toucana

MIV (Men in Veils)

Cos-play anti-immigrant Fascists blocking roads near Dover this morning to coincide with the final day of the Reform Party conference up in Birmingham. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cmwyzxlzxpzgt The usual suspects and hold-overs from the EDL, BNP and NF. As a number of other people have pointed out - given how virulently islamaphobic these groups are, it’s rather funny they seem to be so oddly fond of wearing veils.

With apocalyptically awful timing, Reform is currently holding its annual party conference at the Birmingham NEC, and Nigel Farage went on stage today with a Trumpian speech of such monumental stupidity that it is hard to see any viable political way forward for either him, or his cod-fascist cosplay ‘party’. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyeq5jvd2po This type of political power-play is no longer working particularly well even in Trump’s MAGA dominated Washington DC. For a tawdry and peripheral political figure like Nigel Farage who reminds many UK voters of a beery frog-faced, fag-smoking spiv from the 1940s, it is an overplay of epic and delusional dimensions. Not so much cooked as stuffed.

On Tuesday 25 August, John Ratcliffe the Director of the CIA flew to Moscow in a large C-17 Globemaster III American military plane for an in-person meeting with his opposite numbers in the Russian FSB. He left the same day, apparently earlier than expected, without meeting the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. US and Russian government sources have both declined to comment on the reasons for this unscheduled visit, and were reluctant to confirm that it had even taken place https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/25/cia-director-john-ratcliffe-moscow-russia A lightning personal visit of this type to Russia by a Director of the CIA is a very rare event. The last time it happened was in late November 2021 when CIA Director William Burns unexpectedly flew to Moscow in an attempt to discourage Putin from invading Ukraine. US intelligence analysts had detected unmistakeable signs that Russia was about to attack, and the CIA Director was sent to tell Putin that there would be serious consequences if he did so. Russa ignored the warning and invaded Ukraine anyway on 24 February 2022. There is much speculation as to what was discussed at Tuesday’s meeting. Putin is said to have signed three new undisclosed decrees on Monday. One of them is believed to relate to a new large-scale mobilisation of Russian military forces. Another is thought to authorise the Russian government to seize control of key elements of their national infrastructure which are being degraded by Ukrainean drone and missile attacks. The final one is said to define new battlefield objectives for Russian military leaders within the coming year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnMxpQb5gbo It is unclear whether the CIA Director was warning Russia not to ramp up their recent wave of hybrid sabotage and cyber attacks against western European countries, or whether there are real fears that Russia might launch a conventional attack against Baltic state border countries who are NATO members - which would trigger an Article 5 response. Other items on the agenda might have included American concerns over the growing involvement of North Korean forces in the Ukraine conflict, or their annoyance with Russia’s ongoing defiance of international trade sanctions on Iran. One thing seems clear however. The Director of the CIA was probably sent to deliver an ultimatum or warning of some description, and was apparently given very short shrift.

Guanyin (Chinese: 觀音) has an interesting history in Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. From around the end of the Chinese Sung dynasty in the 12th century AD, this Bodhisattva was represented exclusively as a female figure associated with compassion, and most particularly with the needs of women. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanyin The Chinese name Guanyin 觀音 means “Hearer of Prayers” - female ones in particular - and this was how this particular Bodhisattva came to be represented in Chinese Buddhist iconography and sculpture - as a female figure. But that was not quite how this Bodhisattva originally arrived in China. Guanyin was originally part of a dyadic Bodhisattva known in Sanskrit as Avalokiteśvara whose following in China was associated with the second-wave arrival of esoteric Tantric Buddhism known as Vajrayana Buddhism during the Chinese Tang dynasty (618 - 907 AD). In the Tantric Buddhist tradition, Bodhisattvas were often represented as binary sexual pairs, male and female combined in one entity. But for some curious reason the male half of this dyad fell into disuse, along with the male name Avalaokiteśvara, leaving only the female half Guanyin in devotional use from the Sung and Yuan dynasties onwards.

Ars Technica ran a story the other day about how 404 Media connected with a bookseller who agreed to plant an Airtag in a rare book that was part of a bulk order. Ars TechnicaHidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to tr...Amazon’s team uses a T. rex preparing to devour a book as its logo.That Airtag was then tracked to an Amazon AI training facility in Las Vegas that housed a team focused on tearing books from their spines and scanning pages, 404 Media reported. Apparently tone-deaf to the escalating backlash over destructive book scanning, a logo on the door of that team’s warehouse, VGT3, showed a Tyrannosaurus rex preparing to devour a book, 404 Media documented. Amazon have declined to comment beyond stating : “Amazon purchases books through commercial channels to help develop and improve the products and services our customers use,”

David Bowie appeared in some 30 feature films which included major acting roles in: “The Man Who Fell To Earth” (d. Nicolas Roeg 1976) “The Hunger” (d. Tony Scott 1983) “Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence” (d. Nagisa Oshima 1983) “Absolute Beginners” (d. Julien Temple 1986) “Labyrinth” (d. Jim Henson 1986) “The Last Temptation of Christ” (d. Martin Scorsese 1988) He also played memorable cameo roles in numerous other films including: “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me” (d. David Lynch 1992) —> as agent Philip Jeffries “Basquiat” (d. Julian Schnabel 1996) —> as Andy Warhol “Prestige” (d. Christopher Nolan 2006) —> as Nicolas Tesla As well as voicing characters in a video game “Omikron: The Naked Soul” (1999), and in Luc Besson’s animated film “Arthur and The Invisibles” (2006) amongst others. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Bowie_filmography

This adds a whole new meaning to the phrase - "He died with his boots on !" - (p.s. nice to have the forums back again).

The Japanese study involved taxi firms located all over Japan from Fukuoka on Kyushu, to Sapporo in Hokkaido, and also included firms from the capital Tokyo, as well as Takamatsu and Shizuoka on Honshu - all major islands of the Japanese achipelago with a combined population of some 122.4 million people as of 2026. The other study cited was in New York City which is a massive conurbation with a population of 8.58 million people, the largest city in the United States - hardly regionally specific samples or aberrations.

There has been some discussion as to whether taxi drivers keep their wits about them, drive more carefully in general, and are less likely to be involved in road traffic accidents than drivers of private cars. https://www.helpinginjured.com/blog/ridesharing/do-rules-for-taxis-reduce-accidents/ A counter argument is that taxi drivers spend a great deal more time on high-traffic urban roads, so their total annual number of collisions can be higher, and the consequences of a collision can be more serious because cab drivers and their passengers often fail to wear seatbelts on short urban rides. Fatigue caused by long hours of work can also offset the greater driving experience of professional cabbies. Another study in Japan analysed traffic accident statistics and data recorders fitted to cabs from eight different professional taxi firms across the whole of Japan. https://hal.science/hal-05424169v1/file/Tu-B1-3_594298_FASTzero25_Final_Paper_Aga.pdf The conclusions indicate that professional taxi drivers who have held a licence for over 10 years were the least likely to cause an accident. The DR (data recorder) stats suggest that taxi drivers generally drove at safer speeds and braked almost instantly and more effectively within a TTC (time to collision) window when crossing vehicles appeared in their view. The study concluded that they were more observant, and more likely to be following defensive and predictive driving protocols.

An even more spectacular example of structural failure during a routine load test happened on Friday 16 October 1970 when two spans of the famous Victorian pier at nearby Clevedon collapsed during a water ballast test. Clevedon Pier wasn’t fully restored and reopened until 1998 - almost 30 years after that ill-fated ‘safety test’.

It hadn’t been lifted for almost a decade, partly because of the barnacle-like encrustation of nearly 3 tonnes of old padlocks attached to the superstructure over the years by love-sick romantics. No one felt like attempting to operate the bascule until these ‘Lovelocks’ had been removed. I used to work down at the harbour and can remember standing on the quayside watching while Pero’s Bridge was first being tested by Ove Arup who were the original consulting engineers. That single hydraulic ram always seemed distinctly inadequate for the task and the imposed load. Even when it was brand new, the mechanism was straining, and there was a visible lateral jitter as the bascule section came back down to rest. There have been numerous comments in the local press about quite what went wrong. Apparently the engineer ignored a suggestion that they should use a crane to do an initial lifting test. Other people have suggested that the heatwave temperatures may have caused some expansion problems - some even blamed the solar eclipse which took place later the same day !

Pero’s Bridge in the scenic harbourside centre of Bristol has been abruptly closed after failing a routine safety check in a fairly spectacular manner this morning. https://www.bristol247.com/news-and-features/news/peros-bridge-closed-major-structural-fault/ Bristol City Council engineers were testing the lifting mechanism of the bascule footbridge which spans St Augustines Reach just outside Arnolfini Gallery on Narrow Quay, and links pedestrian and cycle traffic over the water to Millenium Square and the Watershed on the Canons Marsh side. The bridge had been closed around 9 am, and the bascule portion had been lifted to a 45° angle for the first time in nine years when the hydraulic ram seals failed, and the bascule fell back down with an enormous crash and jumped its bearing tracks as it did so (The large decorative ‘horns’ are actually lead-filled counterweights). Fortunately there were no casualties According to sources who witnessed the incident, it was the City engineer’s first day in a new job, and one that he is unlikely to forget - (assuming it wasn’t also his last). Pero’s Bridge was built as a Millenium project, and opened in 1999 to almost immediate controversy as its Irish designer Eilis O’Connell promptly disowned it, citing poor workmanship and implementation of her award winning design. The new footbridge was named after Pero Jones an 18th century West Indian boy who was a personal slave of John Pinney - a plantation owner and sugar merchant whose home is preserved as Bristol’s ‘Georgian House’ near Brandon Hill. Pero’s Bridge soon became a favourite location for couples wishing to install ‘Lovelocks’ to celebrate their union by attaching padlocks to the footbridge, and then throwing the key into the harbour. Last year Bristol City Council removed 3 tonnes of these locks after concerns had been raised that the extra weight might cause the bridge to malfunction.

The population weren’t “replaced” by Normans in 1066, they were simply added to by a relatively small number of French speaking Normans who were fairly quickly assimilated into the population in exactly the same way that surviving Romans and Latin speakers were after the collapse of Roman dominion in Britain around 410 AD. What the Normans did bring was a new and fairly short-lived system of aristocratic governance known as feudalism which collapsed a few centuries later - thanks to the depopulation effects of the ‘Black Death’ plague pandemic that devastated Britain from 1348 onwards. I still maintain that the only people really entitled to call themselves ‘Britons’ on either linguistic or ethnic grounds are the descendants of the Brythonic and Goidelic speaking Celtic tribes who fought against both the Romans and the later invaders they referred to as ’Sasunnachs’ - i.e. ’Saxons’.

The original Ptolemy world map doesn’t exist. What purports to be a surviving form of the map is a late Byzantine reconstruction created by monks under the direction of a Byzantine scholar called Maximus Planudes shortly after 1295 AD. It was reconstructed from descriptions and data contained in a manuscript attributed to Ptolemy and known as the Geography (c.150 AD). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy%27s_world_map The name Pretani found in Ptolemy’s Geography is a Greek transliteration for the name of a particular Celtic tribe said to be translated as “painted’ or ”tattooed folk” (c.f. Pictae in Latin) which mutated into a later Welsh word Prydain. Ptolemy was far from the earliest Greek writer to mention this name either: