Tamed headhunter, between projects. last sourcing world-class Talent for @Microsoft. @Trainline, @BBCNews & @Spotify. Always hiring 👀
///wiring.breakaway.dodges
Joined April 2009
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This kid 💓
6 July 1940 | Hungarian Jewish boy Istvan Ferenc Reiner was born in Miskolc to Bela and Livia.
In June 1944 he was deported to #Auschwitz and murdered in a gas chamber after the selection.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
In 1992, an AA employee called Jason Pegler was walking home from work in Dover, England, when he walked past a public telephone box. As he did so, the phone started ringing.
His curiosity piqued, he decided to answer it. To his absolute astonishment, the call was for…him
On the other end of the line was his colleague, Sue Hamilton. She apologised for disturbing him and asked for help with the office fax machine, which she couldn’t get to work. Jason was dumbfounded.
‘Hold on Sue, how could you possibly know I was beside this particular phone box?’, asked Jason.
Confused, Sue didn’t understand the question.
‘What do you mean,’ she replied. ‘Isn’t this your home number?’
Jason explained that he was still on his way home, and that he’d simply heard a public phone ringing as he walked past and decided to pick it up. (And this is where it gets genuinely bonkers.)
When Sue checked the number she’d dialled, she finally worked out what had happened. She had mistaken his AA *staff* number for his home telephone number!
By what must be the maddest coincidence of their respective lives, that staff number was also the number of the public phone box in Dover that Jason was passing just at the moment she called.
Sue had dialled the wrong number, but reached the right person.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
😂😂😂 All the wallopers on this thread clearly unaware that there is an international film festival on in #Edinburgh right now. Not like a movie director might be at that is it?
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
The farming industry thought Jeremy Clarkson was a tourist. The press decided he was a tax dodger.
In June, Cereals, the flagship arable trade show in Britain, was held on his farm. Over 700 exhibitors. Around 25,000 people from the industry.
They brought their own biggest event to his field.
The tax accusation is fair enough as far as it goes. He told The Times that avoiding inheritance tax was the critical thing when he bought land, and he has never once denied it.
Then he farmed it himself from 2019, badly, on camera.
Cleared £144 in year one. Lost money by year six. Opened a shop and was refused a car park. Built a restaurant and got an enforcement notice with six weeks to undo it. Fought two planning appeals and lost most of them.
Bought pigs and lost a litter. Went down with TB and shut the farm for seven months. Opened a pub that only serves British produce and absorbs 56p on every sausage. Left 200 acres bare this year because growing wheat was a guaranteed loss.
Every bit of it filmed and broadcast to fourteen million people.
Then the platform in Westminster with 13,000 farmers behind him. Permitted development rewritten in May 2024, nicknamed Clarkson's Clause. Cited twice in the House of Commons as evidence. Waitrose British sirloin up 193 percent. Agricultural degree applications climbing.
And years of being called a rich prat with a Range Rover for the trouble.
As a plan for quietly sheltering money, it is one of the worst ever attempted. Nobody protecting a tax break spends six years telling the country that farms make nothing, and nobody sane draws two Secretaries of State towards the exact relief he is relying on.
Farmland was a shelter because it does not earn. Nothing gives you a return and a tax break at the same time. The relief existed precisely because the return did not.
He bought a thousand acres for the shelter, discovered on camera why the shelter was there, and then told everybody.
The industry has stopped calling him a tourist.
It holds its trade shows in his field now.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
Harriet Cowan turned up on Clarkson's Farm with her lashes on and a certain kind of viewer decided that a woman on a tractor was a modern invention. The last time this country was genuinely in danger of not being fed, eighty thousand women did the feeding.
They were called the Land Army, and by 1943 there were more than eighty thousand of them. A quarter went into dairy. Others felled timber. Some were put on rat squads, because wartime Britain was overrun, and two of them are reckoned to have killed twelve thousand between them in a single year.
Most had never seen a farm. They came out of London and the northern cities into hostels with no heating, learned to milk by hand in the dark at half five, and worked forty-eight hours a week in winter and fifty in summer with no holiday of any kind until 1943.
The pay was twenty-eight shillings a week, and fourteen of those went straight back for board and lodging. The men working beside them on the same farms got thirty-eight.
Then the receipt, and it is in Hansard, 14 February 1945.
The Land Army women were barred from the forces canteens. Italian prisoners of war, under certain conditions, were allowed in. A member stood up in the Commons and said so out loud, along with the plain fact that these women had been treated as civilians when it came to privileges and as servicemen when it came to being moved across the country at a day's notice.
Two days later the director of the Land Army resigned. She went because the government had decided her women would be excluded from the settlement given to everyone else who served.
So the men came home to a gratuity, a suit, and the legal right to their old jobs back.
The women who had kept those men fed got a rail ticket.
Recognition finally arrived in December 2007. The badges went out the following summer to around forty-five thousand survivors, sixty-odd years late, by which point the great majority of them were in the ground and the rest were in their eighties.
A badge. In the post.
And this is the country that now regards a young woman on a tractor as a curiosity worth a segment. Her great-grandmother's generation ploughed eighteen million acres, ran the dairies, and was told she could not have a cup of tea in a canteen that would serve a captured Italian.
Harriet is not the new thing. She is the oldest thing on that farm.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
Wool is one of the most extraordinary materials on earth and we swapped it for melted bottles.
Consider what it actually is. It grows. On an animal. By itself. The sheep stands on a hill eating grass nobody else can use, and out of the grass and the rain it manufactures, continuously, for free, a fibre so good that we spent most of human history unable to improve on it. You shear it off. It doesn't hurt her. She grows more. You could not design a more generous arrangement if you sat in a room for a year: a self-replenishing, self-powered coat that renews every summer and asks for nothing but a haircut.
And look at what it does. It's warm when it's wet, which almost nothing else on earth manages. It breathes. It wicks the damp off you and holds heat anyway. It's naturally flame-retardant, so it smoulders and stops rather than melting onto your skin. It fights off smell for days. It lasts decades, gets handed down, and when it finally dies you can put it in the ground and it feeds the soil, because it came out of a field and it's content to go back to one.
That's the thing we decided wasn't good enough.
So here's the replacement. We take crude oil, out of the ground, and we crack it in a chemical plant, and we spin it into plastic thread, and we call it fleece, which is a theft of the word, because there's no fleece in it and never was a sheep near it. Polyester. Acrylic. A jumper made of petrol.
And it does the opposite of everything wool does. It's cold and clammy the second you sweat. It stinks after one wear, because the bacteria love it. If it gets near a flame it melts, onto you, which is its own special horror. And every single time you wash it, it sheds thousands of shreds of plastic too small to see, which go down the drain, into the river, into the fish, into the water, into you, forever, because unlike the sheep's coat this one does not go back into the ground. Nothing eats it. Nothing breaks it down. It just becomes the world's problem for the next four hundred years.
We took a material an animal grows out of grass, that keeps you warm wet, saves your skin from fire, and returns to the earth when it's done, and we replaced it with a garment made of oil that freezes you, poisons the water, and outlives your grandchildren.
And they'll tell you the wool's the ethical concern. The wool. Because the sheep had a haircut.
Wear the wool. Let her keep growing it.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
Labour, Tories, Lib Dems and Greens: I demand you stand down in Clacton. I will be a unity candidate and pledge to build at least one affordable house.
Nigel Farage says he wants The People versus the Establishment. So be it.
Leave him to me.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
@auldhag got 2 spares for the event tonight, can meet at the venue.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
"Livestock use 83% of the world's farmland and give back just 18% of our calories."
There it is. The killer stat, lifted off the infographic, courtesy of Poore and Nemecek's enormous 2018 study in Science: nearly 38,700 farms across 119 countries. Damning. Wildly inefficient. Somebody fetch the cow a P45.
One small question before sentencing. Where is that 83% of land?
It's grass. Worldwide, around two-thirds of all farmland isn't cropland at all; it's pasture and rough grazing. Fell, moor, steppe, marsh, scrub.
Marginal land, to use the term of art. Too steep, thin, wet, or cold to grow a single thing a human can chew.
In Britain, about 65% of farmland is good for grass and little else. You are welcome to plant lentils on a Cumbrian hillside. You will then watch them sit there, baffled, and die.
What that land does grow is cellulose, the most abundant biomass on Earth and a substance your gut regards as scaffolding. You cannot eat it. Nor can any pig, chicken, or vegan.
A ruminant can. That is the entire trick. She walks across the inedible two-thirds of the world's farmland and turns it into milk and meat.
So the cow isn't squatting on prime arable while the nation starves; she's working the land that grows precisely one crop, grass, which she eats, which is the whole point of her.
Calling that inefficient is like calling a fishing boat inefficient for its poor performance on the motorway.
Then there's the calorie sleight of hand, which is somehow the dafter half.
Yes, beef is a modest share of calories. So is a glass of cooking oil. You can get calories from a spoon of sugar. Calories are the easy part.
The hard part is everything else the steak is carrying. On DIAAS, the actual measure of protein quality, beef scores about 1.0 to 1.1, with milk and eggs a shade higher.
Wheat limps in around 0.45. Almonds manage 0.40. The FAO won't let a protein scoring under 0.75 make a quality claim at all, which quietly disqualifies most of the plant kingdom.
Then there's B12, of which plants contain essentially none, plus heme iron and zinc in a form your body can actually be bothered to absorb.
Ranking food by raw calories and declaring the steak a failure is like ranking a library by how well the books burn.
By that measure, petrol is the finest meal in Britain.
😁
Retiring from the British Army can be complicated...
Lt. Colonel Robert Maclaren retired from the British Army in 2001 after a long fulfilling career. On the day that he retired he received a letter from the Personnel Department of the Ministry of Defence setting out details of his pension and, in particular, the tax-free ‘lump sum’ award, (based upon completed years of service), that he would receive in addition to his monthly pension.
The letter read:
“Dear Lt. Colonel Maclaren,
We write to confirm that you retired from the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards on 1st March 2001 at the rank of Lt Colonel, having been commissioned into the British Army at Edinburgh Castle as a 2nd Lieutenant on 1st February 1366.
Accordingly your lump sum payment, based on years served, has been calculated as £68,500. You will receive a cheque for this amount in due course.
Yours sincerely,
Army Paymaster”
Col Maclaren replied:
“Dear Paymaster,
Thank you for your recent letter confirming that I served as an officer in the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards between 1st February 1366 and 1st March 2001 – a total period of 635 years and 1 month.
I note however that you have calculated my lump sum to be £68, 500, which seems to be considerably less than it should be bearing in mind my length of service since I received my commission from King Edward III.
By my calculation, allowing for interest payments and currency fluctuations, my lump sum should actually be £6,427,586,619.47p.
I look forward to receiving a cheque for this amount in due course.
Yours sincerely,
Robert Maclaren (Lt Col Retd)”
A month passed by and then in early April, a stout manilla envelope from the Ministry of Defence in Edinburgh dropped through Col Maclaren’s letter box, it read:
“Dear Lt Colonel Maclaren,
We have reviewed the circumstances of your case as outlined in your recent letter to us dated 8th March inst.
We do indeed confirm that you were commissioned into the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards by King Edward III at Edinburgh Castle on 1st February 1366, and that you served continuously for the following 635 years and 1 month.
We have re-calculated your pension and have pleasure in confirming that the lump sum payment due to you is indeed £6,427,586,619.47p.
However,
We also note that according to our records you are the only surviving officer who had command responsibility during the following campaigns and battles:
*The Wars of the Roses 1455 -1485 (Including the battles of Bosworth Field, Barnet and Towton)
*The Civil War 1642 -1651 (Including the battles Edge Hill, Naseby and the conquest of Ireland)
*The Napoleonic War 1803 – 1815 (including the battle of Waterloo and the Peninsular War)
*The Crimean War (1853 – 1856) (including the battle of Sevastopol and the Charge of the Light Brigade)
*The Boer War (1899 -1902).
We would therefore wish to know what happened to the following, which do not appear to have been returned to Stores by you on completion of operations:
*9765 Cannon
*26,785 Swords
*12,889 Pikes
*127,345 Rifles (with bayonets)
*28,987 horses (fully kitted)
Plus three complete marching bands with instruments and banners.
We have calculated the total cost of these items and they amount to £6,427,518.119.47p.
WE have therefore subtracted this sum from your lump sum, leaving a residual amount of £68,500, for which you will receive a cheque in due course.
Yours sincerely . . . .”
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
Here is a huge positive to modern life that gets no press.
I have an old 2009 Toyota, and the AUX port crapped out about a year ago. Went to YouTube. Young, enthusiastic guy explains how to fix it.
It is not obvious - involves taking the dashboard apart in a counter-intuitive way, but once you see it, it's a 15 minute fix.
There are actually dozens of videos showing how to do this, and they collectively have well over 200k views.
Had this happened in 1995, I would have just lived with it. But the combo of the replacement AUX jack available from Amazon and the video of the simple (but not obvious) fix, I fixed it.
I HAVE DONE THIS DOZENS OF TIMES. Replaced the control panel of my dishwasher. Replaced the ice maker in the fridge. Fixed a wonky sanding head on my drill press. Mastered a bandsaw technique that I use for my sculpture. On and on and on...
I think it is likely no exaggeration to say billions of fixes and skill upgrades have been performed worldwide that would not have been performed if it were not for the instruction freely given peer-to-peer on YouTube.
Take a moment to be happy about this. The busted item keeps performing, rather than going to the landfill. The person learning and doing the fix gains a sense of mastery and saves money. It's an unmixed blessing.
Stop doomscrolling. Think of what is busted in your house, find the YouTube video on how to fix it, and fix it.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
Tears For Fears were the best British band of the 80s. Much better than The Smiths. Their first 3 albums are almost flawless. They were huge in America too. They don't get the credit they deserve.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
Myth: "I only wear vegan fabrics. Better for the animals, better for the planet."
Let's check in on Doris's annual contribution.
Once a year, in late spring, Doris is sheared. The procedure takes approximately three minutes. Doris does not enjoy it. Doris does not, by any visible measure, suffer from it. Doris is, immediately afterwards, a noticeably more comfortable animal in the British summer.
The fleece weighs approximately 3 kilograms. It is sold to the British Wool Marketing Board for, depending on the year, between £0.40 and £2.50 per kilogram. The shearing costs more than the wool fetches. Brian is shearing Doris at a loss.
The wool is then:
- Naturally flame-retardant
- Naturally antibacterial
- Moisture-wicking
- Biodegradable
- Renewable, annually
- Carbon-storing while in use
The replacement, in performance fabrics:
- Polyester
- Polyamide
- Acrylic
- Polypropylene
- All petroleum-derived
- All shedding microplastics on every wash
- All requiring fossil fuel inputs to produce
- All non-biodegradable, with a typical landfill lifespan of 200-500 years
A single wash of a polyester fleece can release up to 700,000 microplastic fibres into the water system. These fibres are now in: every tested water source on earth, every tested human placenta, every tested rainfall sample, the deep ocean, the Arctic ice, and the lungs of marine mammals.
A single wash of a wool jumper releases: nothing. The wool, when eventually disposed of, returns to soil within a few years.
The fabric being marketed as the "ethical" alternative to wool is plastic.
The plastic is "ethical" because nobody has been asked to slaughter the polymer.
The polymer also has not been asked.
Doris, by being a sheep on a fell, is producing the most thoroughly sustainable performance fabric humans have ever made.
Brian is selling it at a loss.
The fashion industry, meanwhile, is selling petroleum at a profit and calling it ethical.
Reject plastic. Wear wool.
Doris is, this morning, growing next year's batch.
BigMac 🎧🤓Between Projects retweeted
As I enter my 30th year of being very happily married to a woman way out of my league, I have a message to young men: there is a secret to a successful relationship, it's being best friends with another couple where the man is a useless buffoon
