After 30 years of marriage a wife says to her husband,
“I am fed up of you watching too much sport on TV, snoring, never doing your share of the housework and not bringing in very much money. And now you’re retiring you can think again if you think you’re going to be under my feet all day. I own the house, you can pack your bags and off you go!”
So he packs his suitcases into the car and as he’s about to drive off she says “And I hope you die a slow and painful death”.
He replies “What, you mean I’m staying after all?”
Reeves and Starmer are driving along a London street and the car stops at traffic lights next to a shop window, and there are articles of clothing hanging up with price labels on them – a pair of trousers labelled £50, a coat for £45 and a whole suit for £60.
Starmer says “Our policies to reduce the cost of living are obviously working, Rachel! Anybody would be pretty happy to get a suit like that for £60 pounds. I don’t remember prices like that from a tailor in London under the Tories!”.
Reeves replies “Very true, Keir, but that’s not a tailor, I’m afraid. That’s a dry cleaner.”
The school inspector drops in on an eighth‑grade German class. After greeting the teacher, he turns to a boy in the front row.
“Well then, Tobias — what do you know about Kleist’s Broken Jug?”
Tobias sits up straight and answers earnestly:
“It wasn’t me, sir. I never touched it.”
The inspector stares at the teacher, appalled.
“Did you hear that? What do you say to that?”
The teacher sighs.
“Well… Tobias can be a bit of a rascal. But he never lies. If he says he didn’t break it, then he didn’t break it.”
The inspector, now alarmed, marches straight to the headmaster. The headmaster turns pale.
“Inspector, please — I don’t want this to reflect badly on the school. What would a jug like that cost? If I give you twenty euros, could you pass it on to Kleist and settle the matter?”
The inspector, horrified, rushes back to the Ministry and reports everything to the deputy minister. The deputy minister shakes his head.
“Well, if you ask me… it must have been the headmaster. Nobody pays Kleist that quickly unless they’re guilty.”
Two distinct prehistoric Arctic groups—Dorset and Thule Inuit—cooperate around a wide ice hole on a frozen landscape. The Dorset figures wear simpler pale furs and use older tools, while the Thule group wears layered parkas and stands with sleds, dogs, and advanced harpoons. Both groups gesture toward a live beluga whale surfacing in the ice hole, which remains alert and able to dive. Multiple polar bears appear as tiny silhouettes on the far horizon, observing from a safe distance. The scene is set under low winter light with long shadows and distant ridges, evoking a rare moment of peaceful interaction.
This is the first post of this year 2026, and of the second quarter-century of the 21st Century, as I view it at any rate, although few people seem to be focusing on that, maybe they are not accountants.
I obviously intended more posting this year, but the year did kick off in a predictably busy way.
Thankfully there is always AI. Thanks, or maybe rather “due” to which, whereas before we were all crying out for content, it now seems that the boot is on the other foot and content is crying out for us, like in the Russian reversal jokes. (“In Post-AI internet, content creates you”, etc.)
Clearly not all my exchanges with AI would necessarily interest my readers, so I do need to be selective but in this “Friday AI day” series, of which this is now the third, we at least have the chance to look together with AI (I mainly use Copilot) at some topics.
The topic for today is indeed topical as we are mainly focussing on Greenland, which dominates the news. The aim here is to try and understand better the country and its people but also a little bit a couple of aspects of its wildlife, we do meander off into that at one point, do keep scrolling if that is not your bag, we come back firmly into the linguistic topic and explore a little bit the mystery of Paleo-Eskimos such as the Dorset peoples and their possible intercations with the Thules who are the ancestors of modern Greenlanders.
The main aspect we are going to be exploring below is the area of language. We won’t be learning any Greenlandic, not today anyway, but we are going to be trying to understand what the linguistic landscape looks like and how it fits with other Northern countries.
I will be adopting the simple convention that my questions are in Italics and the AI’s answers the way it gives them, which has sparse use of Italics thankfully.
If you want to find out more, then you can always ask your own AI. Sometimes minor variations on a question can produce different answers, or the same one, in defiance of Einstein’s maxim, rather different answers depending on the mood the AI is in on a given day, it would seem.
With AI I put together the mash-up of John Masefield’s Sea Fever and T.S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Arthur Prufrock, and turned it into a festive scene as well.
The result is a little bit surreal but I hope you get a chuckle out of it, as did the machine.
