If only the 82nd had taken the Nijmegen bridge on the first day...

The difference between Tehran and Belfast is that we have more rain.

Something very noisy just flew over my house but it isn't showing up on the flight trackers, so not the usual C-17 train, meanwhile a couple of USAF KC-135's have been on a jaunt off the west coast of Donegal fuelling something coming across the Atlantic.

My spider senses are tingling.

It's better than that, an American sailor needed urgent medical treatment, so was airlifted from his submarine by a Danish helicopter and taken to hospital in Greenland. This is what probably sparked Trump's post.

Make a warship mid:

HMS Rodney Trotter

OH.FUCK.YES!!!!!!

I think the estate has been more willing to give their blessing to a reboot for the last 10 years or so. They blocked a few attempts in the years after Nation's death, but lately there have been a couple of projects in the offing. Hopefully this one will get off the ground.

‘Blake’s 7’ Reboot In The Works From ‘The Last Of Us’ Director Peter Hoar & ‘A Good Girl’s Guide To Murder’ Exec Matthew Bouch A 'Blake's 7' reboot is coming from 'The Last Of Us' director Peter Hoar and Matthew Bouch and their Multitude Productions indie.

Finally, a glimmer of light in the darkness
deadline.com/2026/01/blak...

I wonder how long we'll have to wait for Alex Garland's Civil War to be recategorised as a documentary?

The Venezuelan operation was a triumph of bribery, not military might, and may not be so easy to reproduce in Mexico.

This will have absolutely no impact on Israel, so the best they can hope for is they've put some people out of a job for the new year.

Hitler was an enthusiastic amateur who never learnt the rules of the game, so on one hand he could easily break the rules he didn't understand and wrong foot his opponents, but OTOH he would make serious strategic mistakes that led to catastrophic defeats.

The archetypal Dunning-Kruger dictator.

It's like Twitter back around 2012, you need to find interesting people and engage to keep the conversation moving, rather than wait for the algorithm to throw something at you to make you angry. Altogether a more civilised experience.

Usually this degenerates into an argument about which particular Spitfire is the best, but fortunately you picked the MkIX and got it right first time 😁

Is BL the version built under license by Kjeller Flyfabrikk, rather than the original Thulinverken model?

In the UK we rely on our family doctor to recommend a specialist and arrange the appointment, because they have a much better idea of who is the best consultant for any given ailment.

I discovered The Colour Of Magic just after it came out (a fortuitous accident involving Woman's Hour on Radio 4 in the 1980's), so was a massive fan by the time Light Fantastic came out, and that still remains one of my favourite paragraphs of all time.

And if I was being particularly provocative (and surely that's the whole point of social media 😁) I would humbly suggest that as the RAF developed Pathfinder tactics and low-level Mosquito attacks they moved closer to precision strikes than the Americans.

I always found it amusing that for all the talk of the USAAF precision raids over Europe vs the RAF's "area bombing", weather conditions meant that most of the American's bombing missions were using a similar radar guided system as the British.

If the submarines had had a working torpedo at the start of the war they'd have definitely been the decisive weapon, but the two years lost in fixing the Mk14 gave the carrier time to establish itself as the primary naval force.

Although the Americans weren't averse to firebombing cities, as the Japanese found out towards the end of the war.

I know a couple of distilleries that are aiming to produce premium whiskies, but that takes years before they have anything they can sell, so in the meantime they're making "premium" gins and vodkas, which they can churn out in a few months, if not weeks.

A constitution, written or unwritten, needs people who are prepared to stand up for it. Trump's power grab in America shows a written constitution is not a protection against authoritarianism if politicians and the courts will not support it.

To be fair they're more aerodynamic than some of his previous examples.

I've got my 3 year old grandson home for Christmas, and I've been having great fun teaching him the MUFC...OK! chant.

It should be entertaining when he goes back home to Liverpool.

Unfortunately true, just when they think they can’t screw up another easy option they prove me wrong again. 😁

I think the USN have a strange need to overhype every ship, which is why they keep messing up these designs by trying to make them the greatest ever, but inevitably end up with a camel. Pushing TLAM again is not a promising sign, but hopefully cooler heads will prevail.

They'd need the longer Strike Length VLS to support TLAM, which is an issue in a frigate hull, but if the follow the example of the Spanish F110 frigate and go for a standard 16 x cell Mk41 they'll be well capable of dealing with most roles.

TLAM is not the weapon for a frigate, which should focus on a fixed role like ASW (another failing of the Constellation), and with a gun, point air defense and at most an AShM system. However the containerised approach does give a good degree of flexibility for future developments.