Local elections today in Graz, Austria's second largest city, and the communists (yes, the actual communists) increased their share of the vote by 7% to 35.8% meaning that they're still the largest party but now can govern in a two-party coalition with the Greens. The FPÖ gained slightly but still only got 12%.

The march of the right is by no means an inevitability or unstoppable.

Fair to say that ORF's commentator got a bit carried away here.

New high end cocktail: The Reflecting Pool.
1- line your glass with a blue fruit roll up.
Then you're going to need:
2 oz rum
4 oz juice that is kinda yellow (pineapple, mango, orange, lemonade, whatever you like)
1 oz blue curacao (you can adjust for color)
Garnish with lime zest
The yellow and blue liquids make a lovely shade of algae and the rum eventually melts the blue fruit roll up, which is, IMHO, the best part.
Enjoy!

Fortunately he didn't cause an accident so I can only laugh at the news that former far right presidential candidate Norbert Hofer (FPÖ) who came alarmingly close to the top job got caught driving at nearly 5 times over the legal limit (2.46‰, limit is 0.5‰) after another driver noticed a car driving erratically and called the police. This means: (deep breath) licence gone for a long time, a big fine, obligatory retraining, a medical assessment and a psychological evaluation before he's allowed to drive again. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. Best of all, he used to be minister for transport. What is it about these people insisting on driving when they're pissed? Did Jörg Haider die in vain?

https://burgenland.orf.at/stories/3360307/

We get told that larger companies acquiring smaller ones can bring economies of scale in purchasing and distribution plus the shared knowledge and technology and processes which benefits consumers who are able to access a high-quality product at a reasonable price.

So how is that that the retail price of a crate of Märzen brewed by one of the big Austrian brewers that is one of the many now owned by Heineken through their purchase of Brau Union is consistently a couple of euros *higher* than a crate of Märzen brewed by one of the brewers that is still privately owned (i.e., Stiegl) or a long-standing cooperative (Murauer)? And at least to my palate they're better beers as well.

It's almost as if...

NOT COOL, MUSEUM. Not cool.

John Livesey playing Otho Sackville-Baggins in the BBC Radio adaptation of #LOTR. The Hitch-Hiker's radio series was about a year ago and still very popular with the public at this point so I'm wondering if this was an intentional Simon Jones impersonation... because good lord he really does sound like Arthur Dent.

Ofcom: No, Restore Britain, it's entirely reasonable for a completely new party that has no electoral record and is probably going to get about 5% of the vote not to be invited onto "Question Time" and you should probably look up the meaning of "due weight" as on this occasion you were indeed due very little weight.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/about-ofcom/how-ofcom-is-run/election-committee/election-committee-decision-on-a-due-impartiality-complaint-12-june-2026.pdf

RIP Roy Hattersley, one of the greats from the days when even being on the right of the Labour party meant still being to the left of everyone else. A great detail from his Wikipedia page:

His father [Frederick Roy Hattersley], at various times a police officer, clerk at Sheffield town hall, and chairman of the council's Health Committee was a former Roman Catholic priest who renounced the church and left the priesthood to cohabit with Hattersley's mother, Enid, a married woman at whose wedding he had officiated two weeks earlier; Frederick ultimately died an atheist.

Enid Hattersley was very prominent in Sheffield council and had her own obit in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/may/31/guardianobituaries.politics

Bafana²

I mean, I don't want for a moment to belittle the achivement of the four #Artemis crew members who have been selected. It is definitely not their fault that the word has clearly come down to #NASA to make it clear that the crew must all be male, family men and with military backgrounds. It is definitely NASA's fault for either a) rolling over and meekly doing what it was told or b) being so backward in its outlook that they didn't even consider the idea that an all-male crew is simply not something that should happen in the year 2026.

And what a smack in the face it is to every one of NASA and ESA's female astronauts to know that they were probably never even considered.

#NASA just announced the crew for #Artemis III and they are all men. Even the backup is male. Seriously, fuck this shit.

rate my battlestation #cat

Massive treat for train nerds - a 4k/60fps cab view of the trip from Graz to Villach via the shiny new Koralmbahn and the 32km long Koralmtunnel. Railjet go brrrrrr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNA7er4FrRo

Thinking back over the last 35 years of my career and the thing that I hadn’t really thought about before is how remarkable it is that the SRE team at Google Zürich had such a toxic management culture that they somehow managed to give a 40-something white dude a nervous breakdown. I mean, that takes real effort.

Consequences for me: collapse in self-confidence, long term career damage and still on antidepressants.
Consequences for management: Promotion, as far as I can tell.

Searching for recordings of Purcell's "Dido and Aeneas" and I DARE YOU AUTOCORRECT

Another bit of trivia about the Brenner blockade: it had cross-party support with multiple party leaders (from the Tirol branches) showing up. The Landeshauptmann (who is ÖVP) attempted to claim that he was only attending "in a personal capacity" but I don't think people have let him get away with that. This wasn't a Green event, or a socialist event, or even a national conservative event. It was *everyone*, because everyone agrees that the situation with transit traffic has become unsustainable.

According to authorities it went surprisingly well and the feared nightmare traffic jams elsewhere failed to appear. This seems a very good argument for doing this more often, or at least until Bavaria takes responsibility for its own part of the megaproject for moving trans-Alpine freight onto rail.

Starting to think that if you gave a bunch of Germans pins and told them to stick them in a map at the location of the Brenner pass far too many of them would place it somewhere near Stuttgart.

Google's amazing new AI-you-can't-turn-off in search seems to have decided that C&C Music Factory was an actual factory.
`

*sighs deeply in Austrian*