Hat tip to @thatidiotmonro.bsky.social for reminding me that unless the captain was obviously fashion forward, this means the Zara Death Pants probably only make second place on the list of "the world's most dangerous trousers"

Which only leaves two questions, really. How the hell does somebody get a pair of trousers so badly wrong that they crash into Cornwall, and how on Earth do you actually get somebody to admit to it?

Ok, so that there is the mortal remains of SS RMS Mulheim - possibly the only ship on record to have been sunk by a trouser malfunction.

And if anybody is wondering exactly where I am, here's a clue - we walked here today from our campsite:

#ShoreLeave

We're going to need a bigger fucking bus though

One of the slightly bonkers details of the ship's last stand is Commander Loftus Jones demanding the ensign be properly hoisted to ensure the enemy knew they were still fighting. That he was personally helping keep the one remaining gun popping away at them was probably a stronger hint...

Shark Awareness Day, it says on my little calendar of weak excuses to post stuff, and this here is HMS Shark. No need for a campaign though. At Jutland the Germans were well aware of the destroyer and what an annoying little shit it was being (at least from a Teutonic POV) and promptly sank it.

So apparently your "lived experience" translates as "I couldn't read the fucking manual"...

First sweet peas of the summer cut for the house... (We planted late, and the stems on these are stupidly short because they're bred for scent - but holy moly are they scented)

This is why @scornflakegrrrl.bsky.social has her kohlrabi growing in their own containment chamber... Depending on what brassicas you're growing you might be able to get a fresh crop in under netting?

Pretty sure hypermedia warfare and technolegal entanglements is code for "not understanding obvious jokes on Blue Sky"

Little shit looks like Max Hastings going overboard with his selfie filters

Unexpected battleship big naturals

Spode him. It's the only way.

There's no reason to suggest the Binface wouldn't be a perfectly decent MP, and certainly no worse for his constituents then the incumbent. There's an obvious parallel with H'Angus the Monkey, who served three terms as mayor of Hartlepool and was generally thought to have done a sensible job.

Clacton has the chance to do the funniest thing...

And yeah, okay, for that sort of cash it'd probably be in need of a refit and modernisation, but I'm sure we can send some lads round to reduce the height of the railings for, er, safety?

Just in case a mystery reader wth an entirely innocent five million quid in their bank account is reading this account for shopping advice, that's roughly enough cash to buy a yacht of similar size and vintage to Robert Maxwell's. It's got to be easier than this politics lark.

How did you find out?

I mean, look, there's a reason that this image was both incredibly funny and doubly delicious when schadenfreude knocked

It's often noted that there's an imbalance in who we choose to remember in statues or memorials. Gertrude was never recognised officially as one of the war dead, but somebody nonetheless slipped her onto the war memorial at Manchester University - which is how I met her today. I'm glad they did.

This here is Gertrude Powicke, who died in 1919 during a typhus outbreak in Poland. She was volunteering with the Friends' War Victim Relief Committee at the time.

He's set them lines!

And I suppose the apparent desire to sit on the bottom of the sea might be the reason for this amazing example of convergent evolution...

Aware that le Grand Hotel, as it was quickly nicknamed, suffered alarmingly from rising damp, La Royale banned it from proceeding at anywhere near its top speed. Not that going everywhere slowly prevented Hoche from adding itself to the long list of ships who successfully rammed their own side...

In Hoche's case the big issues were the guns, the armour, and the military masts. Everything that actually made it a warship, basically.

French warships were notoriously slow to complete - Hoche took so long that it was obsolete before it was even launched - and the changes demanded by various administrations resulted in the sort of weight gain more usually seen in middle age.

Me: the interminable wait for the official Georgia Stanway news means it's going to be really anticlimactic when it finally drops Georgia Stanway:

You might think they it's incredibly stupid to design a battleship already in the process of going the full Moskva, and in fairness so did the French. They didn't actually mean for it to end up like this - the alarming weight issues only dawned on them when it was already too late to change course.