MakemineVanilla

When I wake at night with a dry mouth and I can't be arsed to get out of bed, I just think about Opal Fruits to make my mouth water, such is the conditioned reflex. If that doesn't work I move on to Garner's pickled onions. Its not quite À la recherche du temps perdu, but it's a start.

Clarkson famously said that only cads and bounders drive Jags, and always refer to their vehicle as the "Jaag!"

Some people still call their Dyson vacuum cleaner the "hoover", so you'll need to wait a bit longer.

The machine definitely looks like its missing a few cogs, and I think Mahrez is one of them too.

Liverpool were excellent today and their high-press looked like they might cause us a few problems. City's problem seems to be that they have lost the knack of scoring worldies when they desparately need them.

I now know that it is a subject of particular interest.

A fine example of thread theory if ever I saw one!

Someone asked the question: "Do any string theorists believe in the Many Worlds Interpretation of QM (where the wave function is physically real)?" And got the answer from Chethan Krishnan, an Indian string theorist. "I do! (Even though there are gaps in the many worlds picture that I am unhappy about, I think they are not insurmountable.". So I live in hope!

I'll have to look that up!

So my hope that in one of the multiverses I am always right, is not possible? Oh, bugger!

Doesn't string theory make all things possible?

Isn't that a bribe?

Nige looks like a good choice as a contestant who is attracting both viewers who like him and those that hate him. He's now the Alan Rickman of reality television. Of course the offense archeologists have now found a Tweet where Nella wrote something negative about Somalians on public transport, sounding like a bunch of fishmongers. So she might have lost the sympathy vote.

Various sources indicate that the UK spends less on health-care than other prosperous countries, at under $5k per head of population or around 11% of gdp (pre-Covid). The US spends 18% of gdp, which is way more than any other nation. The Germans spend 12% of gdp. I think the problem is that the government has not increased the health budget in line with the increase in population. The intention to increase the number of Physician Associates, does suggest that there is a shortage of qualified doctors, and the job description does seem overloaded with vague terms and hyperbole. It should be noted that 41% of female doctors work less than full time, which may also be a factor.

Do you have any idea what they do with the money? There have been various studies done over the years on the spending habits of "affluent workers", which revealed that they mostly squander it on gambling or buying consumer durables. This proved to be the case whenever Metro-Cammell won a big contract and were hiring back in the day, and the sky was the limit when it came to overtime which was paid at a very enviable rate.

Or, make the company's product cheaper and therefore more competitive in the market, and so preserve people's jobs, which might otherwise disappear.

Median salary across UK is £34k and £44k in London. Last time I looked it was £26k for most of the UK - I definitely needed an update.

I watched Sisu last night, a Finnish film about a mythical figure fighting the Nazis. I haven't laughed so much in ages.

I see what you are saying there. The press branded her as far right, which deliberately created false expectations, and now her cosying up to Brussels is being framed as moderation. Well spotted!

https://www.courthousenews.com/wheres-the-far-right-meloni-defying-expectations-italys-leader-keeps-lid-on-radical-politics/

I get the impression that the electorate of latin countries love political histrionics, and don't expect it to translate into actual policy. The present prime minister of Italy has proved to be rather more moderate than her speeches seemed to promise. I think Anglo-Saxon nations prefer their political leaders to be toadying, unctuous weasels. I think the expectation that political leaders will fail to keep their promises, is about the same.

Judging by tonight's performance, no one could accuse England of having a surplus of players worthy of a cap. The unforced-error count was beyond belief and the referee had a pretty high score of his own.

To know that would require you to know how tits were percieved at the time of Renaissance, but I would never doubt your omniscience. Desmond Morris had an entirely different theory about tits, as he opined in his book The Naked Ape. He conjectured that tits were an evolutionary step to encourage pair-bonding, in that it encouraged face to face mating; an advantage to any species where there is a long period of dependency of the off-spring. It seems that the twin globes of both arses and a goodly pair of norks, trigger strong mating signals in the male of the species, which may induce eyes to go out on stalks and trigger salivation. He claimed that humans were the only species in which tits kept their protuberant shape once the period of lactation was over. This might explain why arses seem to alternatively compete with tits, as erotic obsessions - the bustle didn't go out of fashion until WW1. Vince Packard might be forgiven for his error, as he wrote his book in 1957, a period when Hollywood seemed to have made a fetish of big tits, and Jane Russell comes to mind in The Outlaw 1943. Looking at Rubens' Venus In The Mirror (1613-14), can we conclude that he loved big female arses?

I think it was Vance Packard (The Hidden Persuaders) who claimed that it was the marketing people of bra manufacturers who established the female breast as an erotic symbol. Certainly in the 1920s having a flat chest was all the rage and the Flappers used to strap their mammaries down, which made Twiggy ideal for the role in The Boyfriend. It seems likely that men can be trained to associate any number of female physical attributes with desirability, and it would seem from the obsession with the attributes of our own Ms Lehmann, that we have entered an age when glutes are king. As far as I remember, Darcy doesn't mention Lizzy Bennet's tits once, in Pride and Prejudice.

I think we have to separate the consequences of the lockdowns from the consequences of the "vaccine". It would seem more likely that the excess deaths probably have more to do with former than the latter, and for which the Government must be held to account.