Trump’s imagination, caring for customers, and whether Trump is really a woman

26 July 2025

While the bigwigs are trashing societies and economies worldwide, here’s some light relief in a selection of irresistible and utterly forgettable facts.

Have you noticed that Trump’s combover has been gradually re-dyed from blonde to grey?  Curiously, the much-published photograph of him with Jeffrey Epstein (which incidentally proves to his complete satisfaction that he was never close to Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell so his name cannot possibly appear in the Epstein files that he’s desperately trying to stop being published) … where was I? … oh yes, the photo shows his hair was originally brown.

During his first presidency, he made 30,573 false or misleading claims during his first four years as president. The Washington Post counted them.

I wonder when Donald Trump will realise his country was named after a filthy foreigner and needs to be renamed.  Trumpton would work and Trump could change his name to Captain Flack, the head honcho in Trumpton fire station (younger readers overseas may need to google this).

I generally try not to criticise people for physical features that are not of their choice, like height or physical abnormalities, but I do have great difficulty watching Trump when he purses his mouth into a shape that exactly matches a textbook anus.

A friend of mine has an EE phone.  When it broke recently, they bought a new phone that had to be verified by a code which, in a stroke of genius, EE sent to the old phone with the damaged SIM card.

This is the sort of unintelligent disregard for customers you expect from Ryanair.  I flew with Ryanair once, some 30 years ago, in the days before they sold flights for a token amount and then gave you the choice of paying extra to sit next to your violent, autistic child or to save money by letting a stranger sit next to them while you catch up on your sleep.

Anyway, our outbound flight was OK apart from landing us at an airport some 15km from Rome and bussing us into the centre.  When we left, they bussed us back to the airport before telling us all their UK flights that day had been cancelled but they could book us on a flight 4 days later, which left a lot of irate passengers trying to find other ways home.  All other direct flights were full, as were trains, so we had to buy an extra night in the hotel and spend a fortune on scheduled flights back the next day, via Prague.

I naturally wrote to the CEO, Michael O’Leary, about this and asked if could think of any reason why anybody should fly Ryanair.  He ultimately answered “reliability and price” so I pointed out he obviously hadn’t read my original letter and told him not to bother to reply.

Ryanair’s attitude to their customers is clear on their website:  they’ll fly you to Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark, but you’ll actually land in Malmö in Sweden.  Likewise, they’ll take you to Florence but you’ll land in Pisa.  O’Leary was once famously quoted as saying he’d wipe somebody’s bottom for a fiver, which perfectly sums up his character.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, aka Tommy Robinson to avoid frightening the peasants, is out of prison and in the news again, at least in Epping.  Lucy Brown, once part of his inner circle that includes the son of one of the Krays, a Canadian far-right publisher and a criminal convicted of threatening to slash the throat of a shopkeeper during a robbery, has described him as impulsive.

She has said “He’ll just rush in, straight away, whatever feels right at the time. He just does not think. Which is why he falls in [to] prison all the time, because he’s always saying stuff that he shouldn’t.”

More management disdain for the people who pay them was seen at the Nationwide Building Society’s AGM last week when an increase in the CEO’s pay of 43% was ‘approved’ (though voters didn’t actually have the power to stop it) and Debbie Crosbie will snaffle £7m of the assets of a mutual society that belongs to its members (who described the increase as “an obscenity” and “hypocritical”).

Another needy CEO is Trump himself, whose ratings are falling daily.  Increasingly, Americans are leaving their home country because they can see Trump destroying it, and many of them are relocating to the Cotswolds (formerly known as the Couttswolds because so many rich Brits live there).  One of the latest immigrants (who, according to my taxi driver last week, are the sole cause of all Britain’s problems) is the American comedian and former chatshow host Ellen DeGeneres and her wife, the actor Portia de Rossi.

This seems diametrically opposed to right wing claims that Britain’s millionaires are emigrating in droves to pay even less tax elsewhere, but who lets contradictory facts stand in the way of a good slogan.

A possible side effect of one of Trump’s ill-considered decisions is that he should consider himself to be female.  One of his first acts as president was to sign an order that gender is “immutably” defined at the moment of conception, saying “‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell …’Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”  Which reveals his total ignorance of human biology.

In fact, for the first 6-7 weeks after conception, it isn’t possible to determine the gender of a foetus because a Y chromosome doesn’t start to develop testes until then.  However, most scientists now accept that sex is not immutably anything and gender is much more complex than just being male or female.

Trump’s unrecorded response to this criticism was “Bollocks to that, or not, as the case may be”.

Still, it does pave the way for an antique joke:  “How do you tell the sex of a chromosome?” / “Take its genes down.”

More ‘magic’, billions, water companies, justice and immigration

17 May 2025

After last week’s mutterings, a friend suggested migration could be added to the list of currently inexplicable things, which made me realise I’d inadvertently been anthropocentric and ignored insects, birds, fish and mammals that migrate for thousands of miles.

The best known is probably the arctic tern which commutes some 15,000 miles between summers in Shetland and summers in Antarctica but they have the ability to sleep while flying, closing down half their brain while the other half keeps the wings moving. 

Perhaps more impressive is the monarch butterfly which migrates annually between North America and Mexico and, though less well-known, the painted lady butterfly which travels between Africa and Northern Europe.  How do they do it?  It’s been suggested that they use the earth’s magnetic field to control their journeys but this is constantly changing as the magnetic poles move so they have to allow for the effect of the deviation if they want to get to the right place.

However, what I find most impressive is the fact that monarch butterflies don’t live very long and each migration is undertaken by newly-hatched butterflies that have never done it before so the route, and the allowance for magnetic pole movements, must somehow be genetically imprinted in their brains.

What will they do when the magnetic poles swap positions, which the alignment of magnetic particles in ancient rocks has shown they do?  It’s thought the swap doesn’t happen overnight and takes a very long time so perhaps the poles just drift away from the geographical poles until they reach the other end of the earth and the North Star becomes the South Star while the Southern Cross becomes the Northern Cross.  And, of course, half-way they’ll be the Eastern Star and the Western Cross, or possibly vice versa.

Many readers may remember my continuing problem with envisaging large numbers, like anything over 10.  Well, I’ve come across another example of just how impossible it is to grasp large numbers and the differences between them.  To help me picture the difference between a million and a billion, I was told to think in seconds:  one million seconds is about 12 days while one billion seconds is about 32 years.

Aaarrrggghhh!

I hope the people with more billions in the bank than they can ever spend will, if governments are too frightened to make them pay more tax, give it away to those people and countries whose need is so much greater.  I also hope that the wind is changing.  Last week, 40% of Centrica’s shareholders voted against the board’s recommended pay plans.  Chris O’Shea, the group’s chief executive trousered £4.3m last year and, yes, he took almost twice as much the previous year but the energy crisis encouraged them to impose huge increases on their customers’ energy bills, taking many of them even further into debt, while O’Shea (and other senior managers) get away with daylight robbery.

Thames Water (the one on the verge of bankruptcy) has a new CEO, Chris Weston, who took a £195,000 bonus after only three months in post and was asked by the Defra Select Committee to justify this.  “Because I’m worth it” he replied.  Can anybody can think of any sensible justification for saying this?

The government is now planning to block the payment of huge staff bonuses from a £3bn emergency loan to Thames Water, which claims these bonuses are vital to retaining its management and that they are its most valuable asset.  Whaaat?  Aren’t these the same managers that screwed everything up in the first place and led to the company being fined millions of pounds?

Down here, South West Water is owned by the Pennon Group and has increased our bill by 30% for the next year while chief executive Susan Davy generously waived her right to bonuses in the two years to March 2024 leaving her with a paltry £860,000 in the latter year (including the deferred reinvestment of shares).  My heart fails to bleed for her.

There’s also something wrong with our justice system when a peaceful Stop Oil protestor is sent to prison for 4 years and a violent child rapist gets 18 months.

And Peter Sullivan, 68, has spent the last 38 years in prison for a murder that forensic evidence has now decided he didn’t commit.

Another interesting comment came my way this week, something I hadn’t heard before, that the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu once said, “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”

So which side should I take on Labour’s latest plans to curb immigration?  Keir Starmer this week spoke of a need to end the “squalid experiment in open borders” in what cynics might describe as an attempt to win Reform voters.  What self-respecting Respect member would be willing to support Labour?  It’s believed Nigel Farage celebrated Starmer’s comments with a bevvy and a fag.

Others saw a connection between Starmer’s view and the ‘rivers of blood’ speech given by the Conservative racist Enoch Powell in 1968.

Next week, all state benefits will be scrapped to encourage recipients to get on their bikes and find work (thank you Norman Tebbit, another ancient Conservative politician, for that suggestion) and the Isle of Wight will be declared an independent territory with 0% taxes through which all UK ‘earnings’ over £250,000 can be channelled tax-free.

And an old story to cheer people up.  The King of Sweden once visited Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize winner who holds 50 honorary degrees and is former President of the Royal Society and Chief Executive and Director of the Francis Crick Institute.  On the royal arrival, the receptionist rang Nurse’s office and said “Gentleman here, he’s … er … watcher say yer king of, mate?”

It may never happen / It already did

1 March 2025

On being challenged this week over having previously called Volodymyr Zelenskyy “a dictator”, Donald Trump said “Did I say that? I can’t believe I said that.”  Then, yesterday, the self-acclaimed dealmaker failed to bully Zelenskyy into signing a deal in an unedifying performance that left me greatly relieved and (still) rooting for Ukraine; which just goes to prove either that one swallow doth not a summer make or that a successful comedian makes a better president than a failed nepo baby.

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified a psychological condition that leads some people to overestimate their abilities.  Now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, it isn’t related to intelligence but it deals with somebody’s ability to judge their competence in a particular area.  People of low ability in a particular field tend to think they’re more skilled than they actually are, which leads to overconfidence and consequential errors of judgement in the field. 

On Wednesday, Volker Türk, the UN head of human rights presented a report on the human rights situation in Gaza, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem saying “Nothing justifies the appalling manner in which Israel has conducted its military operations in Gaza, which consistently breached international law” and that “Hamas has indiscriminately fired projectiles into Israeli territory – amounting to war crimes.”  So they’re both horrid, which is no surprise but little consolation to the many innocents on both sides who have lost families, friends and homes.

Medics and general healthcare workers are protected under International Law but hundreds of them who were working in Gaza have been captured by Israel.  Some have now been released under the ceasefire agreement but at least 160 are still being held prisoner and some of Gaza’s most senior doctors who were released have said they were tortured, beaten and humiliated in Israeli prisons.  In exchange, Hamas is returning hostages it took during its surprise attack on Israel that started this latest episode of the war between them;  some of them are even still alive.

Further south, with a touch of west, it’s estimated that, so far this year, about 7,000 people have been killed in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, including hundreds of women who were raped and burnt, when M23, a Rwandan rebel group, freed male prisoners from the Congolese city of Goma.  Despite the decades-old conflict, Rwanda continues to deny any official links with M23 or any interest in land to the south of Goma in the DRC which (quite coincidentally) has rich mineral deposits.

This is, of course, the same Rwanda that the last government believed would be a good place to send migrants who had risked their lives crossing the Channel to reach safety in the UK.  In 2022, a UK court accepted comments from a Foreign Office adviser who had said “Political opposition is not tolerated [in Rwanda] and arbitrary detention, torture and even killings are accepted methods of enforcing control.” 

When asked about this, Priti Patel who was Home Secretary at the time, replied “You are referring to comments made from officials in a different government department but of course it is the Home Office who has led the economic development migration partnership which is our resettlement partnership to Rwanda.  Rwanda is a safe country and all our work with the government of Rwanda shows that.”

Patel resigned later that year.

According to a recent report from MPs on the Public Accounts Committee, HS2 is “a casebook example of how not to run a major project” and it is “unacceptable that, over a decade into the programme, we still do not know what it will cost, what the final scope will be, when it will finally be completed or what benefits it will deliver”.  Did it really take a bunch of MPs to discover this?

This week, the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported that, in January, sales of new Tesla cars in Europe were 45% lower than the same month last year, dropping from 18,161 last year to 9,945 this year.

Tesla is now keen to discover why this happened.  It’s known that, after the initial excitement, Teslas earned a poor reputation for reliability and many more manufacturers have introduced electric models to compete with them but analysts are now trying to discover whether Elon Musk’s lurch to the political right might be putting people off buying his cars. 

They also need to remember that the early adopters have already bought the things and many of us who like the principle of electric vehicles are waiting for more advanced technology that won’t leave piles of dead batteries full of toxic waste in ten years’ time.  Some of us also suffer range anxiety if we have family and friends at the other end of the country. 

Every time I file my own electricity meter readings, I’m treated to a piece of fascinating but trivial information by QI Elves and yesterday it was “The Sun rotates around its axis every 26 days but, because it’s made of gas, different bits rotate at different speeds.”  This worried me.  If different bits rotate at different speeds, which bit do you choose to measure the speed of its rotation?

While talking about the sky, I assume you were all stargazing yesterday evening when seven planets lined up in a ‘planetary parade’ (which means they appear in a straight line when we look at them from here), a rare sort of super-syzygy that won’t happen again till 2040.

Some worrying news this week came from Luton where a 19-year-old has admitted murdering his mother and two younger siblings and other offences including the possession of a kitchen knife in a public place.  Since this last one is obviously a criminal offence, I’m now feeling very nervous about popping into Lakeland to replace an old kitchen knife.

But, distracted by something else, I did find one interesting piece of information this week:  Kristian Matsson, a Swedish singer-songwriter who performs under the stage name ‘The Tallest Man on Earth’, measures 1.7m (5’7”) from end to end.

A mixture of stuff including onomatopoeia, kindness, stupidity and sleep

9 December 2023

A friend has a spirit guide, Soon Rain, who left their wisdom for us when they were elevated from their corporeal existence on earth, leaving behind a memorial shrine and spiritual sanctuary at Aps-Thab.  One such gem was “If someone doesn’t understand words, draw pictures”.

This has been taken up in Japan, whose foreign population is reaching record levels as more immigrants arrive to fill gaps in the workforce. but not all of them are fluent in Japanese.  Volunteers for a non-profit group in the western prefecture of Mie have therefore produced a guide to commonly used onomatopoeic words and illustrated them with pictures to show what they mean, and verbal descriptions in Chinese, Vietnamese, Nepalese and Indonesian. 

The whole point of onomatopoeia is that the sound of the word conjures up a vision of what it describes – like ‘slurp’ in English for example – but Japanese likes repeating words to emphasise their meaning in everyday situations.  One of the most ‘obvious’ of the Japanese examples is tsuru tsuru, which warns that the floor is slippery – the exact sound of feet slipping on a wet floor (which omits the exclamation that follows).

Another gem was “If you can’t be careful, be kind” and Åsa Koski, a municipality worker in Luleå, a small town in northern Sweden, has launched a ‘Säg hej’ campaign which encourages people to say “Hi!” to each other in the street.

The idea is that, if you’re greeted by a passing stranger, it makes people feel a little bit better about themselves.  It works down here in the country of course – and dog walkers are obliged to stop and exchange compliments about the other’s dog even if they’re jumping up and leaving muddy footprints on our jeans – but remember we have to be careful doing this in a city’s back streets, or even the main streets.  Isn’t that sad.

This news inspired a letter in the Guardian remembering the old New Statesman competition to find the best advice to a foreigner coming to London for the first time.  It was won by Gerard Hoffnung with “On entering a railway compartment, make sure to shake hands with all the passengers.”  Another of his suggestions was to try “the famous echo of the reading room in the British Museum”.

As a raconteur, his style was mannered and squeezed every last second out of dramatic pauses, but it worked.  His most famous story is probably a bricklayer’s request for sick leave, a 1958 audio recording of which can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZUJLO6lMhI.

Tragically, he had a cerebral haemorrhage in September 1959 and died three days later at the age of 34.

The guru Soon Rain also said “If people are poor, screw them.”         

One of the major triumphs of Margaret Thatcher’s reign was to allow people to buy houses they’d previously been renting from local councils with the inevitable result that 40% of housing stock is now in the hands of private landlords and tenants are now paying extortionate rents to them instead of into the public purse. 

What didn’t occur to Thatcher was that this didn’t reduce the number of people on the waiting lists, it just reduced the number of houses available for them.

Her other parallel triumph was to privatise the utilities, starting with BT in the 1980s, allowing us all to become shareholders in the ‘new’ business so its ownership would be spread amongst all those who used it and we would become a nation of shareholders.

There was a huge marketing campaign at the time (“Tell Sid”) to make us all greedy to own a share in the body that was providing services for us.    I refused to buy any at the time because I didn’t see why I should pay more for a service that, as a taxpayer, I already owned but friends of mine made profits by buying shares and then selling them.  Then they cashed in their profits and sold the shares.

This was entirely predictable, as was the end result that, in 1979, before this first sale, 7% of us had money invested in shares.  Eleven years later, following lots of other similar sell-offs by the government and then the individual investors, 8% of us have money invested in shares, so that didn’t work either.

I did once hear something interesting about Thatcher when a key person was late for a board meeting attended by a close friend of mine.  When he did finally bounce in, he apologised for being late and explained he’d been helping Margaret and Denis hide their money so that, when the law caught up with their idiot son Mark, their money would be safe. 

In a survey carried out by the property website Rightmove, the London borough of Richmond is the “happiest place to live in Great Britain”.  It’s also, of course, home to some stunningly expensive houses which is either coincidental or it means that the people who can afford them don’t have to cross paths every day with the hoi polloi who can’t afford them so of course they say they’re happy.

I nearly lived there for several years when I was in my twenties:  I actually lived on a boat moored on the opposite bank so, technically, I lived in St Margarets but Richmond centre and station were much closer. 

A study of the sleep patterns of chinstrap penguins on King George Island in Antarctica shows that they apparently nod off more than 10,000 times a day so they keep a constant (well, presumably, almost constant) eye on their eggs and chicks.  Despite sleeping only for seconds at a time, they still manage 11 hours a day and – here’s one for next year’s IgNobel Prize competition – Paul-Antoine Libourel, from Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre has said “Sleep is much more complex in its diversity than what we read about in most textbooks.”

Which made me think of a lorry I saw last week with “Transport and Plant Training” painted on the side which immediately conjured up a picture of the driver telling an aspidistra how to jump up onto the back of a lorry so they could take it to Kew.

It’s probably time for my pill …