TL;DR: I ate too much food this week.
Life
The third Thursday of the month is Astronomy on Tap night at the pub (it’s an international thing and my local chapter is organised by Cardiff University’s astronomy department). I’ve been going for a couple of years and I look forward to it every month. There are free talks – this time it was on exoplanets (there’s a type called super-puff which I just love), the Wow! signal (my theory is that we’ve never heard it again because it was the last time it was sent rather than the first) and silly papers like this one. There’s also a quiz – this time it was mostly on telescopes and even though we were a team mate down, the two of us came 3rd (out of 13). Side note: last December, I went on my own because my friends were away and I won the quiz, which just feels like a glitch in the matrix to me, and has led to a running joke that my friends (one of whom is an astronomer who has worked in observatories and one of whom has a PhD in astrophysics) are holding me (lol) back.
J. and I also finally made it to Buds, a cute café in a very pretty, leafy suburb of Cardiff called Radyr, and it absolutely did not disappoint, although that wasn’t much of a surprise given we’ve known the owner for a few years thanks to his regular appearance at the farmer’s market before he opened the café (he also won Bake Off: The Professionals in 2021 so he very much knows how to bake).
Speaking of the farmer’s market, I don’t think I’ve ever said on this blog how much I freaking love the weekly farmer’s market. It’s got a really strong community vibe and it’s all local traders but because my neighbourhood is very much a cultural melting pot it’s also very international (there’s everything from Sicilian to Chinese to West African to Syrian to Greek to Portuguese to Finnish). It’s the best and more often than not I will spend my whole Saturday morning there.
And while we’re on food: our favourite Polish shop closed a few weeks ago but we found out that they actually own a bigger store not too far from us. It turns out that that shop is more of a general central and Eastern European store rather than just Polish foods. I bought some Romanian bread and crisps from Ukraine that did not last long.
Entertainment
I genuinely thought Luxembourg deserved more points in Eurovision. I am very, very glad that Austria won though – his voice is quite something. I do not believe for a second that that many people genuinely voted for Israel, however.
I have been trying to watch The Handmaid’s Tale (yes, I know it’s been bad for a while but at this point I might as well finish the show) and I swear to god it’s so dark I have no idea what’s happening in about 95% of it to the point where I might as well not actually watch it at all. I’m not kidding. Here’s a screenshot from episode 3 (in case you can’t tell, there are two characters on screen here).

Links
Bloody hell, this documentary about one of the largest hospital scandals in US history, produced by Mother Jones and Fault Lines, is a really tough watch but brilliant journalism.
While we’re on the hellscape that is the USA, this is a good breakdown of how decades of republican and democratic leaders have enabled everything that Trump is doing now. I guess at least now we have a real-life cautionary tale to counter the “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” crowd (yes, I’m also looking at you, Brussels and London).
Could we turn nuclear waste in a resource to produce energy? Thorizon thinks so.
Speaking of cool tech: a group of Kiwi friends built a rocket that actually made it all the way into space. It took them five years and a good chunk of that was negotiating with Civil Aviation Authority and Airways NZ to clear a flight path.
A bit of a mini-manifesto that I support wholeheartedly: be a good link. On a related note, this is such a lovely way to immortalise a friend.
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