At The Risk Of Sounding Anti-intellectual, I Think That College Should Be Free And Also Not A Requirement

My cartoon for the Guardian Books autumn reading special.

I am coming to France next week!

My latest cartoon for New Scientis. Lots more here.

I am happy to inform the public that there is a dataset of hair salons with puns in their name. It's all in French, but I can only applaud the effort and I hope that one day, similar work will be done for coffee shops, if only to simplify the work of authors wanting to check whether or not something is taken.

data.gouv.fr

Coordonnées des enseignes de Coiffure comportant des jeux de mots cocasses dans leur appellation - data.gouv.fr

Ce jeu de données contient, au format geoJSON, les…

Names include such gems as Faudra Tiff Hair, United Hair Lines, Lucif'hair, No Peigne No Gain, and my personal favorite, Queer Chevelu.

I have a theory on that, and it handily also explains why Nina notices the whole Jane Austen thing as well as making the ball a little less eldritch-horrory. The idea is that this mass hypnosis thing works better (at least when Aziraphale is doing it) when it's for something that people want or are not opposed to, but it falls apart if someone has a reason to nitpick.

When Nina enters the ball, she goes to very upset to not upset at all, and she notices. From that, she's on alert and notices other things, like everyone talking like they're in a Jane Austen novel and the dancing. The other shopkeepers who didn't have such a jarring experience when entering just went with the flow. The fact that Maggie didn't notice anything at first works against the theories that she has any sort of supernatural powers in my opinion. Nina points out the weirdness to Maggie, which raises her awareness, and she's a sweet person who likes Aziraphale and doesn't want to leave him in danger, so his miracle doesn't work. I also think that he *could* make her forget (like Crowley hypnotizing Sister Loquacious in season 1), but that he's avoiding being too heavy-handed.

And as a bonus, it means that there's a bit of a build-in safeguard if you're invited by local ethereal entity trying to set-up humans couple by altering their behavior, state of mind and mode of expression: anything too jarring would snap you out of it.

Hello! Do you happen to know why Aziraphale's miracles don't work on Maggie in ep6? He tries to make her forget and leave and she just answers: "Are you trying to hypnotise me?" We don't see any miracle blockers though.

Hiya! :) I'm afraid I have no idea! :) <3

My take is that both have a finite amount of commitment in them, and put it all into each other. They don't have enough left for a pet, long-term goals, or an address

since Arthur isn’t a fan, would John be inclined to any animals in particular? he strikes me as a cat-lover, maybe for the shared temperament

No, neither like animals

EDIT: neither are pet people should be a better way of saying this. They can empathize with any creature (lily) and they care about creatures, but they’ll never have pets.

Ducks quack loudly before a rain. 📰 🦆 

In the late 2010s, I once car-pooled with someone whose car 1. Had a cassette player 2. Only contained a Best of Queens cassette. I spend the whole car ride ( several hours) wondering if I should say something. Since this was in France and I had never met another French person who had read Good Omens without me recommending it first, I didn't say anything, but I still think about it from time to time.

Q: What inspired you to have Crowley’s Bentley tapedeck turn everything into “The Best of Queen”?

Neil: Back in the days when all cars had cassette decks Terry Pratchett and I both noticed and talked about the fact that we had The Best of Queen tapes in our car we could not remember bying. And our theory was: all tapes turn in The Best of Queen. (x)