Do you have any examples that would support that? I can’t say that I have seen any tendency myself. If anything, dark comedy tends to come from marginalised groups, I’d say.

UK - local authorities are busy un-declaring climate emergency, nationally they are blaming the wildfires on re-wilding done by lefties and anyway, they say, it is no worse than the summer of '76.

Is this a cooling behavior, perhaps similar to when dogs pant?

Yes, that is exactly what it is.

Noetic pollution.

I hate to be that guy, but it should be Physiological needs at the bottom, not psychological.

Welfare unit for the contractors working on the street works project. It will have a loo, a break room, a kettle etc etc.

‘Economical retribution’?

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.

I have my driving licence, work ID, a first aid quick reference, postage stamps and one of those Swiss army knife credit card sized things as well as cash and bank cards.

I’d imagine that whereas you can guess at confusing cursive letters in words from the others around them, you can’t do that with digits.

Dark Mustard

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:

• The Amazing Mr Blunden
• Jason and the Argonauts
• Mon Oncle
• Star Wars (before it became A New Hope)
• The Third Man
• The Omen
• Stalker - which pretty much marked my transition to adult SF

Bite my shiny metal ass!

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.

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.

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.