I listen to BBC Radio because it’s still excellent. BBC Radio 6 is my go-to daily station which specialises in new music and has DJs who are passionate and have a lot of freedom, but the station also follows John Peel’s A-B-C format which keeps things nice and grounded. Also, BBC Radio 3 for jazz and classical (unlike Classic FM, which only plays movie soundtracks) and BBC Radio 3 Chill which is self-explanatory.

ABC’s Triple-J deserves an honourable mention. Student radio can be good as well.

The local commercial stations are all homogeneous slurry, lowest common denominator saccharin slop where every shred of character and local identity has been eradicated. I grew up listening to Rock FM (Lancashire) and Trent FM (Nottingham), both were cheesy but authentic local pop stations that have been thoroughly Borged into ultra-branded and means tested chaff. It’s adverts, relentlessly forced-cheery sponsored segments disguises as ‘banter’, desperately insincere attempts at audience engagement, and, occasionally, heavily edited and shortened versions of the same dozen songs.

Years ago I ran a pub quiz and one of the categories was “Name the song from this description of the lyrics”:

A low-level government employee abuses his access to national infrastructure to secretly spy on a woman he is obsessed with. He acknowledges that he has a unhealthy obsession and that he really should back off, but quickly managed to convince himself to carry on, assuring the audience that he is still spying on her.

A few notes on terminology: Great Britain is a geographic term, not a legal one. Great Britain is an island divided between England, Scotland and Wales which all, along with Northern Ireland, form the United Kingdom. The demonym of United Kingdom, confusingly, is “British”. Sometimes “Great Britain” is used to specifically refer to the UK without Northern Ireland, though there are plenty of parts of England, Wales and especially Scotland that are also not on Great Britain.

Anyway, to answer your question: the currency of the entire UK is Pound Sterling, which is the same everywhere: £1 in London is the same as £1 in Edinburgh. Some Banks in Scotland and Northern Ireland have permission from their respective devolved governments to print their own banknotes, but they must be backed by Bank of England notes stored in a vault and, importantly, they are not automatically accepted elsewhere. Some large retailers will accept them, but shops in Northern Ireland, England and Wales are under no legal obligation to accept a Scottish banknote, whereas the Bank of England notes are accepted everywhere.

Also, while the banks that issue notes in Northern Ireland and Scotland are just regular, privately-owned commercial banks, the Bank of England is entirely publicly owned and doesn’t offer much in the way of traditional commercial banking services.

I can’t recall who first said it, but Roger Moore is a pretty good name for a Bond Boy.

Honestly I’m just disappointed we didn’t get a Homestar Runner cartoon.

Sorry if this was already posted, but I didn’t see it:

There Will Come Soft Rains by Sara Teasdale

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn, Would scarcely know that we were gone.

There’s also a short story by Ray Bradbury with the same title that quotes the poem.

Home automation master race checking in. Do it. I had the same issue so I replaced the switch with a relay paired with sensors for motion, humidity and, ahem, volatile organic compounds (eg stink, stenk, stunk and stank). It solved a number of issues.

Given how far Tim Apple’s tongue has snaked up inside Trump’s fat ass this last year I wouldn’t worry too much about the “willingly” bit.

Altogether now, and-a-one, and-a-two, and-a-one-two-three…

BUT HER EMAILS

Yeah, it’s like when firefighters “save” people from burning building and everyone’s like, “well done firefighters, you did a good job” and I’m over here being smart and sensible saying “if firefighters were such heroes, why did the building burn down in the first place?” because I am very smart and sensible.

We did Work Experience at my school and I managed to get a place at a local radio station. Now, what’s the worst thing a work experience kid could do at a radio station specifically? If you answered “take the entire station off the air” then you’d be right.

The overnight Bernt das Brot broadcasts on Kika. You’re welcome.

From the UK, I’d probably go for The Day Today, which ran for a single six-episode series back in 1994.

It’s a satirical news programme which manages to be more cutting and accurate than anything that’s been produced since, and along the way includes pastiches of fly-on-the-wall documentaries (doing The Office years before The Office), multi-camera soap operas (The Bureau), the rise of multichannel TV (RokTV) and so much more. A lot of the show’s staff were actually from the BBC’s own news department so timbre is spot-on, and received an incredible level of French polish before broadcast meaning every second of it is crammed with gags, slights and real blink-and-you’ll-miss-it jokes and, aside from the dated styling and real-world reference, the whole thing feels frustratingly prescient thirty years later.

The Swedish Navy’s ships do have some bonkers designs, like massive barcodes printed on the side. It’s so that when they get back to port they can scan the navy in.

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Forza Horizon 4 has an awesome open map based on several disparate areas of England and Scotland pushed together. It includes the Derwent Reservoir and damn, which drains into one of the Rivers Derwent, which leads to Derwent Water - none of which are actually connected in real life. I thought that was a neat Easter Egg.

In case anyone is wondering, this is how old phones with rotary dials worked: you wound the dial to the digit you needed and the built-in mechanism would automatically wind it back; as it did it would momentarily disconnect the line as it passed each digit generating pulses that the exchange would count. If you still live somewhere where landline phones exist odds are this still works because the exchange maintains backwards compatibility with pulse dialling.

Up until about twenty years ago virtually every supermarket had a phone by the checkouts with a single pre-programmed button for a local taxi company; we used this trick all the time to call home, our mates, etc.

For all our differences we still have so much in common.

Good old C-x M-c M-🦋