His wife’s from Newfoundland.

It is? And here I was wondering when Pence started wearing glasses in public.

There are some very good right-wing writers and poets. Kingsley Amis comes to mind, or Philip Larkin.

There’s always stuffing and mounting. After all, you don’t know where these people have been.

The sound of its asshole slamming shut as that dump passed shook the forest and started small landslides.

Well, I was there 20 years ago. We were travelling pretty rough but even outside of ‘Tana I could usually find someone who could speak French better than I could. Admittedly the odd English-speaker was a Godsend.

Hurts like a bugger, doesn’t it?

Really? I found that everyone there spoke better French than I did. Which is not hard, but still.

Nice bit of work here.

I recall reading that Dürer actually had drawn the rhino from life, but it was a captive Sumatran rhino that had been in captivity for a long time in Europe and that’s why its hide looked so odd - various malformations due to vitamin deficiencies etc. Unfortunately I can’t find the reference for this. Dürer was a real…

Nobody ever talks about the strains of rats that Belyaev selected on the basis of their hostility towards, and fear of, human beings. Apparently what he got after a few generations was something out of a nightmare.

I’d like to know more about this “nipple land”.

Thanks for this, it’s news to me. I thought Borrelia was a New-World disease.

Where were these mummies found?

It’s still possible. A couple of minutes with no oxygen reaching your brain and you’d be there.

My favourite Soviet use of nuclear power is the string of unmanned nuclear-powered lighthouses along the Russian Arctic coast.

Yes, there were those who thought it’d be like this...

An aerostat probe that floated in the Venusian atmosphere (at the level equivalent to Earth’s atmospheric pressure, say) might last a lot longer - it would not be dealing with the heat and pressure of the surface, although it might encounter things like clouds of sulphuric acid droplets. Still, conditions that high…

Thanks. I sort of thought it was something like that, but it sounds sadder and more unpleasant than what I’d imagined.

Please telll us more about this “Beta Orbiting”.