Louise Weale

[All day Astronomy @forallcurious]

NASA has released one of the most detailed visualizations ever created of Earth’s ocean currents.

Using data from satellites and advanced ocean models, the map reveals massive rivers of moving water, swirling eddies hundreds of miles wide, and the powerful Gulf Stream carrying warm water from the Gulf of Mexico across the Atlantic.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The word dairy is descended from an Old English word for a woman. That is not a coincidence. It is a receipt.

When Harriet Cowan turned up on Clarkson's Farm, false lashes on and hair done, and proceeded to out-farm the presenter while telling him a 4,000-year-old fort was nearly as old as he was, a certain kind of viewer bristled, as though something ancient were being overturned. Nothing was being overturned. Her whole point, that women are farmers too, is not a modern slogan. It is the oldest arrangement in English farming, and the language proves it.

Start with that word. Dairy comes from the Old English dey, meaning a female servant, a woman who worked. The building where milk became butter and cheese was literally named as the place of the woman. The language settled the question a thousand years ago and everyone forgot they had read the verdict.

And it held for most of recorded history. In medieval and Tudor England the farm split cleanly in two. The men had the field, the plough and the heavy beasts outdoors. The instant the milk came inside it belonged to the women, and dairying was so thoroughly female that in medieval Denmark it was thought unmanly for a man to milk a cow at all. By Elizabethan times the writers describing English farming simply assume the wife runs the dairy. By the eighteenth century the manuals put her in sole charge of it.

This was skilled, guarded, valuable work. A seventeenth-century dairymaid might answer for twenty cows and everything their milk became. Cheese recipes passed mother to daughter as what one history calls the secret knowledge, because good cheese and butter were things you could pay rent and taxes with. In an age when a woman could rarely own property, the dairy was one of the few corners of the economy where she made and kept her own money.

The cash even had a name. Butter and egg money.

The wife took her surplus butter, cheese and eggs to the store and came back with coin or credit, and that stream was hers. Farm records show women earning real sums from the dairy and the poultry yard in years the field crops cleared almost nothing. On many holdings the woman's half of the farm was the half that made a profit. Yet before 1860 she was not counted as employed, because she drew no wage. She merely kept the whole thing solvent.

So how did farming become, in the public mind, a man's world?

The same way women were written out of much else: the moment the work started to pay. In the nineteenth century the co-operative creameries took the milk the women had always processed and made the cheque out to the farmer, meaning her husband. Poultry was scaled up into a male-run business. The machinery came and was filed under men's work by default. Every time a piece of the woman's farm turned industrial and profitable, it was reassigned to a man.

The stereotype is not the tradition. It is the residue of the takeover.

Which is what makes Harriet on that tractor funnier than her critics realise. She is not breaking with history. She is the dairymaid the whole trade is named after, with a phone and better lighting, doing the eyeliner her great-grandmother could not spare the time for and running rings round a man who thinks she is the novelty.

She is not the strange new thing. The strange new thing was the century that told her she did not belong there, and it is younger than the tractor.

[Louise Weale @lweale]

@Lady_FanAccount I was young when they sang this. It was amazing then. Now I am old I am staggered by Bobby Farrell’s fitness.

[Louise Weale @lweale]

@Number10cat I loved that kitten, I was also taken by the nose vole. Was Bill the last of The Goodies? I think he preferred being a Twitcher but I remember them with great affection.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

A man who spent thirty years reviewing sports cars has taught this country more about its own food than every minister, union and campaign of the last fifty years combined.

Here is what five series of Clarkson's Farm put in front of the public, and not one line of it is opinion.

- A thousand acres, worked flat out for a year, made a profit of £144. Under forty pence a day.
- By year six the same farm was losing money, weather and prices turning a projected £37,000 into a five grand loss.
- A crop can drown in the field after months of work and take everything with it, and nobody is coming to help.
- The farmer is the only man in the food chain who sells at a price he does not set. The supermarket sets it. He takes it or he takes nothing.
- The council can shut his restaurant, refuse his car park and stop him selling his own food off his own land.
- The subsidy he was told to lean on can be closed overnight, the big estates first through the door, the small farms locked out.
- One outbreak of bovine TB can lock a farm down for months, banned from buying or selling a single cow, through no fault of its own.
- Rear pigs with real care and the butcher's maths can still make them a loss, so the animals go and the loss stays.
- The margins are so thin that a rich man buys farmland not to earn from it but to shelter money that earns elsewhere. The shelter exists precisely because the farming does not.

Now hold that against the story you were sold. Greedy farmers. Subsidised for doing nothing. Wrecking a countryside they are somehow also the custodians of.

There is no profit. That was the reveal. A show that set out to be funny accidentally filmed the slow strangling of the people who feed us, and the country watched it happen and finally understood what its cheap food actually costs.

Clarkson has now admitted the plainest part out loud: it is the television money keeping Diddly Squat alive, and most farms do not have a television show. Britain grows about sixty per cent of its own food and the average farmer is past sixty. That is why both numbers are heading the wrong way.

It took a Lamborghini tractor and a man doing it for a laugh. Fifty years of earnest campaigning could not manage it.

[Louise Weale @lweale]

This is very clever

[Epic Maps 🗺️ @theepicmap]

Three leg Cat playing with Australia 🦘 😂

[Mike Pitts @pittsmike]

After queries, more on Y/Z Holes & parchmarks at Stonehenge.
Excavations first. In this plan (simplified from Cleal et al 1995) I've marked all excavation trenches (mostly 1920s) in green. Stones are black, Y/Z pits outline. Numbered pits are excavated, others interpolated. 1/7

[Louise Weale @lweale]

@AudreySuffolk It sounds quite interesting and adventurous

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

More than a hundred thousand Bornean orangutans vanished between 1999 and 2015. Half the island's population, gone in sixteen years, and the largest single driver is the oil in your biscuit.

Orangutans exist in exactly two places on earth now, Borneo and Sumatra, and both are being cleared at some of the fastest rates on the planet to plant oil palm. Around 350,000 hectares of Bornean forest have gone every year this century. The way it is cleared is the ugly part. The forest is not felled and milled, it is drained and burned. Developers cut channels into the peat to dry it out, then set the land alight, and peat does not burn like wood. It smoulders underground for weeks, sometimes months, throwing up a toxic haze that drifts across whole countries.

In 2015 that haze became one of the worst environmental disasters in modern memory. About 2.6 million hectares burned. On many days that autumn the fires in Indonesia released more carbon dioxide than the entire economy of the United States. A study by Harvard and Columbia estimated the smoke caused around a hundred thousand premature deaths across Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, alongside half a million respiratory infections. The World Bank put the bill at sixteen billion dollars. All of it to clear ground for palm and pulp.

The animals in that forest do not walk away. The orangutan is slow, and it starves among the stumps or wanders into the new plantation looking for food and is killed as a pest. In 2018 one was found on Indonesian Borneo shot a hundred and thirty times with an air gun, then stabbed and clubbed. Mothers are killed and their babies sold into the illegal pet trade. The Sumatran tiger, the rhino and the elephant are being pushed off the same burning map at the same time, each down to a few thousand animals or a few hundred, each running out of the one forest it has.

The culprits are not hard to find. About 85% of the world's palm oil comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, and investigators have traced palm grown on illegally cleared land straight into the supply chains of the largest names in the aisle: Nestlé, PepsiCo, Unilever, Procter and Gamble, Mondelez. From there it goes everywhere. Palm oil sits in something like half the packaged products in the shop, the spread, the chocolate, the biscuit, the instant noodle, the tub of dairy-free ice cream, the very things sold as the lighter, greener, kinder choice.

Almost all of it now carries a small stamp promising it was sustainably sourced. In one recent year the stretch of Sumatra known as the orangutan capital of the world lost more forest than in the previous four years combined. Stamp and all.

[Louise Weale @lweale]

@V_and_A Marvellous workmanship. Probably quite heavy to wear. Which means you have to think about what you are wearing to support it. I’m pleased more men are wearing brooches - maybe a replacement for ties - a man’s jacket might be good for this.

[Louise Weale @lweale]

@V_and_A I like a good brooch. This is fun but depending on what you wear it may catch in the fabric.

[ICO - Information Commissioner's Office @ICOnews]

New legal requirements on how organisations handle data protection complaints are now in force, marking a significant change for businesses across the UK.

The legal duty now applies to all organisations handling personal information, regardless of size or sector.

👇👇

[ICO - Information Commissioner's Office @ICOnews]

NEW: Today we've published our Annual Report and Financial Statements 2025/26.

Read the full report here: https://t.co/6K4uFKw6Ib

[Louise Weale @lweale]

I don’t know if I am just unlucky but it is very disappointing.

[Louise Weale @lweale]

@DHLGlobal Dear DHL Group, is there any way at all of contacting a person at DHL ECommerce UK to ask what is happening to the parcel they are supposed to be delivering to me?

[Louise Weale @lweale]

I wasn’t in, so asked them to deliver the next day. Haven’t heard anything since. When I go to the link they sent me, it updates the date of the At Depot message. Their systems either tell me I am putting in the wrong postcode or cut me off

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

This is going to be a long two months for me — I’m on nights until the end of September, so I’ll be a little sleep deprived.

Night shift work for me means mostly domestic homicides, which is why I’ve had the subject on my mind (and thus on my timeline) today.

It is, at least from my perspective, utter madness that we regularly accept “he got really really angry” as mitigation when a man beats his wife to death, as if a grown man’s inability — no, refusal — to control himself and his behavior is somehow a reason to punish him less.

Meanwhile, if a woman kills a partner who’s been beating her for years because she can’t see any other way out, we (and by “we,” I mostly mean male detectives, DAs, judges, and jurors) refuse to accept that the beatings she endured are mitigation for her crime. It is obscene that domestic abuse is mitigating when perpetrated, but not when it is survived.

Most of the women who kill an abuser have made multiple attempts to leave. They are forced or coerced back, often under threat of violence to themselves or their loved ones, again and again. They almost always believe that if they do not kill their abuser, he will kill them — maybe not in that moment, but inevitably and soon. The courts have failed them; their families are helpless; and the only choices they think they have left are to kill him or to die.

Then, we punish them more severely than we do men who beat their wives to death in a drunken rage, or who strangle them out of jealousy, because punishing women who fight back against male abuse is something that our society has gotten very, very good at over the centuries.

Just look at the relative differences in sentencing: women who kill their abusers in self-defense spend an average of 15 years in prison, while abusive men who murder their female partners spend an average of 2 to 6 years in prison.

Why? Because beating your wife to death is manslaughter, or second degree murder at worst, while killing an abusive husband is first degree murder, and is only considered self defense if it occurs under the kind of circumstances most women simply don’t survive: when you believe he is actively trying to end your life.

Even then, DAs regularly press charges, arguing that victims weren’t really in fatal jeopardy, that they overreacted, that they could have escaped if they’d really wanted to, that they weren’t really afraid for their lives. Women have even been asked - accusingly - why they felt the need to defend themselves _this_ time, when they never had before.

This appalling truth is one of the biggest miscarriages of justice in the Western world.

[Louise Weale @lweale]

Brilliant

[🌷🦋 Love Music 🎶 & Dance 💃🏻🕺🏻 @Tiana_Celine_23]

Rita Moreno performing "Fever" on the Muppet Show with Animal on drums which originally aired almost 50 years ago in the UK on September 12, 1976 and in New York on September 20, 1976 which earned her a Primetime Emmy Award.

[Bécquer 🇪🇸✒🔡 @GustavoAdolf_]

Sheldrick Wildlife Trust es una de las organizaciones de conservación más famosas y respetadas de África, conocida mundialmente por su trabajo pionero en el rescate, rehabilitación y reinserción de elefantes huérfanos. No dejar a ningún elefante atrás, es un valor bajo el cual viven los elefantes: son increíblemente leales y solo abandonarán a los suyos en las circunstancias más extremas. Durante la sequía, la búsqueda de agua de una madre y su cría se convirtió en una trampa mortal. Atrapada sin escapatoria, la madre continuó protegiendo a su pequeño de la única manera que podía: escudándolo con su trompa. Su bebé fue igualmente valiente, corriendo de vuelta hacia su madre y negándose a apartarse de su lado.
Fue una operación monumental rescatar a la pareja, en colaboración con el Servicio de Vida Silvestre de Kenia (KWS), pero lograron liberar tanto a la madre como a la cría. 🐘❤️

[Louise Weale @lweale]

@HJoyceGender I saw The Truth in the West End (definitely recommend) and came home through anxiety and then a ghostly quiet. My heart was with them all.