TudoRama

Send us Fan Mail Ignoble Prize winners of the year. A TudoRama report on unusual research findings. Every year, The Nobel Prize ceremonies are preceded by awards for unusual or even crazy research projects in the IgNobel prize awards. These awards were created in 1991 by Mark Abrahams, editor of the annals of improbable research. He has been the master of ceremonies at all award ceremonies since t...

Send us Fan Mail How to dispose of household trash safely when caught in a thunderstorm.  An educational podcast. This is an educational podcast explaining step by step how to dispose of household waste if you are caught unexpectedly in a torrential storm as took place in Woodford Garden Village around 3pm one afternoon this week, I was engaged in disposing of the week’s back numbers of the Guardi...

Send us Fan Mail Caissa, the Goddess of Chess My attention was caught this week by a reference in ' X, formally known as Twitter'. The post showed a facsimile of a page from the work of Howard Staunton, one of the greatest of English chess players of all time. The post, purporting to come from someone appearing as a reincarnation of Staunton, reads as follows: If you find the key to this...

Send us Fan Mail @deelomas My daughter: Will you do my maths homework for me?  Me: No love, it wouldn’t be right.  My daughter: Well, just do your best! @MaldenSaboteur Places where I get a data signal: • Gate of the Sun, Machu Picchu • Volcanic Caldera in Dodecanese • Out of sight of land in the middle of the Med. • A little spot on a dirt track next to an anthill in Porthcurno. And where not: Wi...

Send us Fan Mail Blairism without Tony Blair. Can Labour pull it off? September 6 2023 A few mischievous thoughts following Keir Starmer’s reshuffle of his shadow cabinet this week. Summer time ends with assorted floods, and raging fires wreaking untold carnage around the world. In England, our politicians return to Parliament. Conservative leader Rishi Sunak has been beset with a battalion of bru...

Send us Fan Mail Is this the end of the Didsbury Literary and Philosophical Society? The chairs grouped around the front of the Didsbury Deli stand empty and forlorn. The meeting place of the Didsbury Literary and Philosophical Society is deserted. Silence falls where once the voices of the Didsbury Lit & Phil members could be heard in deep discussion from early morning onward, most days of th...

Send us Fan Mail Say goodbye to Twitter, welcome to XWTF @Tudortweet Cracked it. The new acronym. XWTF. 'X', Was Twitter, Formerly Let’s hear it for #XWTF  And here’s the first wit and wisdom from #XWTF @lordbonkers We won't return the Elgin Marbles to Greece, but they are free to bid for them on eBay Stay up-to-date with all of Tudor's podcasts, blogs and current affairs comme...

Send us Fan Mail The Creative Process In Chess and Everyday Life.  A training podcast by Tudor Rickards This podcast is offered as an overview for aspiring chess players. I hope it is of particular interest to students of chess of all ages, and perhaps to a wider group of people interested in creativity in everyday life.  I’ll summarise the key points in time- honoured style at the start and in th...

Send us Fan Mail Most Twitter users continue to refer to themselves as Twitter users and retain use the old terms of tweets, Twitter, retweet, rather than the new-brand X-rated, Musk approved terminology. TudoRama will try to avoid confusion until some satisfactory future resolution is reached , by using the nostalgic older vocabulary... Stay up-to-date with all of Tudor's podcasts, blogs and...

Send us Fan Mail England v Spain The Christmas Lottery in Spain, known as El Gordo, the fat one, believed to be the biggest in the world, with payouts approaching two and a half billion euros, but with ways of sharing prizes to community levels. If Spain wins today their Christmas lottery win will have come early. Sunday 20 August I have to search hard in the print media for detailed background an...

Send us Fan Mail England Lionesses v Australia’s Matildas.  A Sofa Drama Wednesday 17 August, 2023 A sofa saga as England’s Lionesses face up against Australia’s Matildas in the quarterfinal of Football’s World Cup. Matildas after the famous Ozzie folk song Waltzing Matilda. It seems that in Australia, Matilda Mania has its grip on that sport-loving country. All is ready in my solitary fanzone. My...

Send us Fan Mail Donald Trump and the Georgia “Witch Hunt”   Tuesday 15 August, 2023 With the reluctance of a strip tease show, a list of a criminal charges against Donald Trump appear on a Fulton County, Georgia website this afternoon local time, and is then whipped away. The court is still reaching its conclusions.  This is the criminal case being prepared by State Prosecutor Fani Willis, centre...

Send us Fan Mail Trending. Bibby Barge Bingo, a game played with up to five hundred players. Congratulations! You have been selected from over a hundred thousand applications we have received,  all seeking admission on our unique new floating accommodation, ton His Majesty’s luxury superbarge, the Bibby Stockholm.  You have won one of the first five hundred pioneering places. Another win. You luck...

Send us Fan Mail I had to check that the story is not a deep hoax. But apparently not, if we can accept The Tampa Bay Times as a reliable source, as reported by the political website Occupy Democrats. I quote their entire post published Wednesday 9 August, 2023:  Florida Republicans go completely off the deep end with their deranged MAGA book bannings as William Shakespeare gets banned by certain...

Send us Fan Mail My message is for inexperienced chess and tennis players. Maybe it will be of interest to those of riper age and greater experience as well. It is an introduction to further podcasts on the subject. The advice comes partly from my own painful attempts at improving my performance in each of the two games. It’s backed up by serious research into the nature of performance and develop...

Send us Fan Mail Twitter wit and humour. Obituary edition, July 2023 @NicholasTyrone @tomhillier @EvLenz @orridge_anna @dontbrexitfixit @deelomas @Hepworthclare @ChillaxBcn @RCdeWinter Comments on Brexit, Barbie, and a 1980s Business Guru during the last weeks before Twitter became X and the old brand name declared X tinct.  @NicholasTyrone My daughter is 11 and for kids her age, “Brexit” has beco...

Send us Fan Mail Trump’s latest and potentially most serious indictment on August 1st 2023, places far more than the former President of the United States on trial. Arguably, the whole political process is under severe scrutiny.  I examine the indictment as analysed by journalistic investigative reporter James Ball. He considers the persistence of belief in what the President calls the great steal...

Send us Fan Mail Where to begin? Where better than at a thinly-disguised hairdressing salon deep in the heart of leafy Cheshire. For reasons mostly due to demands on her time, my appointment with Mandy, my beauty consultant and coiffeuse, had been delayed beyond acceptable limits. I entered her establishment accompanied by my shaggy locks, rather like the famous etching by William Blake of the anc...

Send us Fan Mail Don Drake, an advertising executive in a remote office off Soho,  is struggling to reach a deadline for the Daily Truth a syndicated social media newspaper reaching around the world mostly on the dark web. His boss Harry is increasingly frustrated with his habit of last-minute rescue through his creative genius Come on Jon we need something to get the Greek inferno headlines off t...

Send us Fan Mail Submitted to Twitter by @RCdeWinter,   attributed to Jill Thomas Doyle I’m afraid you may need to play some of the examples more than once to enjoy the delightful humour and grammatical subtleties. A grammar book walks into a bar  * A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.   * A bar was walked into...

Send us Fan Mail Nigel Farage, Coutts, and a tale of biometric mishaps. Friday 21 July I am not alone in having a problem with my biometrics. Or, more precisely, the fancy system installed on my National Westminster banking app to protect me from a world crammed with scammers intent on electronic theft. By one of those coincidences, my irritation with Nat West this week coincided with that of the...

Send us Fan Mail Sunday 16 July My review as the tournament reaches a breathtaking finale. Wimbledon began with a tweet from Green MP Caroline Lucas objecting to the Tournament’s sponsorship by Barclays Bank, as an exercise in greenwashing.  As you will hear, it ended with a tweet from Louis Vuitton, for reasons which will eventually become clear. The first week is fast becoming a faded memory. Af...

Send us Fan Mail BBC news over the last 24 hours seems to be in a state of shock, in which rational decision-making has disappeared. It reminds me of the communication confusion I personally experienced at the time of the soviet invasion in Czechoslovakia, in August 1968. The current confusion was triggered a week ago by  an article in the Sun newspaper. The article had been in typical Sun hyperbo...

Send us Fan Mail I have mithered too long. Yesterday, I passed the very shop from which I bought my once and only favourite pair, so many years ago. Something stopped me entering. Cowardice? Maybe. A feeling of apprehension, certainly. No time in a busy schedule? Not really. I hurried past to the nearby car park and home. An email awaited me from Geraint ap Wrecsam, commenting on my earlier lament...

Send us Fan Mail Thursday 6 July 2023. Possibly a momentous day for social media. Elon Musk’s new plaything Twitter lurches from sick into to intensive care.  Mark Zuckerberg launches a rival platform Threads as part of his futuristic and gigantic global operation Meta Platforms Inc , (Meta for short). Meta sprang into life in 2021. It did do, according to its PR as a reaction to ‘ the company&apo...