Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

I remember reading this a while back.

On Thursday, Mack shared a video of the queen’s former royal protection officer, Richard Griffin, telling a very funny story about the monarch in honor of her Platinum Jubilee in June.

“This remains an all-time story about the queen,” Mack captioned the video.

this remains an all-time story about the queen pic.twitter.com/hI2yNUac0H
— David Mack (davidmackau) September 8, 2022

In the video, Griffin shares a story about a time the queen pranked two American hikers. He explained that he accompanied the monarch on a picnic in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, near Balmoral Castle when they ran into the tourists, who were on vacation in the area.

“The Queen would always stop and say hello … it was clear from the moment we first stopped they hadn’t recognized [her],” he told Sky News.

So the American tourists started making small talk with the queen before asking her if she lived in the area.

“She said, ‘Well, I live in London, but I’ve got a holiday home just the other side of the hills.’”

One tourist then asked the queen how long she had been visiting the area, and the queen replied, “‘ever since I was a little girl, so over 80 years’” Griffin recalled.

That’s when curiosity apparently struck the Americans.

“‘Well, if you’ve been coming up for 80 years, you must have met the queen?’” one of them asked her.

Without missing a beat, the queen replied, “Well, I haven’t, but Dickie here meets her regularly,’” referring to Griffin by a nickname.

The bodyguard then said the tourist turned to him and asked him what she was like.

And it seems Dickie was feeling a bit mischievous as well and followed the queen’s lead.

“‘She can be very cantankerous at times, but she’s got a lovely sense of humor,’” Griffin said he told the tourist.

Still oblivious to the fact he was in the presence of royalty, the tourist threw his arm around the bodyguard and put his camera into the queen’s hand, asking if she’d mind taking a photo of the two of them. The queen obliged.

The tourists then took a snap with her as well and went on their way.

Griffin remembered that once the tourists were out of earshot, the queen turned to him and said:

“‘I’d love to be a fly on the wall when he shows those photographs to friends in America. Hopefully, someone tells him who I am.’”

This is a rumor. This is only a rumor. In the event of an actual announcement....

So the father-in-law of Dominic Cummings, one of BoJo's cabinet, told a reporter that BoJo came back to work after having a very serious run-in with COVID far too soon, and that he's entirely not fit. The problem was, Boris was literally in a damned if you do, damned if you don't position. He either had to get back to work, or resign. If he resigned, he would throw the UK into even more chaos regarding COVID and Brexit than it was already in. If he didn't, he risked wrecking his own health further.

He chose the latter course. And apparently he's paying the price.

And now it's rumored that some time after the first of the year that he's going to resign as Prime Minister. Date unspecified, I guess it depends on how long he can hold out, and possibly how much chaos it looks like Brexit is going to be, the answer to that is MASSIVE.

So a No Deal Brexit is going to happen at the end of the year, shit is going to break all over the UK, the Torries are going to be scrambling to try to patch things up, the Remainers are going to be cringing, the Leavers are going to be shouting "We Won!(?)" and then wondering why the supermarkets are empty and they can't get their prescriptions, and the Europeans are going to be shaking their heads. And probably Nicola Sturgeon and Scotland are going to start preparing a Leave UK/Join EU vote.

It's possible that the UK still might get some deals settled with the EU, but from what I've been reading, it doesn't seem likely. They're still wanting Most Favored status, but entirely on their own terms and with no equal responsibilities, and the EU won't budge, and why should they? England is the one who left the organization, and negotiating is a two-way process. If all you're going to do is demand everything your way, there's little reason for the other side - whom you're very dependent on - to acquiesce.

BoJo's gov't hasn't even been able to strike meaningful deals with America's negotiators! Trade negotiations are a fundamental aspect of government, and the Torries haven't seem to have had much success in that area.

I don't deeply follow UK politics, do any Torries have the following to pick up the pieces and try to follow through on Brexit if BoJo resigns or dies?

https://www.businessinsider.com/dominic-cummings-father-in-law-boris-johnson-will-resign-february-2020-8


There's an interesting series of photos of U.S. Presidents, at the start and end of their presidencies, showing how much of a toll their terms take on them as it's an insanely stressful job. Of course I think that starts after Lincoln. I have no idea if they have a similar series for PMs, I would imagine it would show similar changes.

First up, a movie written by an artificial intelligence. It's only 10 minutes long, but it's pretty interesting. An article on Ars Technica pointed me in this direction. These people set up an AI and fed it a few hundred movie scripts that they found on the internet, received some prompts from a film competition, and turned it loose.

Unfortunately I can't embed this video. A word of warning: it not only auto-plays, it starts a second video after it's done.


From Slashdot, "Creepy British startup Score Assured has brought the power of "big data" to plumb new depths. In order to rent from landlords who use their services, potential renters are "...required to grant it full access to your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and/or Instagram profiles. From there, Tenant Assured scrapes your site activity, including entire conversation threads and private messages; runs it through natural language processing and other analytic software; and finally, spits out a report that catalogs everything from your personality to your 'financial stress level.'" This "stress level" is a deep dive to (allegedly) determine whether the potential renter will pay their bills using vague indicators like "online retail social logins and frequency of social logins used for leisure activities." To make it worse, the company turns over to the landlords' indicators that the landlords aren't legally allowed to consider (age, race, pregnancy status), counting on the landlords to "do the right thing." As if this isn't abusive enough, the candidates are not allowed to see nor challenge their report, unlike with credit reports. Landlords first, employers next...and then? As the co-founder says, "People will give up their privacy to get something they want" and, evidently, that includes a place to live and a job.

In late May, an apartment building in Salt Lake City told tenants living in the complex to "like" its Facebook page or they will be in breach of their lease."

So, if the UK Parliament doesn't put in some decent privacy laws, you've got a big problem there if this company and concept continues to exist. I think I would definitely be in favor of someone like Anonymous doxxing this company's board of directors.

"The Conservative Party have attempted to delete all their speeches and press releases online from the past 10 years, including one in which David Cameron promises to use the Internet to make politicians 'more accountable'. The Tory party have deleted the backlog of speeches from the main website and the Internet Archive — which aims to make a permanent record of websites and their content — between 2000 and May 2010."

http://news.slashdot.org/story/13/11/13/1734213/britains-conservatives-scrub-speeches-from-the-internet

Apparently if you buy a domain that was previously archived by the Internet Archive and change the robots.txt file to block archiving, the IA deletes all of the previous scans. Also apparently the Canadians under Harper are doing a similar thing. There are still archives if one knows where to look, but it will make fact-checking previous claims and promises more difficult.

How long until American politicians start practicing unspeaking?

This equipment can be used to "...shut off phones remotely, intercept communications and gather data about thousands of users in a targeted area." It also covers an area "...up to an estimated 10 sq km, forcing hundreds of mobile phones per minute to release their unique IMSI and IMEI identity codes, which can be used to track a person's movements in real time."

Wow. I'm not really surprised, something like this is kind of inevitable. One of the purposes of this is to prevent a bomb from detonating that's rigged to a cell phone, which is kind of stupid, because any bomber worth their salt would have fallback detonators which this would not be able to counter.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/30/metropolitan-police-mobile-phone-surveillance

Well, it would be more accurate to say that they are considering several giant steps. They want to install black boxes on upstream internet providers that will record ALL INTERNET ACTIVITY that originates in or from the UK.

It's a proposal right now, so who knows if it will become reality. Considering everything else that they've done that became reality, I'd be expecting it in a few years.

If you live there or plan on visiting, it might be time to hire a VPN service outside of the country.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3384743/Internet-black-boxes-to-record-every-email-and-website-visit.html

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/07/0337205