France to ban culling of unwanted male chicks by end of 2021 BBC news told us yesterday, and I could barely contain my disbelief. Unwanted males are the price you pay for specialised breeds, whether dairy cows or layer hens.

After a lot of trial and error, I think I have a system for creating and using routes that I can live with.

One of the things I am trying to be better at is processing the little scraps of information I squirrel away "for when I have time". A note I made on 28 July 2013 said simply "Microryza crowd funding". I had absolutely no recollection of what it might be.

Turns out it is a site for crowdfunding ex...

Chris Aldrich has a long and throught-provoking piece asking How to follow the complete output of journalists and other writers?. It drew an interesting comment from Alexandra Samuel, putting the case that publishers who have paid for a piece have no interest in an author building her own audience...

I really wanted to post this 3 days ago, on January 10th. That would have been one year since I started recording the amount of spam I was getting over on my micro-site. I first noticed the problem in November 2018, and in January 2019 started keeping track.

This graph shows all the data from...