Radio Derb October 11 2024

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 01m50s Controversy in science, new and old
  • 14m24s Disaster equity
  • 27m09s Hillary, Zamyatin, and Us
  • 38m59s Voice cloning
  • 40m50s Using a shovel
  • 43m36s An old friend is angry
  • 46m46s Signoff with Cilla

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Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On Rumble

Full Show On Odysee 

Transcript

01 — Intro.     And Radio Derb is on the air! Greetings, listeners. That was Haydn’s Derbyshire March No. 2, as originally scored for clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet, serpent, and percussion, the serpent being an 18th-century wind instrument now defunct, ancestor I think of the modern trombone. And this is of course your formidably genial host John Derbyshire with some notes on the passing charivari.

We are now less than one month away from the general election. I shall of course have things to say about that. The Southeast of our country has been stricken by yet another natural disaster; I shall cover that, too. Before either of those topics, though, I’m going to take a detour through science.

I am, as I’m sure I have mentioned before, a science geek from far back. Although I don’t have any expertise in any of the rigorous sciences, the old affection lingers and I try to keep up with developments.

There has been news from the world of science this past week, so let me start off with that.

02 — Controversy in science, new and old.     Tuesday this week the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the award for the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics. It goes jointly to John Hopfield, a 91-year-old American and Geoffrey Hinton, a 76-year-old British-born Canadian.

The award has caused something of a stir among physicists and a lot of grumbling. Hopfield is indeed a physicist, but Hinton isn’t. If you have to put him in any one particular bucket in the academic sciences, it would be Computer Science. He is in fact currently Professor Emeritus in the Computer Science department at the University of Toronto.

So what’s he doing with a Nobel Prize in Physics? Let’s see what the Nobel Committee says about the award, quote:

This year’s two Nobel Laureates in Physics have used tools from physics to develop methods that are the foundation of today’s powerful machine learning. John Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other types of patterns in data. Geoffrey Hinton invented a method that can autonomously find properties in data, and so perform tasks such as identifying specific elements in pictures.

End quote.

Yeah, that sounds like Computer Science, seasoned with some neuroscience and General Systems Theory. So again, what’s this got to do with physics — you know: gravity, electromagnetism, subatomic particles, and so on — physics.

Seeking enlightenment I consulted my favorite YouTube physicist, Sabine Hossenfelder. This lady has a doctorate in theoretical physics from a good German university and has taught as an assistant professor at an Institute for Theoretical Physics in Sweden. She’s written a book on the subject and there is an asteroid named after her.

Sabine — I hope she won’t mind me addressing her by her Christian name — did indeed have things to say about the award. She posted a six-and-a-half-minute clip on her YouTube channel which started thus:

[Clip:  The 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics did not go to physicists. It went to two computer scientists for developing the first neural networks, which became the basis of what we now call Artificial Intelligence.” If you still doubt that physics is in crisis, the fact that the Nobel Prize in Physics goes to computer scientists should make you think.]

That last sentence, where Sabine says “physics is in crisis,” refers back to one of her hobby-horses. You can hear her talk at length about it in a video from last Saturday, before the Nobel Prizes were announced.

In that earlier video Sabine moans that there has been no real progress in physics for the last twenty years, and that physicists are just, quote, “endlessly arguing about the same irrelevant questions,” end quote.

She has a point. Theoretical physics today is a cold, limp thing by comparison with what it was in the early twentieth century when the great names of the field — Niels Bohr, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg — were conducting their tremendous overhaul of classical physics.

We are in fact approaching the centenary of one of the milestones marking that era: the October 1927 Solvay conference in Brussels, where Bohr locked horns with Einstein over what we now call the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Sabine is right in that nothing half so exciting — nothing one percent as exciting — has happened in theoretical physics this past quarter-century.

Sure, physicists have come up with clever ideas like String TheorySupersymmetry, and Loop Quantum Gravity. However, none of these theories has escaped from the realm of clever ideas. Not only do they have no practical applications; no-one has even come up with a way we might verify or falsify them.

This dead zone into which physics has gotten itself stuck is so noticable that even non-involved laymen have noticed it: your genial podcaster, for example. Here I was almost twenty years ago, writing in National Review, February 2005, Longish quote from myself:

It seems to me that we are passing from the Age of Physics to the Age of Biology. It is not quite the case that nothing is happening in physics, but certainly there is nothing like the excitement of the early 20th century. Physics seems, in fact, to have got itself into a cul-de-sac, obsessing over theories so mathematically abstruse that nobody even knows how to test them.

The life sciences, by contrast, are blooming, with major new results coming in all the time from genetics, zoology, demography, biochemistry, neuroscience, psychometrics, and other “hot” disciplines. The physics building may be hushed and dark while its inhabitants mentally wrestle with 26-dimensional manifolds, but over at biology the joint is jumpin’. A gifted and ambitious young person of scientific inclination would be well advised to try for a career researching in the life sciences. There is, as one such youngster said to me recently, a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked.

End quote.

With so little of much importance happening in physics you can’t blame the Nobel Prize Committee for stretching their definitions a little. Computer Science may not be a branch of physics, but it is physics-adjacent. The expression “quantum computing” ring a bell?

You might even argue — and some commenters on social media have argued — that since physics deals with the fundamental nature of the material world, all of science is physics-adjacent. As one commenter expressed it, quote: “There is just one nature,” end quote.

Radio Derb is going to rise above all this undignified nitpicking and just offer sincere congratulations to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton on their Nobel Prize.

While doing so, I can’t forbear noting that Geoffrey Hinton, full name Geoffrey Everest Hinton, has some distinguised ancestors. His paternal grandfather’s mother, Mary Ellen Hinton, was born Mary Ellen Boole, daughter of the mathematician George Boole who gave his name to Boolean algebra. Mary Ellen’s mother — George Boole’s wife — was born Mary Everest: her father’s brother was Sir George Everest, Surveyor General of British India in the 1830s who gave his name to Mount Everest. Hence Geoffrey Hinton’s middle name, Everest.

The whole lineage there is distinguished in different ways. George Boole’s fourth daughter — and so Geoffrey’s great-great-aunt — Lucy Everest was the first female professor of chemistry in England. Mary Ellen Hinton’s fourth son Sebastian, Geoffrey’s great-uncle, invented the jungle gym.

As a longtime connoisseur of mathematical biographies I’d like to tell you the darkly comic story of George Boole’s death, but that would be straying too far afield. I’ll just alert you that if you read about it, it will put you off homeopathy for life.

Just one more footnote to this segment. I included a longish quote from myself, from something I wrote for National Review in 2005. The context of that 2005 article was the controversy over Intelligent Design, which was still newsy, and which in fact got me my first ever mention in the news pages of the New York Times.

Intelligent Design, which religious groups were putting forward as an alternative to the Standard Model of evolutionary biology, is pretty much a dead letter now; but the controversy is historically interesting, and for all I know may make a come-back. That’s the context of this footnote.

The history of that controversy goes way back into the nineteenth century. A major milestone there was the Scopes Trial — often unkindly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial — of July 1925, famously fictionalized as the play and movie Inherit the Wind.

Note the date there. Next July, July 2025, will be the centenary of the Scopes Trial. Mark it on your calendar. Perhaps it will ignite a rebirth of the old controversy. Who knows? Perhaps I’ll see my name in the New York Times again …

03 — Disaster equity.     ln Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire hurricanes hardly ever happen. On our Atlantic coast, unfortunately, and its extension into the Gulf of Mexico, they happen a lot. Last week I reported on Hurricane Helene — the name would have given Eliza Doolittle trouble all by itself — which shot north up the Gulf to strike our mainland, most disastrously in western North Carolina.

I mentioned that we were getting warnings of another hurricane to come, Hurricane Kirk, out in the Atlantic beyond the Leeward Islands. In the event Kirk turned east and north across the Atlantic to assault Portugal, Spain, and France earlier this week. All that Uncle Sam got from Kirk was some high surf.

Meanwhile Hurricane Milton was developing way over west in the Gulf of Mexico. It — seems to me we should say “he” and “she” for hurricanes, but I’ll stick with “it” — Milton barreled east across the Gulf towards Florida’s west coast, making landfall Wednesday night with 120-mph winds. It quickly traversed Florida and then faded out in the Atlantic somewhere north of Cuba.

These being the closing weeks of a general election campaign, the destructive horrors of Helene and Milton have of course been brandished as weapons by the campaigners. The brandishings conformed pretty clearly to my snobs-versus-slobs model of our politics.

  • The snobs, with their champion Kamala Harris, blame the hurricanes on global warming — which, they told us, is a consequence of the deplorable affection that Donald Trump and his slob followers nurse towards the internal combustion engine. Global warming is a key pillar of snob ideology.
  • The slobs, with their champion Trump, drew our attention to the sufferings of the common people in Appalachia and elsewhere whose homes, businesses, and often lives have been destroyed by the gales and floods. They say that the snob elites in charge of our federal government and its agencies have been slow and lackadaisical in relief efforts.

As best I can judge from news reports, the slobs have much the better of this argument. The federal government and its emergency relief agency FEMA have indeed been tardy.

Most of the relief work for victims of Helene has been carried out by local survivors and volunteers from elsewhere, including major fundraising and technological support efforts from Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Not only has FEMA not been much help, they have been actively hindering these nongovernmental efforts, sometimes turning volunteers back, confiscating their supplies, even threatening them with arrest.

Sample quote. This is from The Washington Stand, Tuesday. Quote:

The Coast Guard veteran recounted that during her 11 years of service, she was stationed in Puerto Rico when both Hurricane Maria and Hurricane Irma hit in 2017. [Inner quote.] “FEMA did the same stuff there, to the point where the Coast Guard, we did not work directly with FEMA because they were doing shady stuff … They were confiscating supplies, they weren’t issuing supplies, they mishandled money, they mishandled distribution of supplies, and the locals suffered for it. And they’re doing the same thing in North Carolina … This is not a ‘conspiracy theory,’ this is not ‘false information.’ Like I’m here, I’m boots on the ground … FEMA is here and they’re doing really sketchy, shady stuff. [End inner quote.]

End quote.

Elon Musk has been trying to provide internet and communications terminals to hurricane survivors in North Carolina but, quote from him in that same Washington Stand piece, quote: “FEMA is both failing to help and won’t let others help.” End quote. FEMA for example wouldn’t let Musk’s helicopter land to deliver critical supplies.

For fuller coverage of our federal government’s incompetence and indifference I refer you to Mark Steyn’s coverage, also on Tuesday, in which Mark is at his scathing best.

Mark also adds some color to the snobs-versus-slobs model. He notes — as did many others, including Elon Musk — that last Saturday afternoon, while his fellow citizens in Appalachia were weeping over the wreckage of their lives, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, who has FEMA as one of his responsibilities, was spotted at a super-high-end menswear store in Georgetown, D.C. apparently buying fashion boots.

How does FEMA see its own objectives, presumably with Secretary Mayorkas’ approval? We’ve been learning about that this past few days.

Key phrase: “Disaster Equity.” Sample quotes from a FEMA Disaster Preparedness Meeting, quote:

We should focus our efforts on LGBTQIA people … they struggled before the storm …

FEMA relief is no longer about getting the greatest good for the greatest amount of people … It’s about disaster equity.

End quote.

FEMA leadership is as correct as it could be. The head of the agency, reporting to Mayorkas, is Deanne Criswell, a Biden-Harris appointment. She is the first woman to head FEMA; before that, she was the first woman commissioner of New York City Emergency Management, in which position she made a royal screw-up of the city’s response to the COVID outbreak.

Ms Criswell is white. That surprised me when I looked her up: the plat du jour for early appointments in the Biden-Harris administration was black women. Is Ms Criswell LGBTQIA — or, as we say here at Radio Derb, proud? Not likely: she’s married with two sons and five grandchildren.

Perhaps to make up for Ms Criswell’s whiteness and straightness, her second-in-command, Erik Hooks, is black. Sample quote from him:

Black communities are on the frontlines of climate change and related extreme weather events.

End quote.

If you want to dig deeper into the DEI takeover of FEMA, I refer you to Daniel Greenfield’s post about it earlier this week. Here’s a sample quote from him. The Hurricane Ian he mentions struck the west coast of Florida two years ago. Quote:

[Inner quote.] “Black and African American communities often suffer disproportionate impacts from disasters. This is something that we must work to change and that starts with how we prepare,” [end inner quote] FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell argued.

A few weeks later, Hurricane Ian became the third most expensive weather disaster and claimed over 150 lives. Most of the dead were white senior citizens. Elderly people living near the coast were the ones actually most at risk. FEMA had sacrificed their lives for equity.

End quote.

Given all the politicization going on here, and the fact that those areas in western North Carolina worst affected by Hurricane Helene are pretty solidly red, there’s been speculation that the federal government is slow-walking relief and repairs to ensure that as many voters as possible won’t be able to show up at the polls on November 5th. I don’t know what the balance of evidence is on that, but … I wouldn’t be surprised.

And of course a major national disaster wouldn’t be complete without a conspiracy theory. Social media have been glad to oblige, with claims that the hurricanes have been steered by weather modification technology — which is a real thing, but not on anything like the hurricane scale.

Georgia congressperson Marjorie Taylor Greene has been stirring this little pot, with RFK, Jr. coming up fast in support. It’ll be interesting to see whether this theory settles in as a permanent inmate of the conspiracy-theory zoo, along with COVID origins, collapse of the World Trade Center, the Kennedy assassination, Pearl Harbor, the sinking of the LusitaniaJoanna Southcott’s box, and all the others.

I’m not susceptible to conspiracy theories myself, but I sometimes find myself wondering why there are so many of them. Could it be that they are all part of some great unitary plan, directed somehow from Conspiracy Central, to baffle, confuse, enstupidate and enrage the human race? A sort of conspiracy conspiracy? I’m just wondering …

04 — Hillary, Zamyatin, and Us.     And then, of course, the Presidential campaign. How’s that going?

For us Trump voters, pretty well. With only a little over three weeks to go, the Donald’s numbers are looking good, with some definite upward movement the past few days.

I’d like to think that some of that is due to Trump’s obvious concern and activity in helping the hurricane victims. Perhaps it is; but much more of it is a result of Kamala Harris doing a media tour.

I guess her handlers felt that she needed to show herself to the voters more, so she did. The result was, that even more voters than before got a close-up look at how ignorant and incoherent she is.

Whether or not I am right about that, here’s how it went on the Vice President’s Sunday-Monday-Tuesday lightning tour of media outlets.

  • Sunday was a double-header. First Kamala did an interview with lifestyle podcaster Alex Cooper.

I confess I had never heard of this lady or her podcasts — she has two. She sure has been successful. Wikipedia tells me she’s signed a deal with Spotify worth $60 million. For a podcast? What am I doing wrong?

I couldn’t tell you what the two ladies talked about — something to do with tampons, I think. Whatever it was, the customers didn’t much like it: Ms Cooper, according to Newsweekquote, “ended up seeing a net loss of 4,083 across both accounts in the days after the interview.” End quote.

  • Also on Sunday the Veep was interviewed on CBS’s 60 Minutesby professional correspondent Bill Whitaker. This has generated controversy. Fielding a question about Israel, Harris’s answer, which took her twenty seconds to deliver, made even less sense than usual.

The CBS editors cleaned up the recording and aired a special on Monday with a shorter response — only seven seconds long — apparently clipped from elsewhere in the interview. That shorter response didn’t have much information content either, but it was less of a meaningless jumble than the Sunday version, and it’s easier to stay awake through seven seconds of Kamala than twenty.

  • Tuesday was another double-header. Tuesday morning Harris went on ABC’s girl show The View. This was her first liveTV appearance since she was nominated as a Presidential candidate.

I don’t know what transpired here — c’mon, man, you surely don’t expect me to watch this stuff — but from news reports after the event she mainly took the opportunity to heap insults on Donald Trump and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, to the hearty approval of Whoopi Goldberg and the other giggling gals.

  • Also on Tuesday Harris did a one-hour interview with Howard Stern on his SiriusXM radio show. Stern still seems to own the Homeric epithet “shock jock” but I lost track of him some time this decade and I’m not sure if he still answers to “shock jock.”

If he doesn’t, Stern could trade it for “Trump Hater.” He sure doesn’t like the Donald. He says he fears him, too, although I think that’s just an affectation. At one point in the interview Stern claimed that if Trump were to be re-elected the Sun would go out. Uh-huh.

Again, I didn’t listen to the interview, just read about it afterwards. Some of that reading was fun. Even the New York Times columnist couldn’t keep a straight face. Quote from her:

Stern was a little too openly butt-smoochy for my taste, but I like a little more spice in my political interviews. So my vote for Harris’s next stop? “Hot Ones.”

End quote.

In case you’re wondering, as I was, what “Hot Ones” is, it’s a YouTube show where the host asks his guests questions as they attempt to eat hot wings covered in various sauces.

So that’s been Kamala Harris’s week: four interviews with outlets any one of which would give an arm — well, a couple of fingers at least — to help her make it to the White House. And after it all, Harris’s numbers aren’t looking great.

What would they look like if she’d faced off with interviewers who aren’t in the tank for her? Better, possibly. At least viewers would give her credit for courage.

A very interesting development this past few days has been Joe Biden’s apparent unhooking of himself from the Harris campaign.

There’s been a little spat between Harris and Ron DeSantis over whether DeSantis has been deliberately not taking Harris’s phone calls about the hurricane relief. Should DeSantis take her calls? Biden was asked at a Wednesday presser in the White House. Replied Joe, quote:

All I can tell you is I’ve talked to Governor DeSantis. He’s been very gracious. He thanked me for all we’ve done. He knows what we’re doing, and I think that’s important.

End quote.

Whoa! This is a Joe Biden I might get to like! My old Daily Telegraph colleague John O’Sullivan shared the feeling on X. Tweet:

He’s introduced a new note of mischief & revenge in a campaign that has become largely predictable trench warfare. Most of the entertainment until now has come from the GOP side, but Biden is matching them jab for jab — except that the jabs are hitting below Democrat belts.

End tweet.

Some more cynical spirits have suggested that Biden believes Trump is going to win the Presidency and wants to be in Trump’s good books — or at least not in his bad books — in hopes of getting a Presidential pardon for Hunter, and perhaps also for himself.

Whatever: Joe is definitely making the race more interesting. I never thought I’d hear myself say that.

In an effort to bolster her poll numbers, Kamala Harris has been enlisting her party’s big names: Barack Obama and the Clintons. I guess it might help; but if I were advising her, I would have left out Hillary. Barack and Bill can still get a crowd on their feet and cheering, but I don’t think Hillary ever could.

Whatever political skill she ever had — it wasn’t much — she seems to have lost. In a CNN interview at the weekend, she said the quiet thing out loud. Listen.

[Clip:  But we now know that that was an overly simple view; that if the platforms — whether it’s Facebook or Twitter-X or, ah, Instagram or TikTok, whatever they are — if they don’t moderate and monitor the content, er, we lose total control …]

Did you get that? “We lose total control …” We. We, the ruling class. We, the snobs.

Of course, “total control” — totalitarianism — is what our elites seek, the destination they’ve been dragging us towards for sixty years.

For persons who know their 20th-century imaginative fiction, Hillary’s “we” also has a sinister ring. We is the name of a novel.

Originally written in Russian around 1920 by Yevgeny Zamyatin, one of the very earliest Soviet dissidents, We came out in English translation exactly a hundred years ago, 1924. It was the inspiration for both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Says Wikipedia, quote: “It influenced the emergence of dystopia as a literary genre,” end quote.

If they ever do get the total control Hillary seeks, Zamyatin’s nightmare will have become true and our civilization will be at an end.

05 — Miscellany.     And now, our closing miscellany of brief items.

Imprimis:  Here’s something new to worry about, especially for us podcasters and broadcasters: voice cloning.

Jay Shooster, running for Congress in Florida’s 91st District, put out a 15-second TV campaign ad. Some ingenious crooks recorded his voice and ran it through some AI software.

The result: Jay’s Dad got a phone call from Jay begging for help. Jay said he’d been in a serious car accident, got arrested and needed $35,000 bail money. Except it wasn’t Jay on the phone, only a clone of Jay’s voice.

I’ve had to sit down with Mrs Derbyshire and give her The Talk. We now have a secret password I shall use any time I call her, so she knows it’s me and not just a clone of my voice.

If you, dear listener or reader, have your voice out there in the public sphere for any reason, I recommend you do the same.

And am I surprised that one of the earliest and most profitable applications of Artificial Intelligence has come out of the criminal fraternity? No, I’m not. We live in a fallen world.

Item:  Did you see the pictures of Kamala Harris and her husband wielding shovels while planting an October 7th memorial tree? They generated much mirth. It was plain that neither she nor he had ever handled a shovel before.

Several commenters were reminded of the exchange between Cecily Cardew and the Honorable Gwendolen Fairfax in Oscar Wilde’s play The Importance of Being Earnest.

CECILY.  Do you suggest, Miss Fairfax, that I entrapped Ernest into an engagement? How dare you? This is no time for wearing the shallow mask of manners. When I see a spade I call it a spade.

The Honorable GWENDOLEN.  I am glad to say that I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.

Eh, slobs and snobs. It’s all good fun; but I felt a twinge of sympathy for the Harrises.

Growing up in England I only knew the shorter kind of shovel, the one with a handle shaped like an uppercase “D.” You gripped the straight bar of the “D” with your palm facing up, got your knee behind your hand, and pushed.

The shovel with a long straight handle and no “D” we in fact called an American shovel, although I later learned that in some parts of England — Cornwall, I think — shovels are American style. You always get these inexplicable regional oddities in an old country. Perhaps there are places in the States where the “D”-handled shovel prevails.

If there are such places, Long Island isn’t one of them. When I moved to the U.S.A. and bought a house here with a garden to look after, I had to learn how to use the American shovel. I think I’ve got the hang of it, though I’m not a hundred percent confident even now.

Item:  People sometimes ask me if I’m still in touch with my dear friend Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov now that he is no longer President of Turkmenistan.

I certainly am. Former President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, as I’m sure you all know, handed off the Presidency to his son Serdar Berdymukhammedov in 2022 and retired to the less demanding post of Chairman of the People’s Council of Turkmenistan.

Now that he has more time on his hands, Chairman Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov is even more diligent than before about keeping up with old acquaintances. I get frequent emails from him.

Most recently they have been rather angry. A fellow-countryman of his, a Turkmenistan patriot, posted to X in praise of their country’s flag. His post included a picture of the flag, which is indeed … striking.

Unfortunately not all X users appreciated the esthetic. Sample comments:

  • Looks like a bad graphic from a 90’s Nintendo game.
  • The only flag to both make eyes water and induce vomiting.
  • Ugliest flag of all time
  • This flag looks like an 8 bit video game flag for a Banana republic.
  • How could children be expected to draw this flag at school?

And so on. It is easy to understand Chairman Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov’s anger. Who, he asked me by email, is the proprietor of this disgraceful website? I told him it is a fellow named Elon Musk. In reply, Chairman Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov urged me to find the street address where Elon Musk lives, so that he, the Chairman, can send over some agents to “educate” him.

Of course I don’t want to cause trouble for anyone, but so far I have not been able to come up with a diplomatic response. Suggestions from Radio Derb listeners will be gratefully received.

06 — Signoff.     And that’s all I have for this week, boys and girls. Thank you for your time and attention, and a solemn, respectful Columbus Day to one and all.

Just another reminder, if you will permit me, that you can help keep the lights on here in the Derbyshire house via PayPal or snail mail as shown on my personal website, or using Zelle direct to my bank, or with a tax-deductible donation by a check earmarked with my name and mailed to: The VDARE Foundation, P.O. Box 211, Litchfield-with-a-“t”, CT 06759. Thank you.

For signoff music, indulge me, please, in a brief nostalgia trip to 1960s London, where I squandered my late-teen and early-adult years. Here’s Cilla Black with one of the musical mementoes of that time and place. It was actually the signature song for one of Michael Caine’s earliest movies.

Cilla Black is no longer with us but Michael Caine is, still the cheerful Cockney at age 91. He officially retired from acting one year ago this Sunday. Many more birthdays, mate.

There will be more from Radio Derb next week

 

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Hi-ya!
Hi-ya!
59 minutes ago

I’m not susceptible to conspiracy theories myself

oh, brother…

David Wright
Member
Reply to  Hi-ya!
52 minutes ago

Careful with the wrongthink oldtimer.

Ben the Layabout
Ben the Layabout
38 minutes ago

Spade, eh? Here’s part of a script that might have aired on the vintage Jack Benny radio (briefly, TV) program. In that era, they could have gotten away with such humor. Today, maybe not so much.

Scene: Jack and Mary in back yard.

Mary: Jack, will you help me plant the new bush?

Jack: Well, Mary, for that job we’ll need a spade.

Mary: A spade?

Jack: [Yells] Rochester!

Rochester: Yes, boss. [joins them]

Jack: Rochester, please bring a shovel from the shed so that we can dig a hole and plant this new bush.

Hi-ya!
Hi-ya!
2 hours ago

Intelligent Design, which religious groups were putting forward as an alternative to the Standard Model of evolutionary biology, is pretty much a dead letter now;

See how out if it I am, I thought it was evolution that was the dead letter!

Ben the Layabout
Ben the Layabout
Reply to  Hi-ya!
28 minutes ago

Even if one could prove beyond all doubt that a God was responsible for life, instead of the admittedly improbable billions of years of random chemical mixing and other physical phenomena culminating in evolution/natural selection, Then it’d be a valid question among cheeky scientists, asking where God came from. Fundamentally the problem, at least for determinists, is one of infinite regress. As Monty Python so aptly put it at the finale of “Galaxy Song”:   So remember when you’re feeling very small and insecure How amazingly unlikely is your birth And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space… Read more »

Hi-ya!
Hi-ya!
1 hour ago

AI is so helpful:

Hurricanes started being named for men in 1979, when the United States began using both male and female names for storms in the Atlantic basin. The practice of using only female names for hurricanes ended in the late 1970s due to increasing awareness of sexism.