Napping. I wake as I hear my wife go downstairs. Birch trots down with her, clack clack clack. Seconds later, a scream. I think: I was dreaming before that, so I got the REM boost. Best get up and investigate.

As I enter the kitchen she screams again. She is staring intently at the light fixture over the island, holding a rolled-up glossy circular. Ah. The Flies.

About three days ago I saw a fly in the kitchen, and thought: isn’t a bit late for you fellows? Oughtn’t you have migrated, or whatever you do? Wife said it must have come from outdoors, but I think, well, Musca domestica, right? Doesn’t that suggest they come from indoors? We have no rotting piles anywhere, no breeding grounds, no compost pails. It’s a mystery. Well, it will die.

It did, but not before it called in all its kith and kin. For the last two days there have always been two flies in the kitchen. One is struck, another spawns. One is mashed against the window; another appears in the undercounter lights. The second she sees one, all thoughts are banished and her mind ordered to the ancient art of stalking and striking. The battered husk falls to the floor, where Birch snaps it up. He has begun to pitch in, watching intently as she gets on a chair to kill the fly, and occasionally making a great show of trying to catch one as it zips past. I got two myself, thanks to my stealthy approach and sure aim. It was probably old as well, and doing the fly equivalent of taking a nap. Probably not enjoying any REM, which would probably be hellish for a creature with compound eyes.

Then I made straight-ahead old-style unapologetic tacos. No cumin-garlic seasoning, no organic corn shells, no fresh pico de gallo, no freshly-grated artisanal cheddar. Just. Tacos. I had some ground beef I bought on sale that needed to be used today. It was a chub on the cusp, shall we say. I piled mine high with jalapenos, and realized only later I had jalapenos with each of the day's three meals. Breakfast was a single-egg (jumbo) omelette with jalapenos and sausage; lunch was the aforementioned bratwurst with jalapenos and cheese; supper was meat, cheese, and jalapenos. Yet each was delightfully different. Each had its own bright note that made the area beneath the eye attain a state of slight humidity, and each reminded me that the world is cold, but the food is hot. And you have to be alive to know the difference.

I went to the Tate Modern a few years ago, walking along the grey embankment on a day of low clouds. It is the fourth most popular museum in the world, a statistic I find astonishing. the Louvre, Vatican, and British museums are more popular, and reward repeat visiting. One visit to the Tate Modern's dismal storehouse was enough. The Tate Britain I could visit ten times more.

A review of the new Tate Modern exhibition of England in the 80s:

The exhibition covers the “long Eighties” (1977 to the dawn of the Nineties) and contrives to be both vast — more than 350 photographs and archival materials — and oddly narrow. The same themes — Aids, strikes, race — come up again and again, while other subjects are pushed to the margins or left out altogether.

I looked up, out of interest, the results of the 1981 census that found that around 95.4 per cent of the population was white, 2.7 per cent Asian and 1.5 per cent black. While it is right that under-documented groups should have their experience brought to the fore, this exhibition so skews the balance that you might believe that white Britons made up less than a quarter of the population and that they principally divided into bankers, miners and National Front thugs.

Is it dangerous to say this on English social media? Are those census stats racist? Nowadays just to state them is to imply something, according to the discord mongers. If you state the facts you must follow them with a condemnation of everything the facts suggest. Malevolent forces shaped that particular set of stats. They were the result of exclusion. It would have been better had not a compounding series of -isms prevented its formation.

The Times goes on:

The captions make you want to weep: “To explore fetish subcultures from a feminist perspective”; “His photographs interrogate a perceived tension between his heritage, spirituality and gay identity”; “Their artworks and writings challenge photography’s sexist and colonialist past, and its relationship to class politics. Rather than using the camera to stereotype, categorise, objectify or commodify, they use it to reclaim agency.”

Okay. “Hey, what do you do for a living?” “I reclaim agency.”

The Telegraph piece concludes: “To a certain kind of curator, trotting along on a high horse, its overarching focus may feel on point. But Tate’s audience is bigger and broader, and much of it will hate being told what to think.”

Will it? There will be many heads nodding at Marcuseian shibboleths shufflingpast on parade, thinking oh def if I’d lived back then I would so have been normalizing fetish subcultures in pathetic little-bleached-lily villages.

It’s like this Jaguar ad.

“Challenging boundaries,” the ad concludes.

There are no boundaries left to challenge. Everything outre is de rigeur. Everything shocking is hawking something. Everything avant is already guarded by the taste-maskers to ensure its unassailability. Anything goes but everything's gone, because the most obvious ad in the world today, the easiest, the least imaginative, stars the gender-neutral person in a dress with a sledgehammer.

It’s 1961.

The Mirror was an evening paper, and merged with the Times in 1962.

The what?

		THE WHAT?

I had no idea.

Project West Ford (also known as Westford Needles and Project Needles) was a test carried out by Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory on behalf of the United States military in 1961 and 1963 to create an artificial ionosphere above the Earth.[1] This was done to solve a major weakness that had been identified in military communications.

At the height of the Cold War, all international communications were either sent through submarine communications cables or bounced off the natural ionosphere. The United States military were concerned that the Soviets might cut those cables, forcing the unpredictable ionosphere to be the only means of communication with overseas forces.

To mitigate the potential threat, Walter E. Morrow started Project Needles at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 1958. The goal of the project was to place a ring of 480,000,000[3][4] copper dipole antennas in orbit to facilitate global radio communication. The dipoles collectively provided passive support to Project Westford's parabolic dish (located at the Haystack Observatory in the town of Westford) to communicate with distant sites.

It kinda sorta worked, but satellites made the project redundant. Oh:

As of April 2023, 44 clumps of needles larger than 10 cm were still known to be in orbit.

Keep that in mind if you're ever on a spacewalk and your suit suddenly doesn't feel pressurized anymore.

		Lesser-known names in the scandal. Neither Horan or Rosner figure in the Wikipedia entry on the quiz show cheat-fest.

Van Doren originally tried out for Tic Tac Dough, but the producers figured his tony tweedy vibe would be better for 21.

		Before there were FAFO social media videos, people had to content themselves with feel-good stories like this. The two molls came in with a knife, said “Give us the money, Pop, or we’ll kill you.” Gilbert goes fort the knife, can’t quite get it away, figures aw to hell with it, gets his 38 from the drawer and pops the frail in the mitt. He’d been in the Navy for 32 years and was regarded as an expert shot. “I figured I could shoot that knife out of her hand,” he told the paper. The story says it was his fifth hold-up in six years, and third time he’d “shot it out” with robbers. Gilbert pops up in a 1957 case where he gives testimony about another stick up. He’s described as an employee of Benson’s Liquor. Which still exists!

Which still exists! At least as of this writing.

		There seems to be a general agreement that he was killed by the locals. As in, he swam to shore from the foundered boat, after which he was killed, and eaten. Retaliation for the deaths of the three locals at the hands of the Dutch Patrol. Yes, the Dutch were in Indonesia doing stuff in 1961.

A Maniac!

He later turned himself in, and was deported to Yugoslavia. He’d knifed his brother-in-law’s family because . . . they put him in a mental institution.

Rote political cartoon du jour:

They were always called that. Peddlers. SMUT PEDDLERS. You can sing it to the tune of “Salt Peanuts,” I guess. Or think of the Tom Lehrer song, with its marvelous rhymes, and the way he lands on that last word.

And no one says it any more:

That doesn't seem right.

For subscribers, something later today:

That'll do. Next for you: ads aimed at 1960s restaurant managers, because that is what we are all about here.