Phlegmatic

"We can all put aside our partisan differences for a moment and agree that this Trump-Clinton “Dirty Dancing” duet is the best thing to come out of the debate."

Don't trust "factcheckers". Maybe it’s just my innate cynicism and a background as a professional sceptic that always makes me doubt someone who claims to be “unbiased” when giving you “the facts”.

Why Truman fired MacArthur. Fascinating account.

Weaker Sterling is (on balance) somewhere between good and very good for the UK economy.

...and another article making a similar argument.

Tolkien might not have been too impressed by the current trend to concentrate on the ethnicity of science fiction and fantasy authors rather than the quality of their work.

There is no such thing as trickle-down economics.

This is the best explanation of why so many people will vote for Donald Trump that I've seen.

Ched Evans is Not Guilty. Here's ten myths about the case that need to be busted.

Who is winning in Labour and the Liberal Democrats' race to be the most anti-semitic party?

Dennis Byrd didn't deserve to die in a car crash.

Dolly Parton's 'Jolene' slowed down is amazingly good. (Thanks beckyc)

18 Game of Thrones moments improved by quotes from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Given the dearth of available options, who should American conservatives vote for in the presidential election?

Are we seeing the beginning of a political realignment in the UK? Interesting lecture.

Here's a particularly unsubtle example of simple corruption from the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth.

Political map of Europe, year-by-year from 3650BC to 2016AD.

70-year-olds play D&D for the first time.

The third most likely person to become the next President of the United States, and how he would do it. OK, it’s beyond unlikely, but not impossible…

BBC admits Bake Off is catastrophic social experiment

A pretty clever piece of political profiling and surveying from the Social Market Foundation.

Terror attack stopped by heroic activist who established a safe space in local mall.

A blog that examines the use of fonts in science fiction. What a time to be alive.

Labour's new shadow minister for domestic violence has personal experience of the issue - a police caution for domestic violence.

Typical day at the Labour Party conference.

Brilliant picture of Jeremy Corbyn at his own party conference protesting to bring back the position of Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health. Now, see if you can guess which politician it was who abolished the position of “Shadow Cabinet Minister for Mental Health”…

Amazingly, there is an article on the website of Standard Life all about collecting tabletop games. Pretty good article too, although there are a couple of factual errors. They should have asked me! (One of the people interviewed described H1 Bloodstone Pass as “almost impossible to get hold of”. We had one in stock, although ironically we sold it last week to a bloke in Denmark.)

Epipens are really expensive in the US. Here's why.

Jewish Labour Movement heckled by Corbynistas at the Labour Conference. The speaker (not the heckler thank god) was a friend of mine at Magdalen.

You don't need this laptop.

Trying to understand the EU's actions against Apple and the Republic of Ireland.

It's not shocking that professional employers judge applicants for client-facing roles partly on their appearance and their dress. What is shocking is that not only do state schools not teach this stuff, they sometimes don’t like it when employers try to do it instead.

Useful smartphone test. When I last bought a smartphone, I read lots of reviews, but one question that was never asked was “How good is it at making and receiving calls?”, that is “How good is it at actually being a phone”"?”

According to the latest Rowntree Foundation definition, someone in the top 0.32% of global incomes is now "in poverty". Muppets.

British WW2 propaganda posters.

Think you're good at Lego building? This guy is better.

If you were an American games company raising funds on Kickstarter for a new family card game "that combines speed, hilarious gestures, and your silly side for 2-6 players, ages 6+", and you weren't that familiar with politically incorrect British playground slang, what's the worst name you could come up with...?

"Nobody ever got sacked for buying IBM" …but maybe in this case, someone should have been.

When I was an auditor, this sort of clever statistical analysis was called a logic check. This is a good logic check on why American police might treat certain groups differently. (Hat tip to ford_prefect42.)

Archaeological evidence of a major bronze age battle in northern Germany c.1250 BC.

Balls. Lots of little blue balls.

Do you not have enough ambient sounds in your life?

Have the Brexit predictions come true (yet)?

The most amazing D&D map ever created

Headline of the Month (2)

A very high percentage of male Pashtun Afghans are homosexual paedophiles. (Of course, they don’t consider it to be homosexual, which is forbidden by their religion, “because they aren’t in love with their boys.)

The first 'new England' - the forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the Black Sea coast.

31 Essential Science Fiction Terms and Where They Came From

Quality report on the impact of minimum wages, the 'gender pay gap' and high pay from the IEA.

A very clever analysis (in 59 tweets) of how Donald Trump came to win the Republican nomination.

Fear of angering muslims means electoral fraud will continue

Survival Guide for Conservative, Classically Liberal & Libertarian Science Fiction & Fantasy Authors

A useful summary of how many types of people disapprove of Pokemon Go. (Christians, muslims, moral guardians, leftards, gaming purists, conspiracy theorists, nanny-statists, more leftards, SJWs, puritans…)

Remember when the Democratic National Convention used a photo of Russian warships by mistake? No? That's because it got very little coverage over here.

I love these Game of Thrones posters that HBO did. One per episode (almost)!

The plot of all three major Tolkien works in a single haiku.

Pretty much how I feel about both babies and cats.

The IMF was wrong and I was right. (I feel smug.)

Some clever statistical analysis of the EU referendum.

"How did the language of politics get so toxic?"

Considering the impact of cheaper Sterling.

Clare Short is responsible for a lot of the bad things that have happened in Zimbabwe.

The French civil servant with only 10% of a brain. (I know that sounds like base political satire, but actually it’s a serious scientific article about a bloke in France who is missing 90% of his brain.)

This couple should get an agent and sell the film rights to Richard Curtis.

Reds Exploiting Blacks: The Roots of Black Lives Matter

One of our local aristocrats has died.

Dear Boris: William Hague's 10-step guide to being Foreign Secretary

Will we be sending Mr Chamberlain?

Vintage gun adverts. (That is, vintage adverts for guns, not modern adverts for vintage guns.)

The far left is trying to rig the Labour leadership election. Again.

RIP VHS

Hillary Clinton seems to have been a big fan of the late Robert Byrd. Who’s Robert Byrd? This guy.

Clinton's choice of running mate is both shrewd (in terms of taking votes from the sort of Republican who would never vote for Trump) and sound (in that he's pro free trade).

Jewel-encrusted catholic martyr skeletons? Or archliches...?

Why bad ideas refuse to die.

Whatever happened to William 'The Refrigerator' Perry?

No, the British did not "frantically" google what the E.U. is hours after voting to leave it.

New Robin of Sherwood audio drama with original cast. (We’re working our way through the boxed set in preparation!)

Gordon Murray has died. No, not the bloke who designed the car in the userpic, the guy who did Trumpton, Camberwick Green and Chigley.

How the **** did a television journalist as bad at her job as this one get a flipping CBE? This is a total car crash and she comes across as (at best) incompetent and at worst borderline deranged.

Mapping the growth of cities over the last 6,000 years.

An interview with Matthew 'Pandemic' Leacock.

Five steps universities could take to revive free speech on campus.

NASA's mission in the 1960s: Get America to the Moon. NASA's mission in the 2010s: Reach out to the muslim world. (Wait, what?)

One of my occasional hobbies is social media (usually Facebook) hoax-slaying. I think I'm pretty good at spotting hoaxes. You can usually recognise something in the wording that doesn't seem quite right. Maybe it's my auditing experience - professional scepticism and all that.

Usually these hoaxes are crime scare stories - marks on the pavement are signs left by dognappers, look out for axe-wielding maniacs who get into your car at petrol stations - or chain letters purporting to be from Microsoft or Apple. Today though, we've had a political one. It's this:

"The most perfect thing I have ever seen just happened on the replacement train bus service between Newport and Cwmbran:

White man sat in front of a mother and her son. Mother was wearing a niqab. After about 5 minutes of the mother talking to her son in another language the man, for whatever reason, feels the need to tell the woman "When you're in the UK you should really be speaking English."

At which point, an old woman in front of him turns around and says, "She's in Wales. And she's speaking Welsh."

Perfect."

The Untold Story Behind Saudi Arabia's 41-Year U.S. Debt Secret

Have we reached peak Waitrose?

Guide to Figuring Out the Age of an Undated World Map

Street Fighter and Philosophy

The unexpected treasure found on an abandoned liner on the North Wales coast

...and more on that story.

How to predict the Referendum result

Man almost goes into Games Workshop

Clever SEO.

Republican Stockholm Syndrome