What The Actual !!!

Breaking up with me and then expecting me to cheer you up is quite the aftercare package. Sadly, discontinued. Miss Me on Your Own by Rose Static 🤎 His jacket’s with the neighbour. youtu.be/S-ob0qP3-gM

Lord Ashcroft’s new poll for the Mail on Sunday has Labour on 31, the Tories on 26 and Reform on 18. Cue champagne in Tory HQ. Small detail, though. This isn’t the usual “who would you vote for?” approach. Respondents score their likelihood of voting for each party from 0 to 100, with a threshold of 50 and turnout weighting. Ashcroft says his approach tends to find Reform a few points lower than other pollsters. He’s also a former Conservative deputy chairman. That doesn’t automatically make his numbers wrong. It does make reading the methodology rather more useful than admiring the headline. Farage has been calling this week’s polling “jiggery pokery”. Ashcroft’s camp points out Nigel wasn’t complaining when they had Reform nine points ahead. Fair. Annoyingly fair. Politicians love a poll until it stops loving them back. Source: [Poll results and methodology reporting] dailymail.com/news/article-1…

November 1970, Oregon. A 45 foot, eight-ton dead whale is stinking out the beach. The highway department’s solution? Twenty cases of dynamite. Half a ton of the stuff. The beach erupted, blubber rained down, and a three foot chunk flattened the roof of Walter Umenhofer’s new Oldsmobile. His verdict: “My insurance company’s never going to believe this.” Plot twist: the state’s insurer paid him full retail value eleven days later. Imagine filling in that claim form. Accident, theft, fire… airborne whale. What the actual!!! Source: [Contemporary newspaper report] theexplodingwhale.com/eviden…

“Stop shrinking to fit places you've outgrown.” Quieter in meetings. Polite about rubbish behaviour. Laughing at jokes that genuinely aren't funny. All that effort to make everyone else comfortable, and what do you get? A sore neck from all the nodding. If a room only likes you when you're half yourself, it's not your room. Get your coat, love.

Who answers the door at quarter to four? With the river coming up the stairs and June hammering on the glass, you’d want to be the neighbour who does. Wake the Whole Street, my new blues-rock track as Rose Static, is out now. 🎸 youtu.be/qAnmYBDM35Q

You can play against a stranger online. But if you’re under 16, the government plans to stop you talking to them. “Behind you!” Apparently that’s where the policy gets complicated. The under 16 social media ban is planned for spring 2027. Restrictions on chatting with strangers in games are also planned, but don’t have a start date yet. Protecting children matters. So does asking how these checks work. The government acknowledges more adults will have to verify their age too. That doesn’t automatically mean handing over a passport, but it does mean another check between you and something you used to just use. Can we discuss whether this actually works without pretending everyone asking questions wants children left unprotected? Source for reference: [Government online-safety fact sheet] gov.uk/government/publicatio…

Rehearsing my coffee order for the entire queue. Twelve people. Silently mouthing it like I'm prepping an Oscars speech. Get to the front. “Hiya, can I get a... um... a... the brown one?” Every. Single. Time.

I wrote a love song for the person who steals your toast and somehow still gets invited back for breakfast. 💙 Making Room for Two by Rose Static. The official lyric video is out now 🎶 youtu.be/i-vcz2jUPuU

Energy independence. Lovely phrase. Slightly odd name for a bill banning new North Sea oil and gas exploration licences while we still need oil and gas. Existing fields can carry on, so no, nobody’s switching the whole North Sea off tomorrow. But Labour MP Graham Stringer calling imports over domestic production “crazy and perverse” does rather puncture the sales pitch. Meanwhile, a leaked EU negotiating draft reportedly wants UK payments and restrictions on deporting European offenders as part of an electricity-market deal. Britain hasn’t agreed to those demands. Important distinction. Still, between importing energy and negotiating the price of access, “independence” is doing an impressive amount of heavy lifting. Sources for reference: [North Sea bill reporting] independent.co.uk/news/uk/po… [EU negotiating draft reporting] independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho…

In 1958 the US Air Force studied a real, top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon. It was called Project A119. The point? A flash visible from Earth to impress everyone during the Cold War. A young Carl Sagan worked on modelling the dust cloud. Not a better telescope. Not a nice flag. A nuclear explosion. Grown men. With funding. What the actual!!!

“If your peace needs everyone to agree, that isn’t peace. That’s a hostage situation.” Some people don’t want a conversation. They want an audience that claps on cue. The second you disagree, suddenly you’re “the problem.” Guard your opinions like your house keys. Not everyone who knocks deserves to come in. What the actual!!!

Newcastle defender Amar Dedić went for what sounds like a perfectly ordinary walk with his archery gear near a Northumberland reservoir. A passerby panicked. Northumbria Police sent six patrol cars including armed units chased his car seven miles, and seized the lot. Teammates even stopped to help while he was being questioned. Police later confirmed recreational use, no public threat. Six cars and armed officers. For a man with a hobby bow. Knife crime? Good luck getting half that response. What the actual!!!

You open the fridge. You stare into it like it owes you answers. You close it. You walk away. Then you open it again thirty seconds later, as if the contents might have reinvented themselves into a three-course meal while you were gone. They haven’t. It’s still the same sad yoghurt and a jar of something you bought in 2023 “for a recipe.” What the actual!!!

So Labour’s Conversion Practices Bill is sailing through with penalties of up to five years. Philosopher Kathleen Stock and a few others who’ve actually read the wording are pointing out the obvious: under a vague enough definition, a parent saying “love, you’re a girl” could be treated like an abuser. Supporters swear there are safeguards. There always are, until there aren’t. We’ve reached the bit where the state wants the power to criminalise ordinary parenting, and you’re the bigot for noticing. What the actual!!!

I stand with Donald Trump 🇺🇸

So in 1814, London didn’t just have a rough Tuesday it had a literal beer tsunami. A 22 foot vat at Meux’s Horse Shoe Brewery burst and sent a 15 foot wave of porter tearing through St Giles. Houses collapsed. Eight people died. And the coroner’s verdict? Basically “oops, misfortune.” The brewery nearly went under… until the taxman kindly gave them a rebate on the beer that flooded the streets. Only in this country could you drown a neighbourhood in ale and still claim it back on expenses. What the actual!!!

Imagine being born in Antarctica, where temperatures can plunge below −40°C, and your parents’ solution is to dress you in the world’s fluffiest onesie. 🐧❄️ That’s essentially life for an emperor penguin chick. Those adorable grey bundles of fluff are covered in insulating down that helps trap warm air close to their bodies. The catch? Their baby feathers aren’t waterproof, so they can’t simply jump into the sea whenever they fancy a swim. And the parenting arrangements are extraordinary. Female emperor penguins lay a single egg, then head off towards the ocean to feed. The male balances the egg on his feet beneath a special fold of skin called a brood pouch, keeping it off the freezing ice. He can spend roughly two months incubating that egg, surviving on stored body fat while enduring some of the harshest winter conditions on Earth. Two months. No takeaway. No central heating. Not even a biscuit. 😳 Once the chicks hatch, the adults take turns feeding and protecting them. As they grow, chicks gather together in groups called crèches, which can help them stay warm and offer some protection. And here’s another lovely detail: emperor penguin parents and chicks can recognise each other’s individual calls, even among enormous, noisy colonies. So next time someone complains about getting up for a night feed, spare a thought for the emperor penguin dad standing on Antarctic ice with an egg balanced on his feet. Mind you, at least nobody’s asking him where the spare nappies are. 😂💕

Somewhere in the ocean, two sea otters are floating around holding paws so they don’t drift away from each other while they sleep. 🦦💕 Meanwhile, some of us can’t even share a duvet without it turning into a territorial dispute. 😂 But sea otters have a few more surprises tucked into those adorable little furry bodies. For starters, they have the densest fur of any mammal, with hundreds of thousands of hairs packed into a single square centimetre in some areas! Unlike seals and whales, sea otters don’t have a thick layer of blubber to keep them warm. Instead, they rely on that extraordinary fur to trap air against their skin. And their table manners are rather impressive, too. Sea otters use rocks to smash open shellfish, sometimes balancing a stone on their chest while floating on their backs. Some even keep a favourite rock tucked into a loose pouch of skin beneath their forearm. Imagine having a favourite rock. Not jewellery, not a handbag, not a fancy phone. Just a really good rock. 🤣 They also have enormous appetites, eating roughly a quarter of their body weight each day to help maintain their body temperature. And those adorable hand-holding photographs? They’re real, although it’s not something every otter does. Sea otters can also wrap themselves in kelp to help prevent drifting while resting. So we’ve got an animal that sleeps holding hands, carries its own cutlery, owns a favourite rock and spends much of its life floating around on its back. I’m beginning to suspect sea otters are doing life better than the rest of us. 😂💕

Imagine looking in a mirror and actually understanding that the enormous creature staring back at you is YOU. 🐘🪞 Sounds perfectly ordinary to us, doesn’t it? Although, admittedly, some mornings I’d rather not recognise the woman looking back at me. 😂 But in the animal kingdom, recognising your own reflection is surprisingly unusual. In a fascinating experiment, researchers placed a large mirror in front of Asian elephants. One elephant, named Happy, repeatedly touched a mark on her own head that she could only see using the mirror. She wasn’t trying to investigate another elephant. She appeared to understand that the reflection belonged to her! And elephant intelligence goes far beyond mirrors. They have remarkable memories, recognise familiar individuals, maintain complicated social relationships and communicate using deep, low-frequency rumbles that can travel over considerable distances. Elephants have also been observed comforting distressed companions, helping injured herd members and investigating the bones of dead elephants. What makes the mirror experiment particularly interesting is that not every elephant passed it. Scientists are still exploring what mirror recognition actually tells us about animal self-awareness, because intelligence comes in many different forms. Personally, I love the idea of an elephant discovering its reflection for the first time. Imagine having a nose that can pick things up, ears the size of satellite dishes and a body weighing several tonnes, then looking in the mirror and thinking… Well, that’s quite a lot of me, isn’t it? 🤣💕