Margo Kingston proclaims love for Theresa May on Twitter

Margo, it might be time for a Bex and a lie down. Plus other media tidbits of the day.

Margo Kingston’s weird Twitter love. Margo Margo Margo Kingston … what are we going to do with you? Throughout the election we watched Kingston’s blizzard of tweets and “Tweeted Times”, with the mounting anxiety one feels as a drunk father loses his way through his daughter’s wedding speech. For the first four weeks, Kingston urged us to believe believe believe in the deathful carousel as an expression of living politics. Then even she couldn’t keep it up and began an open reflection on the death of public engagement. Ruh-roh. We had seen this before. Kingston is a first-rate forensic journalist, who has a deep need for politics to be more than it is, an urge that can get her into trouble — as her book Off The Rails documents, simultaneously the story of Pauline Hanson’s 1990s rise and fall by a journalist following her around, and an account of Stockholm Syndrome from the inside. As the demand for big P Politics got greater and P-P-P-Pauline rose afresh, things did not look good. But disaster averted — Margo has fallen for Theresa May. Say whut?

Yes, according to Margo:

God, Theresa May? A shires Tory, with an appetite for mass surveillance? Really Margo?

Apparently so. There’s more like that, a stream of enthusiasm not interrupted by May’s appointment of Boris Johnson as foreign secretary BORIS JOHNSON! No matter. We could with some of that here:

The comments are not kind: “This is like when you voted for Howard in ’96.” “You’ve really lost it,” etc etc.

Well, it was a long eight weeks for all of us. But, hell. If you look for big Meaning in mainstream politics, you’re bound to end up treating political professionals as some combination of Tom Jefferson and Boudicca. Take a break, Margo. In the desert of the real, the mirages will always still be there when you get back. — Guy Rundle

Kinder, gentler Tories. Mensch-watch: Just in case anyone thought we were getting a kindler, gentler Tory party in the UK, here’s this exchange from during the real-time ministerial reshuffle, when it was (erroneously) believed that loathed health minister Jeremy Hunt had lost his spot:

Note in what follows that this poor bloke merely reported an occurrence.

Who would take that on? Our old friend Louise Mensch stepped up:

and

Mensch is a big supporter of Teresa May, who once observed that the Tories had to lose their reputation as the “nasty party”. How’s that going? — Guy Rundle

Dino emoji for all. If you’ve felt the burning need to condemn obsolete opinions with a single cutting emoji comment, you may find relief soon. And if you think your thoughts and feelings can only be expressed through a perfect, carefully constructed dinosaur, you’re in luck, according to The Washington Post.

A proposal (“one of at least two”) currently under debate at the Unicode consortium puts forward a green sauropod as an essential piece of our emoji language. According to its creator, the dino emoji would mean “impractically large,” “obsolete” or “about to go extinct” in addition to meaning “a dinosaur”.

“The Unicode Consortium release 72 new emoji into the world. None of them is a dinosaur. Dominik Schwarz, a self-described ‘Internet rando’ with a deep and abiding love of dinosaurs, is trying to change that.

Schwarz thinks the sauropod is uniquely suited to the task. In several languages, including English, German and French, “being a dinosaur has the meaning it has,” in the sense of being older, or somehow out-of date.”

Unicode is still considering the proposal, but the consortium has acknowledged that the need for dino emoji is clear. — Crikey intern Emily Robertson

Apollo spacecraft code now public, including original NASA jokes. The original code powering the Apollo spacecraft has been public since 2003, but thanks to transcription work by tech researchers Ron Burkey, Chris Garry, and devoted humour researchers at Reddit r/ProgrammerHumor, the full code is now online with commentary containing original NASA jokes.

“[L]ast Thursday (July 7), former NASA intern Chris Garry uploaded the software in its entirety to GitHub, the code-sharing site where millions of programmers hang out these days…many of the comments in the AGC code go beyond boring explanations of the software itself. They’re full of light-hearted jokes and messages, and very 1960s references.”

One of the source code files is called BURN_BABY_BURN–MASTER_IGNITION_ROUTINE. The display system program contains a quote from Shakespeare’s Henry VI. And since the code is public, GitHub users can now add their own space humour to the record. — Crikey intern Emily Robertson

Video of the day. Andrew Bolt and BFF Rowan Dean explain Pokemon Go.