So much for love?

Italy’s famous Lovers’ Arch collapses into the sea on Valentine’s Day

The famous arch of the sea stacks at Sant’Andrea in Melendugno, Puglia, Italy, popularly known as Lovers’ Arch, collapsed on Valentine’s Day after strong storm surges and heavy rain swept across southern Italy.
The rocky arch, one of the best-known natural landmarks on the Adriatic coast, got its name as it served as a backdrop for wedding proposals, selfies and postcards, and was one of the most recognisable symbols of the Salento, one of Italy’s most heavily visited tourist areas. […]
According to local authorities, strong winds, rough seas and intense rainfall in recent days progressively weakened the rock structure until its final collapse on Saturday. It is the most significant damage inflicted by coastal erosion on the landscape of the Salento. […]
Mediterranean cyclones, known as medicanes, include Cyclone Harry which struck in January, have been devastating ports, homes and roads, reshaping the structure of coastlines. Medicanes are warm-core systems that are becoming increasingly frequent in the Mediterranean, driven by rising sea temperatures linked to the climate emergency.
“With the Mediterranean [experiencing] among its hottest years on record in 2025, warmer seas are supercharging the atmosphere and fuelling extreme events,” said Christian Mulder, a professor of ecology and climate emergency at the University of Catania in Sicily.

Is it just me or is the symbolism in this story ever so slightly on the nose? Obviously not a funny situation on the whole, of course, cos obviously climate change is having bad effects, but something about the timing of this particular bad effect was kind of marvellous…

Second Best

This would be a kind of desolate photo anyway, but it’s even more so when you know that’s Jimmy Nicol, temporary Beatle… that’s him at Melbourne airport after completing his task of filling in for Ringo on the Fabs’ mid-1964 tour when the latter was ill; once he was good to go again, Nicol was good to go back to the UK and obscurity. I found this on Threads via the Flashbak account there, and some of the commenters on that post were kind of swooning about what a great experience that must’ve been and how he’d always be able to say he’d been a Beatle. And I was interested to discover George Harrison actually threatened to pull out of the tour if Ringo couldn’t play; once they’d calmed him down and all agreed that getting someone to take Ringo’s place was better than just cancelling those shows, Jimmy was brought on board as the ringer for Ringo (sorry).

But what good did it do him? Piss all, apparently; he went from being a relative nobody to the fame of being Ringo’s stunt double and being huge for ten days and then pretty much back to relative nobodyness. Nine months after his Beatles stint, he was bankrupt. Apparently when Paul McCartney read this news, he was moved enough to get him a gig with Peter and Gordon on their 1965 tour, and that seems to have been all he otherwise got from the Beatles. By and large it seems he’d rather forget having been a Beatle, and apparently when he was approached to be part of the Anthology he refused. Per Wiki, he’s apparently still alive but hasn’t been seen in public since the early 2010s. And that photo just became so much grimmer after I’d done that bit of reading on him.

A thousand lights look at you

I’ve always been a bit iffy about the Stooges, in that I think they never made a fully successful album (never heard The Weirdness nor Ready to Die, admittedly), though you’d have a great best-of made from the highlights of the first three albums. On re-listening to Fun House this evening, I may have to revise that somewhat. I have it on CD but I listened to it a ripped-from-vinyl form tonight, a rip of the new Rhino High Fidelity repress obtained from my usual hush-hush sources… and while I’m still not perhaps 100% convinced, it worked a lot better for me in this form than it ever has before. There’s a coherence and consistency and direction to it I don’t think I’ve entirely appreciated before. I also played it at somewhat higher volume than I normally do, which possibly made a difference. Maybe that’s what I should’ve done all along.

Whatever, it is awfully pleasant to revisit something you’ve known for years and find you like it more than you did before, though I do still think “TV Eye” should’ve been the opening track. The band wanted “Loose” to be the opener, and I understand that, but the record label preferred “Down on the Street”. And with all due respect, both parties were wrong; Iggy shouting “LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOORD!” the way he does would’ve been a hell of a way to kick off proceedings, kind of like if the Beatles had ended Abbey Road with “I Want You”…

Bye?

Tommy Robinson flees UK claiming he’s ‘a priority target for ISIS’

FAR-RIGHT agitator Tommy Robinson has claimed that he has fled the country because he is a priority target for terror group Daesh.
Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, posted a video on X/Twitter, sharing what he alleges are conversations between himself and Bedfordshire Police.
The video purports that police informed Robinson that a Daesh publication is “encouraging others to commit violence” against him.
The three-minute long video has been viewed over 280,000 times, with Robinson posting a link to donate underneath the post. […]
In the footage, Robinson appears to be having a conversation with someone from Bedfordshire Police on speaker phone.
The publication is reportedly called Yalgaar, a propaganda magazine linked to Daesh that is proscribed material.
Robinson asks for a copy of the magazine but is told that he could be charged with a terrorism offence if he accesses it.
The person on the phone then tells Robinson that this does not mean that he can legally carry a weapon for self-defence, or take any pre-emptive action.

Like that would stop this silly cunt anyway? I don’t know, something about this feels off, and not just the idea that ISIS thinks he’s that important or even knows he exists… I mean, why was this putative conversation being recorded in the first place. Does Stevo just record every incoming phone call as a matter of course? Have Bedfordshire police confirmed the authenticity of call? Has he even left the UK at all? Cos some airline must have a record of taking him somewhere… And this call for donations? Yeah, the bullshit is strong with this one, all right:

The video then cuts to a black and white slow-motion video of Robinson walking in front of a Wizz Air plane on a runway, with the caption: “Tommy has now left the country.”
It adds: “Tommy is looking into relocating his family for their safety. Please can you help with this, and any ongoing security costs.”
A web address to donate then appears across the bottom of the screen.
The link leads to a “secure donation” website, which reads: “Help support Tommy and his work for a better future for the UK.
“Tommy has invested time and risks everything daily to speak and act on behalf of the people. Help him to help you more!
“Together we will Make England Great Again and Unite The Kingdom.”

Stevo cares for his family so much he made sure he was somewhere safe before they were. And Uniting the Kingdom by making England great again? Do the other countries in the UK just go and fuck themselves? Does whoever wrote this shit thinks the Scots will just let the English “be great” by themselves? There’s only so much bullshit even we’ll put up with from those southerners…

I’m shocked, shocked, etc.

Elon Musk posted about race almost every day in January

Elon Musk’s longtime fixation on a white racial majority is intensifying. The richest man in the world posted about how the white race was under threat, made allusions to race science or promoted anti-immigrant conspiracy content on 26 out of 31 days in January, according to the Guardian’s analysis of his social media output. The posts, made on his platform X, reflect a renewed embrace of what extremism experts describe as white supremacist material.
“Whites are a rapidly dying minority,” Musk said on 22 January, a short time before taking the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, while reposting an Irish anti-immigrant influencer’s video about demographic change.
Musk’s posts included him repeatedly claiming white people face systemic discrimination, endorsing the conspiracy that there is an ongoing genocide against white people in countries around the world and promoting a claim that white people would be “slaughtered” by non-whites if they become a demographic minority.
“If you stripped Elon Musk’s name off of these things and showed them to me, I would think that this was a white supremacist,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Extremism, who reviewed a selection of the posts.
Musk has for years promoted anti-immigrant and far-right content in his posts, as well as endorsed rightwing activists and political parties around the globe. The Tesla CEO’s most recent output displays a more consistent and explicit engagement with white supremacist content and nativist activists than in the past, however, lending them the imprimatur of the world’s richest person and spreading their ideas to his audience of over 200 million followers. Beirich said he appeared “deep into the world of white nationalism”.

Yes. Yes he has. People who have been paying attention have long since known this about him. I’m not sure why the Graun is presenting this as news. Still, it’s never not good to have Edolf’s bullshit on record like this. But at least he’s also willing to stand up for the Chinese…

Apparently what’s really behind this particular outburst is that he’s pissed because he can’t use Anthropic’s Claude AI thing to develop Grok because Claude’s terms of use specifically ban users from using it to build their own other things, or something like that. But in any case, Claude is apparently racist, heterophobic and misandrist. No one seems to be sure why he invoked this book at the end of his post nor what it has to do with anything, and he chose the name “X” for his own company so it’s not he has any right to mock others… Whatever, though, he’s just made himself look like a complete tit, which, again, is no surprise to anyone who used the Internet at all…

Well done Angus, etc.

Via the estimable Terry Sedgwick on FB:

So that’s two weirdly unsurprising things happened in local politics this week: the Coalition reunited again and Sussan Ley got the arse as Liberal leader. And this apparently leaves the Coalition with a potentially complicated parting gift:

[Ley] intends to resign in coming weeks, sparking a by-election in her massive western New South Wales electorate.
It could be a very interesting and complicated election.
Having served a few weeks longer than Alexander Downer did in 1994-95, and a couple of weeks less than Brendan Nelson after the defeat of the Howard government in 2007, Ley’s leadership is the second-shortest of any federal Liberal leader.
But her tenure as the member for Farrer is the second-longest in the seat’s history.
The seat was held by former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, a National, until his retirement in 2001.

This could be a headache on two fronts, one being the resurgence of One Nation who are going to want the seat, and the other being the Coalition’s own rules… under which, the sitting member in a Coalition-held seat isn’t challenged by the other side at election time, if the sitting member is Liberals then the Nationals don’t put up a candidate, and vice versa. But when there’s a by-election and there is no sitting member, it’s fair game for both sides… and given they’ve both only just patched up their differences, they probably don’t need this sort of potential tension. Ley has been saying things about clearing the way for Angus Taylor by not sticking around to undermine him, but I feel this is more like leaving a big steaming shit on his doorstep out of spite…

As for Angus Taylor himself…

…THIS is still what he’s best known for all these years, i.e. providing Australia with one of the great social media self-owns. But what has he done otherwise that was actually, you know, useful instead of just inadvertently comedic? I mean, he lost to Sussan Ley at the Liberal leadership contest after the last election; he was clearly considered so piss-poor that the Libs would rather vote for a woman of all things. Today Malcolm Turnbull was calling him the best-qualified idiot the party had ever met. I can’t believe the party couldn’t find a better option; obviously Sussan’s time was up (and I’m kind of impressed they let a woman run them for so long anyway), but was no one else available? This dickhead is the best they can do? How does Dave Shittleproud feel? Eh, whatever. As long as people (especially Labor) keep using that gift of a Facebook fuck-up against him while he’s there, cos that’s what matters most of all…

Who rules over you, etc

“THEIR head of state”? Oh Albo. What an interesting phrase, and an unfortunate one too. I can see those words being repeated throught racist and antisemitic propaganda of the sort spread by The Noticer (and, as the article notes, further spread by certain far-right characters in our so-called government), questioning whether Australian Jews place their loyalties with Israel ahead of Australia… cos if I, er, noticed the potential implications of that choice of words, I’ve no doubt the cunt behind that “news” site did so too. Not exactly what our Jewish friends need right now.