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Nothing to add, but good work!

Narrowly managing to post this before the gig instead of after, but I'm going to this tonight:

Last July + Meg Lee Chin + Sex Bandit + Oogan + Guru Honey Badger at the Dublin Castle, Camden.

I had no idea Meg Lee Chin was still a going concern. Love her album Piece and Love.

I'll tell you something, I'd be very happy if I was as energetic as Meg is at the age of 63 (leaving aside that I'm below fifty and not as energetic at the moment...)

Narrowly managing to post this before the gig instead of after, but I'm going to this tonight:

Last July + Meg Lee Chin + Sex Bandit + Oogan + Guru Honey Badger at the Dublin Castle, Camden.

Copied and pasted from facebook:

SATURDAY, 24 JUNE 2023 AT 13:00
Pre Summer 2023 Southern Contingent Gathering
The Spice of Life - Soho

Hello fellow drokkers!
Summer is basically here, so let's gather before we're all sat at airports for days on end.
The pub this time will be The Spice Of Life, so make sure to take note of the location. It looks like some of us popped in there 6 years ago, from my google maps notification, so it can't be that bad!
See you all for a good old natter over a drink or two...

Copied and pasted from facebook:

SATURDAY, 24 JUNE 2023 AT 13:00
Pre Summer 2023 Southern Contingent Gathering
The Spice of Life - Soho

Hello fellow drokkers!
Summer is basically here, so let's gather before we're all sat at airports for days on end.
The pub this time will be The Spice Of Life, so make sure to take note of the location. It looks like some of us popped in there 6 years ago, from my google maps notification, so it can't be that bad!
See you all for a good old natter over a drink or two...

p.s. I say 'my' theory but both the cat and dog theories are pretty widespread, though I've never seen both mentioned in the same place.

Dogs might be noisy and a bit thick, but they're not out there exterminating the smaller wildlife just for laughs.

Hmmm, I think the main reason for that is because cats are generally let out on their own while dogs are usually on leads.  My addition to the debate is my hatred for those extra long leads that irresponsible owners use to use up the whole pavement / footpath / etc.

On a more positive note my theory is that cats and dogs have had a hand (pay) in domesticating humans, and vice versa.  Dogs helped provide protection and aid during hunting in the paleolithic while cats protected grain stores once we started having those.  When I was last in rented accomodation both we and our neighbours had cats.  The letting company sent somebody to check for pest control once per year (about the only bit of maintenance they ever carried out without a struggle getting them to visit) to no avail - we had no mice or rats for the half a decade we were there.

I've read various bits of Bacchus (stories used to pop up in various anthologies in the nineties) and got the first few months of the regular series that came out.  I'm going to withold asking why the praise is quite so high until after the MCBC episode alluded to!

(p.s. I did like Bacchus, I just don't think I'd rate it above From Hell).

I've always referred to the tyrannosaur rhyming with satanic.  Mills must have said the name out aloud in an interview somewhere?

p.s. regular (three or four times a year) Southern Contingent meetups occur at a central London pub - usually near Covent Garden.  We'll probably have to wait a few months until the next one.

Which we never hear about any more since Burdis left the forum. I really enjoyed the one I attended -  any chance you could flag 'em up here when they come around for folks who hate facebook?

Shall try to remember to do that!  Also the South-Eastern Contingent meetups (in Cambridge).

Hey! No one offered me any Japanese porn when I joined the forum!

(Begrudgery aside, glad to have you, BadlyDrawnKano. Excellent username.)

Thank you, it's based on a true story as in my early teens I'd spend so long trying to draw Kano, Dredd and various other characters, but despite my best efforts they never turned out well!

The perils of skim-reading in a break - I was left wondering how trying to draw Kano and Dredd ended in Japanese porn, then decided to re-read the comments...

Summer's here! – and that means fellas jacking up their car stereos and rolling down the windows as they drive by.
Gangsta rap, classic rock, even good ol' country and western – it doesn't matter so long as it's loud and it invades my living room while they're briefly stopped in traffic.
I've asked the council about digging an anti-tank ditch at the top of my street, or at the very least strewing the road with little steel spikes, but you know what municipal bureaucracy is like.

Just wait for pot holes instead, it'll take less time.

Also Aunty in Mad Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome :-(

I've read various bits of Bacchus (stories used to pop up in various anthologies in the nineties) and got the first few months of the regular series that came out.  I'm going to withold asking why the praise is quite so high until after the MCBC episode alluded to!

[Rather than upholding the rule of law, she often sort of seemed to think she was the law. Like Judge Dredd.]

After extensive searching I've managed to find the Times article (without paying for a Times subscription).  I've put the interesting bit in bold.

HUGO RIFKIND
Sorry, Rishi, you're to blame for Braverman
Prime minister vowed to restore seriousness and stability but retaining the home secretary fatally undermines that
Hugo Rifkind
Monday May 22 2023, 9.00pm BST, The Times
Let's start by floating two possibilities for the rest of this parliament. Ready? They are: a) that Suella Braverman eventually says or does something that means she can't stay in government; or b) that she doesn't. Now, ask yourself which seems more likely.
While you're pondering that, let's jump over to Rishi Sunak at the G7 summit in Hiroshima on Sunday. There he was, having just spent three days being one of the seven most important people in the free world, talking wars and jets and all that other big geopolitical stuff. Only, what's the first question he gets asked? Step forward the BBC's Chris Mason, asking about the Sunday Times story that Braverman sought help from civil servants over a speeding fine.
Sunak frowns. He winces. He drinks a glass of water. Even after that, though, his reply — "Do you have any questions about . . . the summit?" — still has all the thin and dangerous fury of Genghis Khan coming back to his war chariot to find it's got a wheel clamp. He's beyond all that stuff. He's above it. Except he's not.
Suella Braverman is a problem. She has always been a problem, and she still is. And yet this week some feel she is being smeared. "It is no coincidence," suggested the Conservative MP Miriam Cates, "that it's in the same week that she had been very vocal about the need to put proper limits on legal migration." The problem with this, though, is that it suggests some vast hinterland of other weeks when having Braverman in his government has caused Sunak no embarrassment at all.
Her current infraction, all that being said, doesn't seem a terribly big deal. Caught speeding, she asked her civil servants if they could arrange for her speed awareness course to be done privately. They said no. That's it. Call this "minister tries to dodge speeding fine" and it sounds terrible. Call it "minister asks innocent question" and it sounds like almost nothing at all. So maybe, sure, there really is some blobbish plot to get rid of the home secretary. Although if there isn't, I find myself wondering, why not?
Right at the top of Sunak's cabinet, remarkably enough, all three of the great offices of state are still occupied by people first put in place by Liz Truss. Granted, they don't have much else in common. James Cleverly, for example, is the cabinet equivalent of the bathroom you can't quite be bothered to change when you move into a new house. The toilet still flushes; it'll do for now. Jeremy Hunt, meanwhile, was technically a Truss appointment but having replaced the disastrous Kwasi Kwarteng as chancellor, he's better understood as a Sunak appointment who just got there early.
Braverman is a different kettle of fish. There were howls of dismay even in 2020 when Boris Johnson made her attorney-general, thanks to a previous attack on judges for ignoring politics. You might think this rather the point of judges, as indeed do they. She'd go on to suggest that governments were allowed to break international law and to declare that there had been nothing illegal about Dominic Cummings' infamous motorised eye-test, when not even the police, let alone the courts, had yet said any such thing. Rather than upholding the rule of law, she often sort of seemed to think she was the law. Like Judge Dredd.
Few were surprised when Truss made her home secretary, faithful as it was to the overarching Truss philosophy of doing the worst thing whenever possible. You may recall, though, she was actually forced to resign from that cabinet at the height of its dysfunction because of some baffling scandal about an email. Ask even seasoned Westminster hacks what happened there and they're liable to wince and shrug. As if some political shenanigans are too twisted for human ken, like the Upside Down in Stranger Things. That Sunak opted to reappoint her, a mere six days later, cuts right to the heart of his biggest problem. "This government will have integrity, professionalism and accountability at every level," he'd just said, and this was no mere John Major-style "back to basics" hostage to fortune. Because he knew, Sunak, what he had to do.
He knew that the great Tory drift into unseriousness, which beleaguered Theresa May and was exploited by Boris Johnson, had continued, under Truss, to slam the British economy into a wall. He knew that his party's reputation was at rock bottom and he knew that a large part of the reason for that was personnel. And so, alongside the five pledges to the British people he eventually came up with, there has always been a sixth unspoken one. Which is something to do with no longer letting government be dominated by the sort of characters who, as the Twitter meme has it, would struggle to get out of Willy Wonka's factory alive.
The trouble is, he doesn't quite have the guts. He didn't have them right at the start, when the Truss project had flailed off into the sun and he could have done almost anything. And he certainly doesn't have them now, when the challenges to his authority have become so routine that his own cabinet ministers get to deliver them from the stage at rival conferences to which he isn't even invited.
So yes, up there on his own stage in Hiroshima, fresh from trying to avert World War Three, I've no doubt he thought it maddening, dim and trivial that he was being bothered with any of this nonsense. It is he, though, who made the mistake of inviting the nonsense back into government, exactly when it was at its weakest — and he who still seems to lack the courage to knock it on the head. And when you mess up, as Braverman has learnt, you can't dodge the penalty. It's just a question of how you pay.