Microposts
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Just been for a bike ride. I think I’ve forgotten how my legs work.
Lots of people out, mostly keeping their distance.
Down to the Olympic Park. Nice view of the Orbit.
Good piece by Margaret Atwood about… what everything’s about, these days.
Any child growing up in Canada in the 1940s, at a time before there were vaccines for a horde of deadly diseases, was familiar with quarantine signs. They were yellow and they appeared on the front doors of houses. They said things such as DIPHTHERIA and SCARLET FEVER and WHOOPING COUGH. Milkmen – there were still milkmen in those years, sometimes with horse-drawn wagons – and bread men, ditto, and even icemen, and certainly postmen (and yes, they were all men), had to leave things on the front doorsteps. We kids would stand outside in the snow – for me, it was always winter in cities, as the rest of the time my family was up in the woods – gazing at the mysterious signs and wondering what gruesome things were going on inside the houses. Children were especially susceptible to these diseases, especially diptheria – I had four little cousins who died of it – so once in a while a classmate would disappear, sometimes to return, sometimes not.
This video on how to deal with your food shopping is good. I’m alarmed to hear that some coronaviruses can live frozen for — two years, I think he said? So buying open bread from the bakers and freezing it is probably not as safe as I had thought.
Oh, here’s The Guardian talking about the government’s mass text:
UK mobile firms asked to alert Britons to heed coronavirus lockdown
As I imagined, it’s not like there’s a massive database with everyone’s numbers. They just asked the operators to send it to all their customers.
I just got a text from the government about the new regime. I assume everyone did. I didn’t know they could do that. It just has this link.
Some thoughts on using Instapaper, from Dan J: Doubling Down on Instapaper – Dan J’s IndieWeb Headquarters.
Quite similar to my own experience (though with more note-taking).
In General Election 2019: the news media failed profoundly — but not in the way you think, Adam Tinworth buries the “lede.” Probably deliberately, as the whole piece is worth reading.
The key point is that the Reuters research showed that people spent only 16 minutes a week on average reading news during the election.
That’s a ludicrously low figure.
Also odd is that the Shortcut that I used to create this post pulled this text out as the title: “The Media & the 2019 General Election: trusted, but little consumed.” Which would be better in terms of not burying anything, but I can’t see where it came from. The <title> tag, I’d have to guess, but you don’t really see those on a phone. And not that much on a computer, once you’ve got more than a couple of browser tabs open.
FotoFebruary, as some on Micro.blog are calling the February Photoblogging Challenge. Day 1 theme: Open.
Why not join Micro.blog and take part?
Deviate. Hesitate. Repeat. 😟
I joined the Fabian Society recently, mainly so I’d get a vote in the Labour leadership election (I’m not rejoining Labour, at least for a while). So today I’m at the FEPS-Fabian New Year Conference 2020. Or #FEPSFAB20, as they’d like us to tweet.
I ate the last piece of our Christmas cake today. Christmas is now definitively over. If there was ever any doubt of that.
I don’t know if online petitions do much good, really, but with Trump trying to drag America into yet another war in the Middle East, the very least we can do is try to stop the UK from getting involved.
Jolyon Maugham QC and the Good Law Project are petitioning Johnson to ask the EU to allow us to have associate EU citizenship, as part of the exit negotiations. I can’t imagine it’ll do much good, but there’s no harm in signing.
On one level I think they’re trolling Johnson: suggesting that he might want to — or suggesting that there’s any chance he would — appear statesmanlike.