Auntie May's recipe corner

"Brussels bad, avacado good."

Mueller mulls monkey business

Google News - improving your news headlines with the best images since 2002:

"Thursday briefing: Trump 'looking forward' to telling Russia story", it says here. If the relaxed body language doesn't scream "innocent of all charges", then I'm a monkey's uncle...

"Melania said this was okay."

"I don't even wait. And when you're a star they let you do it. You can do anything."

You won't believe what he looks like now!

Prince Philip looks far more cheerful now he's retired.

Blue planet in crisis

Doubts around Theresa May’s leadership trigger sharp falls in Sterling: sea turtles "concerned."

Probably just another headline/image pairing mismatch by Google News's algorithm, although I wouldn't be entirely surprised to hear that even marine reptiles in the far-off Pacific are shaking their scaly heads in disbelief at the sheer magnitude of the British government's omnishambolic implosion.

Big blue

Yet another unfortunate pairing of headline and image, courtesy of Google News.

"Blue whale takes centre-stage at Natural History Museum"

So that's why they call high-profile politicians "big beasts." Mind you, that looks more like a picture of a white elephant than a blue whale to me.

Tories crash and burn

Well, not literally - just another fortuitous headline image pairing fail, courtesy of Google News:

The image probably belongs with the recent fire at Camden Lock market.

Meanwhile, from the world of proper blogging comes some more solid evidence of Tories in trouble. It's not that original to notice that the Conservative Party has a demographic problem, due to the advanced age of many of the people who voted for Ukip-flavoured conservatism.

Things get more interesting when you dig into another piece of received wisdom - that the Conservatives are starting to appeal to a working class who don't identify with Jeremy Corbyn's brand of Islington socialism. Except, it turns out, that the National Readership Survey's socio-demographic classifications "deal with pensioners by classifying them all as working-class unless they are rich enough to be considered independently wealthy."

This sounds like fairly bad news for the Conservatives, if the replacement of their older voters by younger, working-class ones is just an illusion, caused by the way the NRS assigns class to demographic groups. Which it apparently is:*

The following chart, from Ipsos MORI, gets to the point. If you look at the cross-break of age groups by class, you find that the effect pretty much vanishes. Labour won the working class, defined as such, handily, and lost the retired by a distance.

Original and important, I think - see The Yorkshire Ranter's full post, including chart, here.





*Corrected from "Which it apparently does" (I pressed "publish"before realising that reordering that line had turned it into gibberish).

Freak accident

A story from the Independent as it just appeared on Google News:

"CCTV footage shows man get hit by bus in Reading then walking into the pub Video footage has shown a man get hit by a bus  -then immediately get up and calmly walk into a pub. Simon Smith, 53, was walking down Gun Street in Reading at the weekend, when a purple double-decker bus came careering around a corner and hit ..."

I'm no expert, but that looks less like a purple bus than a grey aircraft carrier to me. Mind you, if I'd just staggered into a pub in Reading after having been hit by an aircraft carrier, I'd have lied and claimed it was a bus, too. I wouldn't want them thinking I was too drunk to serve.

I guess the Royal Navy simply faked the CCTV footage later, to save themselves from having to admit to accidentally sending their most expensive warship to Reading after a bizarre Sat Nav error. And they'd have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for those meddling kids at Google.

"It's news, Jim, but not as we know it..."

"Flat earthers may have a point - they're just 4000000000 years out of date" 

...said the clickbaity headline in Google News.

"What sort of maniac is making this claim?", I wondered to myself as I clicked through and brought up this Metro headline:

Earth ‘was once flat and covered almost entirely in salt water’
Earth 4.4 billion years ago was flat and almost entirely covered in water with just a few small islands, new research suggests.

It's only by reading past the headline that you discover that we're talking "flat" in the sense of "not having mountains", rather than Discworld flat.

Never mind fake news, this is fake fake news. And the worst of it is, they got me with it (and I pride myself on not clicking obvious clickbait).

Metro's caps locked tag line, by the way, is "NEWS... BUT NOT AS YOU KNOW IT"