In a democracy where a large proportion of the population are retired or working age but non-working, you are bound to get people voting for national wealth allocation that is in the long term unsustainable. (I have no solution to this problem.)

I've not been overly impressed with Radio 3's "25 for 25" series of new musical compositions, many of which have been the classical music equivalent of a local govt DEI/ESG initiative. Commendations therefore for this morning's radical and fascinating piece: Héloïse Werner, M87,

"Dividends were declared after the company considered its legal obligations" says Thames Water.
Perhaps not the killing argument that it seems to think it is.

Media exam question proposal for 2026 degrees.
"51 people dead and 100+ injured in a nightclub fire in North Macedonia is a bigger news story than "at least" 31 killed and 100+ injured in US bombing of Yemen. Explain why this is so."

Tragically, another person closely linked to the Kennedy assassination, agent Clint Hill, has died, at the all-too-young age of 93. Cause of death "not given". The evidence of a wide-ranging conspiracy keeps on mounting. Nearly all the people who were in that cavalcade are now dead.

Whenever BBC Radiophonic Workshop is mentioned these days, the only name that seems to come up is that of Delia Derbyshire, as if it were some kind of one-person show.
It would be nice for the likes of Brian Hodgson to be better remembered.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_H...

It remains (on the surface) somewhat puzzling that investors should react with such surprise that the Chinese can make something more cheaply than the US.
In fact, the US fund managers have been looking for an excuse for some time to take some profits on Nvidia.

Top stuff from John Authers of Bloomberg this morning:

"The most important issue for ESG, and its opponents, is that it seems to have had little effect on anything. The world is still getting warmer, and voters still hate capitalism. "

Luke Johnson giving it large on R4 at 6.15 this morning on the farcical nature of a government asking a regulator to make the country grow faster, and how there wasn't a single current cabinet minister who had ever tried to run a company, ever.

Tip: If you think of today as the start of the New Year, #January almost seems to be of a normal length.

One of the great unsolvable mysteries in life is how Raymond Burr, whose looks and acting style marked him out as a natural successor to Robert Mitchum as one of the great screen baddies, ended up in the roles of a brilliant lawyer and a wheelchair-bound (in San Francisco!) police consultant.

It was something of a shock to me to realize that all the "niceness" on Blue Sky was in fact a parody, and that you were all being just as nasty as the people on X, but in a more subtle and sarcastic way. Brilliant!

Is it physically possible to wrap #presents on your own, or do even the people who claim to be able to do it solo (whom I note usually live as part of a family) eventually reach the point of saying to their partner: "If you could just put your finger on the wrapping paper THERE for a second ..." ?

Remember, it's just getting to that time of year when you scrabble around looking for a spare Christmas card to send to someone who has sent you a card, but whom you left off your list.

Christmas cards are in four piles + one virtual
1) In envelopes, stamped, addressed
2) In envelopes, addressed, run out of stamps
3) In envelopes, forgot address, no stamp
4) In envelopes, to be hand-delivered
5)(Virtual). Run out of cards, forgot address, out of stamps.

I was idly wondering whether Radio 3 had deliberately made its new Saturday morning schedule so awful (a real waste of genuine talent) in order to encourage people who just want to hear music over to Radio 3 Unwind. If so, it's certainly worked in my case.

When the Tesco till shows your Clubcard has shaved off £2.27 it's easy to feel a flicker of triumph, as if you've outwitted Tesco, rather than doing pretty much everything they wanted for the past twenty years.