who don’t have valid documents? The risk is that they could be treated as illegal immigrants, who are the current political boogeymen. They’ll be locked out of the pensions they worked for, along with housing, health care, and other services. 

And the problem isn’t just that they can’t all be reached. They’re none of them young–they arrived pre-computerization, remember–and they won’t all be technologically gifted. You know how that happens: The decades pass, you get older, the world changes, and you don’t necessarily keep up with it. 

But gee, it’s progress, and if a few bodies fall by the wayside, who cares? At least until there’s a public flap about it, at which point all decision makers will put on their surprised face.

 

The ghost of Boaty McBoatface

Having told us there’s no money for (almost) anything sensible, Britain’s government has decided to redesign the bank notes. Because, hey, why not? It’ll lift everybody’s spirits. And now that not many people use cash anymore, what could be a better time to redesign it? 

I haven’t been able to find out how much the redesign will cost, but what the hell, it’s only money.

So it all makes perfect sense that someone decided to get the public involved by asking what picture people want to see on the new notes. That worked really well when they–that’s the public, you understand–were asked to choose a name for an arctic research vessel and chose, by a wide margin, Boaty McBoatface. If you missed the story, you can catch up with it here. It’s a testament to both the British sense of humor and British bureaucracy at work. 

Already one writer, Athena Kugblenu, has suggested honoring British culture with a picture of an organge traffic cone. 

Why a traffic cone? 

Because the country has an uplifting tradition–which generally involves a combination of alcohol, youth, and athleticism–of putting them on the heads of statues.

If you want to suggest something for the redesign, here’s your link. And if it’s suitably absurd, leave it in the comments as well.

 

And since I mentioned statues

It seems folks have been climbing the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, not necessarily to add a traffic cone but during protests, although someone did add a strip of turf to give him a green mohican.  

 So in May the government made moves in the direction of turning that into a crime. Not the mohican and not climbing on statues in general, but climbing on this particular statue. As the Sun, one of the trashier of the right-wing papers put it, “Thugs who climb on Winston Churchill’s London statue face JAIL.”

I hate to link to the Sun, but what the hell, I am quoting it. And they did use all those capital letters. They had to. If they don’t use them now, Trump will gobble them all down and there’ll be none left for anyone else’s hysteria.

The penalty is up to 3 months in prison and a $1,000 fine. The bill, is if passes, applies not just to the Churchill statue but to monuments commemorating World Wars I and II as well.

Sleep well tonight, my friends. The country will be a safer place to live in once this passes.

 

When is a biscuit not a biscuit?

In other important news, McVittie’s asked the Biscuit Museum (yes, there is such a thing) to remove Jaffa Cakes from the premises. 

We’ll get to why in a minute, but first, for the non-British speakers among us, what’s a biscuit? It’s what Americans call a cookie–something round, sweet, and flat. And the Jaffa Cake meets all those criteria. What’s more, stores (shops in Brit-speak) stack Jaffa Cakes in the cookie display–or at least the one in my village does–since they come in the kind of packaging most cookies inhabit. 

Still, McVittie’s insists it’s a cake, and since McVittie’s is the maker of the flat, round, sweet little beast–well, you’d think they’d like the publicity of being in a museum, even such an odd museum, but they don’t.

Why not? Tax law. If the thing’s a cake it’s not subject to VAT. 

To what? Value Added Tax, which is a long name for a hefty sales tax. Plain biscuits? No tax. Chocolate-covered biscuits, though? Tax. Obviously. And Jaffa Cakes are chocolate-covered whatever-they-ares, so this is Important. McVittie’s and the tax office arm-wrestled over it in 1991, McVittie’s won, and it’s not backing down. They’ve been sold as taxless cakes ever since.

It used to be theologians who argued about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin.

 

A chatbot insists the dog ate its homework . . .

. . . but strictly in the metaphorical sense. 

Our story begins with someone–let’s call him Barry Smethurst, since that’s his name–waiting for a train, which is late, so he goes online and asks WhatsApp’s chatbot for TransPennine Express’s customer service phone number so he can ask what’s happened to his train. 

He gets a number. He calls the number. The number turns out to belong to someone who has nothing to do with TransPennine Express–he’s a property industry executive in Oxfordshire, 170 miles away, but he does use WhatsApp and his number’s on his company website, although Smethurst probably doesn’t know all that because he asks the bot what the number is. 

“Let’s focus on finding the right info for your TransPennine Express query!” the chatbot says cheerily and complete with exclamation point.

Smethurst no longer cares. He’s found something better to do while he waits: he wants to know why the bot gave him the number.

It was “based on patterns,” the bot says, and it would “strive to do better” in the future. The number, though, is “fictional.”

Bullshit, Smethurst doesn’t exactly say.

“You’re right, the bot says. It was “mistakenly pulled from a database.”

What database?

“I didn’t pull the number from a database. I generated a string of digits that fit the format of a UK mobile number but it wasn’t based on any real data on contacts.”

“Just giving a random number to someone is an insane thing for an AI to do,” Smethurst tells it, although what good he thinks scolding a bot will do is anyone’s guess.

That’s where the story drizzles away, sadly. Maybe his train pulls into the station. Maybe he sinks into a pit of despond so deep that he can no longer type. We leave him there, phone in hand, feet on platform, bot within thumb’s reach, but he’s given me an excuse to move to a more bizarre story about AI gone wrong, although it happened outside of Britain’s borders. 

A Norwegian man filed a complaint against OpenAI’s ChatGPT after he went online to look for information about himself and was told that he was in jail for killing two of his children. 

Yes, it’s nuts to think you’ll learn more about yourself by looking online than by putting down your phone and spending some time with your own non-electronic self, but we’ve all done it. 

Okay, most of us have done it. Or at least some of us have done it. Or–screw it, I’ve done it, although I don’t have kids so if anyone tells you I killed some of them, understand that it’s not physically possible. 

AI and the weirder aspects of the Bayeux Tapestry: it’s the news from Britain

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Let’s start today’s post in Chicago, which you may already know is not in Britain, but it’ll all make sense if you stay with me a while. 

In May, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a summer reading list, as newspapers do when summer threatens and they need some fluff to fill their column inches. I don’t know if they have any book reviewers left on staff, or if they ever had them, but they farmed the work out to a freelancer, who farmed it out to AI, because why would a responsible newspaper hire someone who actually reads books to write about books?

It might be relevant that the paper cut its staff by 20% recently. Or to put that less delicately, fired 20% of its staff. 

The article that the freelancer turned in and the paper printed recommended six imaginary books, although to be fair they were credited to real writers. It even had synopses for them, and reasons people might like them. 

Irrelevant photo: poppies

The article included a few real books, also by real writers, but nobody’s perfect. 

The Sun-Times said, “We’re looking into how this made it into print as we speak. It is not editorial content and was not created by, or approved by, the Sun-Times newsroom.”

Which makes it sound a bit like some AI-generated copy stormed the newsroom and locked the reporters in closets so it could put itself into print. 

It might be worth adding, in this context, that a summer supplement quoted a food anthropologist who also doesn’t seem to exist. 

And the connection to Britain? We’ve been told that artificial intelligence is going to play a greater role in British military procurement.

What could possibly go wrong?

*

I was going to leave it there, but I can’t resist an AI-gone-wrong story. Britain’s high court is less than happy about dozens of false citations and quotes from case law being relied on in court–presumably generated by AI. An £89 million damages case had 18 of phantom citations and I have no idea how many phantom quotes, so it seems fair to guess that these aren’t all being generated by your street-corner mom-and-pop law firm.

 

How to tell if you’re in Britain

I mentioned that Chicago isn’t in Britain, and I stand by that statement, but if you ever find yourself in a strange city–or town, for that matter–and need to know if it’s in Britain, the simplest way is to head for someplace that serves food and ask for tea, or better yet, builder’s tea. If you get a funny look, you’re not in Britain. If no one thinks that’s odd, you are. If they tell you they don’t serve tea but get all apologetic about it–yeah, that’s Britain.

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You could also look for the nearest mass-participation race. If some of the runners are dressed up as anything other than runners, that’s another sign you’re in Britain, although admittedly not as useful a test since races aren’t happening all the time on every corner. Still, an article about April’s London Marathon mentioned runners dressed as Sherlock Holmes, a chicken, Spiderman, the Elizabeth Tower (that’s the tower that houses Big Ben, which is a clock), and a rhino.

The rhino gets special mention, because the runner inside the costume broke a Guinness world record for the most marathons completed in a 3D costume: this was his 113th dressed as a pachyderm. 

Listen, fame is fleeting. You have to grab any chance you get. 

 

How clear is biological sex?

Back in May (remember May?), Britain’s Supreme Court ruled that the words sex, woman, and man in the 2010 Equality Act refer to biological sex. You know: XX or XY. Vagina or penis. Pink baby clothes or blue. 100% pay or 87% pay. Any idiot can tell the difference and as of now everybody has to go to the corner–not to mention the toilet–assigned to them at birth. 

It all sounds simple until you talk to someone who actually knows about this stuff. I’m not going to do even a shallow dive into it here but a Scientific American article does a great job of exploring the complicated reality behind what’s supposed to be simple. 

 Among other things, it says, “Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary—their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. . . .

“When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have . . . uncovered variations in . . .  genes that have subtle effects on a person’s anatomical or physiological sex. . . .

“These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms.”

And that’s just the part I happened to grab on my way out the door. It really is worth a read. 

If determining a person’s sex was as simple as the Supreme Court seems to think–

Listen, I don’t know how to put this delicately, but people studying the Bayeux Tapestry–that massive history-of-the-Norman-Conquest in pictures–are debating whether it includes 93 penises or 94. 

If that strikes you as an awful lot of genitalia stitched into a single tapestry, even a massive one, I should mention that 88 of them are on horses. That may or may not normalize the situation.

Why are the experts unsure? Surely, even with the boundaries between the sexes blurring, a penis is still a penis.

Well, in real life, to the best of my knowledge–and I’ll admit to not being an expert on the subject–it probably still is, but this is art, not life, and art is notoriously messy. Some experts say the object in question could be the scabbard for a sword or dagger. 

As Fats Waller said, “One never knows, do one?” Although I’m pretty sure he was talking about almost anything else. 

The Supreme Court has not seen fit to rule on this. Yet. But the debate has led to wonderful quotes, including one to rival Fats Waller’s: “I counted the penises in the Bayeux Tapestry.”

 

Okay, that was weird; let’s talk about politics

Two members of the Middleton St. George parish council got in a fight that ended up with scratches, blood, bruised fingers, and a broken pair of glasses, all of which filled a fair number of column inches and could have saved that Chicago newspaper from having to review nonexistent books.

The men involved in the fight are both in their 70s, and if both are telling the truth they each hit the other one first. Sadly, no one was wearing a body camera, so we may never be sure, but an audio recording does include one of them saying, “David, no, please, there are women in here.”

Women? Horrors! What are they doing in a meeting? Never mind, they won’t stay long. Both of you sit back down and pretend to be grownups until the ladies go back to the kitchen to make the tea.

*

If anyone’s gotten into a physical fight in Parliament lately, I missed the story, so we’ll have to make do with fires in Westminster Palace, where Parliament meets: there’ve been 44 in the past ten years. The building’s also full of toxic material, and no, I’m not casting aspersions on any political parties, although it wouldn’t take much to tempt me. I’m talking about asbestos, which has been found in over a thousand items.

Items? Beats me. It’s an odd word for the context.

The building was built between 1840 and 1860, which makes it newer than a lot of British buildings, but it’s held together by chewing gum and political bile. Specifically, disagreements over whether to spend money on either replacing the building with something new and functional or on the serious repair work that would make it safe. 

The problem is that either approach would cost billions and take ten years at an optimistic estimate. Less optimistically, it could take seventy years. Putting it off would cost more in the long run and risk the whole place going up in highly embarrassing flames. But spending billions on a refurb of Parliament’s meeting place isn’t a good look at a time when we’re being told there isn’t enough money to put the National Health Service back on its feet, when money’s being pared away from the disabled, and when–oh, hell, I could extend the list for many dismal paragraphs but won’t. 

Prediction? The story will drag on for years, unresolved. Unless it goes up in flames.

*

Boris Johnson–former Conservative prime minister and continuing national embarrassment–was selling a photograph (that’s of him, with you, in case I haven’t been not clear) for £121 before an event called “An Evening with Boris Johnson.” Tickets were extra, but for your £121 you did at least get a free handshake. 

If you only bought a ticket, all you got for your money was a seat. 

Unnamed allies of Johnson’s say he’s scoping out the possibility of a political comeback: he’s bored out of Westminster and thinks there’s unfinished business. Which, no doubt, only he can wrap up. 

To be fair to him, he’s not our only continuing national embarrassment. If we could make money exporting embarrassing politicians, we’d even out the balance of trade–which was, as I’m sure you know–£3.70 billion in March 2025. 

*

Meanwhile, back at Westminster, a Conservative MP claimed more than £1,100 in expenses for copies of Whos’ Who, which are available for free in the House of Commons’ library. 

Why did he need his own? I’m speculating here, but probably because he’s listed in it. And, you know, some days you just need to open the book and reassure yourself that you exist. And existed in three previous years, because he bought copies for each of four years. 

I’m sympathetic. Sometimes I have to look at my blog to remind myself that I exist. I mean, who doesn’t? Why else do we publish these things?

Death and technology: it’s the news from Britain

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A British court ruled that a will was valid even though it was written on the back bits of cardboard that started out in life as packaging for Mr. Young’s frozen fish and Mr. Kipling’s mince pies. As a result of the ruling, a diabetes charity will inherit £180,000.

Yes, I do hear the irony there–mince pies; diabetes–but relatives explained that diabetes runs in the family, so the pies aren’t necessarily responsible for the death. 

The will ended up in court not because of the unorthodox stationary but because the details of who got what were written on the frozen fish box and the witness’s signature was on the pie box, leaving the court to decide whether they were really part of the same document or if, maybe, some fundraiser for the diabetes charity hadn’t snuck in through a window, destroyed the packaging from four Yorkshire puddings, and scribbled out a new, more favorable version of the will on the fish box. But no: the court held that the same pen was used, hinting that they were written at the same time.

The family wasn’t challenging the will. It only ended up in court because–oh, you know. Overloaded court system. Frozen fish. It had to happen.

Irrelevant photo: rhododendron

*

Since we’re talking about wills, let’s push a little further into the topic and talk about what happens to us after we die. Not as in heaven, hell, reincarnation, the underworld, all that sort of speculation, but as in whether AI will keep a virtual version of us going after the original goes the way of that Yorkshire puddings box. 

On the current evidence, it just might, but only if we pay enough money. For $199, one company will let you upload videos, voice messages, photos, whatever you’ve got, and then its algorithm will put them all in a blender, whizz them around a bit, and produce a version of you that the living can call on the phone or get text messages from. So twenty years after you’re dead, you can still say, “Am I the only person around here who knows how to wash a dish?” and your family will say, in unison, “Aww, that is so sweet.” 

If you want to go as high as $50,000 plus maintenance fees, you can have yourself made into a 3D avatar, holding up a greasy dish to illustrate your point.

The possibilities don’t end there, though. Bots can now generate content, so your ghost may not be stuck repeating the weary old lines you wrote for it. It could potentially come up with its own content, which it will deliver in your voice. Or what it’s decided is your voice. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

 

A few words from the Department of Things that Could Possibly Go Wrong

To answer this question, we have to leave the UK and head for the US, where the following story is the least of what’s going wrong. 

A tech entrepreneur got trapped in a self-driving cab in–oh, I think it was December of last year. (Sorry–I’m not a newspaper. I get around to these things when I get around to them.) The cab got him as far as to the airport, then began circling a cement island in the parking lot while he (let’s assume frantically) called the company and the voice on the other end told him to open his app because she didn’t have a way to shut the thing down.

After eight loops someone managed to shut the thing down and he emerged, dizzy and late for his flight–which was delayed so he caught it. He still doesn’t know if the voice on the other end was human or bottish.  

*

That gives us a nice segue into technology.

A widely quoted psychologist and sex advisor from the University of Oxford, Barbara Santini, may not exist. The University of Oxford (a.k.a. Oxford University) is real enough, as is psychology. Sex advisor, though? Not a real job title, and just to make sure I’m right about that I checked with Lord Google. He knew of nothing between sex therapists on one end of the spectrum and brothels and call girl services on the other.

I’l going to be seeing some really annoying ads for a while here. 

In spite of working in a field that doesn’t exist, Santini’s been quoted in Vogue, Cosmopolitan, the i, the Guardian, the Express, Hello, the Telegraph, the Daily Mail, the Sun, BBC.com, and other publications, both impressive and unimpressive, talking about everything from Covid to vitamin D to playing darts to improve your health. A lot of her quotes link back to an online sex toy shop. 

Neither the shop not Santini were responding to journalists trying to confirm her existence, and articles quoting her are disappearing from the internet as fast as dog food at feeding time. 

Cue a great deal of journalistic soul-searching about how to verify their sources’ credentials in the age of AI, which has put pressure on journalists to work faster and made it fast, easy, and cheap to crank out an article on any topic you could dream up. 

Impressively, at least two of the publications that fell for the trick have published articles about it.

*

Meanwhile, Amazon’s selling books written by AI. 

How do we know the authors aren’t human? Samples that were run through an AI detection program and scored 100%. 

It costs next to nothing  to throw a book together using AI, and hey, somebody’ll buy it. It would be bad enough if these were novels (I’m a writer, so that worries me) but these were self-help books. One on living with ADHD noted, helpfully, that friends and family “don’t forgive the emotional damage you inflict.” 

The one on foraging for mushrooms, though, wins the red-flag award for dangerous publishing. It advocated tasting–presumably to make sure they’re safe. 

AI is known for not being able to tell dangerous advice from common sense. It’s trained on solid science books but also on complete wack-a-doodlery, and it can’t tell the difference.

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Britain’s Ministry of Justice is–I think we need to tuck the word allegedly in here–developing a program to predict who is most likely to kill someone. The program was originally called the Homicide Prediction Project, but its name was toned down and it’s now called Sharing Data to Improve Risk Assessment. By the time anyone works their way through the new name, they’ll have dozed off.

You saw the movie, now live the full-on experience.

The Ministry of Justice says the project “is being conducted for research purposes only.” The prison and probation services already use risk assessment tools–I believe those are called algorithms–and says this is only an experiment to see if adding new data sources makes them more effective. So it’s all okay. 

*

I admit I’m stretching the topic to shoehorn this in, but a university student had to be rescued from Mount Fuji (that’s in Japan, which is not, as you may be aware, anywhere close to Britain) not once but twice. The second time was because he’d gone back to find his phone.

Things that got lost: it’s the news from Britain

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Ever since some inventor turned metal detectors loose in the world, people have been finding loot in British fields–Roman coins, Anglo-Saxon silver hoards, prehistoric whatevers–and especially when I read about those coins I can’t help wondering, Who put them there? Were they lost? Were they hidden? Why haven’t they been found until now? 

I won’t pretend to answer any of those questions, but I thought I’d remind us–a category in which I somewhat obviously include myself–that it’s not just ancient people who lose stuff. We do it all the time. So let’s talk about stuff that gets found in Britain, since that implies it got itself lost in the first place.

Irrelevant photo: a camellia

Secret documents

Someone going to a football game in Newcastle parked his car and found documents spilling out of a black plastic bag. Being the nosy sort of person I admire, he looked to see what they were and found what the paper called “potentially confidential military information,” including names, ranks, emails addresses, shift patterns, details of weapons they were issued, and codes for an armory’s intruder detections system. 

Wheee. 

What were they doing spilling out of a black plastic bag and strewn along a street in Newcastle? The Ministry of Defense is “looking into this urgently.” They’ll get back to us when hell freezes over, or possibly a few weeks after.

Coins

No metal detectorist of the future is likely to find this set: as Britain sleepwalks its way toward a cashless society, significantly fewer children are being rushed to hospitals after swallowing coins. They’re harder for sticky little hands to find.

How significant is “significantly fewer”? From 2012 to 2024, the number of under-18s who had nose, airway, or throat surgery after swallowing a small object declined by 29%. Historically, coins swallowed by children younger than 6 accounted for 75% of those surgeries, since not a whole lot of 17-year-olds swallow coins, probably because no one’s promoting it on TikTok. 

Yet.

Parents still have to worry about magnets and button batteries (shiny, smooth, highly appealing, and I bet I’d have tried one if they’d been around when I was at the coin-swallowing age). 

Remarkably few toddlers swallow credit cards.

Monsters

Here I admit I’m pushing the category. This story’s not from Britain but the US, which doesn’t have a lot of ancient coin hoards to be found but has more than enough political monsters to make up for a shortage in any other category.

A babysitter in Kansas was having trouble getting one of the kids settled in bed because there was a monster under the bed.

No monster, she said. I’ll take a look to prove it.

She looked and found a man lying on the floor. 

I’d love to give you a blow-by-blow of what happened next, but all I know is that there was a fight, the babysitter and one kid were knocked down, and the man took off running but was arrested the next morning. He used to live there, although not under the bed, and already had a court order to stay away. 

The kid will never sleep again.

Creme Eggs

If you’re not from Britain, you need to know that Creme Eggs appear every Easter. They’re chocolate and have horrid-looking white and yellow stuff inside. I don’t know what they taste like and I’m afraid to find out. I suspect that you have to grow up with them to think they’re a good idea and you might’ve figured out by now that I didn’t.

However. The people who love them love them, and a man in Dogsthorpe, which is in Peterborough, which is someplace or other in Britain–it hasn’t been lost lately–was arrested after stealing 325 of them. That’s £220.50 worth of chocolate-covered runny goop. When he was arrested, he had a duffel bag full of them and a “suspicious bulge” in his jacket. The arresting officer went to unzip it and the suspect warned him, “It’s all gonna fall out.” Which is what makes this qualify as stuff that gets found. In Britain.

Aldi

Can I slip in something that doesn’t get found? A Welsh village of 500 people was listed online as having an Aldi store. (Aldi’s a discount supermarket chain.) More people than the roads can handle promptly showed up to do their shopping and a milk tanker got stuck in a narrow lane trying to make a delivery.

The farmer who went to help the driver said, “Poor fella tried pulling up and backing the trailer up our hill in a misguided attempt at turning around. Went down with a tractor but the fella had no idea where the towing eye was, so I left it to the experts.

“They straightened him out to go to Hiraethog to turn around. As he was rounding the corner at the bottom of the hill, he slowed down to open his window and thank us–and nearly got stuck again, bless his cotton socks.”

It’s surprising how easily a truck can get stuck in Britain’s narrowest roads. Or a camper van. Or anything like that. A road near us is locally famous for swallowing trucks whole. It now has a sign, put up by the residents, warning of narrow lanes, stone walls, sharp turns, and enough other dangers to make the sign pretty much unreadable. They left off the dragons, hostile residents, and Vandal hordes, but my partner and I are thinking of adding them some night under cover of darkness.

The phantom store was apparently the work of a prankster, but when the story ran in January, Aldi’s website hadn’t gotten rid of the imaginary store. 

Bananas

In Nottinghamshire, a plate of peeled bananas has been appearing once a month. When the article I’m stealing this from first ran, also in January, the bananas had been showing up for more than a year. If anyone knows what they mean or who’s leaving them, they’re not talking.  

They don’t appear to have been lost, only found.

Cave art

In 2005, Banksy smuggled a cave art-style drawing, Peckham Rock, into the British Museum and it stayed there for three days before it was spotted. It showed a human figure, an auroch-type beast with two arrows in its side, and a supermarket trolley, which is what I’d call a supermarket cart. The cart was the giveaway, as was the cement it was drawn on. 

The staff only spotted it after Banksy’s website challenged people to find it. 

It was returned to him and thirteen years later he lent it back to the museum as part of an exhibition called I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent.

A government report

The Home Office spent at least £22,000 and three years trying to bury an internal report on the Windrush scandal. The scandal? Well, the Home Office had announced that it would create a hostile climate for illegal immigrants and ended up detaining and deporting hundreds of legal immigrants whose presence in Britain dated back to the Windrush generation: immigrants from British Caribbean islands who’d been encouraged to immigrate to Britain to help it recover from World War II. 

The report found that the scandal had its roots in 30 years of racist immigration law. You’re shocked, I know. So was the Home Office. That’s why they decided to bury it.

A transparency campaigner managed to get the report released. Without using a metal detector.

Norfolk Island

We’re leaving Britain for this one, but we’ll touch base briefly before we head out the door for another week. 

You probably already know about Trump imposing tariffs on Heard and McDonald Islands, which are both uninhabited, at least by humans. Less well known is the 29% tariff imposed on Norfolk Island, population 2,188 squeezed into 13.4 square miles. But small as it is, Trump & Co. found it.  

What did the place do to get whacked with that tariff? They seem to have gotten their silly selves mixed up with Norfolk, UK, Norfolk; Virginia (if you’ll look on a map you’ll find that in the US); and New Hampshire, which is also in the US and is abbreviated NH, not NI, but hell, they’re all letters so you could see how a person might mix them up.

The administrator of Norfolk Island said, “There are no known exports from Norfolk Island to the United States.” 

That didn’t stop the US Observatory of Economic Complexity–

Okay, I need to interrupt myself here: that sounds like a department I’d invent but I’m quoting an article in a reputable newspaper, The Guardian. And I checked with Lord Google to be sure. It appears to be entirely real. 

So: that didn’t stop the US Observatory of Economic Complexity from either blaming or crediting it–take your pick–for exporting £504,000 worth of goods to the US. 

The problem seems to stem from errors on the bills of lading, although the article says, as if tippy-toeing through a minefield, that it’s not “alleging that the companies are responsible for the errors.” I believe that translates to, “Don’t sue us.”

Don’t sue me either. I’m not alleging anything. I’m just sitting on the couch reading the newspaper and bothering you about it.

History

History was lost briefly and then found and restored on a US government website.

A US National Parks Service page about the Underground Railroad–a network that helped slaves escape to freedom–took down a photo of Harriet Tubman, an escaped slave who made repeated, not to mention wildly risky, trips into the slave states, leading something like 70 people to freedom.

The Underground Railroad? That was a network that sheltered escaped slaves on their way to safety. So, yeah, why mention its best-known conductor?

After an outcry, to my surprise, the page has been restored, at least to the point of including Tubman. The revised page–the one that you won’t find anymore–emphasized “Black/White Cooperation,” not the efforts of enslaved people to escape slavery. In fact, the first paragraph avoided any mention of slavery.

Give the folks in charge a bit more time and we’ll find that slavery never happened at all. It was all just another experiment in Black/White Cooperation and a bit of a misunderstanding.

If the holidays are over, who’s watching you now? 

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Now that Christmas is over and the people who think Santa watches them have let their guard down, allow me to call your attention to a new source of anxiety: your air fryer is watching you.

Don’t have an air fryer? That’s okay. Your audio speakers are doing the same job. Don’t have either one? Some other household object is ready to fill in. Have you checked the salt shaker lately?

Britain’s oddly named consumer organization, Which?, reports that “data collection [on the products they tested] often went well beyond what was necessary for the functionality of the product – suggesting data could, in some cases, be being shared with third parties for marketing purposes.”

You’re shocked, I know. Me? I’m hard to shock, but the phrase “be being” kind of threw me.

Actually, the air fryer did too, but I guess that’s what you want for a spy–an appliance on one would suspect. 

Which? tested three air fryers, which “wanted permission to record audio on the user’s phone, for no specified reason.” Some asked for the new owner’s gender and date of birth when they set up an account, although Hawley’s Small and Unscientific Survey reports that age and gender don’t often affect cooking times. That’s based on a sample of one: me. I haven’t changed gender but I have gotten older and cooking times have held steady.

The questions aren’t optional. Unless, of course, you don’t bother to set up an account. I don’t have an air fryer myself, so I’m making a wild guess when I say you can probably use the beast without an account. Plug it into the wall. Turn on the heat. Fry air.

Semi-relevant photo: a camellia, blooming away in December. It doesn’t care who you are, how old you are, or even if you have a gender.

Smart watches, on the other hand, aren’t smart unless you agree to the small print. At least one, Huawei’s, wants permissions Which? considers risky, allowing it to bump around inside your phone, record audio, access files, and see what other apps you’ve installed in case it gets lonely and wants to commune with a few like-minded apps. 

It also wants to know your exact location. 

None of that, the company swears, is used for marketing or advertising. And it’s all justified, although how is anyone’s guess. 

Smart speakers are all over the map in terms of what they want to know and I got bored with the details, so if you need to know what your smart speaker’s up to, either assume it’s no good or go read the article. 

*

Which? also conducted a survey about the worst holiday presents people were given. The most notable entries were a gravesite and a toilet seat. Probably not to the same recipient or from the same giver, but that’s a guess.

 

On the other hand . . . 

. . . not all technology wants to record our every electronic move. Some wants to help us be better people (as defined by its developers), and in pursuit of that goal Apple and never mind which other firms have created gizmos that can rewrite or summarize our emails before we send them. Presumably with our permission, but don’t count on that being true forever. The goal is to make us sound friendlier and more professional than in fact we are, but AI’s new to the job, so there’ve been a few glitches.

I do love a good glitch.

An email from a woman breaking up with her boyfriend was summarized as, “No longer in a relationship; wants belongings from the apartment.” 

Whatever the original said, we can all agree the improved version’s much friendlier.

The text accompanying a photo of a kid working on a car with his father came out as, “Photo shared of child reaching into car hood; air filter changed.” A series of five emails were summed up as, “Russia launches missile and drone attack; shop early for Black Friday Deals.” And a message from Amazon said,  “Package was delivered tomorrow.”

AI has also been introduced to Ring door cameras. Since it doesn’t have human-generated text to improve, it–

Words fail me, so let’s cut to the example. One sent a message saying, “Dog took boot. Kitten cheese escaped the house.” 

*

I don’t think we can blame either AI or a bot for this, but what the hell, it’s vaguely tech related, so I’ll drop it in here: a Swedish government minister’s emails–or possibly her staff’s emails–got loose in the world and informed one and all that she’s terrified of bananas. So much so that her aides sweep rooms before she enters to make sure no bananas can ambush her.

 

What happens when AI cross-pollinates with religion?

A church in Switzerland (full disclosure: that’s not in Britain; neither is Sweden) installed an AI version of Jesus that, unlike the original, can talk to people in 100 different languages. The church was short on space, so they set it up in the confessional, beaming in an image of Jesus as imagined by I have no idea who–my bet is someone northern European and white. Before people used it they were warned not to disclose personal information and had to confirm that, yes, they understood it was an avatar.

Two-thirds of the users said it was a spiritual experience. The other third? One said it was “trite, repetitive, and exuding a wisdom reminiscent of calendar cliches.”

Criticism divided along sectarian lines. Catholics tended to be offended by the use of the confessional and Protestants by the use of imagery. Given the glitches AI’s prone to, the organizers may have had a worry or three about what Mr. J. would say, but disappointingly, he doesn’t seem to have said anything odd. No confabulated Bible quotes. No escaped cheeses. 

No, I’m not going to excavate the joke that’s just under the surface of that last sentence. We’ll move on.

 

Low-tech possibilities

A group called Forest Research has trained a dog to sniff out a disease, Phytophthora ramorum, that’s responsible for thousands of hectares of British trees being felled. It’s spread by rain, and even after 14 years of Conservative government Britain is still rich in rain.

Forest Research hopes to train dogs to spot other pests as well. As for prototype dog–Dog 1.0– he probably thinks he’s just out in the woods having a good time.

What tea bag makes the best cup of tea, and other British dilemmas

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Every year, Britain’s consumer champion, the oddly named Which?, does a blind test of the nation’s teabags and picks a winner. Because, folks, this is important. You’re a consumer. You need the experts’ opinion on this before you wander cluelessly into a supermarket and buy the tea you, in your ignorance, think you like.

Besides, Which? gets some free publicity out of it. 

This year, in what one headline called a “shock result,” a budget tea, Asda’s Everyday–the cheapest of the contestants–came in first. The high-end Twinings was in joint last place with it doesn’t matter who. What does matter is that Twinings’ tea bags cost four times more than Asda’s. 

My favorite, Yorkshire, wandered in somewhere between the two. 

What qualities do the experts judge tea on? Color. Aroma, Appearance. Taste’s on the list somewhere. Ability to boot you into consciousness first thing in the morning isn’t.

Irrelevant photo: Last week’s post also had an irrelevant picture of Fast Eddie, but surely it’s not possible for a childless cat lady (who’re you calling a lady, asshole?) to post too many cat pictures. So here’s Fast Eddie in slow mode.

The advice column

If you’re in the market for free advice, allow me to offer you this: never try to communicate in an accent or dialect you didn’t come by honestly. I mention this because a local council–in non-British English, that’s a governmental body–tried to use the local dialect for an anti-littering campaign and got it wrong. In very large type.

The North Yorkshire Council put up signs–hundreds of the beasts–urging people to “Gerrit in’t bin’” 

Oops. That should’ve been “Gerrit in t’bin.”

What’s with the “t’”? It’s short for the and it’s a Yorkshire thing. 

Why? 

Why not? There’s no arguing with accents or dialects. They are what they are and they do what they do. 

But let’s not take anything for granted: “gerrit” means get it. “Bin”? It’s what I grew up called the garbage can–that thing you throw trash in. But that’s a Britishism, not Yorkshire’s own invention

To be fair to the council, I don’t know that they’re not from Yorkshire. They may just be people who had some apostrophes to spare and got caught dropping one in the wrong place. As I understand the apostrophe process, we’re born with a certain number and the instructions about how to use them were written by Ikea. So as the years go by, some people get desperate, and they drop theirs in any spot that looks likely. Or if not likely, possible.

It’s not entirely their fault.

A lot of the posters were put up in tourist sites on the theory, no doubt, that visitors would be charmed by a bit of local color, but whether the visitors are looking at the original version or the corrected one, 76.3% are locked in place while they try to unscramble the letters and think, What????

 

The ghost of prime ministers past

Fifty-six days after he became Britain’s prime minister and moved into his new office, Keir Starmer had a portrait of a former prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, moved out. Apparently short of things to get outraged about, Conservative Party leaders pitched a fit.

But since I’ve been making fun of people’s apostrophe use, I should be careful about this: if multiple people do that thing I just mentioned, do they pitch a single collective fit or multiple individual ones?

Either way, they accused Starmer of being vindictive and petty, of spending his time rearranging the furniture instead of governing, and of appeasing the left wing of his party. 

To which the left wing of his party said, “If only.

That kept the news cycle fed for nearly a day, but when the nation failed to rise up in arms the outrage machine went into sleep mode, during which it appears to be doing nothing but is in fact searching the internet for new and surely more popular sources of potential outrage.

 

The Ig Nobels

A winner of this year’s Ig Nobel Awards, Saul Justin Newman, from University College Lonon, reports that the claims about extreme aging–living past 110–are, to be scientific about it, mostly bullshit. 

“I’ve tracked down 80% of the people aged over 110 in the world,” he said. “(The other 20% are from countries you can’t meaningfully analyse). Of those, almost none have a birth certificate. In the US there are over 500 of these people; seven have a birth certificate. Even worse, only about 10% have a death certificate.”

To be clear: he only looked for death certificates for the people believed to be dead. The ones who were still alive? It’s pretty much expected that they wouldn’t have one yet.

A lot of the over-110s are concentrated in blue zones, where a startling number people are said to live past 100. “For almost 20 years, they have been marketed to the public. They’re the subject of tons of scientific work, a popular Netflix documentary, tons of cookbooks about things like the Mediterranean diet, and so on.”

But in a 2010 review by the Japanese government, “82% of the people aged over 100 in Japan turned out to be dead. The secret to living to 110 was, don’t register your death.”

Don’t have anyone else register it either.

Okinawa, which was supposed to be a hotspot of extreme aging, turned out to have the worst health in Japan. The best way to find concentrations of super-agers in Okinawa super-agers is to figure out where the halls of records were bombed during World War II. 

“If the person dies [in the bombing], they stay on the books of some other national registry, which hasn’t confirmed their death. Or if they live, they go to an occupying government that doesn’t speak their language, works on a different calendar and screws up their age.”

As for hotspots in Italy and Greece, “By my estimates at least 72% of centenarians were dead, missing or essentially pension-fraud cases. . . . [In Greece], over 9,000 people over the age of 100 are dead and collecting a pension at the same time. In Italy, some 30,000 ‘living’ pension recipients were found to be dead in 1997.”

In England, several low-income areas–”the worst places to be an old person”–have a high number of people over 100 but surprisingly few 90-year-olds. Unfortunately, if you’re going to live to 100, one of the requirements is that you have to live through your 90s first, even if there’s no glory in it.

So will getting an Ig Nobel get people to take his research seriously? 

“I hope so. But even if not, at least the general public will laugh and think about it, even if the scientific community is still a bit prickly and defensive. If they don’t acknowledge their errors in my lifetime, I guess I’ll just get someone to pretend I’m still alive until that changes.”

The fun hasn’t gone out of British politics yet

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Once Britain’s Conservative government was booted out, it looked like the grownups, in the form of a shiny new Labour government, were in charge at last. In other words, it looked like the fun had gone out of politics, but have hope: humanity’s most absurd qualities haven’t been banished. 

This is admittedly gossip and rumor, but it’s credible enough for a responsible paper, the Guardian, to have trusted it: low-level guerilla warfare is going on inside 10 Downing Street between Sue Gray, the prime minister’s chief of staff, and Morgan McSweeney, who was his election strategy wizard and is now his head of political strategy. 

The plan was for McSweeney’s desk to sit outside the prime minister’s office, since he would be in and out of there more than Gray, but apparently Gray has moved McSweeney’s desk away from the prime minister’s door. Twice. Which implies that he’s moved it back at least once. She’s also (allegedly) tried to block his access to a secure computer system that would let him get security briefings.

There’s hope for humanity yet.

A nearly relevant photo, but you’ll have to read to the end to find out why. This isn’t the cat in the news but our own Fast Eddie in the foliage.

 

Exit Liz Truss, pursued by a head of lettuce 

Admittedly, though, the Conservatives were more fun. Watching them run the country was kind of like watching a classroom full of six-year-olds try to make a pie from scratch after the adult’s been called away: a lot to laugh at, but now that their parents have taken them home and, we hope, washed their clothes, there’s a real mess to clean up.

I’m not on the clean-up crew, so allow me to call your attention to Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 49 days. During the final stretch, disaster was so clearly headed her way that a newspaper put a livecam and a blond wig on a head of lettuce and asked if it would last longer than Truss.

Or maybe she was in office for 45 days. Or 50. For reasons that I won’t try to understand, different sources are coming up with different numbers. Whichever one we pick, she still holds the record for the country’s shortest-serving prime minister and the lettuce outlasted her, but that hasn’t stopped her from publishing a book, Ten Years to Save the West–an ambitious goal for a politician who couldn’t save her own premiership. And more than a quarter of that first year is gone already. 

Modesty prevents me from making fun of anything more than the title since I haven’t read it. 

The reason she’s back in the headlines is that she walked out of her own book event in August, which must also set some kind of a record. A crowd-funded group called Led by Donkeys had installed a hidden banner above the stage. When they lowered it by remote control, it read, “I crashed the economy.” Inevitably, it included a picture of a head of lettuce. 

Truss said, “That’s not funny,” and walked off stage. End of event. She has since accused Led by Donkeys of stifling free speech, although nothing they did kept her from speaking and a banner can also be considered speech. In fact, interrupting someone can be considered free speech. 

Led by Donkeys calls itself an accountability project and says the new government will inevitably “disappoint us in some, if not more, respects . . . so it’s inconceivable that we won’t turn our attention in a really direct way to what the government is doing.”

I can hardly wait.

 

What’s it worth to be booted out of office?

In the year after she stepped down as prime minister, Liz Truss made £250,000 in speaking fees. In one speech, she took in more than most of her fellow citizens earn in a year.

Suella Braverman made £60,000 as a speaker, although I’m not sure about the time period on that. She also made £14,000 for newspaper articles in the Telegraph and accepted an all-expenses paid trip to Israel worth £27,800. A mere nothing, but then she wasn’t prime minister. She never got past home secretary.

The top earner is Boris Johnson, who made £4.8 million in the six months after he stepped down, £2.5 million of which is an advance on some unspecified number of speeches. I haven’t seen a breakdown of the rest of his income, but I’d think twice before paying him an advance on so much as a piece of toast, even if I was looking at both bread and toaster. He got an £88,000 advance (or “a rumoured” £500,000–go figure) in 2015 for a book on Shakespeare.  

What does he actually know about Shakespeare? Indications are, not much. In 2021, a leading Shakespeare scholar was approached to help him with his homework by answering questions for Johnson. “The originality and brilliance, his agent assured me, would lie in Mr Johnson’s choice of questions to ask and in the inimitable way in which he would write up the expert answers he received,” the scholar said when he went public about it.

The book has yet to appear–or from what I’ve read, make its way to the publisher, but that hasn’t stopped him signing a £510,000 deal to write his political memoirs–for a different publisher. 

And I still don’t have my toast.

*

To prove there’s no justice in this world, the lettuce–which, you’ll remember, outlasted Truss–ended up on the compost heap. 

 

Meanwhile, in Cananda . . .

 . . . a totally separate Conservative Party aired a feel-good election ad, full of patriotic hoorah about how much they love Canada. You know the kind of thing: a Canadian father drives through the suburbs, only it turns out that was shot in North Dakota. The kids in school? That was from Serbia. The university student? Ukraine. The kid in the park with her grandparents? London. The two jets on a training mission, “getting ready to defend our home and native land”? Russia.  

And the sunset with the words “we’re home”? Venezuela. 

The ad has been pulled.

 

And in nonpolitical news . . .

. . . Larry Richardson is the author of a dozen academic papers on mathematics that have been cited 132 times. Larry Richardson is also a cat and, disappointingly, his papers are gibberish. 

Larry was boosted into academic stardom by his person’s grandson, a grad student in metascience and computational biology, who had run into the academic trick of getting your papers cited by either writing the papers citing you or paying someone else to do that for you. This matters, because the more a scientific paper is cited, the more important its author becomes. It influences hiring and tenure decisions. If you’re a cat, it gets you headlines.

Not that you care about headlines if you’re a cat. 

The papers that cite you can be gibberish as long as they have a plausible title. In fact, a program, MathGen, can produce them for you if you can’t be bothered writing your own nonsense. And  they can be written by long-dead scientists and mathematicians. 

Ever wanted to have your paper cited by Galileo? It can be arranged. 

The papers can also be written by your grandmother’s cat. You upload them to ResearchGate, let GoogleScholar do its work, then delete them. Or leave them. What the hell, it’s your call. 

GoogleScholar doesn’t sound overly cautious about what it accepts as a scholarly paper. Someone got it to accept a cafeteria menu. The authors are C.S. Salad, P. Pack, B. Noodles, C. Fajitas, and R. Beans. If the hyperventilating comments on Twitter are to be believed, the paper’s been cited multiple times.

R.  Richardson’s goal was to make L. Richardson the world’s most-cited cat. It took two weeks but only one hour of that was actual work.

The cat whose record L. Richardson broke was E.D.C. Willard, whose human was theoretical physicist Jack Hetherington. Hetherington added E.D.C. to a single-author paper because he didn’t want to go back and change all the we’s to I’s. E.D.C.–also known as Felis Domesticus Chester Willard, or Chester to his friends–racked up a mere 107 citations. He went on to drop his coauthor and write a paper and a book chapter under his own name.

R.  Richardson assures the world that L. Richardson–who goes by Larry–has been compensated in some unspecified way for the use of his name. R. Richardson did not comment, but you can find his profile here.