Scarficus

@piperocktheory You mean Brian Jones.

imagine there was a 5th Beatle who couldn’t play an instrument, had a worse voice than the others, didn’t write any of the music, tried to dissuade the band from making Revolver, purposefully sabotaged Sgt. Pepper from ever being finished, was a rapist, and they couldn’t fire him

@serenelyjoyful The recent government review recommends that exam time be reduced I believe. It's a lot. In English alone students do 7.5 hours of exams at GCSE.

Do unis now require so many GCSEs? If you/your child were confident about high predicted A level grades, why not do just a bare minimum GCSEs? That is effectively what many academically gifted kids did in the past

@lembitopik Yes we should all ignore SCIENCE and listen to a random on the Internet instead.

Heavy rain, grey skies &12 Celsius. BBC & eco-nuts scream of global boiling, but the only thing that’s melting in Southern England today is their climate crisis credibility

@ItsAndyRyan @sammyersson If the voice of the narrator or implied narrator is strong enough, it should dictate the vocabulary and tone of the narrative.

@sammyersson I've read stories set in France that were written in English. Isn't that a bigger jump? What if a story is set in multiple countries - do the idioms need to change each time?

If i wrote a story set in Victorian London and I described things using southern American idioms and verbiage it would read as discordant and disconnected from the setting. The same is true for British vernacular in american set stories.

@rocknrollofall No Ringo? No Dave Grohl? And where is Tony McCarroll?

Top 10 Greatest Drummers of All Time according to Rolling Stone: 10. Stewart Copeland 9. AI Jackson Jr. 8. Mitch Mitchell 7. Gene Krupa 6. Clyde Stubblefield and John “Jabo” Starks 5. Hal Blaine 4. Neil Peart 3. Ginger Baker 2. Keith Moon 1. John Bonham

@medialens Yeah but it was hotter when dinosaurs ruled the Earth so it's fine

What is so staggering about the frequency of scepticism about UK temperature measurements is that records are, of course, constantly being shattered all around the world. In January, Berkeley Earth, a California-based non-profit research organisation, indicated the scale of this: ‘We conclude that 2025 was the third warmest year on Earth since 1850. It is exceeded only by 2024 and 2023. This period, since 1850, is the time when sufficient direct measurements from thermometers exist to create a purely instrumental estimate of changes in global mean temperature. Berkeley Earth’s analysis combines 23 million monthly-average thermometer measurements from 57,685 weather stations with ~500 million instantaneous ocean temperature observations collected by ships and buoys. ‘The last 11 years have included all 11 of the warmest years observed in the instrumental record, with the last 3 years including all of the top 3 warmest.’ Are these 23 million measurements from 57,685 weather stations all being faked in pursuit of some dark Orwellian agenda? The idea is simply pathological. medialens.substack.com/p/invitation-t…

@ItsAndyRyan Not quite a city but Walthamstow is referred to by some as The Stow.

Is The Hague the only city with the definite article in its name? For years I'd hear 'The Hague' and assume it was a building or institution.

@SunilSharmaUK This has to be one of the dumbest takes in history.

Key thing here is “on record.” We have climate data from the last 100-200 years. Planet Earth was formed over 4.6 billion years ago. We have less 0.00000001% of climate data. In no other argument would it be acceptable with that data sample, would we enact policies that will people & nations poorer.

@BBCWorld Pathetic

Cuba is a national security threat to the US, Rubio says bbc.in/3PzkbI0

@natehendley @HiddenYorkshire They were first to do quite a lot of things. Off the top of my head: a writing group, stadiums, flanging (the word was coined by Lennon), being a studio band, even releasing songs globally in English...

@HiddenYorkshire Yup. Also, the Beatles were the 1st pop band to regularly play sports stadiums in N. America, they wrote, sang, and played their own songs (unusual for the era), weren't based around one singer and an anonymous backup band (also unique for the era) + constantly evolved musically.

"people hating the beatles" discourse is kinda tired but i do wish that people would actually understand what pop music was before them. elvis was a league of his own and black rock/soul artists like little richard weren't considered acceptable mainstream music, so the actual charting pop songs of the time were saccharine brill building nonsense like 'forget him' by bobby rydell (1963); this is what pop music would have been for years if the beatles hadn't come along. you can hate the beatles, but you have to be able to name a no. 1 single from 1962

@PolitlcsUK They half right, Starmer should resign. But to replace him with Farage would be national suicide.

🚨 WATCH: Rachel Reeves is repeatedly heckled while at a petrol station in Leeds

@Naturalphilosy 6:30 is a lie in

“How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” — Charles Bukowski

@norvil_jones @Saganismm You keep telling yourself that pal.

@Saganismm Bertrand Russell was a failure and a shallow thinker - Gödel essentially destroyed him. It was the amazing productivity of capitalism and the wealth it has created, and continues to create, that has allowed more leisure time, not socialism.

"The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. In the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was the ordinary day's work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: 'What do the poor want with holidays? They ought to work.' People nowadays are less frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our economic confusion." — Bertrand Russell

@SkyNews Farage is a Trump supporter when Trump is actively damaging the UK economy and siding with Putin against Europe. Farage is a traitor.

Reform UK have won more than 1,000 seats and eight full councils in the local elections - as Sky News projects that Farage's party could become the largest in the country if there was a general election after today's results. 🔗 trib.al/7mGYYju

The sheer propaganda power of a joint UK media smear campaign. Zeteo.com/subscribe

Sharing, without comment, British newspapers’ depictions of the only Jewish person currently leading a UK political party . Times. Mail. Telegraph. Sun.

Melanie Phillips is doing exactly what Owen Jones suggests is happening. Note how she refers not to Polanski’s Jewish identity but to his Jewish ancestry.

An obvious antisemitic caricature of Zack Polanski in The Times. But there will be no media or political outrage, which tells you all you need to know.

@AdrianEdmondson For all we know Corbett was the better guitarist.

Just heard someone say 'Who was that guitarist in The Rolling Stones - Ronnie Corbett?'

@anishmoonka Thriller is not a great album though.

Michael Jackson and Quincy Jones listened to 800 songs to find 9. Then Quincy threw out 4 of those 9 and went back into the studio. Beat It, Human Nature, P.Y.T., and The Lady in My Life were emergency replacements for songs that were not good enough. They spent four months just listening. Quincy and Rod Temperton sat in a Los Angeles studio in 1982, going through song after song after song from every songwriter they could pull a favor from. Most got cut after a few seconds. Of the 800, they only ended up recording around 30 with Michael actually singing. Of those 30, only 9 made the final list. And then Quincy listened to the finished album, decided 4 of his own picks were not strong enough, and pulled them. The four songs he replaced them with became some of the most famous in pop music history. The four he cut went on to become hits for other artists. Recording those replacements almost broke the team. During the Beat It sessions, Quincy had three studios running at the same time. Eddie Van Halen was in one of them laying down his guitar solo for free. He had thought the call from Quincy was a prank his friends were pulling on him. Michael was in the next room, singing a vocal part through a cardboard tube. Engineers were mixing in the third studio. They worked five days and five nights with no sleep. At one point the speakers overloaded and caught fire. Quincy later told the BBC they had to carry engineers out of the studio on stretchers. Musicians too. Greg Phillinganes, the keyboard player on the album, said there was a moment where everyone thought it was finished, that they had nothing left to give, and Quincy was still standing there saying "It is not there yet" while Michael, almost falling apart, kept asking what they were supposed to do now. They finally finished mixing in early November. Then they sat down to play the master back, and the album sounded weak. They had crammed too much music onto a normal vinyl record, and the grooves had to be cut so narrow that the punch was gone. So they cut a verse from "The Lady in My Life," shortened the famous 29-second intro of "Billie Jean" that Quincy had been trying to drop the entire time, and remixed almost the whole album from scratch. One song a day. Eight straight days. The only track they left alone was "The Girl Is Mine" because it was already on the radio. The final mix wrapped on November 8, 1982. The album came out 21 days later. The wolves you hear at the start of the song "Thriller" are Michael. The engineer set up tape recorders in a barn overnight to catch his own dog howling, and the dog never made a sound. So Michael did the howls in the booth himself. Some of the background vocals on the same track were sung in the studio's shower stall. Vincent Price did his entire spoken-word horror section in three takes, and the verses he was reading had been written by Rod Temperton in a taxi on the way to the studio that same morning. Michael never wrote his songs on paper. He recorded them on a small handheld tape recorder and then sang them back from memory in the studio. The album ended up selling around 70 million copies. It won 8 Grammys, sat at number one for 37 weeks, and produced 7 Top 10 hits out of 9 songs. At its peak it was moving a million copies a week. But all of that came after the work was done. The work itself was 800 demos, 30 recordings, 4 last-minute saves, three studios running until the speakers caught fire, and a producer who refused to put out something he did not believe in even when it meant pulling his own album apart twice. Nine tracks because they could not find more that were good enough.