A feast of leftovers
A sort of selection box.
I am writing this on the Friday before Christmas; by the time you read it, in a sort of metaphor for the passing nature of all things, the big day will be behind us, and we’ll all be in the weird yawning gap between Christmas and New Year. You’re probably surprised to be reading it at all. You’d forgotten it was even Wednesday, hadn’t you? I bet you had.
Anyway, I’m giving myself the week after Christmas off, on the grounds that a) I’ve not committed to doing absolutely nothing for more than two days in a row for a distressingly high number of months, and I just feel like it’s time, and b) I have a book to finish before winter is out, so I’m taking a breath while I can.
So this isn’t the normal edition of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. Instead, it’s just a series of links, to things you might find amusing or entertaining: those which I failed to include in the weekly links roundup, due to lack of space; or those I wrote this year I was particularly pleased with, as a sort of “best of”. Normal service, with anger about politics and nerdy analysis and, of course, a map, will resume next week.
A turkey sandwich. Image: Rowan Jacobs/Flickr/CC BY-ND 2.0.
Some interesting, comforting or amusing things I found down the back of the internet
1. Earlier this week, on one of my occasional Google searches for the train that changed my life, I discovered that there is a British gymnast named “Elizabeth Line” – who has had, one must assume, a bloody awful year. Her Google alerts will be knackered for a start.
Anyway, here’s a picture of her in action – on what one wag in the replies has called a “Cross Rail”.
2. Trying to plan the next few weeks of your life in the UK? The Guardian is keeping a helpful wall chart of the scheduled strikes.
3. How did it come to this? The Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch has published a series of public spending graphs, highlighting exactly what the Conservatives have done to the state since coming to power in 2010. “Like Trussonomics, austerity was ideology-over-evidence,” he argues. “Unlike Trussonomics, it was not quickly reversed, and so has gone on to cause enormous, lasting damage.” Devastating reading. Twitter thread here; full article here.
4. Or, if you want to keep it simple, here’s one graph from the Times which explains a lot about the mess we are in:
5. Anyway, that’s enough of that. Moving onto other important things, here’s a video of an octopus changing colour in its sleep. Apparently this might mean that she’s dreaming. Cool.
6. Killer whales have fashions, which means that, for a period in 1987, it was cool in certain killer whale communities to wear dead salmon on their heads. Just like parts of the human world in 1987.
7. An oldie but a goodie from LiveScience: this story of a family of orangutans who befriended a family of otters in a Belgian zoo. Can anyone else smell a sitcom?
8. An amazing tweet from Joan Collins, concerning the truth about her and Captain Mainwaring out of Dad’s Army.
9. Remember Jon Stone’s London Cycle Routes YouTube channel? Someone’s been mapping his routes. It’s starting to look like a pretty nifty network.
10. The cast of The Traitors as characters from Greek mythology. Great stuff from Callum O’Brien.
11. Why do cities build grid systems? This brilliant piece in the Economist explains. As with most things in the Economist, it’s unbylined; but I have it on good authority it’s the work of Midwest-correspondent and recovering Brummie, Dan Knowles.
12. Talking of lines upon the earth, consider this 37 metre tall, 2,000 year old, etching of a cat, discovered in 2020, which was clearly done by some ancient native Peruvian nine year olds.
13. One for the archive TV / old music fans, not to mention one particular friend who I suspect has stopped reading this newsletter some time ago and this is a good way of checking: a thread in which a woman and her dad work out what records Del Boy is selling in a 1983 episode of Only Fools & Horses.
14. Here’s Bob Hoskins on playing Super Mario. Wait for it.
15. Here’s Billy Connolly, on whether he’s been mean about his home town of Glasgow.
16. Then there are the phone book listings for Adam West in his home town of Ketchum, Idaho.
17. Here’s a baby jaguar, learning to swim.
18. Here’s a man trying his homemade limoncello.
19. Here’s a view from the Forth Bridge, just because it’s stunning. Honestly, it’s like something out of an epic fantasy game:
20. In 1974, a DJ created an entire radio station in his shed in Stevenage, with a range so limited the only listener was his, presumably tolerant, wife. This was dressed up as something to do with the government’s treatment of pirate radio apparently. Anyway, unthreatened by the competition, the BBC covered it, and the results are lovely.
21. And finally, the story of the World Rock Paper Scissors Championships of the early 2000s.
The best of 2022
Some things I wrote for this newsletter this year which I am pleased with.
1. Some unfocused rage about London’s stupid station names.
2. Even before Kwasi Kwarteng accidentally pressed the self-destruct button, “Tory economic competence” was an increasingly implausible myth.
3. How many lines does London have now?
4. How many lines does everywhere else in the UK have now?
5. Remaining monarch for 70 years is a pretty unusual achievement, actually.
6. So how do storms get their names?
7. On Finland, and other places that don’t exist. An extract from Tom Phillips’ and my book, Conspiracy: A History of B*llocks Theories, and How Not to Fall For Them, which – if you were unlucky enough not to receive it for Christmas – you can buy here.
8. And finally, everything I learned from this two hour MP3 of all Scotrail’s automated station announcements.
And with that, I will wish you all a very happy new year. As we’ve been saying every year for, ooh, about six years now – it can’t be any worse than this one, right?