toucana

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:

I wonder if the author of the OP has any idea where the the terms “Briton” and “British” originally came from ? (Probably not as they seem to hail from Russia/Ukraine). The terms historically refer to speakers of the Brythonic group of Celtic languages - specifically the P-Celt speakers who spoke (and still speak) Welsh, Cornish, and Breton (in northwestern France). My own paternal line is from the outer Hebrides in the far north of the UK. My father was the first member of that line to speak English as their first language. The mother tongue of his own father and all his ancestors back into the mists of time was Scottish Gaelic, which is part of the other Q-Celt aka Goidelic branch of the Celtic languages that were spoken in the British isles for many centuries before Anglo Saxon was first heard on these shores.

There is an urban legend that back in 1899 Charles Holland Duell who was the Commissioner of the US patent office suggested that his position should be closed down because “everything that can be invented has already been invented”. The story is quite untrue, and was based in part on a joke printed in Punch magazine that same year which in turn played on a comment made in 1843 by an earlier commissioner Henry Ellsworth who said that “progress was so fast it taxed belief.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Holland_Duell The timing of 1899 and the locale of a patent office is however quite interesting. In June 1902 an obscure German physicist called Albert Einstein was employed in the Swiss Federal patent office in Bern as a technical expert class III. He whiled away his time by writing private research papers, including one on special relativity in 1905, and another on the photo-electric effect the same year (which won him the Nobel prize in 1921) before being promoted to the rank of a second class expert in 1906 - in which capacity he worked for another three years, before leaving to pursue full-time academic work on general relativity in 1909. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis_papers Given that another German physicist Max Planck also first presented a paper on quantum theory in 1900, history suggests that any attempt to write an endpoint into scientific discovery is likely to be premature.

Back in 1981 a German SciFi novel called ‘Der Letze Tag der Schöpfung’ by Wolfgang Jeschke was first published, and was translated into English a year later as ‘The Last Day of Creation’. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Day_of_Creation The opening part of the novel deals with the topic of temporal anachronisms i.e. the discovery of anomalous artefacts identifiable as fragments of a high technology recovered from parts of the ancient geological record where they had no right be. In a number of cases these objects were first discovered during the middle ages or earlier, and had been preserved and venerated by the Catholic church as the relics of saints. In a pre-scientific era, such artefacts were so far beyond the comprehension of those who discovered them, that they were often treated as examples of a Xoanon - a Greek word for a cult object or statue belonging the gods and fallen to earth from heaven. ‘The Last Day of Creation’ isn’t predicated on a Silurian hypothesis: it’s actually to do with the possibility of time travel - but I won’t offer further spoilers in case anyone wants to read it. The relevance here I suppose lies in the difficulty of even recognising any puzzling remanent of an ancient technology for what it is. One example that comes to mind was an unrusted iron dagger discovered in 1925 by Howard Carter inside the burial wrappings of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutenkhamun which puzzled archaeologists enormously. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-36432635 Tutenkhamun died around 1323 BC and was mummified over 3,300 years ago, but the Iron Age did not begin until around 1200 BC - so you have an apparent anachronism The explanation is that the ancient Egyptians used iron ore taken from a meteorite - as was established in 2016 when scientists found that the iron blade contained high levels of nickel and cobalt similar to those found in another meteorite that had landed in northern Egypt in prehistoric times.

Ceuta is correctly described as an ‘autonomous Spanish city’, one which happens to be located on the North African coast on the La Almina peninsula which is joined by a narrow isthmus to the territory of Morocco. The interesting point is that it isn’t the only one. There is another autonomous Spanish city and former free port called Melilla which is located several hundred kilometres to the east along the Moroccan coast on the eastern side of another peninsula called the Cape of Three Forks just north of Nador. But you won’t hear very much about it in the news because the sea passage to Almeira in Spain from there is about 103 miles - five times longer longer than than the sea crossing between Ceuta and Algeciras which is barely 20 miles. Morocco maintains irredentist claims on both Ceuta and Melilla, but has discovered that fomenting chaos in Ceuta by standing down their border guards at regular intervals and allowing tens of thousands of illegal migrants to flood into Spanish territory generates a much more gratifying amount of press coverage and Schengen related paranoia in the EU, because Ceuta is so much closer by sea to mainland Spain.

Update: The DOJ has now dropped all charges against Olympian David Hearn who had been arrested and charged with 'vandalism' of the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC. NBC NewsTrump administration drops Reflecting Pool case, blaming...The Justice Department said “it is difficult to attribute the widespread damage to the Reflecting Pool to vandalism, let alone to establish that fact beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Film cameras continue to be used in the movie industry to this very day. Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster The Odyssey was filmed entirely on 70mm IMAX cameras which had to be fitted with massive acoustic blimp hoods to muffle the mechanical noise of the film transport mechanism - because Nolan insists on recording all the acting dialogue on the actual live camera takes (no ADR used in post-production). Disney began using motion capture film of live dancers to assist studio animators in their hand-drawn artwork as early as 1937 when Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was in production. Dancers like Marge Champion were filmed performing movements which animators could study and analyse with the help of rotoscope tracing to understand and replicate the dynamics of the moving human body. These types of motion capture techniques continue to be used to this day in modern digital formats to create CGI effects like Gollum in The Lord of The Rings - (One of my younger relatives is a stuntman and Parkour athlete who does this type of motion capture work professionally).

I wonder if lotus eating was an entirely gluten-free past-time ? Who knows ? The Lotus eaters or λωτοφάγοι, appear in book ix. of ‘The Odyssey’, but there is some dispute as to who they were and what they ate. Back in the 5th century BC , Herodotus reckoned the λωτοφάγοι, lived in coastal Libya, but Polybius said no, it was on the island of Djerba off the coast of Tunisia. Some say the lotus was the jujube fruit, but as its leaves contains saponin and ziziphin which inhibit the ability to taste sweet things, and the lotus was said to be “as sweet as honey” this seems unlikely. The Egyptian Blue Lotus which was a type of mildly narcotic water lily doesn’t quite fit the bill either. No doubt all will become clear later this year when Elon Musk deploys his trillions of dollars and Grok AI to create a "historically accurate" version of ‘The Odyssey’ spoken in perfect Homeric Greek by an all-white cast in non gender-fluid roles :-P

Yes he was forced to leave the RAF in 1923 after that alias was exposed by the press, but he managed to rejoin the RAF in 1925 under a new alias 'T.E Shaw' after a brief and unhappy stint in the Royal Tank Corps. Air Marshal Hugh Dowding who subsequently became the head of RAF fighter command authorised the enlistment. I should perhaps have appended T.E. Lawrence's translation of the same two passages cited from the other versions mentioned in the video:

πλέων ἐπὶ οἴνοπα πόντον ἐπ' ἀλλοθρόους ἀνθρώπους, - 1.183 "sailing on the wine-dark sea to men of another language", (Odyssey) I recently watched Christopher Nolan’s new film version of ‘The Odyssey’ , which is an entire topic of its own (do go and watch it in an IMAX theatre if you possibly can). But the experience sent me back to my own bookshelves, to see which translations I had available of Homer’s original poem - a work which I first read almost 60 years ago as a young schoolboy, during a summer holiday heatwave rather like the present one. By chance I stumbled across a recent YT video by EJ Borg called “Which Translation of Homer’s Odyssey Should you Read?”, and this provides a handy roundup of seven of the most popular English translations currently available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJD3PFlhFUI For illustrative purposes, the video offers the same two sample passages (Book 1: 1-9 and Book 9: 473-482) from each translation presented anonymously, and in random chronological order - and invites the viewer to grade them according to taste. The first passage contains the opening lines of the poem, and the second is the scene where Odysseus taunts the Cyclops as his men escape aboard their ships from the monster’s’ island. The oldest translation on offer is by Alexander Pope (1721) which renders Homer’s dactylic hexameters in heroic couplets - rhyming pairs of lines in iambic pentameter English verse. The newest translations include the one by Emily Wilson (2018) which is said to have inspired Christopher Nolan’s reading of the film, and the very latest one by Daniel Mendelsohn (2025) which like Emily Wilson’s translation offers a line-by line rendering of Homer’s original poem. Honourable mentions include E.V Rieu’s lucid prose version (1946) which was the very first ever ‘Penguin Classic’ - a labour of love carried out during long nights spent in air-raid shelters during WW2, and that by American poet Robert Fagles (1996) who also translated ‘The Iliad’. My own personal favourite English translation of ‘The Odyssey’ however is not mentioned in this video at all. It is one credited to T.E Shaw (1932) ‘Who he?” you may ask - well… that translator is a pseudonym for T.E. Lawrence aka ‘Lawrence of Arabia’. Back in the early 1930s after publishing ’Seven Pillars of Wisdom’ (1926) a monumental first-hand account of his military experiences fighting in the Hejaz during WW1, Lawrence sought refuge from the public spotlight by secretly re-enlisting in the RAF under a false name as Aircraftman T.E. Shaw. He then spent four years translating ‘The Odyssey’ from the original Greek during his spare time from his RAF duties. Lawrence’s translation fascinates me because of the remarkable background, he brings to the task as an archaeologist, scholar, linguist, traveller and war hero which perfectly complements a work he describes in a translator’s afterword as “the oldest book in the world worth reading for its story, and the first novel of Europe”.

I think this précis overlooks a couple of hidden factors. i. England had a significantly more gruelling tournament schedule than France - and that was in spite of the fact that England topped their own group stage quite easily. It was England who had to travel to Mexico and play the co-hosts at home and at high altitude in the intimidating Azteca stadium in Mexico City. It was England that had to play a knockout match in very hot and humid conditions against Norway in Miami Florida, before travelling to play a semi-final match against Argentina in Atlanta. ii. England had one day less than France did to prepare for their Bronze medal match back in Miami. France had four days of rest, while England had only three days after their semi-final knockout in Atlanta. It was always a given that England were likely to tire more quickly than France in the second half, and that they would start conceding goals as their cumulative physical and mental exhaustion took hold. That being said, I don’t think many people would have had England 4-0 up at half-time on their Bingo card, or winning the match 6-4 with the last kick of the game - An extraordinary match !

Geekshirt

Italian band Planet Funk with Finnish singer Auli Kokko on lead vocals in 2001 - (Now adopted as a victory anthem in both World Cup Soccer, and PDC World Championship Darts).

I don’t think the coating used on the Reflecting Pool was a preformed liner. Photos of the installation process show that it was sprayed onto the concrete base of the pool in multiple layers with a binder to laminate it firmly onto the concrete surface The Scientific American article indicates this was a hybrid form of polyurea coating involving a resin which cures into a solid finish. Interviews conducted by the New York Times with surfacing experts however suggest that a pure polyurea material should have been used instead to ensure flexibility. When used to re-line water pipes, these types of hybrid compounds can be deployed in a process known as CIPP (Cured in Place Pipe) which is a structural “No-Dig” repair that creates a new pipe within a damaged sewer, drain or culvert - as described here: https://fastfixdrainageandplumbing.co.uk/drain-lining-repair/ A resin impregnated liner is winched or inverted into the defective pipe, pressurised, then cured using either hot water, steam or UV light footnote: It has emerged that Greenwater who installed the Naonobubbler Ozone treatment systems at the Reflecting Pool were ordered to deinstall and remove the units from the perimeter of the pool for the duration of President Trump’s UFC event held on the South Lawn of the White House on June 14 - presumably because someone thought they were ‘unaesthetic’. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/26/us/politics/reflecting-pool-trump-algae.html The Nanobubbler units were only hurriedly reinstalled after the pool turned green.

According to Scientific American, the lining material used on the Reflecting Pool in 2026 was called Rhino Linings Pipeliner 5000 which is an elastomeric polyurea coating. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-the-paint-is-peeling-off-the-lincoln-memorial-reflecting-pool-experts-explain/ A data sheet for this coating can be found here https://www.uscoatingspec.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Pipeliner_5000_11-70PW_TDS.pdf You can check out the detailed chemical and physical properties of this product in some detail - and to me it seems like you would need a pneumatic drill rather than a box-cutter to do serious damage to it.

I wonder if you have ever looked into the etymology and meaning of the word ‘hobby’ ? A common dictionary definition is “an activity done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure” (NOAD/OED). I would commend the words ‘leisure’ and ‘pleasure’ to your attention - perhaps these are wholly unfamiliar concepts ? Many hobbies are distinctly solitary occupations with no social component whatsoever. Quite a few of them are in fact pursued precisely because of their ‘antisocial’ nature - they lack any form of involvement with other people. How would philately (stamp collection), or the study of fossils fit into your scheme? One of my own more unusual hobbies is going for solitary walks at twilight and listening through headphones to the echo-location calls of bats with an ultrasonic heterodyne detector. What sort of ‘common goals’ or social ‘objectives’ does that fulfil ? I think that the formation of friendships has a great deal more to do with reciprocal patterns of emotional need - and most often a shared sense of humour.

Probably the best scientific overview of the Reflecting Pool problems I have yet come across is this 24m long YouTube video called ‘AquaDiary Podcast’ created by a young female water management scientist https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PrT4p8SMAU The podcast confirms that the algae problems are chronic and endemic to the nature and location of the pool, and that the cosmetic alteration of painting the bottom of it blue made matters much worse by raising the temperature of the shallow water. One scientist has compared it to placing a heater under the entire pool. The podcast flags up the issue that by hurriedly pouring countless gallons of hydrogen peroxide into the pool, the Parks Department effectively destroyed important cellular evidence as to which species of bloom was taking place. The popular assumption is that the algal bloom was of a species called Desmodesmus, but this cannot now be confirmed because hydrogen peroxide (a powerful oxidising agent) causes lysis of the cell structures of the algae rendering them unidentifiable. There is a possibility that this could have been a Cyanobacterial bloom which is potentially much more dangerous to both animals and humans, as Cyanobacteria can release potent liver toxins. The bottom line is that what the Reflecting Pool problem really requires is an ongoing scientifically based water monitoring and mangement plan, not a series of quick fixes and knee-jerk reactions. Implementing such a plan would have cost a fraction of the $14M spent so far on what was basically a politically-driven vanity project of President Trump, which was devoid of common sense or scientific input - and was implemented on a no-bid basis without due diligence or oversight.

Guess that's one way of turning it blue

In the general spirit of outdoing ‘The Onion’, it transpires that an Ohio based firm called ‘Green Water Solutions’ was paid to rip out the existing filtration system at the Reflecting Pool and replace it with a ’Nano-bubbler’ ozone system. https://www.instagram.com/reel/DZ6cUsSNcKR/ As comedian Jimmy Kimmel notes, they certainly nailed that one - mission accomplished ! Shame Trump didn’t hire ‘Blue Water Solutions’ instead :-P

You are correct. The elements of this problem have always existed ever since the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool was first dedicated back in 1922 - and it was never intended to look like a bright blue swimming pool in the first place. I recall visiting the Reflecting Pool in Washington DC back in the summer of 1973 on my first ever visit to USA, and it looked a distinctly dark shade of greyish brown. If you squinted hard enough, you could just about make out a reflection of the Washington Monument- but that was it. The ballyhoo arises from the fact that Trump loudly boasted that he would transform the pool into a crystal clear “Flag Blue” pool as part of his vanity projects vandalism of Washington DC to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Republic on 4 July 2026. Having spaffed millions of dollars on a no-bid renovation contract awarded to one of his MAGA donor buddies, Trump is now trying to deny that the disastrous consequences of this bungled makeover even exist. Some of his spokespersons are putting out statements insisting that “The pool is crystal clear and a bright blue colour” when anyone can see for themselves that it is a putrid green, with large chunks of the newly installed blue pool liner delaminating and lifting off the concrete bottom of the pool. This MAGA denial of reality is what was parodied in the political satire black comedy film “Don’t Look Up” released in December 2021 in which two astronomers attempt to warn humanity about an approaching comet that will destroy human civilization - ( a metaphor for climate change). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbIxYm3mKzI

The Reflecting Pool normally receives water from two possible sources. One is the Potomac Tidal Basin which has suffered ongoing problems from a major raw sewage spill back in January which dumped 240 million gallons of phosphate-rich raw sewage into the Potomac River. https://potomac.org/blog/2026/1/30/potomac-interceptor-sewage-spill-updates The other source of water for the Reflecting Pool is from the municipal water supply that contains Orthophosphate which is added to prevent the release of lead and copper from pipework into drinking water supplies. https://www.epa.gov/lead/why-do-water-systems-add-phosphate-drinking-water-what-are-health-effects-drinking-water Phosphates are nutrients that feed algal growth. Add in bright sunlight and shallow stagnant water, and you will have an intractable problem.

A Canadian YouTuber called 'Swimming Pool Steve' has unexpectedly found himself thrust into the limelight after a guest appearance on CNN as a pundit with expert knowledge of pool sealants and filtration systems. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcwqnDUC4-Q In his latest video he addresses the delamination problems now reported to be affecting the Polyurea lining of the Reflecting Pool, and he favours the theory that the binding layer has failed either because of inadequate preparation of the concrete surface, or because of negative hydrostatic pressure arising from an elevated water table - (the Reflecting Pool was built on marshland).

Alligators are fresh water animals who would probably feel quite at home in the murky green waters of the Reflecting Pool right now . But as the pool is just 30” deep at best, and only supports snails and mallard ducks, the alligators would probably need to eat passing tourists to survive. Perhaps MAGA could transform the pool into a novel “Meet The Alligators” themed visitor experience ?