The tie with Edward Cullen’s hair and eyebrows is the best thing I’ve ever seen. I’m so glad someone posted a link to Jenny’s recaps on here a few years ago, because that woman is a fucking hero.

I saw Sir Alix (as she was announced) jousting at Peterborough Heritage Festival last year (the heritage festival is the one good thing about living where I do, where the cathedral grounds are occupied by re-enactment groups from all across the history of Britain for one weekend a year). It was the first time they had…

Thirded. You are very welcome here. I’ve already voted Remain, this is stupid and I’m sorry that it’s even happening.

It’s entirely true. The problem is, Britain is run by people (overwhelmingly men) who mostly grew up in a bubble of privilege in which they learned to overestimate their own importance and expect the world to give them what they want, and that’s how we end up in these ridiculous messes. The response from this…

All the stars for “Sentient Pinterest Board”.

Seriously, I went to visit Alnwick Castle in Northumberland (they filmed the flying lesson scene in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone there, and these days they sell overpriced “Quidditch” lessons for kids as part of the visitor experience) a few years ago, and inside the house, dotted around on sofas or…

Oh I see, thank you! That makes perfect sense, thinking logically. I think I was just confused because it’s just not used here - or I was thinking of the scene in Sleeping Beauty where Fauna is trying to make the birthday cake without magic and is just confused by everything in the recipe ...

As with middle-aged parents who still use Internet Explorer despite being gently but repeatedly urged to move onto Chrome or Firefox to make their own lives easier, America keeps on going with the Imperial measurement system (ironically) and Fahrenheit. Bless you, glorious stick-in-the-muds.

I think what makes it so great is that almost everyone can relate to it on some level - the worst thing that can possibly happen is that somebody’s bake goes wrong. Most people have, at some point in their lives, baked something that ended up somewhere on the scale from going inexplicably slightly weird to…

“Corrupt and disingenuous liar” here. I’ve posted about this here before, but, like many other people, I really do think the whole Nefertiti bandwagon is unhelpful, not to say counterproductive. Okay, so further chambers in KV62 may contain the burial of more individuals belonging to the immediate or extended family…

As an Egyptologist, I wholeheartedly concur.

I went to a village college comprehensive school in Peterborough, where the kids came from either the villages surrounding the town, the town, or RAF Wittering (those whose parents didn’t pay for them to go to school elsewhere). There were a few kids who were lower-middle-class by local standards, as there’s a fair…

Wow. Commenting on the ethnicity of the ancient Egyptians on the internet without getting a massive backlash makes all the degrees worthwhile!

Technically, only the four little guys in the white kilts on the bottom row are meant to be Egyptians, but yeah, Egypt has always been fairly diverse. I can see how it happens, but I’m always surprised when people seem to think that ancient Egypt was some kind of hermetically-sealed bubble with a single homogenous…

A friend and I have had quite a few conversations about how you could make a seriously cool game where you have to get your character through all the various stages from death to the Egyptian afterlife, where you have to get across the various rivers and dodge fire-spitting cobras and have the right password to get…

I don’t believe they didn’t realise he wasn’t Egyptian for a moment, I think whoever picked him up was just not intelligent enough to realise that it would have serious consequences. I mean, when it comes to screwing up, it’s not like the Egyptian security services don’t have previous in the knee-jerk over-the-top…

I’ve seen some interesting theories as to why Giulio Regeni was picked up, disappeared, and tortured (there’s a good article here). I mean, we all know that the Egyptian secret police disappear people, and terrible, terrible things happen to them, but generally speaking, they don’t disappear foreign nationals, who…

In the second episode there’s a scene which is split between Ross reading out O.J. Simpson’s suicide note at a press conference and the Kardashian kids watching it on TV at home. The reporters at the conference ask how to spell Kardashian, which leads to a shot of Kim spelling the name out loud like, DUH, and then the…

It was such a beautiful film, and a really nice representation of the experience of having to find your own way and grow into yourself in a new place. The part where Eilis is sailing back to New York and she’s able to give solid advice to a nervous first-time migrant made me cry like an idiot, because I’ve found…

I don’t know what it is about the Chinese, but I’ve been seeing more and more of them in Egypt recently (which is great for the tourism industry, which needs all the help it can get at this point), and I seriously wonder what sort of advice they’re given about what to pack before they go. I work in Luxor during the…