Unfortunately can't find this on the Guardian online site, but there's a piece in the print edition 'Say you won't be mine: boom in anti-Valentine's Day gifts', with cards and other items dissing on Valentine's Day as consumerist hype ...

Er, while selling cards, mugs, knicknacks, etc, emblazoned with the anti-Val message.

Surely a dignified ( Read more... )

Okay, I will concede that AITA reveals previously unplumbed Things In Woodsheds.... that I think might boggle even Aunt Ada Doom.
But honestly, this one. He asked me if him and his girlfriend could use my house to give birth at. I didn't even know what he was getting at at first but he explained to me that their apartment doesn't have a bathtub, is ( Read more... )

A recent hoohah over Female Spanish thriller writer Carmen Mola revealed to be three men.
(And really I do not quite grasp how on earth somebody/ies writing 'ultraviolent Spanish crime thrillers' about 'detective Elena Blanco, a “peculiar and solitary woman, who loves grappa, karaoke, classic cars and sex in SUVs”' is somehow “Spain’s Elena ( Read more... )

I mean, really, those people who say this kind of thing: A former naval surgeon whose Wiltshire constituency includes Stourhead - named in the colonialism and slavery report because its 18th-century owner inherited money made partly from trading shares in the South Sea company, which supplied slave labour to central and southern America - Murrison ( Read more... )

When somebody describes something as transcending a particular genre.
I have the strongest suspicion that the subtext is, 'I don't actually read [particular genre], good heavens, no, what do you take me for, but I like this particular [book/author], so I will say it rises above the common ruck of which I have no actual firsthand knowledge'.
Wot, me ( Read more... )

Do we, my dearios, think that the fuming opinionators who turned out in force to decry the National Trust's dred wokerie as violating the spirit of a Grate Nashional Institushyon will be baying quite so loudly about this:?
National Trust plan to fence off acres of Wiltshire park for tenant: Critics say loss of public access to section of Dinton ( Read more... )

But the other day I came across a Twitter thread about dealing with born-digital archives, and the case study they were talking about was, Will Self's emails.
Will. Self's. emails.
Apparently his papers have been acquired by the British Library and being processed, and he's not even dead yet. Self is a particularly interesting writer from the point ( Read more... )

Okay, maybe this thing is rare, precious and unique and maybe it should be Innamuseum, as someone was bewailing on Twitter the morn, but I'm also wondering if everybody who was working there or even just visiting, got a memento piece and museums are groaning when they get offered them.
Much like antiquarian book dealers offered The Family Bible or ( Read more... )

UK women are being ‘used as guinea pigs’ by ‘abortion reversal’ doctors: or so they say... “We do help hundreds of women every day in the UK,” said a tired-sounding American woman who spoke to an openDemocracy undercover reporter in the middle of her night. “We’re like the international abortion pill reversal line.”
....
[T]he Society for the ( Read more... )

My life in sex: the 32 year-old man who only fancies older women.
I know he says that 'To me, young women all look the same; but older women are distinctive and uniquely beautiful' - but he also says that he has 'always been exclusively attracted to mature women', which feels to me just slightly contradictory?
I also have questions about what ( Read more... )