Alan Francis

For the record, I think a progressive smoking ban is total genius. It makes it illegal to *start* smoking without forcing all the existing smokers to give up at once.

Like saying *new* cars must come with seatbelts without forcing every old car to be retrofitted, or new houses must be built with solar panels without making everyone install them in houses unsuited.

New adults are banned from smoking ... without forcibly retrofitting older adults.

Wes Streeting looks like he belongs behind the desk at a Carphone Warehouse or your local Skoda dealership.

My son needs to get some survey responses for an assignment at college. Dont take it too seriously, it's just a 3 or 4 questions and the aggregated results are purely for a college assignment :-). If you have a couple of minutes and fancy helping out, it's an MS Form at https://forms.office.com/pages/responsepage.aspx?id=WNzgmUucIEiGFwTDhsJUxv58Gj80BJRBirZhiXX_TTBUQURJSVFJQ09YR1lQQ0gyMVNTRFo4SDFaSi4u&route=shorturl

Incredibly depressed to discover Reform are in with a chance of being the second largest party in the Scottish Election. Heartened to see that all polls still point to SNP being the largest party by some distance, and maybe an overall majority (though that's a stretch in our system)

Sure I’m preaching to the converted…. If you’re in the UK, don’t forget to vote today.

Low turnout is how these fuckers end up wielding disproportionate amounts of power because inherently angry and unhappy people always make time to vote.

Nothing positive to say. They don’t care whether you vote for Labour or Reform, they’re just terrified of Scottish independence. The SNP have been in power for so long in the face of this. This concentrated hate. It’s almost every newspaper, the BBC everything. And still we managed to hold steady at roughly 50% support for almost 15 years. Imagine the landslide if the mainstream media were actually neutral.

@meganL@mas.to Usually either :

1. to pay for the upkeep of the facilities
2. To discourage local disreputable types from using them as a place to do disreputable things.

You'd see the former reasoning sometimes at a beach or park. The latter often at railway or bus station stations. Usually the disabled or baby change facilities are free if you ask.

Great interview with Bob Odenkirk https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/25/magazine/bob-odenkirk-interview.html

The most comprehensive thing I’ve seen about the CarPlay issues https://www.bgr.com/2062658/iphone-17-carplay-wired-issues-fix-firmware/

Now on my second little wireless CarPlay adapter. They just crash and reboot my cars head unit after 2-3 minutes. Will try it for a bit with no music playing, just Google maps, and see if it can stay up.

Dancing round the kitchen to Wonderland. The 12” really highlights that magic drum and bass underpinning all the Big Country guitar sound https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RlTlc5yZhIk