It’s the corruption, stupid

The American dream is dying. Good

The American dream is dying, according to the Times of London. To mark the US’s 250th anniversary, the paper commissioned YouGov to explore whether the country’s citizens still believe that if you “work hard and play by the rules” you will eventually be successful. Turns out, only 38 percent of the respondents think this applies to all Americans, while 59 percent think the American dream is now less attainable than it was when they were growing up. In addition, 38 percent rated today’s quality of life as “excellent” or “good,” compared with 60 percent who said the same about 1976, the bicentennial year.

Rory Sutherland

The BBC’s shameful treatment of Top Cat

Films nowadays often come with advance warning of “smoking,” “partial nudity,” “drug use” or something called “language” (presumably to prevent alarming people unaware of the invention of the talkies). Yet language can be triggering. I know that from watching the BBC as a child, when two linguistic absurdities drove the seven-year-old me practically insane. One was the Blue Peter habit of referring to Sellotape as “sticky-backed plastic,” a phrase unspoken by anyone else in any other circumstances, except in parodies of BBC children’s programs.

Mary Killen

Dear Mary: should guests offer to reimburse me for charging their electric car at my house?

Q. I’m an artist and work from home painting people’s pets from photographs. While working I take a lot of FaceTime calls from friends, with my phone on a stand. My problem is that my husband is in the racing world, and when they glimpse him in the background they want to ask him for tips. How can I say “Sorry he is too busy” without sounding rude? – Name withheld, Newmarket A. FaceTime offers “portrait mode” which blurs the background while keeping you in focus. Tap the screen, then the effects option, then “enable portrait.” While this will not fully hide background objects, it makes details harder to see.

Peter Bear

The joy of licorice

“I’ll swap you two of my rolls for three of your spogs.” That was the sort of thing you’d hear round the tuckshop in morning break when we schoolboys swapped and bartered our Liquorice Allsorts. We all had our favorites, spogs being the round pink or blue jelly buttons that had a coating of tiny sugar grains, while the pink or yellow coconut rolls featured a plug of licorice surrounded by coconut ice. Pontefract Cakes were another schoolboy favorite: small round discs of licorice that were allegedly one of, if not the oldest commercial sweets in the world. In the 11th century, Benedictine monks introduced licorice to Pontefract, Yorkshire. At that time, the plant’s roots were commonly chewed to soothe sore throats, ease coughs and help digestion.

Dot Wordsworth

Where do passion-killers come from?

“Rearing homing pigeons was always a passion for the Queen,” said a feature in the Daily Mail about Elizabeth II on the centenary of her birth. Yet perhaps that passion didn’t rage, hot as lava, through her veins, decade after decade. With Sir Keir, it has been football – “his only real passion and his one release from the tensions of office,” according to another source of the Daily Mail’s. Every young person tries to convince their chosen “uni” that they are passionate about law or sport science. “When you can turn your hobby and passion into your profession, then that is the best thing there is,” observed Marie-Louise Eta, the football coach, as though it were a truth universally acknowledged.

And Finally