Absolute monarchies tend to come to a very sticky end, as happened in England in the 17th century and France in the 18th.

Oh yes. It seemed like science fiction at the time, and when my office upgraded to a fax machine which printed on plain paper rather than the heat-sensitive stuff on a roll, that was actually pretty exciting. We still had Telex at the time, and it was only a few years since the inland telegram service had ended (you could still send them internationally).

There is a history of inclusive radio in the UK which goes back at least to the 1960s. Anyone who was born here and is over the age of about 50 will know about Kenneth Williams, who appeared in radio comedies with Hugh Paddick. The material is dated and may be regarded as clichéd and demeaning now, but they played two gay men called Julian and Sandy on a show called Round the Horne from 1965 to 1968, and the same characters came up in later shows as well. Bear in mind this was on national radio at a time when gay sex was still illegal in the UK. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_and_Sandy for more details.

Oh yes, 6 Music is a good one. I notice that Iggy Pop has a Sunday afternoon show at the moment (16:00 UK time), and he’s had several series on there in the past, they just keep asking him back because he’s interesting and has good taste in music. And also on Sundays (20:00 UK time) is Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone, which has been running for years - so long in fact that when it started I remember recording it on cassette tape so I could play it on my commute to work.

As with all BBC radio there are no adverts apart from their own promotional stuff, and everything is available for 28 days after broadcast via the BBC Sounds website and app - https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/stations

I spend a lot of time listening to BBC Radio 3, which is their classical station, but they also have a jazz show 5 nights a week, and lots of other music apart from classical - ‘world’ music, experimental and new music, all kinds of interesting stuff in the evenings UK time. Serious music radio, done properly.

I really love WFMU in New Jersey. Of course they broadcast on FM, but they have four live streams (I especially like the ‘Give the Drummer Radio’ stream https://wfmu.org/drummer). Take a look at the schedules - you’ll find lots of music that you won’t hear on mainstream radio, across a wide range of different genres, and all of it is archived so you can listen to past shows and see the playlists for each one. It’s listener supported, so there are no adverts except for their own WFMU fund raising. My favourite shows:

• Continental Subway with David Dichelle, on the Drummer stream, playing music in many languages - https://wfmu.org/playlists/CW
• This is the Modern World, with ‘Trouble’, on the main WFMU stream. Incredibly eclectic - https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/LM

I came here to say this. And for people who didn’t study Latin (which I did as an adult, having chosen German as my second foreign language at school), there is a video on YouTube which explains in detail exactly why that scene is so funny:

https://youtu.be/UfH6gjxTTgE

Hmm, that is tricky, isn’t it? Of course there are many travelogues about train journeys and many novels where the train journey is incidental. I can even think of a radio show on the BBC, Alexei Sayle’s Strangers on a Train, where the presenter takes train journeys and talks to people he meets about their journeys and their lives:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/m0013zmp?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

However, novels like the one you are looking for are elusive and nothing comes to mind. For what it’s worth, here’s a list of train-related books from Goodreads, which might give you some ideas:

https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/89742.Tales_on_Track_Trains_in_Fiction

I know just enough about the light spectrum and the red shift to understand why this is funny (thanks Prof. Brian Cox!), but it underlines how shallow my knowledge is. So much cosmology, so little time…

At home it was 28.8k dial-up (but my PC came without a modem, or a sound card or CD drive come to think of it, so I installed one myself), and Compuserve from 1993. Before that, dial-up BBS run by a hobbyist. Compuserve was great and the discussion forums in particular were fun, not unlike Lemmy.

At work, X400 email on a DOS PC. That was maybe around the very end of the '80s or early '90s. It seemed like science fiction, and very few people in business had email at the time so it wasn’t really very useful.

Yes, I see. It doesn’t sound very hopeful then.

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I’ve been wondering how long it will be until his opponents start to be arrested. That has been a successful strategy for Putin, along with rigging who can be on the ballot if there are any future elections (and from comments I heard before the election, when Trump was addressing some kind of white nationalist evangelical gathering, I get the impression that elections are far from certain now) so it would be no surprise to see a similar approach in the US.

You’ll have to forgive me because I’m a European with a limited understanding of US law, but what can stand in the way of wholesale dismantling of the democratic process? Am I correct in thinking you don’t have a politically independent judiciary and that the Supreme Court was stacked with Trump supporters during his first term, so he can essentially do whatever he wants?

My 5th birthday. I had mumps, but my mother had already organised a birthday party for me, so I lay upstairs, confined to bed, listening to a roomful of other kids having fun downstairs.

This was a very long time ago, before children were routinely given the mumps vaccine.

Yes, agreed. He seems to regard life as a zero-sum game, in which he can’t win unless someone else loses, so he doesn’t understand the concept of win-win. It’s a kind of cognitive bias which is a serious weakness in someone who apparently imagines himself to be a master of ‘the art of the deal’.

Well, the vikings reached the east coast of what is now Canada in around the year 1,000, but they were Norwegians, not Danes. They never got any further than New Brunswick, but who knows, if they visited Florida perhaps they would have stayed…

In these dark times it’s great to see the Danes responding to unpleasant orange chauvinism and bigotry with dry humour. It kind of deflates the mafia boss’s self importance.

I’m watching series 7 of a Danish TV programme called Badehotellet at the moment and it struck me that the Danish sense of humour it portrays is very much like the British, full of irony and self-deprecation. If they could buy the UK as well I’d be extremely happy.

I haven’t followed pop culture since about 1985. I’ve never heard of Kendrick or Drake (apart from Sir Francis Drake and Nick Drake, and of course you can’t mean either of them, given they died in 1596 and 1974 respectively).

I like it here, not least because I understand a lot more of the things people talk about than I ever did on Reddit. Perhaps the users here tend to be older on average, I don’t know. There are certainly fewer people than over there, and that must account for some of the differences in content scope.

Yes, I’m new to Lemmy, ex-Reddit, and now I’m looking at what else I can do. I ran Linux Mint on an old laptop for many years, but that was when I was still working and I also had a company laptop on Windows if I needed it. So now I’m retired and currently I only have a refurbished Lenovo with Win 10, which goes out of support soon. I suppose I could do dual boot on that machine, but I’d rather have Windows in a VM for the rare occasions when I can’t get something to run in Wine. I have no idea where I’d buy a copy of Win 11, but presumably Microsoft have a store.

I’ve had a few QSOs though amateur satellites. I bought a dual-band antenna from a company in the US and used a cheap Chinese handheld and my 20 year-old FT817 for the uplink and downlink. There was a surprising amount of activity, really tricky to make myself heard.

I’m interested in those Dresden books. I’ve read all of Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London series, and the premise sounds similar, albeit with an American setting rather than a British one. I did a quick search and saw a description which mentioned ‘hard boiled’ detective fiction - I’m not a fan of Raymond Chandler-style prose, so I wonder if that’s a feature of the Dresden series.

As for me, I just finished Bleak House by Charles Dickens. I’m reading all of his novels chronologically, but for a bit light relief I’m now reading Hamlet by Wm. Shakespeare.