Category Archives: News

Of mice and men and women and Barbie dolls

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It’s not easy for me to write about the news these days without wanting to slit either my wrists or someone else’s–I lean toward the second choice, always–but I can offer you a few wristless bits and pieces. Let’s start with a mouse in Wales.

Yes, the world is indeed going to hell when the best news I can offer starts with a mouse. 

A retired postman in Wales, Rodney Holbrook, noticed when he got to the workbench in his shed, small objects–clothespins, corks, nuts, bolts–weren’t where he’d left them: they’d been gathered up into a box. So Holbrook set up a night vision camera and it captured a mouse tidying away the stuff he’d left out. Holbrook thinks it’s using the junk to disguise its stash of nuts, but to date no one’s asked the mouse, so that’s guesswork. 

He’s named it Welsh Tidy Mouse.

To understand the story fully, you have to understand the relationship between British men and their sheds. I don’t come anywhere close to understanding it, unfortunately. All I can tell you is that there’s some sort of magnetic attraction between the two.

Irrelevant photo: Sunrise

 

I can also tell you that when I say “a shed” I’m not talking about a place outside the house to stuff all your junk but about a workshop. The shed’s roots run so deep in the male side of the culture that when I consulted Lord Google on the subject of men and sheds he led me to the Men’s Sheds Association, which reassured me that I hadn’t made up the connection. The group provides sheds that are “community spaces where men can enjoy practical hobbies. They’re about making friends, learning and sharing skills. Many guys come just for the tea and banter – everyone’s welcome.“

They might or might not welcome someone who isn’t of the male persuasion (they did say “everyone”), but my guess is that they’d be less thrown by a tidy mouse joining them. When they say “everyone,” they could easily mean everyone we’re thinking of. 

 

Speaking of men and women, though

Mattel, the company that makes Barbie dolls and that was thoroughly spoofed in the movie Barbie, is trying to cash in on the film by releasing four new dolls: a studio executive Barbie, a film star Barbie, a director Barbie, and a cinematographer Barbie. In response to which screenwriter Taffy Brodesser-Akner tweeted, “Where is Screenwriter Barbie? Does Mattel not know how to make sweatpants? Does Mattel not know how to get avocado toast on a t-shirt and just kind of leave it there?”

David Simon, who created The Wire went a step further, calling for a grip Barbie, a teamster Barbie, a “key set PA Barbie who has to go into Movie Star Barbie’s trailer and tell the delicate flower to get the fuck down to set because 120 other pissed-off Barbie’s are waiting for her. That film taught Mattel nothing.”

 

Enough of that. Is it safe to talk about politics?

Yes, but not for long or my (or someone else’s) wrists will be in danger. We’ll stick to the peripheral stuff.

When Boris Johnson was mayor of London, he made regular appearances at LBC Studios, which Lord Google tells me is a talk radio station but which uses a camera. Don’t ask me; when I hosted a radio show, we were invisible and free to wear as much avocado toast as we wanted, although this was so long ago avocado toast hadn’t been invented yet, and neither had avocados. Or toast. There wasn’t a camera to be found.

The reason the camera’s important is that Johnson made such a habit of mumbling and sliding his chair out of camera range in response to tough questions that eventually they bolted the guest’s chair to the floor. They called it the Boris Bolt. It didn’t stop him from mumbling when he didn’t have anything sensible to say, but it did at least keep him on camera when he did it.

*

Okay, just a little more about politics. This is from Ottawa County, Michigan, where a group of commissioners affiliated with Ottawa Impact, a right-wing Christian group, took over the county board in November 2022. One of the things they did was try to get rid of the county’s public health officer, Adeline Hambley. She and her department had supported mask mandates and Covid vaccinations, making her an instrument of government tyranny. They’d also offered sexual health tests at a Pride festival, which the new commissioners saw as “encouraging sexually perverse behavior,” according to a Washington Post article. 

Hambley wasn’t about to go quietly. As she saw it, her job was about health, not about serving the board. “I want to work with the commissioners so we can protect the community,” she said. “But I am not their subordinate.”

After ten months of negotiation (fighting might be a better word), both parties agreed that the county would pay her $4 million in return for her resignation.

Then the commissioners discovered that bad things would fall off the top shelf of the county’s financial closet and smack them on their heads if they went through with the deal, because they hadn’t consulted the most important player in the game, their insurers. 

What sort of bad things am I talking about? They’d lose their insurance, which would lose the county its AAA bond rating, which would drive up the cost of borrowing.

Oops.

At last call, the county was trying to back out of the deal and Hambley and her lawyers were trying to enforce it. 

If they ever do get rid of her, the plan is to replace her with a local HVAC (that’s heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) safety manager who’s never held public office and, I think we can all assume, knows a bit more about public health than the Welsh Tidy Mouse.

Hambley? She’s an environmental health specialist with an MBA in business administration and a minor in government tyranny. 

In the most recent article I found, the mess was still working its way through the courts.

Portcullis House and Westminster Palace, the crumbling seats of British government

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If you need a simple image to stand in for the complexities of Britain’s crumbling infrastructure–and who doesn’t, every hour on the hour?–look no further than Portcullis House, which was built in 2001 as office space for 213 MPs, along with their staff members and (I have to assume) general hangers-on. Already rain is leaking in and panes of glass are dropping from its gloriously dramatic atrium roof.

The original budget for this marvel of architectural longevity was £165 million, although the actual cost was £235 million. But don’t grumble. What’s £70 million between friends? The building was supposed to last for 120 years (or 200 years, according to a different article), so that’s a bargain, right?

Okay, maybe it’s worth a grumble. That works out to roughly £1 million per MP, and the price includes, as a kind of bonus, £440 per MP for reclining chairs (not available to staff and hangers-on) and £150,000 for a dozen or so fig trees that were imported from Florida to grace the atrium–at least until (slight exaggeration alert) they get bashed to bits by falling glass.

On the positive side, anyone’s welcome to enjoy the fig trees. 

The price doesn’t include some £10 million in legal costs over a contract that wasn’t awarded to the lowest bidder.

Irrelevant photo: stormy seas near Bude

Last May, the building needed mechanical and electrical repairs estimated at £143 million. But that’s just a start. A more recent estimate that includes the roof comes in at $235 million. So that’s the same amount as it cost to build, right? 

Possibly. Maybe it’s more, because I’m not sure if the second estimate includes the original £143 million or if it’s in addition. Never let me loose around numbers.

 

Yes, but . . . 

. . . in 2002, the National Audit Office reported that the building had been constructed to a “high standard of architectural design, materials and workmanship,” so you shouldn’t worry about any of this. Such a high standard that in 2018 MPs were already mumbling about lawsuits because of leaks and cracks in the roof. 

Sorry, just found another article: make that 2016. If anything’s happened beyond mumblings and grumblings–you know, anything in the way of actual lawsuits–I can’t found traces of it.

 

But what about the roof?

The atrium roof is the dramatic bit of what’s gone wrong. It’s made of double-glazed panels–basically air sandwiched between two sealed panes of glass. Their goal is to keep the heat in and let the light through, and double-glazed panels aren’t bad at that until they start to leak, which one–or maybe that’s two; it’s all a little murky–did, dumping lots o’ water on the floor many yards below. All across the political spectrum, it was described as a deluge. 

It’s heartening, in our politically divisive climate, that we can still find something to bring political enemies together. 

So far, not much glass has fallen out, but then you don’t need a whole lot of falling glass to make the average person who has to walk underneath it nervous. They’ll be putting up a safety net, just in case.

The problem is that there’s no simple way to get up to the roof. It wasn’t designed with repairs in mind. It was pretty. How much can you expect for £235 million, after all? The only way to inspect it is with a drone and the only way to do maintenance is to send up an abseiling team. Which, predictably, means not a lot of maintenance gets done.

I’m trying to picture a team abseiling with a double-glazed window panel and I can’t do it. They’d end up blown to Buckinghamshire. (It’s a non-metropolitan county, whatever that means.) I suspect any replacement has to involve a crane. And yet more money.   

The roof above the offices is also leaking, and rain’s finding its way into MPs’ offices. On the other hand, the walls and windows are bomb proof. If you want to harm 213 MPs, you’d do better to use a rainstorm than a bomb.

 

Wait–we’ve lost track of Westminster Palace, and it was in the headline

If those 213 MPs weren’t housed in Portcullis House, they would (I think) be in Westminster Palace, where both the House of Lords and the House of Commons meet. It’s positively overloaded with history. It’s also overloaded with leaks, mice, and fire hazards. The pipework is so complicated and interwoven that the pipes can only be patched, not replaced. The heating stays on because the folks in charge aren’t sure they could restart the system if they once turned it off.

And did I mention asbestos? It’s full of asbestos. And electrical plugs that spark and fizz. Toilets leak–at least one of them into an MP’s office–and I have it on good authority that this is worse than rain. A fire patrol is on duty 24 hours a day–and needs to be. Between 2007 and 2017, they had 60 small fires. 

In 2018, a stone angel on the outside of the building dropped a chunk of masonry the size of a football onto the ground. In 2022, an exclusion zone was set up.

So why doesn’t the building get fixed or replaced? It’ll be expensive. And everyone will either have to move out for a while, which some number of traditionalist MPs resist, or the repairs will have to be done while government totters on around it, making the repairs both slower and more expensive. A specially convened committee recommended moving everyone out. So far, the recommendation has been ignored.

Both choices are problematic, so the only sensible alternative is to do nothing, which costs an estimated £2 million a week.

I’ve seen various estimates for how much a full slate of repairs will cost, including £3.6 billion, £13 billion, and between £9.5 billion and £18.5 billion. So what the hell, make up a number. Construction never comes in at the estimated cost anyway. 

If you want links for all those estimates, sorry, I’m bored. Look them up yourself.

A cross-party committee–possibly the same one whose recommendations about moving out while the building’s repaired are being ignored–said there was “a real and rising risk” that “a catastrophic event will destroy the Palace.” Possibly from an angel hurling something worse than a stone football. 

The thing is, schools and hospitals around the country are genuinely falling apart–that’s what I meant about the infrastructure crumbling, and it comes without an exaggeration warning. The buildings most recently in the headlines were constructed on the cheap with a particular kind of concrete that’s now past its use-by date. In the face of that, it’s hard for a government to let itself be caught committing however many billion pounds into for repairs at Westminster. 

But even before the latest crumbling schools and hospitals became public knowledge, no government, no party, no nobody wanted to be associated with the outrageous expense of fixing the building. The rest of the country–schools, the National Health Service, local government, and oh, so much more–are being squeezed by austerity, a political word that means We’re shrinking your budget and don’t much care what sort of problems that creates becasue it’ll look like your fault. So again, a few billion pounds to fix the seat of government isn’t a good look.

Neither is the money that subsidizes food and booze for MPs and Lords at Westminster, but that’s less public, not to mention a slow drip as opposed to a deluge, so they continue. One theory holds that some of the traditionalists don’t want to move out of Westminster Palace for repairs because the subsidies wouldn’t move with them.

So before any serious repairs are undertaken, that angel’s going to have to drop something more dramatic than a stone football. And have excellent aim.

“Party Gate” artwork sweeps the Turnip Prize

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This year’s Turnip Prize winner is Mr. Keep Calm for his artistic creation, “Party Gate.” 

You know about the British scandal called Partygate, right? It was about the government of the day throwing parties inside (and outside) 10 Downing Street during the pandemic while the rest of the country was in lockdown and less well-connected people were being fined (some heavily) for breaking the rules. Not to mention while families were being kept from saying goodbye to dying relatives. It shocked us all that a government led by someone as correct and responsible as Boris Johnson would do such a thing. Not one of us had noticed the first two, three, or fifteen parties they threw. Even the ones that made the front pages.

So that explains the work’s title, but what’s the Turnip Prize? It was created in 1999, after Tracy Emin won the prestigious Turner Prize for a piece of art called “My Bed,” which was–you got it–an unmade bed, presumably hers, although never having slept with her, or wanted to, I can’t vouch for that. 

The Turnip contest rules specify that any work that displays “too much effort” is disqualified.

Mr. Keep Calm’s work qualified. “I was too lazy to take the gate to the recycling tip and decided to enter it into the Turnip Prize,” he said. “It’s a great honour and I can see this as an opening for greater works to come.”

Competition organizer Trevor Prideaux said, “Mr. Keep Calm . . . clearly has what it takes to be recognised in modern art circles and will be remembered in art history for no time at all!”

Irrelevant photo: fields after a frost.

Did a New Zealand MP pledge loyalty to King Charles or a skin rash?

New Zealand hasn’t cut its ties to the British crown, so its MPs have to pledge allegiance to the monarch-of-the-moment, who at the moment (spoiler alert) is named Charles. So some members of the Māori Party pledged allegiance in Māori–not a controversial thing to do; it’s one of the country’s official languages–using harehare, a word for Charles that can also mean a skin rash. Or something unpleasant. 

A skin rash and its related meanings are the more common translations, but either Charles or Charlie is arguably accurate. Te reo Māori–the Māori language–is like that. One word can have so many meanings that I stopped turning to the dictionary. It was leaving me more confused than I was when I started. And if that isn’t difficult enough for someone trying to learn it, the language has multiple variants, so pronunciations and meanings shift depending on where you are and who you’re talking to.     

In the past, the Māori Party has called for New Zealand to divorce itself from the monarchy, but I’m wondering if a skin cream wouldn’t be more appropriate.

 

Countries that don’t exist

I seem to remember Ikea selling a shower curtain that featured a map of the world with New Zealand deleted, possibly because some people are phobic about rashes. But that’s ancient history–it happened at least two years ago and probably more. Who remembers that far back? The updated version of Your Planet, Edited, comes to us courtesy of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, which was asked whether Australia existed and answered no. It was sure enough of the result to put it in a nice little text box.

And that’s how I learned about a longstanding conspiracy theory that claims Australia’s fake news. 

Are they serious about that? These days, who can tell? 

Once the news of Australia’s non-existence hit social media, an Australian wanted to know, “Does that mean I don’t have to pay my bills?”

Sadly, it doesn’t. Later searches held that Australia does, in fact, exist. And if the person who raised the question hasn’t fallen into the sea, it will be taken as proof of the country’s existence, because some people will seize on anything to prove they’re right.

 

And that gives you real confidence in . . .

. . . Sports Illustrated, which published several articles generated by artificial intelligence on its website, complete made-up names for the writers and AI-generated author photos.

Or else the articles weren’t generated by AI. It depends who you want to believe, since we can all believe whatever the hell we want these days. 

As far as I can figure out, Advon Commerce, “an e-commerce company that works with retailers and publishers,” generated the copy, and it told the owners of Sports Illustrated that “the articles in question were written and edited by humans” but that it lets writers use pseudonyms to protect their privacy. 

You know what writers are like. They can be so shy about getting their names out.

The scales have tipped heavily in the direction of the articles being generated by AI, with the weasel-words (you know: might, appears to, that kind of thing) disappearing from articles about it. The company that owns Sports Illustrated has since fired its CEO, not long after having fired three lower-level execs.

Did any of that have to do with the articles?

“We have nothing further to add to the company’s prior statements regarding AI,” a spokesperson said.

Staff at the magazine, along with the union representing them, pitched a fit when the articles first came out–they would’ve anyway, but the magazine’s owners has been cutting staff recently, which didn’t put them in a forgiving mood–saying the articles violated basic journalistic standards.

As we all know, though, cutting staff and using AI to generate articles aren’t related. I only put them next to each other because I’m a rabble-rouser from way back.

 

Your understated headline of the week . . .

. . . comes from the Guardian, a newspaper I have a huge amount of respect for, but that won’t keep me from making fun of it. It’s pretty good at making fun of itself anyway. A November 6 headline reads, “Sellafield nuclear leak could pose safety risk.”  

Yes, I could see where a nuclear leak might do that. 

Full disclosure: the online headline that I linked to is a little different but still not great. The article goes on to say that Sellafield is Europe’s most hazardous nuclear site, with a crumbling building and cracks in the toxic sludge reservoir. Two days before, an article mentioned that Sellafield had been hacked as early as 2015 by groups linked to Russia and China, but that the news is only coming out now. 

So yes. It could, just potentially, post a safety risk, although I’ll admit the headline won’t win any great-headline prizes. If I get to give out the award, I’ll give it to the (sadly, unknown) paper that ran with “Red tape holds up bridge.”

 

Your heartwarming stories for the week

When California’s wildfires ripped through a stand of redwoods in 2020, it got hot enough to defoliate the trees, which normally resist burning. They don’t get to be 2,000 years old by packing it in every time a wildfire comes along. It looked like the end of the ancient trees, but they’re showing signs of life. Drawing on sugars they stored decades before, they’re pouring energy into buds that had been dormant under the bark for centuries and are now sprouting from the blackened trunks.

That has nothing to do with Britain, but what the hell. It’s a nice story. We could do with a dash of hope.

*

Back in Britain, a three-year-old’s stuffed toy–a monkey called Monkey–was lost when he and his mother were on a train, and (reading between the lines here) he had the predictable meltdown. His mother says he was distraught. I expect she was too by the time she reported the loss in Birmingham, where they changed trains.

The monkey was found in Edinburgh–it had continued on to the end of the line–and was sent to Birmingham the same day. It stayed there overnight and someone found it a little Christmas sweater with the British Rail logo in sparkly yarn, then they sent on to Bristol, where mother and son collected it. It had traveled 619 miles, on three train lines. 

No charge. 

*

In St. Paul, Minnesota, someone returned a library book, Famous Composers, that was more than a hundred years overdue. 

The library no longer charges for overdue books, so no charge there either. Which is just as well, because the person who returned it (predictably enough) wasn’t the person who borrowed it. 

Musical chairs, artificial intelligence, and British politics

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The people allegedly leading Britain played musical chairs this week. Suella Braverman, who’d been the head of the Home Office, was the one most noticeably left sitting on the floor when her chair was yanked away. So she goes from Home to home, or at least to Parliament’s humiliating back benches, where she’ll do everything she can to make herself the focal point of the party’s combative right wing. 

Her de-chairification surprises no one. She was a horror show, although that doesn’t disqualify anyone these days. More to the point is that she was too blatent about not following orders. 

I don’t like admitting this, but I find it hard to make fun of her. She drains the humor right out of me, so forgive a lapse or three here.

One of the least horrid things she’s done, and that’s because it didn’t involve any actual consequences, was say that people lived on the street as a lifestyle choice. She’s also tried to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda (the Supreme Court just ruled that illegal) and dog-whistled up a right-wing mob that fought the police and tried to attack London’s ceasefire demonstration.

Irrlevant photo: Grapes, growing above the tables at an outdoor cafe this past summer.

 

Since her chair was pulled out from under her, she smashed it up on her way out (metaphor alert there), sending a letter of resignation that accused the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, of failure, betrayal, magical thinking, and bad breath.  She claims that she made a secret agreement with Sunak when she accepted the post of Home Secretary, which he betrayed.

Would she release the text of it, a reporter asked? 

Um, not today. 

In the meantime, as long as he was moving the furniture, Mr. du Jour moved everyone else around too. The foreign secretary became the home secretary, which is his seventh ministerial position since 2019.  He is, of course, an expert in whatever the hell he was in charge of in all of them. The health secretary became the environment secretary. The chief secretary to the Treasury became the paymaster general.

Hands up anyone who knew the country had a paymaster general.

Me neither.

And to solve a problem I didn’t know we had, he appointed Esther McVey to be a minister without portfolio in charge of the government’s anti-woke agenda. We’ll all be notified that we need to turn in our alarm clocks any day now. 

Okay, she’s also in charge of common sense. I did know we had problems around that.

To replace the foreign minister, Mr. du Jour grabbed someone who’s been sitting home contemplating the obesity of the universe* and made him the new foreign secretary.

Who are we talking about? Why, David Cameron, one of our many former prime ministers. We’re rich in former prime ministers these days. Since Britain’s deindustrialization, producing them is one of our top industries and if you’d like to order a few dozen let me know and I’ll send you a link.

Cameron, what with being the foreign secretary of the moment, isn’t available for export just yet, but let me talk him up anyway. He’s the guy who thought having a referendum on Brexit would mean his party would stop arguing about it, the country would settle down, and we’d stay in the European Union and live happily ever after. So yeah, he’s a bright guy with infallible political instincts.

After he retreated from politics, he got caught with his fingers not quite in the till but close enough that an inquiry scolded him for a “significant lack of judgment” after he lobbied government officials on behalf of a bank he had an interest in, which collapsed not long after. But who cares about that? We’re all so punchy, it looks like the act of an elder statesman. Mr. du Jour’s hoping Cameron comes with a stash of stability and authority that he’ll share with his several-times-removed replacement, and maybe even pass around the table at cabinet meetings. 

As for Mr. du Jour himself, no one yanked his chair away but someone did replace his political persona. Some five weeks ago at the Conservative Party conference, he presented himself as the candidate of change. He wasn’t running yet, but so what? It’s never too early to stake out your position. It makes you look strong. And stable. And several other adjectives. He would be the candidate of change, overturning three decades of political consensus.

Why did he want to overturn thirty years of political consensus? Is political consensus necessarily bad? Who cares? It’s something to run against, and it costs nothing. Or–well, yeah, it costs a lot when the country falls apart, but it doesn’t appear as a line item in the budget so you can always blame someone else for the results. 

Whatever. His party has been in power for thirteen years, making it hard to be the candidate of change, so whatever he came up with was likely to be extreme.

But now Mr. du Jour is positioning himself as the candidate of stability. He’s moving to the center of his party. Which isn’t that close to center, mind you. Cameron’s the guy who introduced austerity, driving a fair swath of the country into poverty and leaving the infrastructure creaking and groaning, but hey, it’s all just politics, right? Don’t take it personally.

Are these people real? 

Possibly not. It turns out that artificial intelligence can now generate pictures that look more real than pictures of real people. Admittedly, it has to stick to the faces of whites to do it. It’s absorbed the structural racism of the society in which it functions. 

As an aside, if Suella Braverman heard me say that, she’d accuse me of being a member of the Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati, and she’d be one-third right. I’m not a big fan of tofu and can’t stay up much past nine these days, but the Guardian’s a good paper.  

But back to artificial intelligence. I’m reasonably sure that these people aren’t real–especially Sunak, who’s had more political persona transplants than any flesh-and-blood human could survive.

I mentioned that AI isn’t as convincing at generating non-white faces, though, and Britain’s current government has a significant number of brown-skinned cabinet members, who are doing fuck-all to make the country a more equal place, except possibly for the people at the very top. Or at least for themselves. So they may look slightly less real than the white cabinet members, and–following the logic that says the most real looking people are the ones who aren’t real–you might therefore mistake them for real people. They’re not. They’re a double bluff using AI’s limitations to scam us all. 

We’re being governed by avatars who’ve broken loose from some apocalyptic computer game. Or the next season of Dr. Who.

 

And from the Department of Political Overreach . . .

. . . comes this story: 

The principal of a Texas school introduced a policy that said students could only play theatrical roles that aligned with their sex at birth. His goal was to cut a trans boy out of a starring role in a production of Oklahoma. High school drama departments being what they are though–there are never enough boys–that meant other students couldn’t play the roles they’d landed. 

All hell broke loose and the school said, okay, fine, you perverts can play any role you want but we’re cutting the play so it’s more age appropriate–incidentally cutting the trans kid’s solo. 

What’s age inappropriate in Oklahoma? It was first performed in 1943, when sex hadn’t even been invented yet.

More hell broke loose and the school board reversed the principal’s decision.

We’ll give the last word to the trans kid, Max Hightower: “To know there is a big group out of people who want to help me and help everyone affected, it feels like we’re on even sides now and can actually win this fight.”  

*

And this: The Florida legislature is considering a bill that would ban any discussion of girls’ menstrual cycles in the schools before the sixth grade. Any discussion. So if some kid is bold enough to bring it up, presumably everyone has to run out of the room. Forget the enforced calm of a fire drill. Run, kids, before the sound wave catches you. It’ll destroy your innocence and you’ll never get it back.

How old are kids in the sixth grade? Eleven to twelve. Some kids get their periods at eight. 

*

Not to be outdone, a priest in a Czech village smashed the pumpkins that kids had carved and set out near his church. Twice, since when the original ones were replaced he did it a second time. 

In a letter of apology, he wrote, “Leaving the rectory on Sunday evening, I saw numerous symbols of the satanic feast of ‘Halloween’ placed in front of our sacred grounds. I acted according to my faith and duty to be a father and protector of the children entrusted to me and removed these symbols,” 

He wouldn’t have done that if he’d known they’d been carved by kids, he said,

“But try to remember that my duty as a figure of authority and a priest is to protect children and families from hidden evil.”

Now there’s a guy who knows how to apologize.

 

And finally the Department of Political Irrelevance reports . . . 

. . . that deodorant sales are up 15% since workers have (reluctantly, for the most part) returned to the office after working remotely.

—————-

  • Contemplating the obesity of the universe: I’m indebted for this phrase to a guy who taught philosophy, and to a student of his who wrote in a paper, “When we consider the obesity of the unvierse, we know there must be a god.”

The Conservative Party drains its shallow pool of talent

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I’ve suspected for quite a while that the Tory talent pool would run dry, but we seem to be seeing the final drops of run out. 

What am I talking about? Well, the story starts some years ago, when Labour was in power and Gordon Brown was, so briefly, the prime minister. He committed the country to building HS2, a high-speed rail line that would link London with the north–Birmingham, Manchester, and Leeds. Whether it was a good idea is open to raucous debate, but since then one government has tossed it to the next–from Labour to a Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition to a series of Conservative governments–and it’s gone further and further over budget. 

The initial budget was £32 billion. Okay, it was £32.7 billion, but when you’re dealing with billions, who cares about the .7? According to some estimates, the whole thing would now cost £100 billion.  

Irrelevant photo: Not a dandelion but one of a zillion flowers that look like them but aren’t.

Ah, but the whole thing won’t be built. One leg of a Y-shaped line was canceled years ago, and now the prime minister du jour, Rishi Sunak, has announced that the entire northern part of the project is going in the scrap bucket and the money that saves will be spent on other transportation projects in the north of England. 

Why the north? Because the whole thing was sold as a way to connect London and the north, and prime ministers du days past, especially Boris Johnson, made a lot of noise about how that would bring prosperity to the north, which could use a bit of that, thanks. His favorite phrase was the annoying leveling up. I expect he was nervous about letting that scary word leveling run around bare-ass nekked, because folks might think the project would take something away from London. 

So he reassured London that it would continue to be the favored child, but the north would now become just as favored, just as rich. Every child would be the favorite. And I’ll become my own grandmother.

It’s in this context that, in the midst of the Conservative Party conference, the government published a 40-page prospectus to back up Sunak’s cancellation of the northern leg of the line: Network North: transforming British transport. On the first page, it plonks Manchester down where Preston’s supposed to be. Since I can’t locate either Preston or Manchester, I’m taking the word of two sources, one of which says, cautiously, “At first glance . . . it seems to relocate. . . .”

I’m not sure what happens at second glance or why it only seems. Still, even appearing to misplace a major city does give the impression of carelessness.

But let’s not be hasty. The prospectus is clearly the product of deep thought and careful work. It promises to fund an extension of the Greater Manchester Metrolink system to the airport, although the system linked to the airport in 2014. It promises improvements in Plymouth, which even I can find, right down there on the south coast, which is another way to say, Not in the north. Bristol–also not in the north–was promised a £100,000 investment until, overnight, the promise disappeared in the online document and was replaced with some vague verbiage about the west. Which is, likewise, not in the north. And then there’s a commitment to upgrade a road near Southampton (situated where the name makes you think it would be, not in the north), but that was a mistake. They meant Littlehampton, which isn’t on the south coast but is pretty damn close. 

I don’t know about you, but I’ve come to love British politics.

 

So what’s left after the cancellation?

What’s left is an expensive train from London to Birmingham. Which–I’m getting tired of typing this–isn’t in the north. It’s in the Midlands, where it’s always been. After trains reach Birmingham, they might end up using the existing track to Manchester, but instead of being high-speed, they’ll run slower than the trains that already run on that line. The existing trains tilt. The new ones won’t. The article I stole this from doesn’t say so, but I assume that means they have to slow down on the curves. 

Oh, and the platforms are too short for the high-speed trains the system was originally planned for, so they’ll be replaced by skateboards. 

Can’t stay upright on a skateboard? Get out on the highway and stick out your thumb.

The transport secretary, Mark Harper, has since clarified that his department was only giving a few examples of where the money might be spent so we needn’t get so starchy about it all. 

And did I mention that £1 billion has already been spent on the canceled part of the line–or at least invoices amounting to that have already been submitted? You see why I can’t get worked up about the £.7 billion, right?

Queerness and the natural order of things: it’s the news from Britain

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Kew Royal Botanic Gardens is celebrating the queerness of nature this month–“the diversity and beauty of plants and fungi,” as they put it, especially those that “challenge traditional expectations.” 

They’re messing with us, right? 

Well, no. Not unless we’re the sort of people who accuse the natural world of political correctness when it doesn’t meet our expectations. Included in the Queer Nature festival are:

The Ruizia mauritiana, which grows male flowers when it’s hot and female ones when it’s cool

Citrus trees, which can switch between asexual and sexual reproduction.

Avocado trees, which flower twice, the first flowers being functionally female and the second, functionally male. 

And fungi, which have worked out thousands of ways to reproduce.

Thousands? Apparently. What else do you have to think about if you’re a fungus?

You might want to see the exhibit soon, before someone decides it’s unnatural and shuts it down.

*

Irrelevant photos: Beach huts near Whitby. What are beach huts? They’re a British thing. A very British thing. If they make no sense to you someone other than me may have to explain them to you. But aren’t the colors wonderful?

 

Speaking of nature and the unnatural, someone cut down a much-loved sycamore that was growing along Hadrian’s Wall, in Northumberland, in a spot that was named after it: Sycamore Gap. The tree was some 300 years old. 

It’s not clear yet who cut it down or why, but when someone planted a sycamore sapling a few yards away from the stump, “to restore people’s faith in humanity bring a smile back to people’s faces, and just give them a bit of hope,” the National Trust, which owns the site, uprooted it. It’s a world heritage site, they said. It’s an ancient monument. You can’t just run around planting hope without permission from the proper authorities. It might mess with the archeology.

There may well be some solid reasoning behind this, but they don’t seem to have communicated it yet.

They’ll plant the sapling someplace else.

However. It turns out that sycamores can be coppiced–cut down so that shoots regrow from the stump. So this one may regrow, although it’ll look different. And semi-relevantly, sycamores aren’t a native three. They were brought to the country some 500 years ago. Or else they were brought by the Romans some 2,000 years ago. Take your choice.  

 

Correcting history

A former MP is–or may be–threatening to sue the University of Cambridge because a historian associated with the university named her as a descendant of the people who enslaved his ancestors. One article says she “threatened . . . legal action.” Another article says she “appears to threaten legal action.” 

So we don’t have any agreement on how solid the threat is, but either way she complains of being singled out, since other living relatives went unmentioned. She accuses the university of not protecting her privacy.

She does make clear that she finds slavery abhorrent, so we have to give her credit for being forward-thinking.

The work of the historian, Malik Al Nasir, documents the business empire that linked plantation slavery to shipping, banking, insurance, railways, distilleries, and the sugar trade. It’s been described as ground-breaking. 

 

Correcting the interview list

Almost 20 years ago, someone went for a job interview at the BBC and ended up on the air–not being interviewed for the job but as an IT expert who the interviewer asked about a legal dispute between Apple records and Apple computers. 

How’d that happen? The applicant, Guy Goma, was in one waiting room and the expert, Guy Kewney, was in another. When someone walked into the wrong waiting room and asked for Guy–well, Guy responded. And panicked his way through what must have been the weirdest job interview of this life. 

The clip seems to be immortal–it has 5 million views on YouTube alone–and Goma’s gone public to say he should be getting some royalties. I haven’t seen a comment from the BBC, but a new trailer for a BBC show, Have I Got News for You, shows him being mistaken for not one but three panelists as well as the host.   

Did he get the job? I don’t think so and I can’t help imagining that someone said, “Listen, if he couldn’t even be bothered to show up for the interview, forget it.”

 

Correcting a death notice

A woman in Missouri applied for financial aid to help with an internship program and discovered that she was dead, at least officially. The financial aid office told her to withdraw immediately–either from the program or the request for aid, it’s not clear which, but if you’re dead I’m not sure it matters. 

The problem involved her social security number, so the woman, now known as Madeline-Michelle Carthen, called the Social Security Administration, which agreed that she seemed to be alive and told her to visit a social security office with some convincing form of i.d. She did, and she got a letter acknowledging that she was, in fact, alive, but over the next 17 years she was turned down for a mortgage, lost jobs, had her car repossessed, and lost her right to vote, all on the grounds that she was dead. 

She eventually changed her name and applied for a new social security number, but since it links to the old one, she’s still more or less dead.

About 10,000 living people in the US are listed as dead each year. May you never be one of them.

 

Meanwhile in Australia . . .

. . . a journalist thought it would be a good idea to test the country’s limits on what people can name their babies. Registrars are supposed to reject any name that’s offensive or not in the public interest, so the boringly named Kirsten Drysdale named her baby Methamphetamine Rules and waited to see what would happen.

Nothing happened. Nobody noticed anything strange about it and the name was registered. 

“We were just trying to answer a question for our viewers for our new show . . . which was just around the rules about what you can and can’t call your baby,” she said (semi-coherently, but under the circumstances, who can blame her?).

She and her husband will change–or else have already changed–the baby’s name, but the original will still appear on his birth certificate. Forever. 

The imaginary crime report from Britain

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A couple of dog walkers in Chapel St. Leonards (population 3,431, in case it seems relevant) called the police to report a mass killing a week or so back. They’d passed a cafe, looked in the windows, and saw people lying on the floor, laid out on their backs and unmoving, eyes closed, covered with blankets.

Ritual mass murder, they decided–as anyone would–and got out their phones. Five cop cars converged on the cafe, lights flashing, and all the inhabitants rushed to their windows to see what was happening.

It turned out to be a yoga class doing a relaxation. 

The perpetrators of the good deed have been sentenced to two months with no TV. 

Irrelevant photo: Trethevy Quoit

*

In Wales, someone has been snatching the trail-marking posts that tell walkers which way they need to go, leaving to wander off into who knows what swamp and raising questions about why the sign snatcher’s going to all the trouble of digging the posts up instead of just wrecking them where they stand, as any sensible citizen would.

I think I can explain, though: When I was a kid, having a fallout shelter sign (or the occasional street sign) in your bedroom was the height of cool, so I can’t help thinking some teenager’s bedroom is full of the things. 

In defense of my generation, the fallout shelters would have offered no protection and we all knew it, so who cared if you couldn’t find one when the apocalypse came? The signposts, on the other hand, really do make a difference. Kind of like, um, yeah, those street signs my friends (I was too much of a coward) stole so lightheartedly.

 

Lawbreaking animals

On a slightly different note (I’ve had one of those weeks, and anyone expecting coherence won’t be happy), two deer–horns and all–wandered into the hospital in Plymouth and ran around the maternity unit corridors until they got a look at the babies, saw that they were pitifully furless and couldn’t be theirs, and left in disgust. 

Okay, nobody’s saying how the hospital convinced them to leave, and in various versions of the story they trotted through the corridors and galloped through the corridors. The hospital’s own statement makes a point of saying that the cleaning staff sanitized the place and that the deer never came into contact with patients, and really, folks, it’s all okay but would everybody please keep the outside doors closed and not feed the deer, because none of them have any medical training whatsoever. 

 

And now to something that’s completely legal

The cosmetics chain Lush got £5.1 million in tax relief from the UK government last year, recorded a 90% drop in profits, and paid its managers £5 million in bonuses.

 

The extreme recycling report

Australian engineers have found a way to recycle coffee grounds into concrete, which could be used in walkways and pavements, decreasing the amount of sand used in construction and helping to build the city that never sleeps.

 

Enough of that. Let’s go out on a note of patriotic fervor

On the last night of the proms–

Hang on. I need to explain that for readers who aren’t British. The proms are concerts that run from July through September. They started in 1895 as Promenade Concerts in parks. In 1927, the BBC got into the act, and today they’re a big deal (and not in parks), and on the last night, in addition to whatever else is on the program, they play a bunch of patriotic stuff. You know, “God Save the [insert monarch of the appropriate sex or gender],” “Jerusalem,” “Rule Britannia.” 

There’s been a predictable flap in recent years about which songs can survive a modern sensibility, what with all that celebration of empire, and how many people of modern sensibility can survive the full range of patriotic songs. 

In 2020, “Rule Britannia” and “Land of Hope and Glory” were going to be played but without lyrics, but after the predictable outrage the BBC backed down and they were sung, word by painful word. 

Traditionally, people wave British flags and sing along when “Rule Britannia” is played. This year, though, a whole lot of people waved European Union flags instead, getting up the noses of patriotic Brexiters. Let’s take a Conservative former Member of Parliament as typical (if a bit more visible than average) when he called for the BBC to investigate how so many EU flags were smuggled into the hall (in small boats, no doubt), “messing up a British tradition” and making a political gesture at an apolitical event. 

Or as the Daily Telegraph put it, “‘Rule Britannia’ represents freedom.” (And, if added, “sovereignty and self-determination, all absent in the European Union.”)

So what does this apolitical song about freedom have to say?

“Rule Britannia, Britannia rule the waves. / Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,” although it’s apparently okay if other people are. “The nations, not so blest as thee / Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall / While thou shalt flourish great and free: The dread and envy of them all.”

Make that the apolitical and freedom-loving dread. 

It’s funny how apolitical a person’s own opinions seem and how screamingly political a gesture from an opposing one is.

William Blake’s “Jerusalem,” on the other hand, is haunting and beautiful. And ambiguous enough that I still don’t understand how anyone, hearing the same words as I do, reads it as a straightforward patriotic footstomper.

 

Jerusalem 

And did those feet in ancient time                                                                                            Walk upon England’s mountains green:                                                                           

And was the holy Lamb of God,                                                                                                  On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

 And did the Countenance Divine,                                                                                           Shine forth upon our clouded hills?                                                                                           And was Jerusalem builded here,                                                                                       Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning gold:                                                                                           Bring me my arrows of desire:                                                                                               Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!                                                                                    Bring me my Chariot of fire! 

I will not cease from Mental Fight,                                                                                              Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand:                                                                                        Till we have built Jerusalem,                                                                                                         In England’s green & pleasant Land.

If you want the music (in a very non-proms version), you’ll find it here.


					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Artificial intelligence, food, and British politics

			
						

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A publisher of multiple regional newspapers has been introducing artificial intelligence into its “process” to–and I’m quoting here from the article that introduced me to this–”reduce the need for human involvement.” Because–and you’ll probably figure out that I’m not quoting now–humans are both pesky and expensive and life’s better all around if we just eliminate them.


The publisher is National World–a contradiction in terms if I ever heard one–and it popped into other newspapers’ pages not because it’s working to eliminate humans from its, ahem, process but because it’s considering a bid for a national paper that’s up for sale, the Telegraph.   


So far, so boring? Well, you may have heard that AI has–she said mildly–a few wrinkles that haven’t been ironed out yet, so increasing its role in either writing or gathering news could take us in some interesting directions, and once you jump to the national level they become more visible. 


Irrelevant photo: the Cornish coastline


Let’s turn to New Zealand for an example. A supermarket, Pak’n’Save, set loose an app that used AI to generate recipes. The idea was that you tell it what’s getting ancient in your refrigerator and it creates a recipe. Just for you. You know: lonesome cabbage seeks unspecified ingredients for meaningful end-of-life experience. That kind of thing.


Actually, I believe users are supposed to specify all the ingredients hanging around their cupboards and refrigerators, so the cabbage is on its own to find partners for its end-of-life experience. All the app does is recommend a method.


However it works, social media took notice when it started coming up with things like an Oreo vegetable stir fry and an oregano-flavored milk sauce. After that, the app became ridiculously popular.


This is why humans need to be pushed out of the picture. Do you know another species that would ask for recipes using ant poison or glue? 


Me neither, but the app wasn’t fazed. It suavely recommended a glue sandwich and “ant jelly delight.” Bleach? A fresh breath mocktail. (It was smart enough to realize a sandwich wouldn’t work. Give it some credit.) I’m not sure what was in the refrigerator to make it suggest an “aromatic water mix,” which would create chlorine gas–”the perfect non-alcoholic beverage to quench your thirst and refresh your senses. . .  Serve chilled and enjoy.”


Very chilled. Chlorine gas can damage your lungs, or if you overindulge, kill you, but what the hell.


Did I mention the Meow Mix fried rice?


Meow Mix? It’s a dry cat food. 


So everyone was having a wonderful time except Pak’n’Save, which was stuck talking to the press while having to sound responsible and sane. So it did what any sane, responsible corporation would do and blamed the users.


“A small minority have tried to use the tool inappropriately,” it said. Besides, they’d fine-tuned it, so it was all okay. And furthermore, no one was supposed to use it if they were under 18. And they added a warning that the company doesn’t guarantee that “any recipe will be a complete or balanced meal, or suitable for consumption.” Because who doesn’t want a recipe for a meal that isn’t suitable for consumption?


Things may have improved somewhat. Interesting Engineering asked for a recipe using tar, bread, stones, mayonnaise, lettuce, and petrol and was told to go take a hike.


That’s the problem with the world today. Nobody wants other people to have fun anymore.


*


Meanwhile, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, which owns everything everywhere, is also turning to AI to produce its content. Their profits took a 75% hit last year and whatever else AI does, it will cut costs. The News Corp’s Australian branch is running 3,000 AI-generated stories a week.


How accurate were they? Who cares? There’s money to be made, people. Buckle up and stop complaining.


 


AI and politics


Meanwhile, back in Britain, where we don’t ask for recipes involving stones and bleach, thank you very much, hackers broke into the electoral register, which has voters’ names and addresses. Britain’s electoral system is paper based, which may mean it’s out of date and slow but also means it’s hard to hack and doesn’t recommend glue sandwiches, so it’s easy to think nothing will be hurt, but some digital experts fret over the possibility of voters being targeted with false information–something along the lines of what happened in Canada when bots auto-called voters telling them their polling places had been moved. AI, the theory goes, makes it possible to target disinformation more convincingly.


Other experts say, “Bullshit”: it takes too much time and work to roll targeted disinformation out on a large scale. I’m not placing any bets on the outcome of this one. My best guess is that whoever hacked that had something in mind, but that doesn’t mean it’ll work.


 


And in marginally related news…


…the village of Tring (it’s in Hertfordshire) lost its internet connection when edible dormice chewed through a cable. Local shops couldn’t accept cards and had to hold out for cash. After the village cash machine ran out and everyone had checked behind their couch cushions and under their cars’ floor mats, shops had to turn away business.  Except for the bakery, which gave away bread and pastries rather than let them go to waste.


After three days, the cable was put back together. I’m not sure what happened to the dormice. I suspect it wasn’t anything good.


And before you ask, the edible dormouse isn’t a mouse, it’s a whole ‘nother species and looks more squirrel-like than mouselike. It was introduced to Britain by the Romans, who really did eat them, but they’re very cute and eating cute animals is frowned upon these days. Except by artificial intelligence, which has no way to measure cuteness.


The only dormouse native to the British Isles is the hazel dormouse. 


You needed to know that.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Who’s the prime minister today?

			
						

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Britain’s had a lot of prime ministers recently, and the average citizen could be forgiven for not caring who’s in charge anymore, but you might think the prime minister himself would remember. Not so. Rishi Sunak went to a pub for a photo op not long ago, trailed by the predictable photographers and reporters and hangers-on, to fill a pint glass and promote the government’s latest solution to our least pressing problem. So far, so boring. Then he referred to himself as the chancellor.


To be fair, he was once the chancellor, and I wouldn’t blame him if he got nostalgic for a job that didn’t involve sticking his head quite so far above the parapet. I mean it’s one thing to lust after the prime minister’s job, but it’s a whole ‘nother thing to actually be the prime minister. Of a crisis-laden country when your party’s best idea involves playing three-card monte with the taxes on alcohol.


Irrelevant photo: I wouldn’t swear to it, but I think this is called a balloon flower, for the shape of the blossom before it opens out.


Anyway, for one glorious moment he forgot that he was and is the prime minister, and I’m sure it served as a mini-break before his actual break, a week or so in California–a break he may have needed but Greenpeace needed even more, because it took advantage of his absence to drape his house in black, in honor of his expansion of oil and gas drilling in the North Sea.


But back to our alleged prime minister: this isn’t the first time he’s forgotten what role he’s playing. Last year, when it was time for the prime minister to stand up and speak to the House of Commons, he kept his hind end blissfully planted on the bench, waiting for someone else to get up there and spout the required nonsense.


It doesn’t explain everything about what’s wrong in our political moment, but I do love it when they give me something new to make fun of.


 


Department of High Security


Meanwhile, our immigration minister, Robert Jenrick–well, to be fair, I don’t know that he forgot that he was the immigration minister, but he may have walked off and left his ministerial red box unattended on a train while he went to the toilet. Yes, ministers have to use the toilet no matter how powerful they become. Sad but true. 


What’s this about a ministerial red box? Well, ministers have red briefcases, called boxes, since they’re not really boxes but are at least boxy. The government’s website says they have to use them when they’re carrying papers that need to be kept secure. Why? Because they “offer a higher level of security.” At least if you don’t leave them on the train seat. 


A photo of Jenrick’s red box sitting all on its lonesome in an empty first class train seat, and Jenrick says it’s misleading since that he was sitting across the aisle. The person who took the photo says, “He 100% left it–it’s an important document case, we were baffled.”


Me, I haven’t a clue what happened but I’m putting my money on him having left it. Since we’ll probably never find out, it’s safe enough.


*


Since we’re talking about security, Britain’a Ministry of Defense accidentally sent a number of classified emails that were meant for the US to Mali, an Russian ally.  


How’d that happen? The US military uses “.mil” in its addresses. Mali uses “.ml.” So Britain sent what it says were a small number of messages that weren’t classified as either secret or more secret than secret. The US, on the other hand, sent millions of emails to Mali, including passwords, medical records, and the itineraries of high-ranking officers.


Who needs spies?


 


And also in the US


Activists who oppose self-driving cars wandering loose on the streets of San Francisco have discovered that if they put an orange traffic cone on the hood of the car, it forgets it’s a car. Or–well, who knows what goes on in the mind of a self-driving car? I was looking for a connection to forgetful politicians. It stops. It goes nowhere until a human being shows up to take the cone off. 


To avoid stranding riders, they’ve targeted empty self-driving taxis. 


 


But back in Britain . . .


. . . English Heritage, one of the massive nonprofits that run visitors through historic buildings, shaking some spare change out of their credit cards and some feelings of awe out of their souls along the way, has discovered that adults will forget whatever bits of dignity they pretend to have if the dress-up boxes that had formerly been for kids only include adult size clothing. 


But because no organization that large and respectable can be taken seriously unless it commissions research before introducing a change like that, it commissioned research into the adult imagination, discovering–surprise, surprise–that adults still have them, and that they seem to improve with age.


I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that this is all bullshit, but that’s okay because I’m not sure it matters anyway. The costumes aren’t available at all English Heritage sites and I’m not clear about whether the change is permanent or only runs through August. If you happen to visit, if you’re an adult, and if the adult costumes have been taken away, that doesn’t mean your last shot at imagination has left. At your age, you’re responsible for your own imagination. Don’t wait for someone to tell you when to imagine, or how.

					

		
		
	


				
					
	

		

						
Britain’s Home Office: what’s it really like?

			
						

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Just when you think British politics can’t sink any lower, the Home Office–


But I need to interrupt myself here. Don’t let the cuddly-sounding name fool you. You know, the home part of Home Office. This is not someplace you go to de-stress and enjoy some soft cushions and a nice cup of tea. It’s home to some of the meanest spirits in a mean-spirited government. 


Are you with me now? I’ll pick up almost where I left off.


–the Home Office noticed that a couple of immigrant detention centers had painted cartoon figures on the walls, so it gave orders for them to be painted over. The initial explanation was that they were “too welcoming,” but when that didn’t play well the second explanation was that they weren’t age appropriate. 


Irrelevant photo: A tuberous begonia. Sitting on a placemat because, hey I had to put it somewhere.


Obi Wan waved his hand and told us all we’d never heard the first explanation. But since Obi Wan’s a fictional character and the government, sadly, exists in the nonfictional universe, some of us have kept the original alive in our memories. We’re aware that Robert Jenrick, the minister for immigration, said it had to be clear that the center was a “law enforcement environment” and “not a welcome centre.” 


Being the minister for immigration is awkward in a government that’s against it, all of it, but the wording, I’ve been told, was inherited from a time when ministries that had been of something–education or health or whatever–became, even when they’re against it, for it.


So what ages weren’t the murals appropriate for? Teenagers, but one of the centers has a family section for parents with babies and toddlers, and unaccompanied children as young as nine are known to have crossed the Channel in small boats. So we can leave that explanation for Obi Wan to deal with.


Those small boats are something the government’s hoping to leverage into an election victory–or at least something short of a crushing defeat. Immigrants risk their lives crossing the Channel in them illegally, since the legal avenues for asylum seekers have been all but closed. 


 


The response


But let’s not get into that. I’ll lose whatever’s left of (or possibly for) my sense for (or was the of?) humor. Let’s talk instead about the response: cartoonist Guy Venables said he had a “huge list of highly regarded cartoonists” who’d offered to repaint the mural. 


What happens if they repaint and Jenrick orders them painted over again?


“We will be cartoonists for a lot longer than Robert Jenrick will be in mainstream politics. So we’ll paint it back on. If they paint it over, we’ll carry on. It’s all you can do about this kind of evil.”


You won’t be surprised to learn that the detention center turned down the offer to repaint the murals–I mean, come on, their boss had just ordered their destruction–so the cartoonists have created a coloring book instead. Its themes are Welcome to Britain and Life in Britain. They’ll be given free to kids in detention and, possibly, sold as a fundraiser. 


 


Other ways to be unwelcoming 


It’s not just humans who aren’t being welcomed. Birds have bee faced with spikes to keep them off statues and buildings. And why wouldn’t humans want make them feel unwelcome? Have you ever seen a bird who filled out the paperwork necessary to move its feathery ass from one country to another? No, of course you haven’t. Scofflaws, every one of ‘em.


Okay, I can’t blame this one on the Home Office, although I’d be happy to. This one’s the fault of the Department for Pigeon Spikes.


Anyway, birds have started not just pulling up strips of metal spikes but making nests out of them. Some have even used the spikes the way their human creators had in mind, facing them outward to keep predators away. 


They’ve also been found to make nests out of barbed wire and knitting needles. The trick is to line the inside of the nest with soft material to protect the chicks. It’s easier than wrapping the chicks in padded vests. Anyone who’s ever tried to keep socks on an infant will understand why.


 


The science news


Scientists have found a way to make energy out of thin air using humidity and pretty much any material that can be punched full of ridiculously small holes. So far, they’ve only made a fraction of a volt, but they’re hoping to bump up the output. And I can’t think of a thing to say about this that’s even remotely amusing but now that our world’s on fire I thought it might be worth mentioning.


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The news is full of stories about artificial intelligence, just as humans are full of what passes for intelligence but given the state of the world might not be. Two stories caught my eye. One was about how to spot online reviews that have been written by AI in order to puff up whatever’s for sale–or if the AI was set loose by a competitor, to tear it down.


What should you look for? Overly perfect sentences. Long sentences. American English. (That makes me a suspect.) Good spelling. Grammatical accuracy. In other words, if anyone writes well, that should set off all the red flags. Or at least if any American does–


More usefully, they warn us to beware of long reviews–the ones that go on for paragraph after paragraph after paragraph, because artificial intelligence doesn’t get bored. And, what with not being human and all, it never has the experience of people edging away when it talks nonstop for half an hour, so it never learns when to shut up.


To be fair, I know people who’ve never learned that either.


But AI is, apparently, adapting. It’s learning British English for British reviews. It may start throwing in a human error or two. 


In the spirit of nothing-is-ever-simple, though, a different article (in the same newspaper) notes that the computer programs that have been introduced to spot AI-written job applications and essays are biased against people who speak English as a second language: Seven of them flagged their writing as being AI generated. One program flagged 98% of it as AI generated but passed 90% of the essays written by native-speaking American 8th graders. 


Why does that happen? Something like ChatGPT is trained to guess what word comes next, so it spits out what’s called low-perplexity text: text using familiar words and common patterns. Throw in something surprising and your writing sounds less GPTish. The problem for non-native speakers is that they’re likely to use predictable words. 


All this comes from a group of scientists, who then went back to their AI programs and asked them to rewrite their essays using more complex language. Those were submitted to the detection programs and were accepted as human-generated. 


Does that mean non-native speakers would be well advised to use artificial intelligence if the want their writing to be accepted as human-generated? Possibly. 


Education is arguable the most important market for AI-detection software, the researchers (or the artificial intelligence that by then had locked them in the cupboard) said. “Non-native students bear more risks of false accusations of cheating, which can be detrimental to a student’s academic career and psychological wellbeing.”



 


A note on book recommendations


I don’t know if you’re aware of what pesky creatures writers are, but we’ll do just about anything to publicize our books, and in an effort to make mine more visible I’ve put up a page of book recommendations at Shepherd.com, which in spite of encouraging me to obnoxiously publicize my page seems like a good website, full of book recommendations that are organized around whatever themes contributors choose. So it’s useful not just for writers but also for readers.


The best publicity is when you can actually offer people something useful. 


The books I’ve recommended are LGBTQ+ books you haven’t heard of and should, but I’d recommend them regardless of whether you’re gay, straight, or something else entirely. A good book can speak powerfully to the community it grew out of, but it doesn’t have to stay within those borders. The ones I’ve recommended can speak to anyone who’s willing to listen.