Crompolius

painting, food and jokes. Is it wine time yet?

[Crompolius @crompolius]

@AyoCaesar Is he a mate of Fabricant?

[Crompolius @crompolius]

@Gamma_Monkey E4

[Soroush @Soroush_1403]

@PrezLives2022 I'm going with 'she emerged, daughter of Poseidon, from the wine-dark sea as the wind whipped her golden hair back revealing the goddess' tears of joy at finding this paradise, a former home of Triton, ready and prepared for her by Apollo.'

[The Husky @Mr_Husky1]

A 24-year-old Polish tennis player arrived in Paris last week ranked 114th in the world, with no sponsors, no guaranteed income, and no certainty she could even pay for her hotel room.

She had to win three qualifying matches just to enter the French Open main draw. Prize money is only paid at the end of the tournament, so a Polish sports drink brand quietly stepped in and covered her hotel bill.

Her name is Maja Chwalinska. And today, she plays in the French Open final.

Before this tournament, she had won exactly one Grand Slam main draw match in her entire career. She had battled depression so severe that in 2021 she couldn't get out of bed. She underwent knee surgery in 2022. She spent years grinding through small tournaments across Europe just to stay afloat.

Then she arrived in Paris, won three qualifiers, and kept winning. Zheng Qinwen. Elise Mertens. Maria Sakkari. Diana Shnaider. Nine straight matches. One set dropped.

She is now the first qualifier in French Open history to reach the final. The last time a qualifier reached a Grand Slam final, it was Emma Raducanu at the 2021 US Open. Raducanu won.

By simply making the final, Chwalinska has earned more prize money than her entire career combined. The runner-up cheque alone is $1.6 million. If she wins today, she takes home $3.25 million.
One week ago she couldn't pay for her hotel room.

[Richard Morris @ahistoryinart]

'Beach.' (c1928) Kenneth Macqueen developed a watercolour technique early in his artistic career that captures the freshness and spontaneity of a seascape. He sketched first, then made his pictures in the studio; the result, a simplified and reconfigured picture.

[Crompolius @crompolius]

@AyoCaesar

[Conor Moore @ConorSketches]

Pep is gone and Arsenal are champions! It’s all over for another year ⚽️

[Crompolius @crompolius]

@WriterHannahBT Seen but not heard (darting about too high) EAst London today

[RobertFella 🇺🇸 🇺🇦 @Bonkavision5]

Too on point not to share. This is great, but too bad the Orange Felon’s enablers won’t let him see it.
This Australian's reply to #Trump's rant about “NATO not being there for America” is perfect.
"Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can't cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage.
You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven't even been convicted of anything. They're just too poor to make bail.
Your life expectancy is going backwards. You're the only developed nation where that's happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba's. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker's stock to your mates.
Your minimum wage hasn't moved in 15 years. You've got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn't attack you.
And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again.
And you're calling Greenland poorly run?
Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no.
'NATO wasn't there when we needed them." When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn't even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years.
And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess.
So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. The only thing poorly run in this picture is your f----- mouth."
- Tony Locke

[Francisco Ribeiro @fraveris]

Pam Carter (Scottish, 1952–2022)

"Tiree Cottage in the Blue",

2015. Oil on Canvas

[Suppressed News. @SuppressedNws1]

WOW

A website is DOCUMENTING Israel’s crimes with GEOLOCATION, dates, categories of crimes, and footage of the incidents themselves.

One click and you can see EXACTLY what Israel did.

An enormous digital archive built for ACCOUNTABILITY.

Link: https://t.co/TWKgXJ41NC

Direct Link: https://t.co/qWkrhx1FT7

[Crompolius @crompolius]

@Parody_PM Close encounters of the turd kind

[4th July - Tory wipe Out @snb19692]

Genuine question for Farage!

"If you received £5 million for personal protection (as you say) why do you tell your constituents you can't hold surgery's due to lack of security???"

It's very puzzling! 🤔
Would have been cheaper to buy a dry cleaners!!! 😎😉

[The Wolf Man @iTheWolfman]

Wowww! I loved this

[No Context Brits @NoContextBrits]

He gets my vote.

[Crompolius @crompolius]

@bbclysedoucet hi lyce just seen you on news night and wondered like me you have deuypetron finger.solidarity sister x

[#WOMENSART @womensart1]

'Kynance Light' by Hazel MacNab, contemporary UK printmaker based in Cornwall #Womensart

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

In 1944, a Swiss engineer named Hans Hilfiker designed a clock for train stations. Sixty-eight years later, Apple put it on the iPad without asking. Switzerland sent them a $22 million bill. Apple paid.

The clock has a red second hand that sweeps the dial in 58.5 seconds, then pauses for a beat at the top of the minute. It waits for an electric signal from one master clock somewhere in the country before jumping forward. Every clock at every station shows the same second.

This kind of obsession runs through every Swiss train ride. Two crews drilled through 35 miles of solid Alps from opposite ends to build the Gotthard Base Tunnel. After 17 years and $12 billion, they met in the middle, 3 inches off. Vertically, the misalignment was under half an inch. It is the longest train tunnel on Earth, and the deepest, with up to 1.4 miles of rock overhead. Nine workers died building it.

Switzerland has more train track per square mile than any country in Europe. Nearly three times more than the European average. The Swiss ride more trains per person than anyone in the world except Japan. The average is 1,500 miles a year.

Punctuality runs on its own scale. Last year, 94 out of every 100 Swiss trains arrived on time. And in Switzerland, "on time" means "within 3 minutes of the schedule." Germany gives trains 6 minutes. France and Italy give 5. Use Germany's gentler rule, and 99 out of 100 Swiss long-distance trains arrived on time. Germany itself manages 62.

The trains have been fully electric for decades. Since January 2025, all of that electricity comes from clean energy, mostly from eight hydroelectric plants the railway owns. A long-distance Swiss train carries one passenger 60 miles on about half the electricity an electric car would use.

Scenery like that takes work. It takes a country that spends $18 billion on its trains in four years, powers them with Alpine water, drills 35 miles through solid mountain, and treats a 3-minute delay as a national failure. The view out the window is what's left over.

[Crompolius @crompolius]

@Martina Trump valley .Utah😂