NWR Silly little things that delight you

In 1968, as protests swept universities across Europe and the US, the Warden and Fellows of Wadham College, Oxford sent this reply to a set of “non-negotiable” student demands:

“Dear Gentlemen: We note your threat to take what you call ‘direct action’ unless your demands are immediately met. We feel it is only sporting to remind you that our governing body includes three experts in chemical warfare, two ex-commandos skilled with dynamite and torturing prisoners, four qualified marksmen in both small arms and rifles, two ex-artillerymen, one holder of the Victoria Cross, four karate experts and a chaplain. The governing body has authorised me to tell you that we look forward with confidence to what you call a ‘confrontation’, and I may say, with anticipation."
 
Maybe not silly, but a neat reminder that not all apocalyptic headlines deserve attention...cited article linked below:
"Perhaps the real test presented by our news environment isn’t distinguishing what’s real from what’s fictional, but what matters from what does not. The people who find that the hardest are high-information voters; people who follow the news closely. We act as if single new events are desperately important, when what really moves the tides is the accretion of news events over time; the underlying trends rather than the over-hyped data points.

Knowing which events are significant and which are not is hard in any context. A group of social scientists designed a machine learning model to study two million diplomatic cables sent by the US State Department between 1973 and 1979. Most of the cables were about trivial events, a few were about important ones - or rather, ones that seemed important at the time. The researchers compared this corpus to the fraction of the cables which were later deemed important by historians. Events that seemed important to the diplomats turned out not to be; events that seemed unimportant turned out to consequential. Even experts - perhaps especially experts - are highly unreliable judges of historical significance."
https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10111931
 
Animals have long played a part. Horses competing in the Olympics have their own passports and fly in business class. When they can fly at all, that is: quarantine laws meant the equestrian events at the 1956 Melbourne Olympics took place in Stockholm. At the 1928 games, oarsman Henry Pearce stopped to let a family of ducks cross his lane “and went on to win the gold medal”. The doves released at the opening ceremony of the 1988 Seoul games weren’t so lucky. Many were “roasted alive when the Olympic flame was lit”.
 
After being at home for 7 days alone I realise how much I love having my kids and wife here.

After picking them up at Gatwick, cooking and cleaning the little fkrs have just eaten everything and are now in their bedrooms though.


Edit: my wife is actually not in her bedroom - she is just asleep on the sofa.
 
Watching a movie (Twisters) in 4DX tonight in Cineworld Leicester Square tonight in the middle seats of the front row. I’d always thought 4DX would be silly but it added massively to the fun. Seriously, you owe it to yourself and all your family to do this. Huge fun!
 
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