100% organic cancer

You could probably have worked this out for yourself:

Stamping an organic label on tobacco products is ultimately a distinction without a difference—organic or not, cigarettes are bad for your health,” Brown said. “Today’s settlement with Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company ensures that all future advertisements make it clear that organic tobacco is no safer or healthier.”
Today’s agreement follows Brown’s contention that Santa Fe Natural Tobacco Company may have misled consumers in advertising its “organic” or “100% organic” Natural American Spirit cigarettes and roll-your-own tobacco and pouches, leading consumers to believe these products were less harmful than other tobacco products. There is currently no competent or reliable scientific evidence to support this conclusion.

2010 press release from the Office of the Attorney General, State of California Department of Justice.

In other news, there's no reliable evidence that dousing yourself with unleaded petrol and striking a match is significantly safer than doing the same with leaded petrol.  Anyway, what are the chances that an industry that knowingly kills off half of its users would have even a twinge of remorse about being caught red-handed, or attain a state of corporate social responsibility through self-regulation any time before Hell freezes over?

About as tiny as you probably guessed. If you can't imply that organic tobacco is healthier, just start implying that it could help you to quit smoking:

So the nicotine in ordinary tobacco is addictive, but the stuff in organic tobacco helps you quit your addiction? Yeah, right...

No surprises there, then. Although seeing such dangerous nonsense being retweeted by a health and lifestyle outfit is a timely warning that some people in the "wellness" industry can be almost as cynical and irresponsible as Big Tobacco.

How clickbait works...

...or doesn't.

Accurate version:

Why is it that neither I, nor anybody I know, cares about the eyebrows of somebody none of us have ever heard of?

Put like that, the questions more or less answers itself. No clicks needed.

Some migrants are more equal than others

So a migrant who fled to a Greek island in order to escape the living hell that was life in a wealthy, peaceful country with slightly disappointing weather, is now upset and traumatised at finding herself having to share the place with people whose only excuse for being there is fleeing a war-torn failed state, featuring intermittent food, sanitation and power along with hot and cold running atrocities.

I'm guessing that the journalist who reported this heart-wrenching story, thinks that the word "irony" means "a bit like iron" or something.

Storm Dave

You can't turn on the radio these days without over-excited, windy politicians and pundits huffing and puffing and threatening to blow your ears off with a hurricane of Brexit-related blether (I call this political weather event Storm Dave), so I was grateful to hear an unusually level-headed thought on the subject in the concise form of a tweet:

Paul E Johnson tweeted  "So we can't survive without being attached to Brussels. Oh dear."
Michael White replied "Nobody says that. Only that it would a) be tough b) not solve much c) rest on escapist fantasy funded by tax dodgers."

If only all radio interviews on the subject were that brief and to the point.

Horror in Middle England

I saw this and it reminded me of something:

Reassuring...

Specifically, it reminded  me of The Archers. If the connection between this diabolical image and Middle England's cherished "everyday story of country folk" escapes you, you clearly haven't tuned into the radio soap for a while. Because the green welly brigade's favourite Aga saga has taken a darkly compelling turn lately, with the horrific emotional car crash that is Helen Archer's Titchener's suffocating marriage to the superficially charming psychopath, Rob Titchener.

It's a grippingly disturbing portrait of emotional abuse, as Rob methodically undermines his pregnant wife, takes away her independence, bit by agonising bit and slowly turns her friends and young son against her, against an even darker background of implied physical and sexual abuse. A tornado of psychological horror has carried us away from the familiar landscape of crop rotation and village produce shows. Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Borsetshire anymore.

And last night, after effectively pushing Helen out of her job in her own whole food shop, thus severing just about her last link with the outside world, Rob turned to her and told her that if she ever needed to talk about anything that was worrying her, she could always turn to him (and, by implication, only him). And a million genteel middle-class people shouted "you bastard!" at the radio.

It shouldn't come as any surprise to see these things in the relations between a prosperous, landed farming family and their eligible, privately-educated son-in-law, but somehow this intrusion of cold, focused cruelty into the wholesome, cosy, complacent world of Ambridge's long-established dynasty throws it into sharper relief.

Likewise, it shouldn't come as any surprise when unpleasant reality starts to happen right under the noses of real comfortably privileged folk but, of course, it does:

David Cameron's aunt has told ITV News that the prime minister's own local council is making a "great, great error" by closing children's centres, as she pleaded with her nephew to provide the funds to keep the services open.
Clare Currie and her sister, the prime minister's mother, Mary Cameron, have signed a petition calling on the Conservative-led Oxfordshire County Council to abandon plans to close 44 centres in the county. 

It's easy to ignore the consequences of cruelty when they're happening to somebody else, safely out of sight. But it starts to gets really scary when the abuse comes home and it turns out that the abuser is family.

I'm pretty sure that in Soap-Opera Land, Rob Titchener will eventually be found out by his nearest and dearest and have to face the consequences of his actions, although you can be sure that he'll try to shift the blame onto somebody else. In deepest Oxfordshire, the scriptwriter of reality seems to have already reached that point in the drama.

Your Philip Larkin antidote

Sometimes, by Sheenagh Pugh

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.
A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.
Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss, sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

And sometimes Sheenagh Pugh sounds exactly like the curmudgeonly cycle-clip-wearing librarian himself, only with a splash of optimism to dilute the brimming cup of futility and despair. Well, I was't expecting life to be a motivational poster, so a splash of optimism will do for me. Cheers!

Hat tip to Radio 4's Poetry Please.

Dogs in spaaaace!

Because our family visit to the National Space Centre coincided with the Centre hosting that Doctor Who convention thingy, the place was stuffed with the obligatory mountain of Doctor Who collectibles (or tat, depending on your point of view). Not that I always mind a bit of memorabilia - I'd have been thrilled if the Space Centre's curators had spent a bit of time on eBay and found stuff like this to put on display:

Your gran's display cabinet goes space-age - rocket-shaped vodka jugs commemorating the space flight of Belka and Strelka, who, in August 1960, became the first creatures to orbit the earth and (unlike Laika) return alive (photo credit El Pantera).

More Belka and Strelka-themed collectible porcelain (photo via ebay).

Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know that it was the Kennedy clan who bagged the ultimate piece of Soviet canine spaceflight memorabilia. After her return to earth, Strelka went on to have a litter of puppies, one of which, Pushinka ("Fluffy"), Khrushchev presented to JFK's daughter Caroline in 1961.

I imagine that daddy accepted the gift with a rather forced smile - the year before, according to Deborah Cadbury's excellent book Space Race, JFK had taken the dogs' flight as an affront to American pride, taking pointed umbrage at the fact that "the first canine passengers in space who safely returned were called Strelka and Belka ... not Rover and Fido." Be that as it may, the Cold War apparently thawed sufficiently for Pushinka to get together with one of the Kennedy dogs and beget a doggy dynasty that exists to this day.

Via here and here.