My phone is a decrepit hand-me-down from my sister. Deep in its addled brain are a few dozen appointments and reminders she inserted years ago, which it now regurgitates more or less at random.

It has just told me that today is my 21st birthday.

Yesterday was apparently the 25th anniversary of a Soviet officer breaking the rules by not starting a nuclear war. I hadn’t heard this before; the even closer shave on a nuclear submarine during the Cuban Missile Crisis was frightening enough.

Both those incidents have only come to light in the last decade; I wonder how many others there have been.

palmer1984 just posted a meme that touches on flag-burning. I’ve always been bewildered by the (mainly American?) objection to burning flags. But if you accept that flag-burning is Bad and Wrong…

How do True Patriots care for their ageing flags? Are they stored indefinitely? Given heroic burial (cremation presumably isn’t an option)? Is there a patch of desert somewhere, where old flags fly until they disintegrate completely?

The military are big on flags and big on rules; they must have some baroque procedure for getting rid of the old ones.

Also: I’ve only come across the obsession with flag-burning in an American context. Are there equally small-minded patriots in the UK and elsewhere?

Where can I find (online or on paper) a dictionary of all the strange little symbols that cover electrical equipment and the like?

What is it with you people and fucking everything in the ear?

Today’s been a write-off in terms of getting anything useful done; now I’m retreating to book reviews

Books