Part of it may also be learned distrust and cynicism.
Like, if you run into a real-life situation where I am telling you "if you bet $10 on this, you have a 50% chance of losing your $10 and a 50% chance of gaining $15", you will not instinctively believe me 100% about the possible loss, the possible gain, or the odds.
TESTABLE HYPOTHESIS: as well as being more pronounced in members of low-trust societies, this phenomenon will be more pronounced in Americans because every day they encounter things priced at $5.99 that actually cost $7.04, meals that cost $30 on the menu but with tip it's $36, and so forth.
No, no, it's totally reasonable that we have an 8% state sales tax because we'll refund it responsibly to home-owners.
IDK. On the veld people constantly traded and continually made new microliths and stuff. Pretty fungible.
Further to 1, didn't the Marshmallow Hypothesis fall over simply because poorer kids had learned (correctly) to be more distrustful of adults?
Eating marshmallows from the bag is great.
Frozen marshmellows are pleasantly chewy, if you enjoy that kind of ultra-chewy thing.
I thought marshmallows were made of antifreeze.
IDK. On the veld people constantly traded and continually made new microliths and stuff. Pretty fungible.
MEN amirite, always ready to trade and collect the newest microliths. SMDH.
WE LOVE YOU UNRESERVEDLY DESPITE YOUR UNDOGLIKE SCEPTICISM!
Never mind all that hippy shit, it's simpler than that. The finding is a consequence of setting up the experiment in an unrealistic way, and if you pose the question as a series of realistic bets with stakes, people do in fact behave rationally in that context, which involves being more risk-averse than you would be if going broke wasn't a problem....because of course it does:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0
As Ole Peters says, the original idea was invented before the distinction between ergodic and non-ergodic data series was and the error persisted for 200 years!
About every ten years or so, I eat a marshmallow by itself (as opposed to in a dessert or a cup of hot chocolate) and re-discover that no, I don't enjoy this experience.
I have a similar cycle with Red Lobster.
Venture capitalism might solve that second problem for you.
I think it's less about the weirdness of fungibility (children aren't, but many other goods are) and that perfectly parallel gain/loss scenarios don't happen much in real life.
Right - it's really pretty weird and unusual that you want to maximize a resource in an unbounded way - except for currency itself. Otherwise there's a range of the thing where you want a secure amount, but not so much that storage becomes a problem.
You can't have everything. Where would you put it?
In re the opinions of Mr. Apostropher at 12, I will eat many plain marshmallows with pleasure, but I've never been to a Red Lobster, and now might never get the chance (as Mr. Hick obliquely notes in his follow-up).
If you rig some experiment where the expected value is "keep your own domicile intact" but one strategy requires you to risk losing half of it, and the other strategy allows you to gain an extra half-of-a-house, why on earth would those be parallel situations?
Part of this is because we think of bets as being rare events. If I owned 100 domiciles and could take this bet every day with one of them, that doesn't sound so bad. If I had a 60% chance of gaining an extra half-house, then yes, definitely.
Marshmallows are disgusting in any form. Also uncanny.
Wait, what do your loved ones look like?
If I owned 100 domiciles and could take this bet every day with one of them, that doesn't sound so bad.
But then you don't have the same intimate knowledge of upkeep and so on as if it were your sole home. But congrats on becoming the rentier class.
One time, we bought real marshmallows and they were even better than the corn syrup ones you get usually.
Never mind all that hippy shit, it's simpler than that.
Kinda love that you led off with this, in order to slow pitch the softball explanation of the non-ergodicity of wealth. I mean, this was just too obvious, I didn't want to insult my readers, etc.
22: Roadside stand at the marsh?
The stand was in the marsh, away from any road.
I don't really like marshmallows. I made them at home a couple of times but was disappointed to find that they weren't much better than store-bought ones (no matter what fancy vanillas or other flavorings you add, they taste overwhelmingly of gelatin), and lack the only good part of the marshmallow, the thin leathery skin.
I've never been to Red Lobster (although bottomless shrimp is an intriguing concept), but Last Night at the Lobster by Stewart O'Nan is probably one of my top 100 favorite novels of all time, and this seems like a good occasion to reread it.
It's gross when you eat ice cream with marshmallows in it (like rocky road) and there are all these little pockets of white slime.
12: I have never eaten at Red Lobster or the Olive Garden. Which made Joe Queenan's America very confusing to me.
The Olive Garden invented putting grated cheese on salad.
It was originally called the Oliver Garden to reflect how the unlimited salad and breadsticks would allow them to respond positively to Oliver Twist's request for more.
Red Plenty would be a good name for a spinoff chain with unlimited salad.
30: Olivier Garden, where you can dream of Manicottiderlay again.
Re: Red Lobster, I am loving that the unlimited shrimp offer that helped bring down the company was possibly channel stuffing on the part of its Thai seafood conglomerate owner.
See, the loss of half a Red Lobster Conglomerate stings a lot worse than its doubling. Why would we need twice endless shrimp?
Vaguely on the topic of marshmallows, another sign of the Apocalypse -- s'more flavored soda.
https://redstonefoods.com/products/R446--rocket-fizz-soda-smores
https://www.foodandwine.com/news/pepsi-smores-flavors-pack
I got a new family to replace my family killed by You know who. You know who says that I am better off. And also says who am I to argue with You know who. Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding. Who can argue with that, eh? Still, I miss them greatly.
Red Plenty is the American way of fast food joints giving you free ketchup packets ad libitum, as opposed to the UK where they charge you ten pence a packet, or at least did in the eighties.
Keeping up the noble American tradition of opening confidently on other people's countries based on limited knowledge forry years out of date.
Was it based on ration points, not money?
37++
36: AIHPMHB, The Menu is a blast.
My 21st-century anecdote about British ketchup is the pizza I ordered at Paddington Station, which turned out to be half a bagel topped with a squirt of ketchup and a hunk of cheddar, all stuck in the microwave and then handed over to me with a smile.
Speaking of British food, I'm reminded that I should once again make an effort to donate blood. I'm now apparently a very low risk for mad cow disease even though I ate meat in the U.K. in the early 90s.
I didn't know they finally lifted that! I was off the list too because of all the childhood beefburgers at the ten-pence-ketchup joint. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure my donor status is still complicated because of demographic changes in the meantime.
You can't donate if you use heroin, but eating the cow brain sandwich at Wetherspoons is now fine.
I guess they aren't worried about overall health risk, just transmissible disease risk.
Red Lobster was always the place we never went because it was too fancy.
I was always afraid "Cheddar Biscuits" was a euphemism.
"My 21st-century anecdote about British ketchup is the pizza I ordered at Paddington Station, which turned out to be half a bagel topped with a squirt of ketchup and a hunk of cheddar, all stuck in the microwave and then handed over to me with a smile."
No, this didn't happen.
This guy comes up to me - big guy, tears in his eyes - and he says "ma'am, here is your pizza, innit, me old china, just a bagel with some ketchup, begorrah, och aye, and a bit of the oul' cheddar on top, what-ho!' And everyone applauded.
If you say that to anyone they'll think you're a politician electioneering who's learned it by heart. I recommend you answer by saying "You went to Oxford? Which college?"
I used to not believe stories about English food, but then I saw a man eating peas off the back of his fork.
Anyway, "ketchup" is a common way to disparage to a poorly or insufficiently spiced red sauce on something that's supposed to be Italian.
I used to make sauce the way my grandmother taught me, with tomato paste. Now I use canned San Marzono tomatoes. My grandmother couldn't get good ingredients easily.
Slightly OT but the original ketchup was a sort of duxelles. Beef Wellington is pretty much literally steak and ketchup (in pastry). The tomato version was created as a response to the reluctance of American consumers to eat fresh tomatoes.
This volleyball movie might have been more fun if I had known anything about volleyball. Or watched the preceding four seasons of anime. But was fun nonetheless! Four seasons of easy viewing sorted!
People only go to volleyball to look at butts.
Counterpoint: people go to lots of other places to look at butts as well.
Fresh tomatoes don't taste good.
Even the really nice ones aren't great, by fruit standards. And you can't just eat them in your hand because the seeds go everywhere.
That's why you get cherry tomatoes. Possibly my favorite fruit.
Old people eat raw tomatoes with just salt and pepper. At least the old people who grow their own tomatoes.
Salt, pepper, and bathos.
Or just a bit of bread and some fake-Celtic singing.
Speak for yourself.
Tolkien actually had tomatoes in early versions of The Hobbit, but took them out and replaced them with pickles, either because he didn't feel comfortable having New World fruit in Middle-Earth (although potatoes and tobacco both appear) or, one book suggests, because he'd worked out that it was too early in the year for ripe tomatoes.
Also, if we have any members of the criminal class here, I have a job opportunity for you!
https://cptheatre.co.uk/Jobs/Vacancy-Artistic-Director-Joint-CEO
Do I count as underclass?
I think that as a citizen of enlightened topless Europe you count as part of the "benefit class".
I have also had excellent pizza in London. There's a wide skew! And it's not like the Paddington bagel was the worst meal I've ever been served - that was probably the burrito in Bishop, California that was basically just a microwaved can of Rosarita.
I've eaten very well in London and elsewhere in the UK. I'll also not hear a word against the cuisine of the nation that invented the chip butty, the perfect sandwich after a night out drinking.
You did not have a microwaved bagel with ketchup and cheddar cheese sold to you in London Paddington Station in the 21st century by someone who pretended that it was "pizza". Give it up. I lived in London for the entire 21st century except the last couple of years and I was in Paddington Station at least weekly during that period. This did not happen.
It's to being on the piss what harira is to a day spent fasting.
The last time I spent any significant amount of time fasting I broke fast with a full English breakfast and I think it's the only time I have ever experienced the kind of dizzying protein high that Crom the dog gets every time we give her a bit of liver.
It was in the summer of 2007 and it absolutely happened. It was one of a few snack/meal items on offer at a little kiosk-type thing on my way out. I am very willing to believe that particular kiosk did not last long.
I guess there's not a straightforward, uncontested story about how Malay ketjap became the original ketchup, but the recurring bottle of it is a good running gag in Mason & Dixon.
I don't think I've even been to Paddington. I remember Euston. They should have signs up pointing to the underground that read "Eustachion Tube."
How is one expected to do anything at all after eating a full English breakfast? I had one once and all I wanted to do was sleep all day.
It was in the summer of 2007 and it absolutely happened. It was one of a few snack/meal items on offer at a little kiosk-type thing on my way out. I am very willing to believe that particular kiosk did not last long.
You had an Ohio-style "pizza bagel". It was not sold to you under the pretence of being pizza.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza_bagel
I am perfectly prepared to believe it was revolting, btw.
I did seven years in Ohio and visited maybe five times in the past year. I've never heard of a pizza bagel referred to as "Ohio-style."
It was nice to get to eat Donato's pizza again this year.
87: The bastard cousin of Cincinnati chili.
Also, if you're ever in Mount Vernon, someone, for reasons best known to themselves, plunked a really nice restaurant there right off the main square.
Even in the frozen section, the "pizza bagel" is expected to have comparable ingredients on top of the bagel that pizza would.
There's probably someone putting cream cheese and lox on a pizza, but they can't get national attention.
I've had cream cheese and shrimp on pizza, but not lox.
They sell some pretty unusual food in Japan under a heading of pizza. Mayonnaise at least. I think that what's happpening in the US is that the "creative" food like that is called flatbread now?
Similarly indiscriminate elasticity of ingredients and taste combinations happens in the US under a menu heading of tacos.
94: I was in ROK, and I think bottomless establishments are illegal there.
That's why they leave the tail when they peel shrimp.
87 You know what they call French fries in France, right?
I ban myself.
In both Germany and France they are called "pommes frites" but in Germany the "frites" is silent and in France the "pommes" is silent. Top- and/or bottomlessness similarly vary by local custom and/or age of enlightenment.
Pomfritky in Czech, last syllable makes them plural. There are also verbs pickupnout and fuckupovat.
"I've never heard of a pizza bagel referred to as "Ohio-style."
Invented in Ohio, apparently.
I went through Wiktionary looking for languages that translate french fries in some way that's not "fried potatoes" or some abbreviation of that, or a transliteration in another language like pomfritky. I found:
- Afrikaans: slap-tjips, slap-chips
- Czech: hranolky, little prisms
- Hungarian: hasabburgonya, prism potatoes
- Finnish: ranskalaiset perunat, French potatoes, but abbreviatable to just the first word, so "French"
And there seem to be attempts to nativize in Scottish Gaelic and Welsh that are cognates meaning "slice" (sliseag and sglodion respectively), but they both have alternates that look mostly like "chips" transliterated.
Ohio usually leads with the airplane thing instead of the pizza bagel.
There's a place in England called Paddington? Is it named after the bear?
111: Named after Arthur Dent's girlfriend Fenchurch.
There's Victoria Station, which got its name because that's where the trains from Australia arrive.
115: I thought that was named after Posh Spice.
"les frites sont belges, tu sais/vous savez" says pretty much every single french person in whose presence i have eaten them, always with this oomph of urgency as if it is just collectively super important to them that californians understand this critical fact.
Slaptjips are shaped like French fries and made of potato, but are not French fries. Whereas the latter are fried until rigid, the slaptjip is fried until cooked, but still floppy. "Slap" means limp, flabby, or similar.
Apparentement, ils sont ni belges, ni francais, mais espagnols! Cree par St Teresa d'Avila (selon Wikipedia, at any rate).
Which calls her canonization into question, frankly.
Apparently, and I find this very peculiar even by the high standards of the sainthood, she used to carve little figures of the crucified Christ out of potatoes and then throw them into hot fat. Occasionally bits of cross, messiah etc would break off during the deep-frying process.
Damn, you people are funny with the rabbit holes. I should instead have asked Moby what they call Chinese food in China.
121: Anti-miracle! She invented a novel sex act bodily pleasure.
Whole damn train painted Snapdragon. "The PC reborn". Launch date, but no actual consumer product mentioned. Interesting.
The crispy fried Body of Christ
In Scottish Presbyterian Communion, there's no particular food and drink specified. The commonest is bread and wine - any sort of bread; my church used sliced wholemeal from the local baker - but (frex) bread and fruit juice, or even oatcakes and whisky, are just fine. The point is to share some sort of food and some sort of drink with each other. I don't see why Presbyterian Mexicans, in a world in which Scotland rather than Spain had been the dominant power in the New World, wouldn't celebrate communion with fried potatoes.
Apparently, the Aztecs had sweet potatoes only. I know you can make fries with those, but I don't recommend if you aren't required to reduce your consumption of regular potatoes for health reasons.
Sweet potato in any form certainly would have improved my communions.
I YAM THAT I YAM, AMEN
130-131: Good point. Please assume I meant Mayans. Presbyterian Mexicans would have used beer and tacos.
Pre-conquest Mexican food sounds pretty nice:
https://florentinecodex.getty.edu/book/10/folio/57v
The lower right translation from Nahuatl has a list of the foodstuffs that the fruit seller/merchant sold and the left hand one has the translation from the contemporary 16th century Spanish.*
* one of my work projects (the digital bit of it, not the translating-from-Nahuatl bit)
I should have anonymized that link, tbh.
Looking like a general election on 4 July.
Ugh, I like the British system of short campaigns, but I don't want those short campaigns to be while I'm actually in the UK. This will be way less fun than platty jubes.
Don't eat the bagel pizzas regardless.
If a pizza bagel is a bagel with tomato and cheese on top, a bagel pizza would be a pizza base with smoked salmon and cream cheese? That could work actually.
I would enjoy a pizza bagel more than a fruity bagel with fruity cream cheese.
A good pizza bagel is a nice nosh. I used to make them for myself, with fresh ingredients, as a quick snack in college. At the time we called them "pizza bagel" or "bagel pizza" interchangeably.
I've made a bagel pizza, except instead of sauce, I added a fried egg, and instead of pepperoni, I used bacon. The cheese was still cheddar.
Thanks sounds like a bagel McMuffin to me.
There's probably a "what is pizza" alignment chart that covers 144 in one of the nine boxes.
Here it is. Structure purist, toppings neutral?
145: But I usually replace the bagel with a biscuit.
147: I always put the top of the bread on too.
Three only pizza bagels I've ever had were the frozen kind. They weren't very good and pizza rolls are a better option.
The miniature frozen quiches are pretty good too.
So are the zionist versions of pigs in blankets.
Anyway, not to short-circuit the pizza parsing, but is it still a universally expected drubbing for the Tories, and does Starmer seem like an affirmative upside or just damage avoided?
I had already moved on to freezer- based snacks in general.
Uncrustables offend me as a concept. I'm not sure how they taste.
153: Looks like. Before the 2005 general election Labour was running at about +6 in the polls and they won 55% of Commons to the Tories' 31%. Now they're running +15-20!
Excuse me, Labour were. You overcorrecters.
Me too! I feel like sometimes kids should eat something like a PB&J sandwich that's only moderately appetizing, and uncrustables make them more like cereal or taquitos or whatever in appetizingness for kid palates, but they get pitched as sandwiches. I resent them.
I like frozen taquitos too, but I can't remember which kind.
re: the UK election
I'm not a fan of Starmer. He ran as a unity candidate to unify the left and right wings of the Labour party, made a lot of promises to satisfy the left of the party, and then has basically run the party entirely around the agenda of the right of the party, along with a lot of purges of the ideologically impure. He has also either adopted or at least not ran against a lot of the more egregious Tory policies.
I still, obviously, expect him to be a massive improvement over the current lot.
Someone should put a new picture of him on Wikipedia. His face looks italicized.
Starmer is maybe actually good on housing policy? Which would be a pretty big deal, housing in the UK is in a dire place.
Otherwise agree, he's running to the center to try to win and isn't going to be terribly exciting to lefties. But winning is a big deal.
re: 163.last
I think that on quite a few areas, he's probably to the right of the general public. However, the audience he is playing to isn't the public on some of that stuff, it's the right wing press and a certain wing within his own party.
I think, on the plus side, he is actually a fairly experienced parliamentary operator, and also familiar with the process of actively doing things as a government, rather than the current administration who are both deeply uninterested in actually doing anything, and malicious evil bastards as well. Alex made a similar point on Twitter.
161 makes him sound like Tony Blair, which would be amazing. Blair Mk 2 would be the best possible outcome for the UK. Picture your town but with, effectively, no rough sleepers and no food banks. We had it in the 2000s, we could have it again.
164.2: yes. Competence is the underrated political quality - the ability to put your policies into effect. Sunk doesn't have it. Starmer almost certainly does.
I would like to be able to sleep through the night without having to get up and switch to the recliner. And I could spent my food bank donation on camping equipment. I'm in.
Re: 165
That wasn't my intention. Although I was always suspicious, even pre-Iraq, of Blair on certain issues, he was also offering a positive redistributive vision for the low paid and unemployed and made huge interventions on child care, benefits, NHS funding, etc. My immediate family had genuine life changing positive outcomes from first Blair administration policies.
Starmer has ruled most of that out and promised more dank austerity. Maybe he'll govern more actively than he's campaigned.
Re: 165
In other words, I'm with you on the positive view of Blair 1, but very sceptical that Starmer either wants to be transformative in the same way, or will be allowed to.
Starmer is maybe actually good on housing policy? Which would be a pretty big deal, housing in the UK is in a dire place.
I saw he put out a decent platform on housing, but then I had the impression it was walked back in many respects, or something different was substituted?
Presumably, the guy calling the election thinks things are about to get worse or he would wait.
Presumably, the guy calling the election thinks things are about to get worse or he would wait.
Or for him personally. But really, who cares if he's faithfully safeguarding the interests of the Conservative Party.
1. Does nuclear power have any salience in the election?
2. Do you think Blair would have been electable if he had been openly Catholic/Christian?
I just remembered my favorite, the little bites of brie topped with some fig mush and surrounded by puff pastry.
I think there was honey involved too.
175.1 No, just the terrible state of the economy which has actually been going gangbusters under Biden. We are so fucked.
178 pardon, UK I see. I need my morning coffee.
168/9: I would add 'or will be able to". Blair was coming in to fairly good economic conditions which allowed him to make those big changes. Starmer isn't.
175.2 is a bit puzzling because Blair, like many previous prime ministers, and many since, was openly Christian. Didn't cause him any issues. https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2023/13-january/books-arts/book-reviews/god-in-number-10-the-personal-faith-of-the-prime-ministers-from-balfour-to-blair-by-mark-vickers
Boris Johnson was openly Catholic - it wasn't really an issue either.
Does nuclear power have any salience in the election?
Not a particularly salient national issue, I would think.
There's a few nuclear stations under construction but they were all approved by the last Labour government, because we hate building things here, in particular nuclear things, so we make sure it takes decades to build anything. Renewables are a local issue as well round where I live because Scottish rural conservatives hate wind farms and don't believe in global warming.
A couple of years back some Green idiot tweeted "nuclear power will not solve our energy problems. The stations will take ten years to build" and was swamped with replies gleefully pointing out that she'd tweeted exactly the same thing ten years earlier.
Further to 180, I would make a distinction between "openly Christian" in the sense of "is Christian, goes to church regularly, talks about it from time to time" and "openly Christian" in the sense of "ponces around shouting about degenerates and whores and the Second Coming all the time".
168: people said literally, exactly this about Blair. remember all the "I'm Tory Plan B" japes?
(Also, he most definitely was both religious and indeed religiose; another of the most hackneyed jokes about him was that he came across like a vicar. He also constantly went on about faith based this and that, and spent a lot of time listening to an Anglo-Catholic air force chaplain* they found from somewhere. The thing he didn't do in office that he did immediately after stepping down was converting to proper Catholicism.)
*honestly, where in the RAF did they have one of those knocking around? not so much per ardua ad astra as be prepared.
183: on Twitter today I had the bracing experience of reading a tweet that said "this election will change nothing, it's a choice between two identical options" and then immediately below it a tweet with a photo of Starmer embracing Corbyn saying "they haven't changed since Corbyn left, beware".
another of the most hackneyed jokes about him was that he came across like a vicar.
I *think* that was more about his manner of speaking than the actual content. Specifically he was criticised as coming across like a trendy vicar. All the "look, y'know, guys" stuff. And the guitar playing.
honestly, where in the RAF did they have one of those knocking around?
If you're in the RAF and a member of a fairly major non-Christian religion, they have you covered - Jewish, Hindu, Sikh, Muslim and Buddhist - though you may end up timesharing with the other two services. They're also advertising for a non-religious chaplain.
I don't know how many RAF chaplains there are total, but there are about 280 in the army. I don't know what the breakdown is between denominations, but six of the last nine Chaplains General have been from a minority sect, though all so far have been some sort of Christian.
re: 183
Maybe. I remember being quite excited by the 1997 campaign, and generally happy throughout that first administration. But, today, looking at "New Labour, New Life for Britain" from 1996 and the manifesto from 1997, except maybe on devolution, the pledges are quite weak technocratic stuff.
But, and this is important, they basically delivered on all of them: better child care provision; reduced NHS waiting lists; more opportunities for young people coming out of education, etc.
If Starmer can do something similar, that would be fantastic.
The thing he didn't do in office that he did immediately after stepping down was converting to proper Catholicism.
Ok, this is what I was remembering. So: Do you think Blair would have been electable if he had been openly and properly Catholic? The timing suggests he himself thought not.
Boris was baptized Catholic and then switched, which is the same as Henry VIII.
Do you think Blair would have been electable if he had been openly and properly Catholic? The timing suggests he himself thought not.
Well, first, as I say, Boris Johnson was openly Catholic, and he was PM.
Blair's main concern was that the PM converting to Catholicism would not go down well in Northern Ireland, and I think he was probably right. So I think a Catholic Tony Blair as leader of the opposition in 1997 probably still gets elected, but he might not manage the Good Friday Agreement, at least not as easily.
Second, I think that the "was he electable" question is a bit mis-stated. He wasn't elected as prime minister - we have a parliamentary system, not a presidential system.
"Is a Catholic electable as an MP?" Yes, clearly, there have been many.
"Would a Catholic have been electable in Blair's constituency specifically?" Impossible to say. A quick google doesn't show any previous MPs who were obviously Catholic, but it's not easy to find that sort of thing out, especially further back. But other NE England constituencies elect Catholic MPs - Catherine McKinnell, for example.
"Is a Catholic acceptable as a cabinet minister?" Yes, clearly, there have been many.
"Is a Catholic acceptable as a party leader?" Yes, Iain Duncan Smith and Boris Johnson are Catholics.
"Is a Catholic acceptable as party leader for the Labour Party?" Well, there's never been one yet, and as far as I am aware no Catholic MP has ever tried to be Labour leader, but until quite recently the Catholic vote was reliably Labour - Labour had a forty-point advantage over the Conservatives when it came to Catholic votes in the 1990s.
Boris was baptized Catholic and then switched, which is the same as Henry VIII.
And then switched back again!
But he still did his marriages wrong.
Which, to be fair, is much more common than it was in Henry's day.
But you're supposed to say that worms ate a hole in your brain.
But he still did his marriages wrong.
He kept on trying, though. Only Anglophone head of state in history to be married more times than Donald Trump. (I have no idea if this is actually true or not.)
It really is an interesting time to be alive.
Why Azerbaijan's Flag Is Flying Amid New Caledonia Unrest
Yeah, that's more of a reach than I would have thought.
Does a "complete elimination of colonialism" mean a return of Anatolia and Baku to the indigenous Greeks and Armenians?
195: I stand corrected. Didn't know he was a polygamist.
196: a mildly genocidal Middle Eastern state is using its petrochemical wealth to stir up shit somewhere in the world? Hold the front page.
Indeed, only majorly genocidal Middle Eastern states make the front page these days.
people said literally, exactly this about Blair. remember all the "I'm Tory Plan B" japes?
Which people were saying this, though? Comments like 168 and 186 are talking about actual improvements to people's lives. The sort of person who was drawing and publishing cartoons making fun of Blair's Babes, or writing witty japes in Private Eye about St Albion's Church, didn't really see any of those improvements, because they were rich already. All they had to go on were the vibes, and they didn't like the vibes.
WHO REMEMBERS THE ARMENIANS?
The Armenian genocide and it's precursors are responsible for so much of modern American celebrity culture.