Gruts

🦆

It’s the end of a Vera

BBC: Dame Vera Lynn: Forces' Sweetheart dies aged 103
Dame Vera Lynn, the Forces’ Sweetheart whose songs helped raise morale in World War Two, has died aged 103. The singer was best known for performing hits such as We’ll Meet Again to troops on the front line in countries including India and Egypt.

Viral marketing

Typically, my tweets on Twitter receive around 0–1 replies, 0–2 ‘Likes’, and 0–1 ‘Retweets’. Then, last night, I tweeted the following:

If only I’d thought to include a shameless plug for my book at the same time!

Schoolboy error.

Unfortunate choice of words

BBC: Coronavirus: Three firms still positive despite the virus crisis

Holofernes’ lockdown haircut goes terribly wrong

One more time…

ISS — The International Space Station passing over our garden last night
(composite photo from 6 originals)

Just after the space station had passed over, I saw these really weird lights in our garden. The conspiracy theorists would have a field day.

Wise before and after the event

So, Boris ‘bus-liar’ Johnson’s chief political strategist, Dominic Cumberbatch—or someone with access to the password for his blog, at least—has been caught retrospectively doctoring an old blog post to make himself look far more prescient than he really is.

That really is a very cheap trick. But it doesn’t surprise me one iota. In fact, I think you’ll find I saw this exact thing coming over a year ago, in February 2019.