A lot of brands do use bags containing plastic - which probably isn’t great in terms of you actually ingesting microplastic as you drink, let alone composting - but some do not. The trick is to find the brands that don’t and use them. They fully compost.
And then all the rest bringing up the rear.
A toss up between Bugonia and The Ballad of Wallis Island in my case.
Films that I saw, on TV or at the cinema, prior to the age of 16 or so that had a major impact on me - in the approximate order in which I saw them:
Long thought to have been damaged in the Great Fire of 1834 - which is believed to have originated in the furnace room of the hall’s basement - new archaeological evidence, supported by historical records, reveals that sections of the hall’s medieval stone walls not only survived the blaze and a nearby WWII bomb strike, but were restored, re-roofed and continued to be used until the building’s final demolition in 1851.
Hmm. Sounds like WWII started much earlier than I had heard.
I have read comparisons in the past. I don’t have them to hand, but the conclusion was that dishwashers were more efficient in terms of water use and energy. However, the type of hand-washing that it was being compared to was itself a very inefficient style of washing (tap running continuously? two full sinks for rinsing? I can’t recall, but not the way that we do).
So handwashing the way we do is probably more efficient but it seems that there isn’t THAT much in it either way, and given the time taken and that we cook from scratch almost all the time, we use a dishwasher for the vast bulk of stuff.
That’s nothing. I have no granadillas, rambutans or mangosteens either.
I guess that you might attract some - but it is going to depend where you are as much as the light source. I’m in the UK, for example, and wouldn’t get a lot of moths right now as we are well into autumn.
However, even with glowsticks, I’d expect that you will find something - just not a lot.
I have no idea where you are or how possible it might be, but I’d suggest volunteering for some local thing: soup kitchen, wildlife conservation, charity shop, whatever.
That will get you out of the house, meeting people - basically without any commitment on your part, so you can walk away, potentially learning new skills and making connections that could lead to a job.
We had the civil wars a century and a half earlier.
They resulted in the king being killed, although no-one wanted thay at the start, and a commonwealth being established for a while. Then a king was restored.
It is estimated that between 100,000 and 200,000 people were killed over that period.
At the start of the French revolution, no-one wanted the king to be killed, but he was. Following the revolution a king was restored.
It is estimated that around 100,000 people were killed across France.
Looked at like that, the two were not so different.
I probably wouldn’t.
From the first RSS feeds onwards I have found that anytime I curate a list like this, 6 weeks later I am ignoring the entire thing. Either the individual feeds contained a few items of interest that one time, but basically nothing since, or else there are a lot of interesting items - but they are buried in a tidal wave of uninteresting ones.
If this justification is actually genuine, then that’s a good baby step in the right direction and only a year or two too late.
However, I’m guessing that they realise that the usual protests would be exponentially larger this year if Israel was there and don’t want to scare the others off by having that going on.
I’d always suggest volunteering - be it wildlife conservation or staffing a charity shop or restoring vintage trains in a museum or whatever. Pick something that you have a little interest in and you will already have that in common with the other volunteers and, as a volunteer, you have no commitments and can walk away at any point.
I don’t think that I had anything like this from cartoons, but I had read about ginger beer in various childhood books long before I actually encountered it in the flesh and also Turkish delight from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which was also one that I didn’t encounter IRL until later.
Ginger beer turned out to be a bit of a disappointment - not a patch on elderflower pressé, for example - but Turkish delight lived up to that passage, and I have thought about the book pretty much every time I have tasted it over the decades since.
I am always a little surprised that people are so keen to ‘read’ the plays. People don’t seem to have a similar desire to read film scripts.
To me, the obvious thing to do would be to watch a performance. There are plenty available online and, depending on where you live, stage performances are not too hard to find.
Reading it without seeing a performance lacks about 90% of the impact, I’d say. Reading it AFTER you see a perfomance is another matter: then you can pull out the language and take a deeper dive, but see a performance first.
As far as TV is concerned, Murderbot, The Eternaut, Babylon Berlin & Your Friends and Neighbors continue to be the best that we are watching at the moment - pretty much in that order.
Film:
The Penguin Lessons (2025) - Steve Coogan puts in a fine, morose performance here. It takes a while to engage, but pays off well in the end. Nothing groundbreaking, but well worth a view.
The Salt Path (2025) - a solid adaptation of the book which, perhaps inevitably, focuses more on the emotional journey of the couple than the incidents of the walk as the book tends to. It did not entirely grab me and felt rather overlong as a result, but still an interesting and well acted tale.
Most recently, spot the car that isn’t black, white, grey, blue or red.
Commercial vehicles don’t count. Gold/bronze gets 1 pt; yellow gets 2 or 4 if it isn’t a sports car; pink gets 4; dark/british racing green gets 4 or 8 if it isn’t vintage; any other type of green gets 6.
We were making this up at the time. That’s as far as we got.
We have played the legs game occasionally, but not much fun on motorways.
And “Horse” from Eagle vs Shark. You win the round when you see a horse and say “horse”.
I really can’t recall but not a lot at all. To avoid the whole blood-diamond thing we bought a vintage one from a charity, where it had been donated.
Yes, much the same here. Forgettable is, disappointingly, the key word.
I’ll carry on watching, but largely in hope that it improves rather than for actual enjoyment as it is.
I associate this with fascists and right-wingers going back a few generations as being broadly equivalent to ‘woke’ these days: i.e. anything vaguely progressive that they didn’t like.
So, without additional context, my reaction would be to assume that the person saying this was a fascist - and therefore to treat any further interactions accordingly - and to wear the term with honour.