Reminder that England and Wales are the only countries in the world with fully privatized water. It's dangerous and immoral. Burnham should put nationalizing water high on his agenda as soon as Parliament returns, but I'm not holding my breath.

Prem Sikka@premnsikka.bsky.social · 7h ago

England water companies want dynamic pricing. Charge more for drinking water, cleaning, showering, flushing toilet during drought. Health epidemics would follow. They lose over a trillion litres a year to leaks; paid dividends, neglected investment. Putting profits before people archive.ph/9oSCf

For the first time in ten years, Apple Music’s crappy algo has turned up trumps and introduced me to Bright Light Bright Light, who couldn’t be more my jam if he tried, and whom I am not possibly cool enough to have come across organically. youtu.be/FgJT5GuvxbA?...

Bright Light Bright Light - An Open Heart

YouTube video by BrightLightx2VEVO

youtu.be

Apologies for a Gen X nostalgia post, but: I miss looking for things. When I was a teenager I had my white whales - the first Electronic album, a copy of Public Enemy by Kenneth Branagh - and would check every record and book shop for them. Now everything’s a click away and some of the fun has gone.

Ally Pankiw (I Used to Be Funny) revealed in an Instagram post that she passed on directing the HBO Harry Potter series. Kate Herron (Loki) revealed in the comments that she passed on directing episodes TWICE. It really is that fucking easy. It's really just that easy.

People can (and do) gripe about George Lucas but the real tragedy is Michael Mann’s effective suppression of the theatrical cut of THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS in favour of his inferior director’s cut (after he realised that, contrary to his usual style, he had accidentally left in some fun and humour).

Weird watching the right-wing columnist cohort try to collectively pull the handbrake on ethnonationalism. Like the world's biggest hotdog man convention.

HK@hkesvani.bsky.social · 6d ago

British columnists love getting everything they wanted and still moaning about it

Goodness knows there is no shortage of terrible Oscar decisions, but Tony Kushner’s exceptional adapted screenplay for LINCOLN losing to ARGO is one of the most egregious. Every line of his dialogue has such glorious texture.

Good grief, what an incredible novel this is. So rich, so wise, so witty and so brilliantly conceived and written. Those Booker Prize cats know their onions. Of course it’s perfect in itself - but it’s fun and tantalising to imagine what a Michael Powell or a Tony Richardson might have made of it.

I recently told a friend that the happiest moments in my life are skiing and Pet Shop Boys gigs. My eyesight is too poor to ski these days so I think, for the sake of my mental health, I really need PSB playing in the garden 24/7. I know Neil’s in his seventies but it‘s surely not too much to ask.

Would you think this drink is DRUGS? And that they would sell drugs in M&S? I did not and I would not, which made it all quite embarrassing at the till. I had to get the man to remove it and he very clearly thought I was lame and square. (I am not suggesting he’s wrong.)

My most dismayingly conservative opinion is that I hate how everywhere stinks of weed these days. (And that people watching or listening to their phones without headphones on public transport should be thrown down a well, but that’s just good common sense.)

The continued political silence over the spread of these anti-migrant, anti-refugee pogroms in the UK is a disgrace. This one has been going on for three nights in a row now and the Home Secretary and Prime Minister haven't said a single word about it www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

Norfolk police arrest two men after officers injured during unrest over asylum plans

Homes of people believed to be asylum seekers attacked during two nights of violence in Thetford

theguardian.com

I appreciate the enthusiasm, Southern Rail, but I’m not sure this really warrants the exclamation point.

Hegseth and Trump strategising about maximising lethality through the warrior ethos.

David Ellison looks uncannily like villainous meathead nepo baby Chip Shreck from BATMAN RETURNS. Obviously pure coincidence.

Poor Patrick on Sewing Bee has such a dreadfully blocked nose this episode. I want someone to slip him a Vicks inhaler.

The most pathetic jingoistic sabre-rattling since Portillo’s SAS speech. The sooner this ludicrous prat is reduced to fronting travel documentaries, the better. But would even TalkTV have him?

The fact that various people are saying Liddle was nice in private speaks to a columnist disease - people having nasty and ugly views once a week for money, with little care for the social consequences. But enjoy that £1 a word!

It’s not particularly well regarded among Petheads - and it’s certainly uneven and not especially cohesive - but Super is a bit of a sleeper Pet Shop Boys album for me. Some of the songs - The Pop Kids, Undertow, Into Thin Air and, especially, Burn - are among the best they’ve ever written.

This may be the worst and most self-involved attempt at mitigation in history. The further down I read, the more I thought they should forget about her licence and just lock her up. I expect better from a cast member of Rentaghost. www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/l...

Lynda La Plante fears writing career over as she is handed six-month driving ban

The crime writer admitted breaking the 20mph speed limit near her home in Kingston-upon-Thames five times between November and April.

standard.co.uk

One thing before I go - speak ill of the dead if they deserve it, especially if you couldn't when they were alive because they were litigious fuckwits.

My most underrated opinion is that, while most artists‘ careers have a clear peak and then a broad diminution (cf Salman Rushdie), Dickens just got better and better. The excellence of his novels can, almost without exception*, be confidently plotted against when they were written.

This is why you dont try to compromise or concede anything to these horrors

JK Rowling centre says Amnesty apology does not solve ‘reputational damage’ — The Independent

Beira’s Place was among organisations labelled ‘anti-rights’ in a briefing document.

apple.news

One of my pet hates is moments in theatre with an implicit pause for the audience to whoop and cheer, usually in approbation of their liberal values (think ‘Immigrants, we get the job done’). Six is absolutely full of them, and Pride has quite a few. I am aware this makes me a curmudgeon.

Pride at the National Theatre. OF COURSE Samuel Barnett is in it. I assume they didn’t actually have to cast him; he just turned up on the first day of rehearsals, called like a salmon by ancient instinct.

I know it’s a scorching hot take, but The Cherry Orchard is a really astonishingly good play. It’s so perfect that it feels like a natural wonder. It’s weird to think that it didn’t exist and then Chekov just sat down and wrote it, and then it did, and the whole world was the better for it.

John Woodcock resigned from Labour in 2018 to end an investigation against him into sexual harrassment, that involved his alleged victim resigning her job. But what do women's rights actually matter to JK Rowling when he's on her side when it comes to proscribing uppity trans people, eh? 1/

I had never before heard of this astonishing detail (from Riley Black’s The Last Days of the Dinosaurs). We suffered through the indignities of Fallen Kingdom and Dominion, and they never thought to give us DINOSAURS IN SPACE?

For all the discourse, the strangest casting in THE ODYSSEY is Benny Safdie. It’s not even bad casting, because he‘s basically there to fill out the armour which he does perfectly respectably. It’s just a bit weird, like Patrick Stewart as Karla in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.

Owl City may be the wettest band in history. He makes The Lighthouse Family sound like Motörhead.