Morning music
On the blog 3 years ago
On the blog 2 years ago
On the blog 1 year ago
Saturday quiz
Only 4/10 this week, narrowly beating the 3/10 scored by political journalist John Rentoul. The ones I answered correctly were numbers 3, 4, 6, and 7 (I have never seen the TV show in question 3, so my answer was a guess, maybe based on something seen subliminally in a newspaper). I really should have also scored on numbers 1 and 2, but did not recall them.
Rightful ownership?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy0zxjp50j6o
“A painting which was stolen by the Nazis and only recovered in Argentina last year must now be returned to the heir of its rightful owner, a court has ruled.
The late-baroque Portrait of a Lady was lost for 80 years until it was spotted in photographs of a house for sale near Buenos Aires.
The house belonged to Patricia Kadgien, the daughter of a Nazi fugitive who had fled there after the Second World War, and she has now agreed to return the painting in exchange for not being prosecuted for concealing it from the authorities.
Portrait of a Lady was among over 1,000 artworks looted from the collection of Jewish art dealer Jacques Goudstikker after the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940.”
[BBC]
Is this rightful restitution, or wrongful enrichment of quasi-fraudsters and tricksters?
See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Goudstikker
Of course, Argentina is very much in the Jewish/Israeli pocket these days, particularly so since the accession to power of that lunatic, Milei.
Talking point
Tweets seen
Russia cannot lose this war, and will not lose this war.
It’s all very well for people to say, “it was ever thus“, that there were always loonies etc, but even if that be so, that does not explain the quantity. The same with stabbings in the UK; yes, there were always a few, but now they happen all over the country, several times daily, often many times daily, and often fatal. Most are done by the blacks, browns, and other non-Brits.
Jason Arday syndrome
“A former Labour parliamentary candidate has been jailed for four years after using a fake Oxford degree to land more than a dozen senior NHS roles – before going on sick leave to avoid doing the jobs.
Amran Hussain, 40, was Labour’s candidate for North East Hampshire in the 2015 general election before embarking on an eight-year campaign of fraud that cost the taxpayer £168,000.
Using fake certificates and fictitious references, he fabricated degrees from the universities of Oxford, Harvard and Birkbeck to blag his way into 13 senior NHS roles across the country…
He secured the roles despite barely doing any work, quickly going on sick leave after each appointment and remaining absent until the contract ended or was terminated.
Hussain took an astonishing 1,332 sick days (70 per cent of his days employed) by claiming he had a litany of illnesses, including post Covid-19 syndrome, tiredness, anxiety, depression, low mood, headaches, neck pain, pelvic pain, vertigo, headaches and dizziness and migraines.
His deception finally unravelled in 2021, when Devon Partnership NHS Trust offered him a £90,000-a-year role as deputy chief operating officer and carried out checks on his application – discovering no record of his claimed job at Coventry and Warwickshire Partnership NHS Trust.“
[Daily Mail]
Is that really any worse, though, than the activities of so many MPs whose CVs are either invented and full of lies (eg Iain Dunce Duncan Smith) or, while superficially accurate, embellished to the point where the CVs are near-fraudulent (David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood, Angela Rayner, and many many others)?
England’s broken justice system
I happened to see the following newspaper report:
“A GP practice manager who conned her NHS surgery out of a small fortune and blew it on designer goods has avoided jail because prisons are too full, a court heard.
Helena Paiva, 33, admitted to plundering £517,260.29 from her NHS employers at the Albion Street Practice in Southwark, London, between January 23, 2023, and July 1, 2025.
Paiva, of Boxley, Kent, was spared jail and handed a suspended sentence after Judge Christopher Hehir said that the UK prisons are ‘full to bursting‘
Judge Hehir also ordered 20 days of rehabilitation activities and 160 hours of unpaid community work, which was reduced as she currently works as a delivery driver.
He told Paiva, who sobbed as sentence was passed: ‘You have come within a hair’s breadth of going down to the cells.”
[Daily Mail]
As I often reiterate (because many people assume, wrongly, that I believe in judicial harshness), I am generally not a “hanger and flogger”, but here we have an example of how things have slid into near-lawlessness.
When I was initially at the English Bar (early 1990s), it was a given that “breach of trust” cases of embezzlement, especially where the sums were substantial, would normally result in incarceration, yet here we have a case involving over half a million pounds, continuing for quite a while (2+ years), and the defrauding of a medical practice but also 8 actual doctors, and the defendant gets a “suspended”…
In fact, the sentence was little more severe than I got in 2024 for publishing the truth on this blog: see
and
The only aspect more severe is that that embezzler woman will have to pick up litter or do similar work for a few weeks, whereas I was excused any unpaid slave-labour.
My own sentence in 2024 (for telling the truth) was 15 “rehabilitation” “days” (in fact, each “day” was between 20 and 120 minutes, the average being about 30 minutes or so) with a young lady from the Probation Service, and a financial penalty of over £700 (about a third was crowdfunded).
Incidentally, the judge who sentenced the embezzler woman, H.H.J. Hehir, is the same as sentenced satirical singer-songwriter Alison Chabloz in 2019. Over 7 years ago. How time flies! See https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-47230443.
Ian Robert Millard 
Well, this Quiz by John Clarke is extremely difficult (another way to look at it is that I am awfully ignorant (LOL))
I would like to know the answer to No. 1 and I shall try to answer questions No. 6 and 7:
No. 6 = The Russian ruble
No. 7 = The river Tagus (in Spanish “el Tajo”)
I am sure about No. 7, but not so about No. 6
Fingers crossed!
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Claudius:
In fact, the second-oldest currency in Europe is either the Russian rouble or the Serbian dinar, both of which originated in the 14thC, and I think the exact date of first use of the rouble is obscure, so that question is a poorly-set one, in my opinion, because there are two possible answers (I do not know which one the question-setter had in mind).
Your answer, therefore, is one of the two possible correct answers (also in my opinion).
I am afraid that your other answer is not correct. The correct answer is the Douro, which meets the sea at Porto; the Tagus meets the sea further south, at Lisbon:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douro
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus
The answer to question 1 (“Pays de Galles“) is Wales, which I should have got but just could not bring it to mind. Incidentally, the newspaper got the spelling wrong: Pays de Galles is correct, not “Pays de Galle“.
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Thank you very much for the information. Well, it was worse than expected. Let´s say the Russian ruble is the correct answer; that would give me a score of 1 out of 10 😭😭😭
What a humiliation! LOL
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Claudius:
Don’t devalue yourself. Many questions in such quizzes are culturally specific, far more difficult for someone from outside UK/USA/Europe.
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