• 3 Posts
  • 89 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • I’ve only heard of Mary Seacole out of the black Britons from history we’re expected to know of.

    I actually googled the musician and he has a relatively interesting story but it’s also not at all surprising people don’t know who he is today - he had one piece which was very popular called the Feast of Hiawatha which according to Google was played regularly until 1939 and then doesn’t seem to have been revived. Seems he was much better regarded as a conductor.

    Anyhow, historically this country’s establishment has made it hard for black people to get famous until the 20th century, something that this academic surely knows. She’s either naive or deliberately skewing her results for headlines by asking for names from a time when her top rankings include a Roman Governor!


  • Easily my favourite section is the bit about journalism itself. Very eye opening (no pun intended)

    There was a clip from Ian Hislop and 2 others from the Eye attending a select committee or something advising politicians about how they could handle disclosing gifts better, and there’s a funny/excruciating bit where one of the Eye journalists responds to an argument saying “they’re beneficial to the constituancy” by reading out to the politician what ‘gifts’ he has claimed: “football tickets… Opera… Stay in a hotel…” until the chairman or whatever intervenes. Private Eye don’t fuck about.










  • Kids who got hooked on smoking use vapes to quit.

    I’m not so sure about this. I don’t have any sources but anecdotally it seems like a lot of kids have leaped into vaping without having ever smoked and have got nicotine habits. It began whenever Juul started marketing themselves as wanting to be the ‘ipod of vaping’ long ago and specifically targeted young people in the advertising despite what they might have said

    Before then it wasn’t a thing - it was adults who had found a way to stop smoking and were being left to do it in peace. I’ll be proper annoyed if all this leads to me not being able to vape anymore because nothing else worked stopping me smoking. It’s the lesser of two evils by a very long shot.

    Imo you should have responsible licensed vape shops that sell these things, and I’d be fine with plain packaging - most of the stuff I get is pretty much in plain packaging already from vpz.

    But if they ban disposables there’s going to be an opening for a black market for dodgy stuff full of even more rubbish. Frankly, they should have done something about this a long time ago