There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
There are some sites where Nativity denial is rampant.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
And maybe that's why Reform is doing well in the polls.
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Because that's what they always do.
Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
Is there even an inn? The implication is that they were guests, but it could have been at a relatives house.
I thought there actually was a census in Judea, but prior to Herod, so Luke got the timeline a bit mixed up.
There was no room in the kataluma.
That's now translated as inn, but the contemporary meaning for it would have been a guest room (in a friend/relatives house). The same word was used for the guest room where the last supper was held, which was in a house.
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Because that's what they always do.
Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
Tommy Robinsons trip to Dubai seems to have been a bit of a flop. Deported after being humiliated by Mitchell.
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
One reason I like historical fiction is for the attempt to have settings with what can be very different values and morals. Whilst even the best ones will necessarily have inaccuracies, and being completely honest about the settings might even offput a modern audience too much, it can be very very funny if no attempt is made at all, and in all sincerity you get something which is basically 90s teenagers set in ancient Rome or something.
There was a teen show about a young Mary Queen of Scots called Reign which was utterly hilarious for its intentional lack of interest in anything realistic, which would go from stereotypical teen romance shenanigans to sudden serious plotlines about massacres of protestants or storming calais etc. Highly recommended.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
As I tend to look at military blogs, all manner of offensive drivel comes my way, about how only white soldiers can be trusted, ignoring hundreds of thousands of Africans, Indians, Chinese, West Indians, who have served this country,
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
One reason I like historical fiction is for the attempt to have settings with what can be very different values and morals. Whilst even the best ones will necessarily have inaccuracies, and being completely honest about the settings might even offput a modern audience too much, it can be very very funny if no attempt is made at all, and in all sincerity you get something which is basically 90s teenagers set in ancient Rome or something.
There was a teen show about a young Mary Queen of Scots called Reign which was utterly hilarious for its intentional lack of interest in anything realistic, which would go from steretypical teen romance shenanigans to sudden serious plotlines about massacres of protestants or storming calais etc. Highly recommended.
My wife introduced me to that show, it was brilliant!
Absolutely did not take itself too seriously in pretending to be realistic and did well with some good source material.
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Because that's what they always do.
Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?
If we really wanted to win the Ashes, we would have a tour of young players who show promise in the first class game to Australia every single year, and get them playing top-level grade cricket in the Aussie leagues. Separate from the Lions tour or the U19 tour.
That would very soon teach them how to succeed in Aus. And then they could go on to be Test players. And if they don't, they could at least pass on what they've learned to their team mates by batting and bowling in the nets with them.
And it will never happen, because it might cost the equivalent of 1 ECB boss' bonus.
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
You have entered a scholarly minefield about the word 'kataluma' which it is too late to get involved in. RSV and NIV both translate it as 'inn'. Make of it what you will.
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
One reason I like historical fiction is for the attempt to have settings with what can be very different values and morals. Whilst even the best ones will necessarily have inaccuracies, and being completely honest about the settings might even offput a modern audience too much, it can be very very funny if no attempt is made at all, and in all sincerity you get something which is basically 90s teenagers set in ancient Rome or something.
There was a teen show about a young Mary Queen of Scots called Reign which was utterly hilarious for its intentional lack of interest in anything realistic, which would go from stereotypical teen romance shenanigans to sudden serious plotlines about massacres of protestants or storming calais etc. Highly recommended.
The “best” are the “novels” of Brandy Purdy.
She wrote a lesbian sex scene, involving Katherine Howard, Anne of Cleves, and a pot of honey.
She wrote of Piers Gaveston being a pagan male prostitute.
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Because that's what they always do.
Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?
If we really wanted to win the Ashes, we would have a tour of young players who show promise in the first class game to Australia every single year, and get them playing top-level grade cricket in the Aussie leagues. Separate from the Lions tour or the U19 tour.
That would very soon teach them how to succeed in Aus. And then they could go on to be Test players. And if they don't, they could at least pass on what they've learned to their team mates by batting and bowling in the nets with them.
And it will never happen, because it might cost the equivalent of 1 ECB boss' bonus.
The only issue there is. How many young players of top level grade cricket standard do we have?
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
As I tend to look at military blogs, all manner of offensive drivel comes my way, about how only white soldiers can be trusted, ignoring hundreds of thousands of Africans, Indians, Chinese, West Indians, who have served this country,
Alogorithims are just following the human example, self-Godwinning but rather than comparing to Hitler, they are enthusing for him.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
You're not blocking enough people. I get almost none of that.
I shudder to think what unfiltered X looks like these days.
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
One reason I like historical fiction is for the attempt to have settings with what can be very different values and morals. Whilst even the best ones will necessarily have inaccuracies, and being completely honest about the settings might even offput a modern audience too much, it can be very very funny if no attempt is made at all, and in all sincerity you get something which is basically 90s teenagers set in ancient Rome or something.
There was a teen show about a young Mary Queen of Scots called Reign which was utterly hilarious for its intentional lack of interest in anything realistic, which would go from stereotypical teen romance shenanigans to sudden serious plotlines about massacres of protestants or storming calais etc. Highly recommended.
The “best” are the “novels” of Brandy Purdy.
She wrote a lesbian sex scene, involving Katherine Howard, Anne of Cleves, and a pot of honey.
She wrote of Piers Gaveston being a pagan male prostitute.
I knew one of them came to a sticky end - didn't know both of them did.
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Because that's what they always do.
Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?
If we really wanted to win the Ashes, we would have a tour of young players who show promise in the first class game to Australia every single year, and get them playing top-level grade cricket in the Aussie leagues. Separate from the Lions tour or the U19 tour.
That would very soon teach them how to succeed in Aus. And then they could go on to be Test players. And if they don't, they could at least pass on what they've learned to their team mates by batting and bowling in the nets with them.
And it will never happen, because it might cost the equivalent of 1 ECB boss' bonus.
The only issue there is. How many young players of top level grade cricket standard do we have?
Maybe we're doing this the wrong way round. Maybe we should train young players how to stay at the crease by making them cricket administrators FIRST.
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
All the way to modern times, admittedly now only in more traditional societies, it was common for travellers to travel very light and expect to be fed and put up by strangers, in exchange for either casual chores or simply news of the wider world. This is how the poor travelled, and it only really stopped with the age of mass transport and communication.
Interesting, I played Joseph in my nativity play and earn in around the ballpark that MiC poll suggests I should earn at the moment. Interestingly too any character in a nativity earns more than those not in a nativity
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Because that's what they always do.
Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?
If we really wanted to win the Ashes, we would have a tour of young players who show promise in the first class game to Australia every single year, and get them playing top-level grade cricket in the Aussie leagues. Separate from the Lions tour or the U19 tour.
That would very soon teach them how to succeed in Aus. And then they could go on to be Test players. And if they don't, they could at least pass on what they've learned to their team mates by batting and bowling in the nets with them.
And it will never happen, because it might cost the equivalent of 1 ECB boss' bonus.
The only issue there is. How many young players of top level grade cricket standard do we have?
A fair number, and they would get better form constant playing in different conditions.
The most frustrating thing about this tour is that with the exceptions of Starc, Cummins, Smith and possibly Lyon I don't think this is a particularly special Australian side, and the ones coming through often struggle when they come for spells in county cricket. Handscomb, for example, had years of underachievement for Gloucestershire and Middlesex before he finally came good in Leicester last year.
Imagine if the likes of Hull, Goodman, Rehan Ahmed, Bashir, Rew, Organ, Potts, Bethel were not just playing in the summer for their counties (or in a few cases, carrying drinks for England) but spending winters playing competitive cricket (again, not training camps) to really learn how to play in those conditions, at a level where they would be highly competitive.
Throw in a couple of wise old stagers to lead - say Madsen, Roland-Jones, Gregory or Northeast - and it could work.
It was tried with an A-tour to the West Indies domestic tournament in 2000-2001 and it did help develop several future Test cricketers, although none that were important in 2004. What it did do however was ram home to the management how bloody difficult touring conditions were in the Windies, which meant the planning of the itinerary for Vaughan's side was far better.
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
All the way to modern times, admittedly now only in more traditional societies, it was common for travellers to travel very light and expect to be fed and put up by strangers, in exchange for either casual chores or simply news of the wider world. This is how the poor travelled, and it only really stopped with the age of mass transport and communication.
It’s something that would seem outlandish to us - the idea of asking a stranger if you could stay the night. But, it features in old novels, and earlier, monasteries were expected to accommodate travellers.
But yes, there were thousands of ways that peasants looked out for each other, in the expectation that this would be reciprocated.
Where we are so different to the past is how individualistic we are, and the way that for a lot of people, the goal is to maximise profit. Whereas, in the past, the goal was to avoid catastrophe.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
I stopped actively using Facebook years ago and never embraced Twitter. Facebook pissed me off when it went to overwhelmingly showing people/groups I never followed rather than my 'Friends'. Defeated the entire point of it as far as I was concerned.
Only thing I still use it for is Messenger with my friends and family.
Like most changes from big tech companies thesedays they seem designed for the company's benefit, not the customer.
Which is a shame, as so many things are much more convenient now thanks to companies, but the attitude seems to have shifted.
Aren't Twitter and Facebook free? AIUI, if you don't pay for it, you aren’t the customer.
There's this to be said for it: how many boys get to play Mary, and how many girls get to play Joseph?
Suggesting that the distribution is skewed by sex as a confounder, with men earning more than women, Good point.
It may also be a case of if you subdivide any group into subcategories, measure a thing, then sort by size of that thing then you will end up with a staircase regardless of actual underlying pattern,
What MiC should have done is a stacked bar graph or a histogram, so we could identify if outliers are skewing it
I’d also assume that there might be an economic correlation - schools in better off areas put on relatively more nativity shows and/or kids from socially excluded backgrounds don’t participate in these shows & also struggle in later life
Yes, and this also correlates with the donkeys and sheep voting Reform yesterday.
Of course, there are no animals mentioned in the biblical accounts. There are definitely no donkeys, sheep or any other kind of domesticated beast, so it is all traditional nonsense invented long after the gospels.
I think I'm with the Wee Frees on this.
[Pope] Benedict puts the record straight in his third book on the life of Christ, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, which was released on Tuesday and looks destined for the bestseller lists with an initial print run of one million.
Having dealt with Christ's adult life and death in his first two books, the pope tackles the birth of the son of God and puts paid to some myths surrounding the newly born Jesus's spell in a stable with Mary and Joseph.
"In the gospels there is no mention of animals," the pope states. He says references to the ox and the donkey in other parts of the Bible may have inspired Christians to include them in their nativity scenes.
The Vatican itself has included animals in the nativity scenes it sets up each year in St Peter's Square, and Benedict concedes that the tradition is here to stay. "No nativity scene will give up its ox and donkey," he says. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/nov/20/pope-nativity-animals
Doesn't seem very conclusive, I presume the gospels don't mention the first poop from the divine baby, but we can safely assume it happened without it being an invention.
There's no reference to an innkeeper either.
Though there is reference to the inn. Which presumably had a keeper. There is no reference to the stable. The stable is inferred, unreliably, from the manger. The shepherds are told to look for the manger, not the stable, as the sign they have the right baby.
The whole splendid thing is a post hoc legitimation myth. The ancient world abounds in them. It is none the worse for that.
There's no reference to an inn either, the word used meant 'guest room', which traditionally would be in a private home and not a commercial inn.
The only bit actually mentioned is the manger.
The same way that the “Publicans” in the Bible are not innkeepers at all.
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
All the way to modern times, admittedly now only in more traditional societies, it was common for travellers to travel very light and expect to be fed and put up by strangers, in exchange for either casual chores or simply news of the wider world. This is how the poor travelled, and it only really stopped with the age of mass transport and communication.
It’s something that would seem outlandish to us - the idea of asking a stranger if you could stay the night. But, it features in old novels, and earlier, monasteries were expected to accommodate travellers.
But yes, there were thousands of ways that peasants looked out for each other, in the expectation that this would be reciprocated.
Where we are so different to the past is how individualistic we are, and the way that for a lot of people, the goal is to maximise profit. Whereas, in the past, the goal was to avoid catastrophe.
Hospitality to strangers who come in peace is one of the oldest human traditions. In the times when we were semi-nomadic hunter-gatherers there was little possibility of accummulating goods so sharing was the normal way of interraction and the origin of trade, as well as a key to maintaining genetic diversity.
And the redactions appear to favour alleged perpetrators over the victims.
Jane Doe Epstein Survivor, who reported Epstein to the FBI in 2009, sent the following letter to the Department of Justice today after it failed to redact her name in the release of the files.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
As I tend to look at military blogs, all manner of offensive drivel comes my way, about how only white soldiers can be trusted, ignoring hundreds of thousands of Africans, Indians, Chinese, West Indians, who have served this country,
I don't follow anybody on there, or use it much, but when I do log in it tends to have one highlighted post it suggests I read. The post is usually authored by Elon Musk. It's almost always a teeth-grinder.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
There are some sites where Nativity denial is rampant.
Well one gospel doesn't mention shepherds, one gospel doesn't mention wise men, and the earliest doesn't mention either. Our nativity story is the equivalent of an AI amalgamation of several documents to come up with a whole that none of them says.
Accepting that Jesus was a historical figure, he had to be born somewhere, but very unlikely that any biblical accounts represent the reality of it.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
You're not blocking enough people. I get almost none of that.
I shudder to think what unfiltered X looks like these days.
It's starting to happen on Spotify, I get Jordan Peterson, triggernometry and other sh*te recommended, I assume they're paying.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
I stopped actively using Facebook years ago and never embraced Twitter. Facebook pissed me off when it went to overwhelmingly showing people/groups I never followed rather than my 'Friends'. Defeated the entire point of it as far as I was concerned.
Only thing I still use it for is Messenger with my friends and family.
Like most changes from big tech companies thesedays they seem designed for the company's benefit, not the customer.
Which is a shame, as so many things are much more convenient now thanks to companies, but the attitude seems to have shifted.
As someone who worked in the industry rather more recently than Roger -
The scene you're looking for is the scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting just to sell them drugs. Then gets angry. "Don't you understand? I'm just here to sell you more meth."
That is social media in a nutshell.
It's a dopamine hit designed to keep you scrolling for just long enough that the algo can a) learn a bit more about what pushes your buttons and b) can serve you an ad it thinks you will click. And it doesn't care if it pushes the worst shit imaginable on you, all it wants is to keep you scrolling for long enough to sell you that click
I have not used social media in five years and I used to sell it for a living. Take that for what you will.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
I blocked Fox a decade ago, I block lots. Never read a shithead twice is the rule. And they still feed me his hate.
Mass clearout of England leadership not in ECB plans after Ashes failure
McCullum’s position likely to come under scrutiny
ECB believes mass sackings would be a mistake
The England and Wales Cricket Board is eager to avoid a mass clearout of England’s senior leadership in the wake of another humiliating away Ashes series defeat.
England’s hopes of winning the urn were expunged inside 11 days for just the fourth time in the contest’s 143-year history with Sunday’s 82-run defeat in Adelaide, and a fourth Ashes whitewash is on the cards in Melbourne and Sydney, unless the tourists can arrest a dismal 18-match run without a win in Australia that stretches back to 2011.
A full review of the tour’s planning and execution will take place following the final Test next month when jobs could be on the line, with Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach expected to come under the most scrutiny.
The Guardian has been told that the ECB do not want to repeat the mass cull that followed their 4-0 defeat in Australia four years ago, however, when coach Chris Silverwood and director of cricket Ashley Giles were sacked the following month, with Joe Root resigning as captain following another series defeat in the West Indies two months later.
While changes could still be made depending on the outcome of the rest of the tour, the ECB believes that mass sackings would be a mistake and leave England less well-placed to learn the lessons of the tour.
Rather than appointing a completely new leadership team, there is a desire at Lord’s to retain what one source described as some “institutional muscle memory” of an Ashes tour, which, given England’s dismal record of one series win since 1987, is in danger of appearing an insurmountable challenge.
I'm sure they'll blame county cricket and cricket fans for all the failures and demand that we immediately hand over all power to the ECB and stop playing first class cricket at all.
Because that's what they always do.
Instead of mass sackings, how about mass executions?
If we really wanted to win the Ashes, we would have a tour of young players who show promise in the first class game to Australia every single year, and get them playing top-level grade cricket in the Aussie leagues. Separate from the Lions tour or the U19 tour.
That would very soon teach them how to succeed in Aus. And then they could go on to be Test players. And if they don't, they could at least pass on what they've learned to their team mates by batting and bowling in the nets with them.
And it will never happen, because it might cost the equivalent of 1 ECB boss' bonus.
The only issue there is. How many young players of top level grade cricket standard do we have?
A fair number, and they would get better form constant playing in different conditions.
The most frustrating thing about this tour is that with the exceptions of Starc, Cummins, Smith and possibly Lyon I don't think this is a particularly special Australian side, and the ones coming through often struggle when they come for spells in county cricket. Handscomb, for example, had years of underachievement for Gloucestershire and Middlesex before he finally came good in Leicester last year.
Imagine if the likes of Hull, Goodman, Rehan Ahmed, Bashir, Rew, Organ, Potts, Bethel were not just playing in the summer for their counties (or in a few cases, carrying drinks for England) but spending winters playing competitive cricket (again, not training camps) to really learn how to play in those conditions, at a level where they would be highly competitive.
Throw in a couple of wise old stagers to lead - say Madsen, Roland-Jones, Gregory or Northeast - and it could work.
It was tried with an A-tour to the West Indies domestic tournament in 2000-2001 and it did help develop several future Test cricketers, although none that were important in 2004. What it did do however was ram home to the management how bloody difficult touring conditions were in the Windies, which meant the planning of the itinerary for Vaughan's side was far better.
Harsh on Lyon, he's got a strike rate of 60, Warne was only slightly lower at ~55. Monty was in the 70s, Bashir is close to 60. For nostalgic fans, Emburey was 105, so my memories of England being incredibly boring and rubbish aren't wrong. Ashwin is at 50 and Yadav's only played 14 tests despite having a strike rate less than 40!!
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
You're not blocking enough people. I get almost none of that.
I shudder to think what unfiltered X looks like these days.
It's starting to happen on Spotify, I get Jordan Peterson, triggernometry and other sh*te recommended, I assume they're paying.
The flagrant abuse of social media to shill views/products is getting out of hand. I don't really have a problem with, for instance, the domestic cookery channels who admit "I was 'gifted' this $product from $company for a review". But for every one of those, there are a thousand who don't admit they're being paid.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
There are some sites where Nativity denial is rampant.
Well one gospel doesn't mention shepherds, one gospel doesn't mention wise men, and the earliest doesn't mention either. Our nativity story is the equivalent of an AI amalgamation of several documents to come up with a whole that none of them says.
Accepting that Jesus was a historical figure, he had to be born somewhere, but very unlikely that any biblical accounts represent the reality of it.
He was clearly born near Glastonbury. Drawn there, magnetically, by King Arthur. Who was also born there. Or died there. I think. Anyway - it's in the Bible. At least the bits of the bible the "Special secrets they don't want you to know" FB/Insta/WhatsApp group tells me.
Did you know the bible is also strongly against wind turbines and pro-Russian fossil fuels? It's an amazing book. Not sure there's much more to it than that. But it lays it out quite clearly in a post about BA pilots back in 2021.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
I stopped actively using Facebook years ago and never embraced Twitter. Facebook pissed me off when it went to overwhelmingly showing people/groups I never followed rather than my 'Friends'. Defeated the entire point of it as far as I was concerned.
Only thing I still use it for is Messenger with my friends and family.
Like most changes from big tech companies thesedays they seem designed for the company's benefit, not the customer.
Which is a shame, as so many things are much more convenient now thanks to companies, but the attitude seems to have shifted.
As someone who worked in the industry rather more recently than Roger -
The scene you're looking for is the scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting just to sell them drugs. Then gets angry. "Don't you understand? I'm just here to sell you more meth."
That is social media in a nutshell.
It's a dopamine hit designed to keep you scrolling for just long enough that the algo can a) learn a bit more about what pushes your buttons and b) can serve you an ad it thinks you will click. And it doesn't care if it pushes the worst shit imaginable on you, all it wants is to keep you scrolling for long enough to sell you that click
I have not used social media in five years and I used to sell it for a living. Take that for what you will.
It's a pretty awful set of services across the industry - and you can understand (for instance) the EU's attempts to regulate/fine or the Aussie teen ban, even if you disagree with the policy detail.
I still haven't found a better news feed than X, but it's a constant struggle to keep it bearable.
The only other thing I use is WhatsApp, which is OK (but crippled) if you turn off notifications completely. Otherwise it's just irritating.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
There are some sites where Nativity denial is rampant.
Well one gospel doesn't mention shepherds, one gospel doesn't mention wise men, and the earliest doesn't mention either. Our nativity story is the equivalent of an AI amalgamation of several documents to come up with a whole that none of them says.
Accepting that Jesus was a historical figure, he had to be born somewhere, but very unlikely that any biblical accounts represent the reality of it.
He was clearly born near Glastonbury. Drawn there, magnetically, by King Arthur. Who was also born there. Or died there. I think. Anyway - it's in the Bible. At least the bits of the bible the "Special secrets they don't want you to know" FB/Insta/WhatsApp group tells me.
Did you know the bible is also strongly against wind turbines and pro-Russian fossil fuels? It's an amazing book. Not sure there's much more to it than that. But it lays it out quite clearly in a post about BA pilots back in 2021.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
I blocked Fox a decade ago, I block lots. Never read a shithead twice is the rule. And they still feed me his hate.
Social media is vile.
We're too polite to block. But if we do, tbe algo immediately thinks 'oh, he must want the OPPOSITE lot of shitheads'.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
There are some sites where Nativity denial is rampant.
Well one gospel doesn't mention shepherds, one gospel doesn't mention wise men, and the earliest doesn't mention either. Our nativity story is the equivalent of an AI amalgamation of several documents to come up with a whole that none of them says.
Accepting that Jesus was a historical figure, he had to be born somewhere, but very unlikely that any biblical accounts represent the reality of it.
He was clearly born near Glastonbury. Drawn there, magnetically, by King Arthur. Who was also born there. Or died there. I think. Anyway - it's in the Bible. At least the bits of the bible the "Special secrets they don't want you to know" FB/Insta/WhatsApp group tells me.
Did you know the bible is also strongly against wind turbines and pro-Russian fossil fuels? It's an amazing book. Not sure there's much more to it than that. But it lays it out quite clearly in a post about BA pilots back in 2021.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
I stopped actively using Facebook years ago and never embraced Twitter. Facebook pissed me off when it went to overwhelmingly showing people/groups I never followed rather than my 'Friends'. Defeated the entire point of it as far as I was concerned.
Only thing I still use it for is Messenger with my friends and family.
Like most changes from big tech companies thesedays they seem designed for the company's benefit, not the customer.
Which is a shame, as so many things are much more convenient now thanks to companies, but the attitude seems to have shifted.
As someone who worked in the industry rather more recently than Roger -
The scene you're looking for is the scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting just to sell them drugs. Then gets angry. "Don't you understand? I'm just here to sell you more meth."
That is social media in a nutshell.
It's a dopamine hit designed to keep you scrolling for just long enough that the algo can a) learn a bit more about what pushes your buttons and b) can serve you an ad it thinks you will click. And it doesn't care if it pushes the worst shit imaginable on you, all it wants is to keep you scrolling for long enough to sell you that click
I have not used social media in five years and I used to sell it for a living. Take that for what you will.
It's a pretty awful set of services across the industry - and you can understand (for instance) the EU's attempts to regulate/fine or the Aussie teen ban, even if you disagree with the policy detail.
I still haven't found a better news feed than X, but it's a constant struggle to keep it bearable.
The only other thing I use is WhatsApp, which is OK (but crippled) if you turn off notifications completely. Otherwise it's just irritating.
My go-to 'news feed' is PB. Here I am, not long woken up, idly looking to see if anything important has happened. It hasn't, so off back to bed for an hour.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
Twitter has now defaulted to showing me 'For You' rather than 'Following'.
I get the stuff you're seeing now and worse.
In the past week I get to see the posts from the likes Lozza Fox, Rupert Lowe, somebody Lucy White who doesn't want Muslims in parliament.
It's like following Tommy Robinson's Twitter feed.
Tommy Robinsons trip to Dubai seems to have been a bit of a flop. Deported after being humiliated by Mitchell.
He’s the UK’s problem, nowhere else wants his divisive rhetoric spoken in public.
Well done to UAE authorities if he has indeed been deported.
Male lead (well, after Christ) gets £14,000 more than the female lead – sounds about right.
Perhaps the great problem that Christianity has is that Christ is always played by a plastic doll.
A remarkably tasteless nativity scene came up on my Facebook page, depicting Baby Hitler, in place of Baby Jesus. The wise men and shepherds had swastika armbands, and there was a Nazi flag on the stable wall.
You need to stop following the Republican Party on Facebook.
Honestly, I’m getting bombarded with Holocaust denial, Russian trolls, rants by Lozza Fox, and Rupert Lowe, and assorted idiocies, despite blocking these sites.
I stopped actively using Facebook years ago and never embraced Twitter. Facebook pissed me off when it went to overwhelmingly showing people/groups I never followed rather than my 'Friends'. Defeated the entire point of it as far as I was concerned.
Only thing I still use it for is Messenger with my friends and family.
Like most changes from big tech companies thesedays they seem designed for the company's benefit, not the customer.
Which is a shame, as so many things are much more convenient now thanks to companies, but the attitude seems to have shifted.
As someone who worked in the industry rather more recently than Roger -
The scene you're looking for is the scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting just to sell them drugs. Then gets angry. "Don't you understand? I'm just here to sell you more meth."
That is social media in a nutshell.
It's a dopamine hit designed to keep you scrolling for just long enough that the algo can a) learn a bit more about what pushes your buttons and b) can serve you an ad it thinks you will click. And it doesn't care if it pushes the worst shit imaginable on you, all it wants is to keep you scrolling for long enough to sell you that click
I have not used social media in five years and I used to sell it for a living. Take that for what you will.
It's a pretty awful set of services across the industry - and you can understand (for instance) the EU's attempts to regulate/fine or the Aussie teen ban, even if you disagree with the policy detail.
I still haven't found a better news feed than X, but it's a constant struggle to keep it bearable.
The only other thing I use is WhatsApp, which is OK (but crippled) if you turn off notifications completely. Otherwise it's just irritating.
My go-to 'news feed' is PB. Here I am, not long woken up, idly looking to see if anything important has happened. It hasn't, so off back to bed for an hour.
Does it matter? Probably very little given how far we are out from an election, the Reform lead and that it's only a fraction of a percentage point anyway. Still, given how despised the Tories were in the middle of last year, I suppose it's an achievement of sorts.
The CCHQ champagne should stay firmly on ice for the moment though.
Does it matter? Probably very little given how far we are out from an election, the Reform lead and that it's only a fraction of a percentage point anyway. Still, given how despised the Tories were in the middle of last year, I suppose it's an achievement of sorts.
The CCHQ champagne should stay firmly on ice for the moment though.
It is no achievement to be polling worse than the 2024 general election which was the worst result in the history of the Tory party.
Visited Bethlehem and Jerusalem in 2019 at the same time as the Eurovision Song Contest (my mistake didn't check) and the proposed visit to Jerusalem by Trump (my mistake didn't know). He had just agreed to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the streets were lined with banners welcoming him almost as a 'messiah' or perhaps a John.
Trump has the ability to find a divisive issue and plump for the side that gives him a personal advantage. He is quite happy to become and ultra for that subject whether he believes it or not. He collects grievances and magnifies them like a human Twitter.
Does it matter? Probably very little given how far we are out from an election, the Reform lead and that it's only a fraction of a percentage point anyway. Still, given how despised the Tories were in the middle of last year, I suppose it's an achievement of sorts.
The CCHQ champagne should stay firmly on ice for the moment though.
It is no achievement to be polling worse than the 2024 general election which was the worst result in the history of the Tory party.
To use a vogue Americanism, in that clip Donald Trump Jr says the quiet part out loud when, as well as Democrats, he attacks RINOs for not recognising MAGA has taken over the GOP.
Doctor Zhivago is on today, Spartacus is on tomorrow, ET is on Christmas Eve, and this year the Great Escape is on BOTH Boxing Day and New Years Day! For Ben Hur you’ll have to wait until 2 Jan.
Does it matter? Probably very little given how far we are out from an election, the Reform lead and that it's only a fraction of a percentage point anyway. Still, given how despised the Tories were in the middle of last year, I suppose it's an achievement of sorts.
The CCHQ champagne should stay firmly on ice for the moment though.
But...at the 2024 general election, the Labour Party polled exactly 10% more than the Conservative Party. Labour is now BEHIND the Conservatives. That is AN achievement.
If - as I expect - the Tories are polling ahead of both Labour and Reform by the end of 2026, then they will have much to thank Kemi Badenoch for.
Comments
I’m not sure that inns (as we, or even medieval people) would understand them, would have been a thing, in that time and place.
The gap between rich and poor was staggering. A middle class scarcely existed, The elite would stay at one of their residences, or the residence of a fellow elite, while travelling. The elite-adjacent might find a residence owned by a patron, or one of the friends of a patron. The masses would look for a doss house, a room for hire, a stable, or else camp out.
Because that's what they always do.
That's now translated as inn, but the contemporary meaning for it would have been a guest room (in a friend/relatives house). The same word was used for the guest room where the last supper was held, which was in a house.
There was a teen show about a young Mary Queen of Scots called Reign which was utterly hilarious for its intentional lack of interest in anything realistic, which would go from stereotypical teen romance shenanigans to sudden serious plotlines about massacres of protestants or storming calais etc. Highly recommended.
Absolutely did not take itself too seriously in pretending to be realistic and did well with some good source material.
That would very soon teach them how to succeed in Aus. And then they could go on to be Test players. And if they don't, they could at least pass on what they've learned to their team mates by batting and bowling in the nets with them.
And it will never happen, because it might cost the equivalent of 1 ECB boss' bonus.
She wrote a lesbian sex scene, involving Katherine Howard, Anne of Cleves, and a pot of honey.
She wrote of Piers Gaveston being a pagan male prostitute.
How many young players of top level grade cricket standard do we have?
Tl:DR - we aint in Kansas any more...
https://x.com/Acyn/status/2002801007617884615
I get almost none of that.
I shudder to think what unfiltered X looks like these days.
(Mallen Baker - 10 minutes.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcFaUpv4VBw
Quota: one of the more interesting Christmas traditions hereabouts. Seen on a trip today.
The most frustrating thing about this tour is that with the exceptions of Starc, Cummins, Smith and possibly Lyon I don't think this is a particularly special Australian side, and the ones coming through often struggle when they come for spells in county cricket. Handscomb, for example, had years of underachievement for Gloucestershire and Middlesex before he finally came good in Leicester last year.
Imagine if the likes of Hull, Goodman, Rehan Ahmed, Bashir, Rew, Organ, Potts, Bethel were not just playing in the summer for their counties (or in a few cases, carrying drinks for England) but spending winters playing competitive cricket (again, not training camps) to really learn how to play in those conditions, at a level where they would be highly competitive.
Throw in a couple of wise old stagers to lead - say Madsen, Roland-Jones, Gregory or Northeast - and it could work.
It was tried with an A-tour to the West Indies domestic tournament in 2000-2001 and it did help develop several future Test cricketers, although none that were important in 2004. What it did do however was ram home to the management how bloody difficult touring conditions were in the Windies, which meant the planning of the itinerary for Vaughan's side was far better.
(Not applicable to the citizens of Hiroshima)
But yes, there were thousands of ways that peasants looked out for each other, in the expectation that this would be reciprocated.
Where we are so different to the past is how individualistic we are, and the way that for a lot of people, the goal is to maximise profit. Whereas, in the past, the goal was to avoid catastrophe.
WASHINGTON (AP) — At least 16 files from Epstein release disappeared from DOJ webpage, including photo of Trump, with no explanation.
https://x.com/Phil_Lewis_/status/2002490603297497550
And the redactions appear to favour alleged perpetrators over the victims.
Jane Doe Epstein Survivor, who reported Epstein to the FBI in 2009, sent the following letter to the Department of Justice today after it failed to redact her name in the release of the files.
I have confirmed her name is currently not redacted in multiple public files.
https://x.com/AaronParnas/status/2002556325004521955
Accepting that Jesus was a historical figure, he had to be born somewhere, but very unlikely that any biblical accounts represent the reality of it.
The scene you're looking for is the scene in Breaking Bad where Jesse goes to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting just to sell them drugs. Then gets angry. "Don't you understand? I'm just here to sell you more meth."
That is social media in a nutshell.
It's a dopamine hit designed to keep you scrolling for just long enough that the algo can a) learn a bit more about what pushes your buttons and b) can serve you an ad it thinks you will click. And it doesn't care if it pushes the worst shit imaginable on you, all it wants is to keep you scrolling for long enough to sell you that click
I have not used social media in five years and I used to sell it for a living. Take that for what you will.
I blocked Fox a decade ago, I block lots. Never read a shithead twice is the rule. And they still feed me his hate.
Social media is vile.
Monty was in the 70s, Bashir is close to 60.
For nostalgic fans, Emburey was 105, so my memories of England being incredibly boring and rubbish aren't wrong.
Ashwin is at 50 and Yadav's only played 14 tests despite having a strike rate less than 40!!
Did you know the bible is also strongly against wind turbines and pro-Russian fossil fuels? It's an amazing book. Not sure there's much more to it than that. But it lays it out quite clearly in a post about BA pilots back in 2021.
I still haven't found a better news feed than X, but it's a constant struggle to keep it bearable.
The only other thing I use is WhatsApp, which is OK (but crippled) if you turn off notifications completely. Otherwise it's just irritating.
https://x.com/jamestalarico/status/2002843689681645723
But if we do, tbe algo immediately thinks 'oh, he must want the OPPOSITE lot of shitheads'.
Good morning, everyone.
Well done to UAE authorities if he has indeed been deported.
Just about to head off to the supermarket.
Then it’s over. The Xmas shopping.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/12/22/tories-overtake-labour-in-polls-for-first-time-since-johnso/
Does it matter? Probably very little given how far we are out from an election, the Reform lead and that it's only a fraction of a percentage point anyway. Still, given how despised the Tories were in the middle of last year, I suppose it's an achievement of sorts.
The CCHQ champagne should stay firmly on ice for the moment though.
https://x.com/nafovoyager/status/2002986891797512199
Said to be the car of Major General Fanil Sarvarov, sounds like another senior scumbag eliminated.
Visited Bethlehem and Jerusalem in 2019 at the same time as the Eurovision Song Contest (my mistake didn't check) and the proposed visit to Jerusalem by Trump (my mistake didn't know). He had just agreed to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and the streets were lined with banners welcoming him almost as a 'messiah' or perhaps a John.
Trump has the ability to find a divisive issue and plump for the side that gives him a personal advantage. He is quite happy to become and ultra for that subject whether he believes it or not. He collects grievances and magnifies them like a human Twitter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_recognition_of_Jerusalem_as_capital_of_Israel
If - as I expect - the Tories are polling ahead of both Labour and Reform by the end of 2026, then they will have much to thank Kemi Badenoch for.
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