Enormous radio bubbles, an unearthly mineral, mass extinction, and another note on the perils of rural England

As I acknowledged a few days ago in “The Deadly Jungles of England,” I’m an Anglophile.  I admit it without shame.  It follows, therefore, that my wife and I went out this evening for a screening of Downton Abbey.  Nobody is likely to confuse the movie with Vertigo or Citizen Kane or The Godfather, let alone with the immortal Groundhog Day, but we enjoyed it nonetheless.  And we wallowed in English landscapes and in the grace (for the correct classes, anyway) of a now long departed era.

Speaking of that earlier post, in which I listed several terrifyingly crime-ridden English locations that should be avoided at all costs by anybody who values his or her life — places like Midsomer, St. Mary Mead, and Oxford — several people have pointed one horrifying den of crime out that I neglected to mention: the appalling, seemingly tranquil village of Kembleford, in the Cotswolds.  If it weren’t for Father Brown, a priest at St Mary’s Catholic Church there, I don’t know that any of the village’s multitude of murderers would ever be brought to justice or hindered from committing further homicides.  I shudder just to think that my wife and I, and our son and daughter-in-law and a grandchild, spent several days in the Cotswolds only last May.  To the best of my knowledge, we never passed through Kembleford.  But what if?  Ours was a very narrow escape from almost certain death.

But let’s cheer ourselves up with a bit of extraterrestrial news!

“Giant radio bubbles spew from near the Milky Way’s central black hole: Newfound structures hint at a violent past for the galaxy’s heart”

“Giant bubbles spotted rushing out from Milky Way’s center: Astronomers have just discovered two giant radio bubbles blowing out from the Milky Way’s galactic center.”

To be perfectly candid, I had never so much as thought of a “radio bubble” before.  But now I have.

“Mineral never before found naturally on Earth discovered in meteorite”

However, the burning question about that mineral now is, Can the Democrats find a way to tax it?

And, finally, if the prospect of new taxes and vast new regulations from President Elizabeth Warren hasn’t yet sobered you a bit, there’s this:

“There’s a Weird Mass Extinction Everyone Forgets, Scientists Say: It’s not the Anthropocene.”