Proofreader/copy editor. Ex-bookseller, voracious reader, music fan, talker, amateur photographer, amateur drinker. The Doctor calls me 'Local Knowledge'.
Aberdare, Wales
Joined October 2013
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Going to be retweeting this regularly, don't worry. – at Aberdare, Wales
The Vaccine Manufacturing and Innovation Centre was built using public money. Now the government plans to sell it off during a pandemic.
This has to be stopped. Sign this petition to tell @KwasiKwarteng to stop the Vaccine Manufacturing Centre sell off👉 weownit.org.uk/act-now/stop-…
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
In 1952, an English teacher named Cecil Dormand secretly paid for a dirt-poor 11-year-old to take a drama course.
He never told him and the boy didn’t find out until decades later.
By then, he was a knight, that little boy’s name was Patrick Stewart.
He was born into a poor family in Mirfield, a small mill town in Yorkshire and his father came home from World War II a violent man, and he was violent toward Patrick’s mother.
Young Patrick learned exactly when to step between his father’s fist and his mother.
An English teacher put a copy of Shakespeare in his hand and told him to get up and perform.
He never stopped and left school at 15.
By 19 he was completely bald... most agencies told him he'd never make it because of that.
In 1987, the LA Times called him an “unknown British Shakespearean actor” when he was cast as Captain Picard.
Then he became one of the most famous faces on Earth.
You’ve probably heard that part.
Here’s the part you haven’t:
He spent decades as a patron of Refuge, sheltering women and children from domestic violence.
But he never stopped trying to understand his father.
He dug up a 1940 newspaper clipping that said his dad had come home with severe shell shock.
He went to France and walked the ground where his father’s unit was pinned down under bombing for hours.
He learned his father had PTSD, and nobody ever helped him.
So Patrick became an ambassador for Combat Stress, a charity that helps veterans.
In 2013, a young woman at a Texas convention told him she was a survivor of domestic violence.
He asked, “My dear, are you okay?”
Then he hopped off the stage, held her, and told her: “You never have to go through that again, you’re safe now.”
At Dragon Con, a Make-A-Wish girl dressed as Spock came to meet him.
2,000 people were waiting for him to speak... he sat down and talked with her for 15 minutes, making all of them wait.
He told her that since they were friends now, whenever she saw him on screen she could wave and say, “Hello Patrick.”
After 9/11, he felt helpless, so he brought his one-man A Christmas Carol back to Broadway for a full week of charity shows.
He played every character himself and donated every cent.
In 2019 he did it again, and every dollar went to feeding hungry New Yorkers.
In 2017, he fostered a pit bull named Ginger, who had been rescued from a dogfighting ring.
She was his first dog in more than 50 years.
He couldn’t bring her home to England, so he found her a family.
Then he kept fostering more.
When he said he was done with Star Trek so many people told him the show had gotten them through the hardest times of their lives.
So he wanted to see if Picard could do it one more time.
Rest in Peace, Sir Patrick 🖖
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to:
Johns Hopkins Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center Fund
alzresearch.org/giving/
Alzheimer’s Foundation of America Caregiver Resources
alzfdn.org/donate/
Photo Credit: Tommy Garcia
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
Someone in Broadstairs in Kent has done this.
Whoever they are, I want to marry them.
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
Tesco could pay every worker an extra £10,000 and still make a profit.
British Gas could pay every worker an extra £35,000 and still make a profit.
Shell could pay every worker an extra £300,000 and still make a profit.
It is the billionaires who are ripping you off.
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
A great rant from a friend:
“I don't know who's running the British newspapers at the moment, but I reckon somebody's accidentally given the editorial jobs to a bunch of fucking doomsday preppers.
Have you seen the absolute state of the news lately?
World War Three. Nuclear Armageddon. Russian cyberattacks. Chinese hackers. Emergency survival kits. How to prepare for the end of civilisation.
Every bloody newspaper seems to be running the same story.
You'd think Vladimir Putin had been spotted at Dover services with a tank and a packed lunch.
And apparently, the most important thing we can do to prepare for all this is go shopping.
Seriously.
We're being advised to stockpile food, water, torches, batteries and enough toilet roll to survive the collapse of Western civilisation.
Do they genuinely believe we're all going to read these articles, leap off the sofa and charge down to Asda like there's a fucking trolley dash on?
I reckon somebody's looked at the Christmas retail figures and thought, "How can we get these bastards to spend another two hundred quid?"
"Tell them the Russians are coming."
"Brilliant. We'll shift those seventeen pallets of corned beef we've had sitting in the warehouse since Easter."
And what exactly am I supposed to do with all these emergency supplies if there's a nuclear attack?
Imagine it.
You're sitting in your living room, minding your own business, when suddenly there's an enormous flash outside.
The windows explode. The roof comes off. There's a nuclear shockwave tearing through the city, flattening everything in its path.
And there you are, crawling across the kitchen floor, desperately trying to get the fucking tin opener out of the drawer.
"QUICK! SOMEBODY GET THE BEANS!"
What fucking difference are beans going to make?
You're about to be vaporised at several thousand degrees. I don't think the nutritional benefits of baked beans are going to be particularly relevant.
But the politicians are the funniest part of all this.
Angela Rayner was asked what she'd be stockpiling.
Sauvignon Blanc and mascara.
Sauvignon Blanc and fucking mascara!
I love that.
The world's coming to an end, millions could die, civilisation might collapse, but Angela's making sure she's got a decent bottle of white and her eyelashes done.
Then Andy Burnham comes along telling people not to stockpile alcohol because they need to keep a clear head.
Well, thank Christ we've got that sorted.
One politician's preparing for the apocalypse like she's going to an all-inclusive resort in Tenerife, and another's telling everybody to drink responsibly.
And apparently Andy's emergency supplies include Twiglets.
Fucking Twiglets.
I mean, at what point did the national security discussion turn into everybody comparing what they've brought to a children's birthday party?
We're supposedly facing the possibility of World War Three, and our political leaders are having a conversation that wouldn't sound out of place in the middle aisle of Aldi.
And then there's the cyberattack warnings.
Apparently, Russia or China could launch a massive cyberattack and bring down our communications, electricity supplies and essential services.
Right.
And what am I supposed to do about that?
Unplug the kettle?
Put the laptop in a biscuit tin?
I can just imagine some highly trained Russian cyberwarfare specialist sitting in Moscow, surrounded by millions of pounds' worth of sophisticated computer equipment.
"Comrade, we have penetrated the British national infrastructure."
"Excellent. Shut down their electricity."
"We cannot, sir."
"Why not?"
"Some bastard in Ellesmere Port has wrapped his Virgin Media router in fucking Bacofoil."
It's a good job Churchill isn't around to witness this.
"We shall fight them on the beaches. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender."
"Unless we've run out of Pot Noodles, in which case we're absolutely fucked."
What a fucking pantomime.”
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
Today, 36 Blythe Road is home to George's Cafe, a quintessential British greasy spoon. However, in 1900, this exact address served as the secret, international headquarters for the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—a famous fin-de-siècle occult society whose members included WB Yeats, Bram Stoker, and Aleister Crowley.
On April 19, 1900, the infamous "Battle of Blythe Road" took place here. Sent by the society's eccentric founder, Aleister Crowley arrived to seize control of the temple room.
Crowley stormed the building wearing a kilt, a black Osiris mask, a tartan plaid wrap, and a large golden crucifix around his neck. He was brandishing a ceremonial dagger and casting curses as he climbed the stairs.
Poet W.B. Yeats and other London members physically stood their ground at the top of the stairs, refusing Crowley entry.
Instead of a magical duel, the dispute was ultimately settled when the landlords called the real-world London police to escort Crowley off the premises.
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
Saint Govan a 6th Century Welsh monk was pursued by Irish pirates to sell into slavery
He hid in cliffs near Pembroke and prayed for salvation
A rock fissure opened up to conceal him
After this he built a chapel at the spot and devoted his life to worship becoming a hermit. 🏴
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
In the middle of World War Two, German soldiers in southeastern Poland started avoiding a cluster of villages.
They wouldn't go in. They wouldn't take people out for forced labor. They put up warning signs and stayed away.
They believed the area was infected with typhus.
It wasn't. Two doctors had invented the whole thing.
The man behind it was Eugene Lazowski, a young Polish doctor working for the Red Cross in the town of Rozwadów. He was watching the Nazi occupation tear his country apart. Executions. Deportations. People shipped off to labor camps, many never coming back.
He wanted to stop it. He had no weapons, no army, and no way to fight.
What he had was medicine.
His friend and fellow doctor, Stanisław Matulewicz, had discovered something strange. If you injected a person with a harmless, dead strain of a certain bacteria, their blood would test positive for typhus.
They wouldn't be sick at all. But on paper, they'd look like they had one of the most feared diseases of the war.
And the Germans were terrified of typhus. It spread fast, it killed, and it could tear through an army. When the Germans found it, they quarantined the area and kept their distance.
Lazowski realized what that meant. If he could make enough people look infected, the Germans would leave the whole region alone.
So he started injecting his patients.
He chose carefully. He sent the blood samples to German labs for testing, exactly as the rules required. The results came back positive. Again and again.
The Germans declared an epidemic zone. Villages were quarantined. Soldiers kept out. People who would have been seized for forced labor or worse were left alone, because nobody wanted to go near them.
Lazowski had to be careful. If too many cases looked fake, someone would ask why nobody was dying. So he spread out the injections over time and kept the outbreak believable.
Eventually the Germans did get suspicious. They sent a team of doctors to inspect.
Lazowski met them with food and vodka and played the gracious host. He guided them toward the sickest looking, dirtiest patients he could find, in the most crowded rooms. The German doctors, worried about catching typhus themselves, took a few samples and left in a hurry.
The tests came back positive.
The fake epidemic lasted until the end of the war. Estimates say it may have protected around 8,000 people.
Lazowski also secretly helped Jews from the nearby ghetto, giving them medical care at enormous risk.
After the war he moved to the United States and became a professor of pediatrics in Chicago. For decades he barely talked about what he'd done. Late in life he finally wrote a memoir. He called it My Private War.
He died in 2006.
He never fired a shot. He beat the Nazis with a needle and a lab test.
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
Fun Fact: Sarah Connor was locked in Pescadero State Hospital for trying to stop Cyberdyne Systems—a plot point from the 1991 classic Terminator 2: Judgment Day that hits much closer to home today.
As modern tech giants rapidly build massive data centers to power and train artificial intelligence, the line between 90s sci-fi and reality feels thinner than ever. Beyond the viral memes, this comparison highlights a genuine, real-world anxiety.
Today's AI infrastructure demands massive amounts of electricity and cooling water, sparking serious pushback from local communities and environmental planners. While our current algorithms are a far cry from a Hollywood dystopia, the internet's favorite joke captures a very real public skepticism toward unchecked technological expansion.
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
In 1998, these pencils were withdrawn from US schools after a 10 year old pointed out a problem…
ALT A set of pencils. The first one has the legend, 'too cool to do drugs', the next one has been sharpened so that it says 'cool to do drugs', the third, sharpened more and says 'do drugs', the fourth one just says 'drugs'.
Julia Thorne 🏴 retweeted
Stan Beaton from West Yorkshire had kept a saved voicemail from his late wife Ruby.
During a technical upgrade with his phone line, the voicemail was accidentally deleted.
A team of 11 engineers worked for three days to search backups and archived systems, successfully recovering the message despite low odds.
Sometimes, love is not found in grand gestures. Sometimes it is just hidden in one saved message.
