Brendan Munnelly

Creator. Author. Lecturer: prose, code, and pixels.

[Brendan Munnelly @2N2L]

💯 The most useful book ever for students of Shakespeare’s #Hamlet.

🤔 Because 400 years of WTF is enough!

https://t.co/WdT15QBaBK

[Proudofus.uk @ProudofusUK]

"Am I not a Man? And a Brother?" 🇬🇧🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

The most famous image of the fight against slavery was made in a Staffordshire pottery.

Josiah Wedgwood was the most famous potter in England. Born in Burslem in 1730, he turned pottery into an industry: division of labour, costed processes, and a heat gauge for his kilns so good the Royal Society made him a Fellow in 1783.

Then he used all of it for something that mattered.

In 1787 he joined the new Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and commissioned a small jasperware medallion: a kneeling African man in chains, hands raised, and 5 words around the rim.

"Am I not a man and a brother?"

He paid for them himself. He never sold one. He gave away thousands, and shipped a batch across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin.

People wore them as brooches, hairpins, and snuff boxes. To wear it was to say, without a word, where you stood. It became the badge of the whole movement.

Arguably the first political logo in history. And every ribbon, wristband and awareness pin since traces back to a potter in Staffordshire who decided to use his kiln for something more than dinner plates.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

He could have stuck to selling china to the rich. He chose to hand a movement its face instead.

This is the revival of British culture. Be part of it.

👉 https://t.co/rih7iKwnvf 👈

Be part of us. ☝️🇬🇧

Be Proud Of Us. 🙏🇬🇧

[Eoin O'Malley @AnMailleach]

Disciplining doctors who failed to follow the party line during the Covid pandemic is inherently anti-scientific. This week’s @Independent_ie column

https://t.co/QM7GRRpbSX

[enter shakira𓅮 @BARFJAMiN]

getting a fast-tracked 3-year jail sentence handed down by an AI judge for a hallucinated crime with no jury or right of appeal. the future of Britain is here baby

[Brendan Munnelly @2N2L]

Ireland needs one of these.

[Made In England @BuyEnglishMade]

Introducing the Made In England gift card.

For someone who appreciates the good things, quietly made and properly done.

They choose. You give them the pick of England's makers.

Available here:
https://t.co/62I93mW71p

[DIEGO @DiegoArchives]

como le explicas a un pibe en el 2060 que esto no fue ia

[🇬🇧 Natalie 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇮🇷 @FireRabbit25]

“It takes a long time to make it simple.”

—David Hockney (1937-2026)

[Fermat's Library @fermatslibrary]

On this day 150 years ago William Sealy Gosset was born. He spent his whole career as a brewer at Guinness, working on a problem the textbooks ignored: how to draw conclusions from tiny samples, like four plots of barley or a handful of hops. The statistics of the day assumed large samples so Gosset invented the statistics of small ones.

Guinness barred its employees from publishing after one of them leaked trade secrets, and did not want competitors knowing it used science to brew beer so when Gosset published his method in 1908 he signed it with a pseudonym: Student.

Every clinical trial, lab experiment and A/B test that runs a t-test today is using the work of Student. The most famous name in statistics is a fake one.

[detty @0ddette]

One of the eeriest pictures from the entire saga to me.

[An Spailpín Fánach @anspailpin]

If Ray D'Arcy had even one atom of self-awareness he would get down on his knees every single day and thank Almighty God he got away with it for as long as he did.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Britain has cleared its uplands twice before. We are most of the way through the third, and almost nobody has said the word out loud.

The first was enclosure. Across the 1700s and 1800s, act by act, the common land that ordinary families had grazed for generations was fenced off and signed over to private owners. Millions of acres. A cottager with a pig and a cow on the common went to bed a commoner and woke up a trespasser, his animals grazing land that now belonged to the big house.

The second was the Highland Clearances. Families were burned out of their glens and put on ships, because a hillside of sheep paid the landlord better than a hillside of people. Whole valleys went silent. Walk far enough today and you can still find the rooftrees lying in the heather.

The third is happening now, and it arrives in a green coat. The hill farmer is squeezed out by carbon money, by tree-planting targets, by schemes that pay him to keep fewer animals, by land-use plans that quietly file his fields under surplus. A drinks company buys the glen to cancel out its emissions. The valley empties on schedule. Only the cover story is new.

Enclosure was sold as improvement. The Clearances were sold as progress. This one is sold as saving the planet.

Notice what does not change. The same families lose the land. The same hills fall quiet. The same large interests end up owning the ground, and the same comfortable people, a safe distance away, explain why it was all regrettably necessary.

History rarely repeats itself exactly. It just keeps clearing the uplands, and reaching for the kindest available word to do it.

[redball @redball2]

🌳🌿🕊️ David Hockney drawing with his beloved dog Ruby beside him, under the trees in his home garden in Normandy, France, April 29 2020 | 📷 @Tate London

https://t.co/MrIqKUARJd

[Brendan Munnelly @2N2L]

@nwl88444048 Containment breach alert,

[Sam C @SamC_reports]

🚨 BREAKING: Manchester United legend Lou Macari has been awarded an MBE in the King’s Birthday Honours.

The former United striker has been recognised for his outstanding work with the Macari Foundation, which has helped tackle homelessness in Stoke-on-Trent over the past decade.

A fantastic honour for a true footballing great 👏

[Brendan Munnelly @2N2L]

@London_W4 @chasedownleads I guessing that includes VAT.

[🇮🇪 This is Ireland 🇮🇪 @ThisIsIreland3]

'Under The Bridge' 🌄💚

📍Ballynacargy, Co. Westmeath 🇮🇪

📸 Willie Forde Photography

#Westmeath #Ireland #Ballynacargy

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

"It was June, and the world smelled of roses."

- Maud Hart Lovelace

[Brendan Munnelly @2N2L]

@LNERCA More of this sort of thing.

[Madeline Grant @Madz_Grant]

Words to live by. RIP David Hockney

[Meirion Jones @MeirionTweets]

Correction of the day. Michael Caine is alive. Not a lot of people at the @guardian know that

[Brendan Munnelly @2N2L]

@Telegraph RIP. Always ready with the bright colours in an otherwise too-grey world.