Whoa! It’s usually Kippers who bring up Magna Carta.

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Always tighten up the valve core first if using a screw-on pump. Always. Continental tubes are particularly bad for being shipped with loose cores in my experience. I now tighten them up when I take them out of the box.

Rishi v Jay Rayner. There’s only going to be one winner there

Rishi’s reading straight from the Big Priti Patel Book of British Food Security there, isn’t he.

He’s wheeled out the sex yeti for an endorsement

It’s like the Honeymonster’s been hitting his own supply hard and long.

The grifting egomanicacs that tend to be drawn towards leadership roles in populist right wing politics

We’re just coming off a political tailspin of Johnson -> Truss -> Sunak. Reform UK haven’t been the only ones competing for the attention of grifting egomaniacs drawn to leadership roles in populist right wing politics.

I do find it amusing that the voters the Tories chased hardest in recent years are defecting to Reform UK, while many traditional right-centrist conservative voters seem to be voting Lib Dem, Labour, or even Green depending on their constituency. Much of the remaining Conservative support looks very likely to depart the electorate over the next couple of electoral cycles. That’s the real extinction event. 

Fianna Fail went from 41% vote share in 2007 to 18% in 2011.

While Fianna Fáil’s slap on the wrist for economic mismanagement was somewhat enjoyable it’s really not comparable: a first preference in PR:STV isn’t the same thing as a vote in FPTP. They went back into government in a subsequent election.

Ride where motorised traffic clears stuff off the road, not where it clears the stuff to. Riding in the gutter will likely get more punctures too, and then probably expose you to more ticks while fixing them in that grassy verge.

I think PR mitigates the risks the far-right poses to a FPTP democracy where once they go from having 20% support to 30% support they are suddenly running the country with no mechanism to keep them in check.

There are very few constitutional safeguards here too: a party winning 30% of the vote could potentially seize control of many of the mechanisms of the state.

Reform UK ahead of the Conservative Party in a YouGov poll for The Times? Ooof.

How do you stop the horrendous dubbing and go back to subtitles?

Set the audio language to French (and display subtitles in English, if you wish), IIRC.

Ah, beaten to it. If you have some French but not quite enough, displaying subtitles in French makes a huge difference in my experience.

Gribs – everything makes a difference . Team SKY used to win lots of races, because Dave Brailsford and his secret squirrels were making incremental gains with tiny changes.

Team Sky would claim they were already doing everything they could right and then finding little performance improvements on top. We haven’t even mandated domestic insulation minimum standards, maintained the fuel duty escalator, or banned private jets. I love the sentiment, but for the marginal gains analogy we really need to start by eating, training, and sleeping properly first.

In the meantime I try to avoid unnecessary car journeys and lobby others to do the same, try my best to keep my ***** English house safe and comfortable with minimum energy use, avoid buying new and avoid consumerism, and when I do buy things I try to buy things I need that will last well.

WB Discovery kind of **** the bed last year. They’ve been trying to trim their outgoings since (canning a bunch of HBO stuff) and simplify their offerings and drive consumers into fewer more expensive platforms (canning GCN+ and removing Eurosport online for new signups etc). It’s not necessarily the profitability of GCN+ that was the issue, but the debt of the parent company, the overheads of maintaining (presumably poorly integrated) diverse operations, and its exposure to the market.

… the Tories are being punished for not actually being right wing …

Yeah, that’s definitely what they’re being punished for alright.

We’re very good at taxing productivity and very bad at taxing rent-seeking and other asset-based wealth leveraging. It’s no wonder we have a productivity crisis and a housing market that consumes our earnings disproportionately.

After watching the F1 version, the first season of this, and the Six Nations version in a bit ambivalent. I feel the format lets down the source material by stripping away the technical detail and attempting to turn sports into soap operas. I’ll probably watch it anyway, but it’s with the expectation I’ll be disappointed.

Baboon spiders. Boomslangs. Mambas. Drop toilets. Quicksand.

I always understood baggies to mean anything that was not skintight. There’s very little left if your shorts must be skintight but not lycra.

Seascale.

(I may be over-emphasising the not a tourist trap bit.)

Not a bike, remotely. Saw some e-trikes  doing deliveries in Belfast recently with a huge box on the back. They (and the riders) looked unsafe at best. The appear to pose a pretty big risk to pedestrians and riders/drivers to me.

We have multiple logistics companies doing urban deliveries with trikes and quads here. I don’t have a problem with them; they certainly feel less menacing on the roads than delivery vans do to me.

It’s all fun and games until the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation fails. We can warm ourselves with fond memories of pedantry about the Gulf Stream in more innocent times.

It was a cold rainy morning in Cambridge, so all the dickheads got in their cars and drove like pricks as they do every time it rains, making things much worse for less selfish road users, and making the climate crisis just a little tiny bit worse, all at once.

Yes.

I do hope Labour are throwing plenty of resources at campaigning in Rishi’s constituency. He can’t be doing much there himself given how he’s made the Tory campaign across Britain all about him.

ebalance bikes exist and are available in the uk. They are classed as ebikes despite them literally having a twist or push button throttle and no pedals.

Kill or maim a pedestrian while riding one and you’re likely to end up trying to argue you weren’t riding an uninsured non-roadworthy motorcycle.

On a road ride around South Cambridgeshire yesterday I saw no Conservative election stuff. Nothing. I can’t remember that from any previous general election.

I’d prefer it to a delivery van.

If the Tories are going to have a leader in the Lords I really think nobody could do zero detail focus, grasping opportunism without scruple at every opportunity, and maximum dark comedy potential like Baron Frost could.

On Call me Dave…

I don’t think he’s allowed in the House of Commons, so couldn’t do PMQT.

Isn’t the convention that a lord wishing to be PM has to resign from the Lords and a government MP resigns so he can have a run for election in a (safe) seat in the Commons? I think he should go for it.

Nothing will change because we repeatedly choose not to invest in change.

Our polling cards arrived in the post here this week. Receiving them it’s hard to ignore how it’s such a waste holding another election so soon after the last local elections. Given the Conservatives aren’t even apparently taking the election seriously, could they not have pulled the trigger on it sooner?

I worry that Labour are showing little sign of cultivating the kind of change people need. After the election Farage could be pretty well placed to attempt an Italian clown manoeuvre for 2029.

Time management. I can do it, with constant effort, but seeing others doing it as if it’s nothing it might as well be bloody wizardry.

Antibiotics will clear it up.

Assuming there isn’t a medicines supply chain issue for what’s prescribed, of course.

I’m not so sanguine about it. Pasokification may see Farage become a likely next PM. I hope he loses ignominiously and ****s off to America.

He won’t do anything for the people of Clayton: he’ll use his position to scapegoat others and present himself as a PM-in-waiting for 2029 with some nebulous platform based on conspiracy theories and promises of more “direct democracy” much like MAGA does.

Farage looks like he’ll start chewing his own face off if there’s a pause in the press conference, doesn’t he?