Straw Poll Man

This simply lowers the tone of the debate, and the British should bow their heads in shame at including Carol Vorderman. I've no idea who James O'Brien is, Bonnie has fucked a thousand of us, and Kier Starmer 69.940,978 at the last count.

The Salt Path-ology

I listened to the podcast ~ not having gone near the book, film or tee-shirt.

Scandalous the way this pair of chancers has been treated though. In a country that looks more fraudulent by the day, we should celebrate this salty couple for doing a runner at every opportunity except perhaps along the path itself.

What I most enjoyed, as I told the Times Literary Supplement, is the way it made shysters like the UK's publishing industry and piss-poor press look equally stupid.

Ed. And where's OUR invite to Hay-on-Wye's literary festival?

Trial By Firestick

It's high-school exam season and I thought it wise to subject followers of the 'blog to similar strictures, designed to separate the transport top-guns from those short of the full ticket.

Accordingly, examine the hand-out on your desks, which is the content Google's AI thinks that a good friend of mine might be interested in on a Friday evening after a hard day lying on the bunk of an articulated tractor-unit... like my good friend.

Select the vid of your choice, and then sit back and listen to what our own native AI program ~ DeepShit ~ has to say about your choice and whether you're a good fit, or need to leave the room quietly and take the bus home like me at RAF recruitment.

Do this before scrolling further down beyond this line, because I can't be bothered with a separate results page.

Now hand in your papers please, with the four most-watchable vids in sequence.

(The examination board is not going to analyse the permutations involved, as that's too hard and we love a quitter.)

Accordingly, simply examine your first choice and read on to discover whether you shape up, or feature at the invertebrate end of the spectrum:

The Bra-Less Ladies of Turkmenistan: no escaping the fact your a disappointment to the blog, not least because they've spelt 'uncensored' wrong but also because that cleavage looks to our minds to be AI-generated and not worth the feeling. It is also Google's highlighted choice, which is decidedly suspicious and embarrassing should your parents be in the room... as will be the case with most of our readers.

Unseen Vintage Photos: it's a pass, but you've barely scraped through.That woman is not vintage, has been seen often at Wetherspoons in Ormskirk and borrowed the SS uniform from a fancy dress-shop. The composition was also staged in a section of IKEA, where she was briefly arrested for nudity and impersonating a member of the UK's special forces.

The Andoni Iraola Problem: go home and enjoy the summer because you made the cut with this analysis of the new coach at Liverpool FC, but we want you back before next term for remedial training.

Why It Failed: or why we don't use hydrofoils anymore. The perfect Friday-evening fare, and you've aced the test. You are invited to the blog's summer-camp at China's Shaolin Temple, where the monks will demonstrate how to terminate a Ted-talk in short order.

(Whilst working in Shanghai the airline treated us to a jamboree and banquet during which there was a Kung Fu demonstration by a man dressed in loose black clothing. Having imbibed several litres of Tsingtao I was minded to join him on stage and naked from the waist up, saying 'Come over 'ere if you think you're hard enough.' Though it's one thing I regret not doing in my flying career, at least I'm still alive.)

Ed. A reader has asked if that's a 1:1200 scale RMS Titanic on the mantelpiece, and qualifies for a free ticket to our summer-camp.

Conflict Resolution Set

We come here, don't we, to our 'anti-social media' site to avoid the doom-scroll and look for creative ways in which to bring the world together, and accordingly we are delighted to include among our merch pages this attractive set of die (baize surface not included) to use to keep a populace abreast of how things are going peace-wise.

Simply roll as leader on waking prior to the business of the day, and announce:

    P,P & P       'All we are saying, is give peace a chance.'

    P, P & W     'Deal is expected to be announced in days.'

    P, W & W    'Expect we'll hit them very hard, very hard.' 

    W, W & W   'We'll be bombing them back to Blockbuster.'

I render thanks to Google's Gemini for the render, the result of foundational work in London by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg, and Mustafa Suleyman... so blame them.

Ed. Yeah, thanks for nothing and there goes my ESTA application.

Surrey, What?

As we celebrate Elon Musk's elevation to trillionaire-hood, spare a thought for these people if you would, in whom he once invested a 10% stake. It's the people at the research park in Guildford who make commercial satellites of the sort powering the Starlink network.

Musk was intrigued at how they had reduced the cost of building satellites by orders of magnitude, which in turn inspired him to do the same with rockets. As a result a Space X rocket will soon be able to lower the cost of launching a kilogram into orbit by a factor of forty... in a virtuous circle that circles the planet.

Ed. Staff are required to use caps because they also make the sandwiches at lunchtime.

More 'Zing' Becomes Electra

This you've got to like and as we've seen how individuals can turn pages, so too can a small number of students at M.I.T. who went on to build a company around 'blown wing' take-off and landing performance.

Concept's not new, but able to be practically implemented by distributed electrical propulsion backed by an onboard generator. They point out that 30 airports serve the USA's commercial airline network, but with an ability to operate inside 300 feet, their Electra extends the number of those nodes to nearer 30,000.

Great things apparently come in threes.

The title a riff on Mourning Becomes Electra, last used mostly to reference a number of losses of the Lockheed Electra to wing flutter. I sat in one once at Edinburgh as I ran the night mail... must be the only flight-deck wide enough to require a separate flap-lever within the reach of each pilot.

In the Navee, you can put your mind at ease...

If you don't think individuals make a difference ~ and it's trendy not to in the UK ~ the results of a YouTuber's months-long effort to build a DIY ground-effect machine has seen the design being marketed as a commercial product... the world's first and naturally from China.

As that nice man from New Zealand points out on his channel it is what anyone who has watched ground-effect videos at 0200 a.m. (and who hasn't?) wants; although at this point in time you'd need to find circa $100,000.

That cost, as with EVs, will doubtless fall in time and this really is one more regime that electrification is making possible following decades of effort in which individuals as stupid as me have lost fortunes trying.

All the action in ground-effect is taking place in the US, China, South Korea and in fact Singapore... with rearguard efforts still underway in Germany and Russia where much of the foundational work took place.

In the UK if you found the wherewithal to do any of this without being shot down by taxes, regulation, scepticism or anywhere to test it without complaint... then no-one would be at all surprised.

In fact apart from the outline I built at scale and uploaded to Boat Design's website in the US, I see no evidence of anyone doing anything whatsoever in the field.

All in all though it adds another layer to China's much-vaunted strategy to dominate the electrification of transport both on land and in the air (inset).

We're trying to do something similar with drones in and around Swindon, but as you can imagine, with products developed elsewhere.*

* By NEROS, STARK et al.