mpk

This isn't the UK government or UK public education policy, to be fair on the UK. It's a £27,000-per-year private school in London - the sort that helps ram the possibly-not-so-bright kids of the wealthy through their GCSEs and A-Levels.

I like that take on it. This might explain why I always say "please" when asking Siri to do things and say "thank you" to the ATM after it gives me my money.

Huge graveyards seem to be a Catholic thing, IME, not least as the Holy Church of Rome remains pretty weird about cremation. In a lot of other countries grave plots aren't sold, only leased for a certain period of time, after which whatever bones remain are dug up and reburied along with all the other bones so the plot can be reused. They're more like safe spaces for decomposition where you can be reasonably certain that nobody's going to dig a hole to install a new drain and accidentally unearth Zombie Grandma.

I can only assume the 88 is a coincidence. it's just a coincidence, right? right?

Plenty of propaganda, but Smoky was a real cat -- was rescued from a bombed-out building after an air raid by the woman in the picture - Miss Ann Twynam of Paddington (a district of London). While I'm sure his saluting trick didn't involve taxidermy, I'm sure it involved bribery. Cats basically owned the black market in tuna during the war when pretty much everything was strictly rationed.

"Babe, you're looking Haplogroup I-M437 tonight. No. Not M-437. Damn, girl, you're an M-438."

Rather embarrassingly, Austria Post doesn’t do that but does have “crypto stamps” which are regular stamps only with a QR code linking to an NFT or something. To be fair to Austria Post, though, they are really good at extracting cash from the pockets of overexcitable stamp collectors with gimmickry like this. https://onlineshop.post.at/en-AT/page/crypto-stamp

“Food truck culture” is pretty much a hipsterism as far as I can tell. It’s a posh way of describing regular food of a sort that often gets sold from the back of a van everywhere except it’s made by and for white people and costs twice as much. Their original purpose of selling affordable food reasonably quickly to workers who want some hot food instead of bringing their own lunch to work but don’t have a long enough break to go anywhere to eat was gentrified away a while back.

One of the things I miss about living in Switzerland is that both of the major supermarket groups had lots of self-checkouts and they were the trusting sort, not the ones which weigh everything constantly and hate you. The advantage of an economy with low unemployment and where supermarket work pays a living wage, I guess.

An "Oops, racism!" incident is pretty much inevitable as well, of course.

Frickin' laser beams or GTFO. A gunbot with a metal-projectile weapon taped to its arm is like something out of a dystopian sci-fi movie where they've lost all the knowledge needed to build new tech.

Well, "Man who wrote some code mostly based on other people's code a very long time ago and parlayed that into media darling status and a lucrative income" is a bit long-winded.