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Autistic woman wants to call you out but forgot her sources An autistic woman desperately wants to call you out but has forgotten the evidence she was going to use to absolutely school your ass, it has been reported. Mandeep Kaur, 22, reportedly wants to…

Mandeep Kaur, 22, reportedly wants to challenge your assertion that violent video games directly cause aggression, but she has decided to hold back just in case you ask her for the receipts.

It me.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSE#In...

In Popular Culture

Seen on Wikipedia: an "In popular culture" section in the article for "GCSE" (qualifications taken in secondary school in England and Wales). I'm not convinced it's a valuable addition.
xkcd.com/446/

(I'm not Australian, so maybe I'm misjudging things and royal tours are met with interest from 100% of the population, but it seems implausible, extrapolating from what I know of the UK.)

It's a good word!

BBC News headline: "Harry and Meghan's trip felt like a royal tour - except many Aussies weren't interested".

Is it not, in that respect, exactly the same as a royal tour?

nava.org/good-flag-ba...

Reference was made in tonight's University Challenge episode to a "very influential" pamphlet produced by the North American Vexillological Association, which made one of the contestants lose their composure and start laughing.

My workplace does weddings, and I ruled it out straight away, because I don't want to be at work while I'm getting married! (As an alumna of the college where I work, I could get married in the chapel; the combination of atheism and it being my workplace made it a definite no.)

Just sowed some seeds inside and made notes on the calendar to sow some others outside later in the year (trying not to think too much about whether the amount of things I want to grow corresponds to the amount of space I have to grow them in).

I Played 'The Boys Are Back in Town' on a Bar Jukebox Until I Got Kicked Out The boys were back in town, but I was out of the bar, because they asked me to leave.

on the 50th anniversary of the release of The Boys Are Back in Town I'm morally obligated to share my favorite story of all time

The Disney Doctor Who deal continues to be so funny to me. Imagine being Disney and having negotiated an agreement with one of the enduring classics of sci-fi and kids entertainment and your reward being 'a lore-dense introduction and fish erotica'.

This afternoon I did a second round of digging up bindweed from the vegetable patch. There is a patch of waste ground full of bindweed and brambles just on the other side of the fence from my garden, so I am never going to be able to eradicate them, but I have got rid of a lot!

I did get my secateurs sharpened and participated in a seed swap (dropped off some leftover tomato seeds and some squash seeds I harvested last autumn, picked up a packet of carrot seeds).

I went to my area's annual eco-friendly gardening event today and for once managed to restrain myself from buying any plants at the many plant stalls (because I am tired and I don't want another plant I have to find a suitable location for).

I feel like I've listened to enough scenes in The Archers set in the Bridge Farm dairy that I could have a crack at making cheese, if a Toast Commune had arisen here.

ME: [wincing, covering up Starmer's ears] sorry, do you mind not talking about politics around Keir? He doesn't know about scary things like nuclear war or poverty or Peter Mandelson and we'd like to maintain his innocence for a bit longer

KEIR: my father was a drill bit

ME: that's right Keir!

I’ll never forget watching The Wicker Man with my outer Hebridean mum. “I just don’t know where there got all that wicker from”

Ooh, so handy to be able to compare and contrast!

Regarding the blog post by Rebecca K Reilly, I loved Greta & Valdin, and I wouldn't have wanted the NZ-specific stuff to have been replaced with British references: the setting and the cultural stuff that goes along with it were integral to it.

I liked contemplating what the unfamiliar-to-me things might be. (American children's books made Oreos sound like the greatest things in the world, and I was bitterly disappointed when I first encountered them.)

Stop replacing the unfamiliar US brand names with British ones! I may not know what Yoo-Hoo or Mallomars or Twinkies are, but it still sounds wrong for Claudia Kishi to eat a Walnut Whip and a packet of crisps. (From Babysitters' Summer Holiday - published as Baby-sitters' Summer Vacation in the US)

I knew that these books were set in America and that some things were different there. I knew many Americans called their mothers "Mom". But the characters in my BSC books were saying "Mum". Was that just a Connecticut thing? I tried to make sense of it, and it just confused me more.

American cultural hegemony is a real issue, but it's not true, as one of the comments further down the thread says, that the process never goes the other way. US children's books published in the UK had, in my experience growing up, a lot of vocab changes, and I hated it.

Also, access to the internet, with its search engines and its information from all over the world, is something most of us have. It is so easy to look an unfamiliar reference up.

LRB: I do not approve of replacing cultural references to ones deemed more comprehensible to a foreign audience. It's interesting to learn things about cultures that aren't my own!

I've had quite a few people comment on this, so - yes, if you're not American and you're trad-publishing into the US market, it's very standard to do an additional edit for the American audience, sanding down local idiom. Rebecca K Reilly wrote a great piece about it from a Kiwi perspective.

My suspension of disbelief for my farming radio soap opera has been destroyed.