Rob Cope retweeted
Buggey was born on the liner Winchester Castle and sailed 200,000 miles over a two-year period. When the liner returned to England to be taken out of service in 1960, Buggey was left by himself because he could not transfer to another ship with the rest of the crew without spending six months in quarantine. Not wanting him to be lonely, customs officials decided to place him in a basket and escort him to his new ship, ensuring that he did not set a paw on English soil along the way. Successfully avoiding the need for quarantine, Buggey rejoined his crew and continued sailing the world.
#cat #cats #catlore
Rob Cope retweeted
VOYAGER 1 JUST CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD
Something thought to be broken for more than 20 years has suddenly come back to life on a spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth.
NASA’s Voyager 1, launched in 1977, recently faced another problem that could have threatened its ability to communicate with us. Engineers needed backup roll thrusters to help keep the spacecraft’s antenna precisely aimed at Earth. But those thrusters had been considered unusable since 2004 after their tiny heaters stopped receiving power.
Then NASA engineers took another look at the old failure. They suspected the heaters might not actually be dead, but stuck in the wrong electrical state.
So they sent a carefully planned command into deep space.
The signal took more than 23 hours to reach Voyager 1. There was no instant response and no way to intervene if the spacecraft reacted badly. Engineers had to wait.
Then, more than a day later, the telemetry arrived.
The temperature had risen.
The heaters were working.
A system believed to be lost for two decades had been brought back to life from billions of miles away.
The timing matters. Voyager’s working thrusters are slowly becoming less reliable as fuel residue builds up inside their narrow tubes. Meanwhile, the spacecraft’s nuclear power source loses about four watts every year. NASA has already been forced to shut down instruments to conserve its shrinking supply of electricity. Only two science instruments remain operating.
And Voyager 1 is still heading farther into interstellar space.
In November 2026, it is expected to become the first human-made object to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth — about 16.1 billion miles away.
A spacecraft built nearly half a century ago is still whispering information back to Earth from the darkness between the stars.
And somehow, every time it seems ready to fall silent, engineers find another way to keep it talking.
Source: NASA/JPL
ALT VOYAGER 1 JUST CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD Something thought to be broken for more than 20 years has suddenly come back to life on a spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth. NASA’s Voyager 1, launched in 1977, recently faced another problem that could have threatened its ability to communicate with us. Engineers needed backup roll thrusters to help keep the spacecraft’s antenna precisely aimed at Earth. But those thrusters had been considered unusable since 2004 after their tiny heaters stopped receiving power. Then NASA engineers took another look at the old failure. They suspected the heaters might not actually be dead, but stuck in the wrong electrical state.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The events described, including the Voyager 1 backup thruster revival, occurred in March 2025 and were announced by NASA in May 2025.
science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager/…
Rob Cope retweeted
Quick reminder.
During World War II, the @RNLI routinely launched into hazardous waters to rescue downed German 🇩🇪 pilots, strictly upholding their mission to save any life at sea regardless of nation or cause.
Between 1939 and 1945, RNLI volunteer crews saved over 6,300 lives, including hundreds of enemy airmen and sailors.
Humanity always came first 🌊⚓
Rob Cope retweeted
Since its foundation in 1824 the bravery of Royal National Lifeboat Institution volunteers has saved more than 146,700 lives at sea.
Hundreds of those volunteers have died attempting to save others. They are the best of us.
Any person or organisation questioning their actions or loyalty to this country should be corrected and ostracised.
Anyone can drown, but no one should.
rnli.org/support-us
Rob Cope retweeted
I did over 15 years as a member of a Mountain Rescue Team.
Call outs could be disruptive, unpleasant, cold, tiring and hard work.
Very rarely did they involve any personal danger or risk to me.
Lifeboat crews put themselves at risk every launch.
I support RNLI.
Rob Cope retweeted
With the heroes of the @RNLI under attack again, I’m reminded of this passage from Bill Bryson.
ALT I had never really stopped to consider what an extraordinary thing the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is. Think about it. A troubled ship calls for help, and eight people - teachers, plumbers, the guy who runs the pub - drop everything and put to sea, whatever the weather, asking no questions, imperilling their own lives, to try to help strangers. Is there anything more brave and noble than that? The RNLI - I looked this up later - is an organization run by volunteers, supported entirely by public donations. It maintains 233 stations around the coast of Britain and averages twenty-two call-outs per day. It saves 350 lives a year on average.
Kudos to
@BootsUK Kilburn High Rd today. I had to come for emergency prescription, at same time customer came in with breathing problems. Staff managed lengthy prescription queue plus emergency, summoned paramedics & found them a room to work. Good work Boots! – at Paddington, London
Rob Cope retweeted
As cabinet member, I was pleased to designate the Prince Charles Cinema an "asset of community value" but the fight is far from over. Its dispute with Criterion Capital reaches the courts next month. londoncentric.media/p/prince…
Rob Cope retweeted
Let us now praise holy women.
Like millions of others, I found myself surprisingly sad over the death of Dolly Parton. Of course, like those same millions of people, I was a huge fan of this woman with an outsized musical talent. She was a regular voice on the radio from my earliest years; I vividly remember eating Wheaties as a 13-year-old on a school morning and hearing her plaintive cri de coeur, “Jolene,” on the pink Bakelite radio that sat on our kitchen counter.
Dolly was a fixture in pop culture through my teenage years with tuneful hits like “I Will Always Love You” and “Here You Come Again” in the 1970s. A few years later, “9 to 5" summed up a whole era of office work when I was working in an office myself.
Her voice spoke, or sang, for itself; but growing up, I was only dimly aware of her prodigious writing talent: she was the composer of 3,000 songs, many of them covered by other artists. And I always enjoyed her sunny disposition and, especially, her confidently pushing back against people who would reduce her to a cartoon.
But only later in life did I became aware of her tremendous charity and big heart: giving away thousands of books to children in need (and “babies”: I love the idea of giving a baby a book); offering countless acts of charity to residents in Sevier County, Tennessee, her hometown; quietly helping a struggling singer or artist or writer or anyone; and being an early supporter of the LGBTQ community, when that could prove deeply unpopular.
The universal mourning may come from that last quality, which you could call charity or compassion, but you could also call holiness. When you read even cursorily about her life, what becomes obvious is a Christian faith that led to a lifetime of kindness and charity, often behind the scenes. This helps to explain the great sadness that greeted her death.
And it reminded me of someone else.
Think of how often we read about Jesus in the Gospels being pursued by crowds. Early in the Gospel of Mark, we read that Jesus’s “fame” spread throughout Galilee, with crowds waiting at his door in Capernaum. It’s not just the healing that people wanted; it was the innate desire to be near holiness: to be near compassion, near acceptance, basically, near love. Holiness calls to us, because it’s a quality of the divine and is one way that God draws us closer.
We saw in Dolly Parton something more than talent, something more than wit and something more than even charity; we saw holiness. Thank you, Dolly, for teaching me about the Christian life. And may you rest in peace with the God you loved and served so well.
Rob Cope retweeted
The world feels a little less kind today.
Dolly Parton was an extraordinary artist, songwriter, philanthropist and entertainer. But perhaps her greatest gift was something much simpler: humanity.
She had an extraordinary ability to meet people where they were, without judgement.
When asked about transgender people and LGBTQ+ rights, Dolly didn’t reach for politics or ideology. She spoke about people.
She knew and loved trans people, gay people and lesbians within her own family and circle. Her philosophy was beautifully uncomplicated: treat people well, love them and don’t judge them.
At a time when transgender people are increasingly discussed as problems to be solved, threats to be feared or ammunition in a culture war, there was something enormously powerful about that simplicity.
You don’t have to understand somebody’s life completely to respect it.
You don’t have to share somebody’s experience to show them compassion.
And you certainly don’t have to diminish another human being in order to defend your own beliefs.
Dolly understood that.
For all her extraordinary talent, wealth and fame, she never seemed to lose sight of the human being standing in front of her.
The world has lost someone utterly irreplaceable.
Perhaps the greatest tribute we could pay her is simply to be a little more Dolly.
Kinder. Less judgemental. More accepting. And always human. ❤️
Rest in peace, Dolly. 🦋🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Rob Cope retweeted
A stellar Coat of Many Colors for Dolly Parton, forever among the stars 💗
ALT Colorful nebula in space with a white haze throughout that is more concentrated in the center with a rippling effect. Colorful gas filaments appear to splash outward from the nebula center, colored yellow, magenta, and blue. A faint black border with right angles at the corners of the images show where the telescope’s field of view stopsdotted line with right angles shows the borders of the telescope’s image. Small white stars dot the background.
Rob Cope retweeted
Dolly Parton on supporting the LGBTQ+ community (2016): “I do not believe we should criticize and judge other people. If you’re the fine Christian you think you are, why are you judging people? I just think we should be more loving, more caring. We are who we are. If you’re gay, you’re gay. If you’re straight, you’re straight. You should be allowed to be how you are and who you are”
Rob Cope retweeted
Westminster Labour has published an open letter to @PaulSwaddle following Chris Philp’s visit to Church Street.
We’re asking him to reject the divisive language and misleading statements used, and stand up for Westminster residents.
westminsterlabour.org.uk/iss…
Rob Cope retweeted
Devastating cuts from Westminster Conservatives are a real threat to front-line services
Rob Cope retweeted
This is one of the most famous paintings in America, and most people have no idea what they are actually looking at...
The painting is Christina's World, made by Andrew Wyeth in 1948, and the woman was real: her name was Anna Christina Olson, Wyeth's neighbour in Cushing, Maine. Since childhood a degenerative condition had slowly taken the strength from her legs, until walking was no longer possible. She refused a wheelchair, and for her entire adult life she chose to drag herself across the ground with her arms instead, going wherever she wanted to go under her own power.
Wyeth saw her one afternoon from an upstairs window, alone in that vast field, crawling slowly toward the house on the hill. He said the painting was an attempt to do justice to her extraordinary conquest of a life which most people would consider hopeless. Her world, he said, was limited physically but by no means spiritually.
That is what turns this painting from a portrait of frailty into one of the most triumphant images ever made...
Look at it long enough and it stops being about what her body took from her, and becomes about what she would not stop doing anyway. The field is enormous and she is small and the house is far away, and still she goes, because the alternative, to be carried, to give up, to let the distance win, was something she simply would not accept.
There is one more thing: Christina loved this painting. Pink was her favorite color, and Wyeth had placed her exactly where she most wanted to be, out in the open, in her own field, under her own sky. Late in her life, when she could no longer even crawl out to that field, she said something that holds the whole meaning of art inside it:
"Andy put me where he knew I wanted to be. Now that I can’t be there anymore, all I do is think of that picture, and I’m there."
