History, Politics And Current Affairs

I have the extra defences of living in a block of flats. There would be the door entry system to get past. Never had anyone trick or treat over 15 years. Thank goodness as I strongly dislike Halloween for its non-Christian religious overtones.

I had thought that the X-Files did the 'no resetting world' a bit earlier, and it is quite possible there were others before then. Interesting to find out in any case. This fellow looked very much like that singer from The Monkeys when he was younger, by the look of it. The thing that Babylon 5 had...

Babylon 5 had a much greater impact than you might imagine. In and of itself it never became mainstream, but it was really the first show on American TV to actually have a continuing storyline where things didn't simply reset at the end of virtually every episode. Didn't know that, interesting! IMH...

Depends on your age I suppose, Babylon 5 was great but it was always more of a niche, almost cult classic. Star Trek is iconic, even to those who have never watched it. Babylon 5 had a much greater impact than you might imagine. In and of itself it never became mainstream, but it was really the fir...

The jokes just write themselves ….

Shut OpenAI down. They have repeatedly shown they cannot be trusted with the dangerous technology they are working on.

End of discussion.

so the news goes that the US Navy weighs renaming carrier slated to honor Black war hero, potentially switching it to Trump, i alwlays hope that a Ford was named after a Legacy carrier, maybe Hornet, Saratoga, Yorktown ore Lexington. That's an obvious and IMMEDIATE reversal once Trump's out of powe...

Engineering failures happen.

Engineering failures like that which take FOUR DAYS to deal with and leave a warship helpless are utterly unacceptable.

This stupidity can easily be dealt with.

Proceed with redesign work but slow walk it so that the ship plans will mysteriously take until at least 16th January 2029 to be ready. Then once we're rid of Trump from power lobby his successor to reverse course.

Looks like 38.1 Celsius might be the top temperature today.

Well 37 Celsius has comfortably been beaten today.

Two nearest weather stations to where I am are both showing 35.8 Celsius at the moment.

Except we didn't conquer the place. Oh we tried and came very close on occasion but we never actually conquered the place.

What finally persuaded them into union was going broke when an attempt at a Scottish colonial empire backfired spectacularly.

Looks like today live up to broad expectations in temperature terms. Ross-on-Wye is showing a maximum of 35.7 Celsius for today at the moment. That's believable because there are a significant number of 34 Celsius range readings on the general Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Gloucestershire area a...

Davion Highlander wrote: ↑Tue Aug 04, 2026 10:37 pm

Bernard Woolley wrote: ↑Tue Aug 04, 2026 8:57 pm Has absolutely pelted it down here for quite a bit of the day. Way things are going, we might have some spare water to send to our English cousins!

And for just a few extra million we promise not to piss in it first!

Isn't that the Irn Bru where said consideration is waived?

It rained here today. Two pretty heavy showers between 4 pm and 6 pm. Far from enough to make any dent in the drought of course.

As for compared to 1976? We're nowhere near as bad as that in overall drought terms. Why? We'd had a dry winter AND a dry spring before summer 1976.

Today we've already breached 30 Celsius widely in the London and East Anglia. So that's the days over 30 Celsius record of 34 equalled today. Looks like 31.5 is the highest value around at the moment, so it might breach 32 Celsius today and break that record. [Edit] Now later in the day we have stat...

33.5 Celsius yesterday, so we've now equalled the days over 32 Celsius record at 19 days. Interestingly the Met Office stats for the day of that weather forecast I linked to showed 29.7 Celsius, so it appears the videp was wrong and we're therefore still one day off equalling the over 30 Celsius rec...

Turns out I'm a day out with my above 30 Celsius count. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtbzkXvPBns Today was the day 33 above 30 Celsius this year according to that Met Office weather forecast video, so we're now one day each off the records for days above 30 Celsius in a year AND days above 32 Cel...

One of the third parties hacked is described as a security firm, and Claude hacked it by taking a malware package, modifying it by inserting hidden executable code into it, and then when the security firm’s malware scanner scanned it this code package compromised the scanner and Claude was then abl...

Yesterday saw 30 Celsius breached but not 32 Celsius. So we're now up to 18 and 31 days.