Chindie

I've got so much else going on in my life that makes me want to jab a knife into my throat at the moment that I don't need the pain of watching us lose to a team I absolutely despise. I sincerely hope I'm wrong and I see a wonderful winning result later. I just don't believe I will and I don't need that disappointment to pile on top of everything else.

First game in a while I'm not bothering to follow. It's going to be a horrible match and no joy will come from it, so best to just ignore it.

As ever, **** Israel.

One of the strangely vivid memories I have is from school in Year 1 about milk bottles. We were sat listening to our teacher explain that blue tits would peck open milk bottles on doorsteps and then put stones in the bottle, she asked us if we could explain why they did that. I answered that the stones would take up room in the bottle and make the milk rise to let them drink it. Apparently that was something children at that age weren't expected to 'get' so they were surprised I did. Carry on.

Evacuate to make room for the bombs.

Bizarrely interesting channel if you've any interest in animals. This video is basically half an hour of a professor who knows what he's talking about railing against another professor who disagreed with him on humans being a type of monkey. He's a bit weird (in a, bodies in the basement kinda way), and I also get the feeling he's a bit religious somehow in a strange way, despite the evolutionary biology knowledge, but the videos are very thorough and quite interesting. Want to know how to identify different lineages of monkeys, or how to identify different species of crocodile, he's your man.

And there's the excuse we're going to be hearing a lot of - the Tories were so bad there's no money. Same shit peddled for a decade they only recently stopped with, making a comeback to the top of the charts. **** 'em.

it's almost like they don't actually believe in anything but their right to power.

*Puts house on us finishing outside of Europe*

I'll be spoiling my ballot again. Not that it matters, it's been a Labour seat since inception bar a single Tory abhorration. But I won't vote for this party. They didn't have my vote last time, they certainly don't this time. A mauve Tory is still a Tory.

Oh I'm not saying it's uncommon, I just think that kind of 'bought into the hype and can't roll back' stuff is bunk. If something is shit it's shit. For example, taking my sacred idols... I love the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but some of it is really quite bad. I love Pratchett's Discworld books, but there's some stinkers in there. I love Tool, but they've produced some absolute turd music. Etc. I think things would be better if critics' didn't have darlings. I pretty much instantly saw that AWITC was bad and it didn't matter how much I adored the band, it didn't make that album better. The world should be like that. ... This has tempted me to go back it and see if I'm being harsh, but I'm pretty certain I'm not. My memory is a couple of solid tracks and a load of clunky arch shit with no hooks and nothing that grabs you.

I never understood the clamour for AWITC. It has a couple of solid tracks, but nothing that comes near SA, and all of the songs are in some way clunky or lacking that snap the first album has. When it came out people lauded it as a worthy follow up (some suggested better than SA), and it never, ever was. It's genuinely quite a weak album imo. It was never going to stand equal with SA, but it doesn't even come close.

Inspiring stuff. Those poor bastards that think Starmer's coming to save us...

Japan is by the far the best of those. India isn't bad but it's far too rushed and it does have the feeling that there was a Indian government rep just off camera or dictating what they did or did not do. You can't cover India in 3 episodes of a show. It's still decent but they could have done more with it. The Japan one is peerless, they actually cover a decent chunk of stuff and pick up on a load of niche things. Plus, well, hey Bim!

Bloc Party had one incredible album, their debut, and then everything else is a few solid tracks wrapped around bleh. A case of a talented band that came out swinging hard and then in an effort to 'develop' they lost their sound and got worse. AWITC is a band that's listened to it's hype and likes the smell of its own shit. Intimacy is a response to the slight backlash the second album got by deciding the problem is they aren't electronic enough and doubling down on the lyrics, but it backfires badly. Four is the sound of a band scuttling back to the roots but with no ideas, and after that nobody cares. I don't think I've ever even listened to the next 2 albums. But that first album. Wow. It's just great songs. I am biased because it came out right at the right time for me - I heard those songs in the moment of my life where they most felt relevant, and so many of them are excellent. Great hooks great melodies great rhythm sections great lyrics... Spectacular album.

The outright collapse in form is worrying.

I know. The problem doesn't go away though. They've attempted to create a definition that captures what they think this is, but the definition they've created captures a variety of dogs, and actually doesn't capture some 'true' XL Bullies (for instance there are some XL bullies that are quite short, thus not meeting the definition but apparently are still dangerous according to their being 'a dangerous breed') and is so wide a definition that it can capture some breeds that aren't XL bullies at all and nobody thinks are. It's nonsense.

The issue with that list, though, is the problem of what is and isn't an XL bully. Nobody can actually identify these animals, they aren't a registered breed. So all the 'XL bully ' cases there are creating an artificial category. A more accurate case would be to note what these dogs almost certainly are, which would give you 'Pitbull cross', 'Staffy cross', 'Rottweiler cross', etc etc. Then look back at the years before an XL bully was even a thing, and you see the same breeds over and over, the majority of which are all acceptable to own to this day. It's a moral panic. A marketing nightmare. A load of idiots got posing dogs for the street and cant handle them, the same breeds that occasionally hurt people 20, 30, 40 years ago.

Exactly. Though they are a 'meaner' breed than understood. If you suddenly have a load of people getting dogs because they're fashionable, in a bad situation, and don't train them, lo and behold you're going to get a lot of dog attacks.

Funnily enough labradors are the most common breed involved in dog attacks, and have killed people.

I'm not saying that bad owners are new. I'm saying that you've had an increase in dog ownership, with a related increase in dogs not being trained and socialised properly, during lockdown, that has coincided with a fashion for muscular pitbull dogs. The issue isn't inherently the dogs. There's been lethal dog attacks forever, we've got numerous breeds that are perfectly capable of killing someone if the fancy took them - have you seen a fully grown rottweiler in a bad mood? It's sobering. The issue is a load of people getting dogs in lockdown, not training them or socialising them (the latter of which is particularly difficult in lockdown in fairness), and going with a fashion for a type of dog that needs to be well trained, particularly if they aren't actually the 'real' XL bully 'breed'. Then you get a series of attacks that seem to come from similar types of dogs (which is itself an issue, turns out there's actually a lot of different dogs that look 'like an XL bully') and people are pointing at the dog as the issue as if they are inherently dangerous, when the reality is the vast majority of them are completely fine (if they weren't, there's so many of these dogs around you'd have the hospitals flooded with dog attack victims). The XL bully thing is a marketing nightmare that's become a moral panic. The actual thing at fault is a bunch of idiots getting posing dogs they can't handle and haven't bothered to train and socialise, then putting them in situations they haven't been used to and the owners aren't prepared for.

The XL bully isn't really a breed (yet, anyway) - if it was a recognised breed you'd lose a lot of the problem. The guy that started the 'breed' wanted to create the ultimate poser dog, a dog that was far stockier than the normal pitbull but with a much more lap dog style temperament. And he did, he ended up with a dog that looked like a pitbull on steroids but had the temperament of pug. The problem though is the look became the selling point and people wanted the muscular mean looking pitbull, which meant it created a market for any idiot to sell any pitbull type dog as an XL bully, and it created a demand for people to breed their own lines of muscle bound pitbulls but who didn't care about the temperament (or worse, wanted a muscle bound pitbull with a nasty temperament), so you ended in the situation where basically every pitbull type dog is sold as an XL bully and nobody knows what they actually are. Then the pandemic happens and a load of people get dogs, and because of the fashion for the XL bully that 'breed' becomes a big part of the new dogs owned, and nobody trains them properly so you get a load of untrained unsocialised dogs of unknown pedigree and unknown lineage running about that then come into an opened up world and some end up attacking people, and because the fashion is XL bullies everyone knows the dog is an XL bully, and before you know it every dog attack is an XL bully and the problem is the 'breed'. Essentially the story here, with these dog attacks, isn't a problem with XL bullies, it's a problem of booming bad dog ownership. But the headline isn't as interesting when it's 'dog attacks person'.

They probably aren't 'XL bullies', and the media circus around the issue is basically a moral panic born of marketing.

Carlson has migrated from right wing mental word removed into flirting with Alex Jones style truly evil elites and demonic aliens (as in literally aliens who are psychic demons from Satan) talking points since being binned by Fox, so don't be shocked if he starts praising Putin as the second coming of Jesus and sucking his toes during the interview.