Thursday, 18 May 2017

Skippy Gone and Emperor Stuffed with Gold


Tragedy! The torrential rain has driven Skippy, the pond skater away. Was the water too bouncy? Was he/she flushed over the side of the pond? Did he/she just fly away? Hopefully other colonisers will come with time.

Spent the afternoon editing and putting together another edition from the Hunts Post for the Norris from last Friday's photos. Finally got the 700MB PDF's uploaded into the cloud. Digression in searching whether one legged ducks do swim in circles and finding, no, they can adapt and swim quite competently (see http://www.miltoncontact-blog.com/2017/05/one-legged-ducks-dont-swim-in-circles.html).

Main UK news is on the Tory manifesto, or should we say, Theresa May's manifesto. She obviously feels confident enough to claw back money from the grey affluent voters, suggesting means testing the winter heating allowance and ensuring that assets greater than one hundred thousand pounds are used for social care in care homes and care in the own home. The manifesto also suggests an innovative solution to growing childhood obesity by proposing they would cut free school lunches and replace them with free (and calorifically smaller) breakfasts.

Brexit ran as a main feature in the Leader's debate on ITV this evening, which Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn boycotted. However, this is hearsay for me as I didn't watch it and the online feedback is still pretty sparse. There is however 'reassuring' news from the EU chief negotiator on the likelihood of success in negotations: Brexit talks could collapse over UK divorce bill because of the potential refusal of member states to soften their demands over the size of Britain’s “divorce bill”.

President Trump has had a bad day. "This is the single greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history!" was his tweeted response to the installation of special counsel Mueller, and "No politician in history, and I say this with great surety, has been treated worse or more unfairly," in his commencement address at the United States Coast Guard Academy. Perhaps the best response to this comes from a tweet by historian Dan Snow:

"
Well, the Emperor Valerian was captured in battle, enslaved, used as a foot-stool, forced to drink molten gold and then skinned and stuffed."

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