Democrats are finally having fun again

Villain
Spencer Jones, a contestant on the reality TV show Race to Survive: New Zealand, who killed and ate a bird from a protected species. The American (pictured) said he knew he was “breaking a rule” by tucking into the weka, a large flightless bird listed by conservationists as vulnerable. “But that’s not important when you’re hungry.”

Villain
Google, which has surely won “the gold medal for worst Olympic ad”, says Caroline Mimbs Nyce in The Atlantic. The tech giant’s latest US commercial is about a little girl who loves American runner Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The girl tells her father she wants to write her idol a letter – whereupon the dad fires up Google’s AI chatbot and gets the algorithm to do it for her. What a bleak message. “It takes the feel-good cliché of a child getting to interact with their idol and squishes a multimillion-dollar large language model between them.”

Villains
North Yorkshire council, for making an apparently unforgivable error in an anti-littering poster written in the county’s distinctive dialect. The offending ad bears the slogan “Gerrit in’t bin”, rather than the completely different and not at all the same “Gerrit in t’bin”. Rod Dimbleby, chairman of the Yorkshire Dialect Society, said the mistake was a “nonsense”, adding: “it’s a real language and it should be written correctly”.

Villains
The Paris Olympics, for providing spectators with less-than-satisfactory food, says The Times. Attendees have complained of stale bread and hour-long queues at venue restaurants, which have been described as more “fast-food hell” than cordon bleu. Many disgruntled visitors have also been unable to order alcohol because of licensing laws, depriving them of a refreshing glass of wine or beer in the 35C heat. In the athletes’ village, hungry competitors have complained of “small portions, undercooked meat and lack of supplies”. Sacré bleu!

Hero
Paul Powlesland, who has become the first crown court juror to take the oath swearing on a river. The 38-year-old lawyer dipped his fingers into a cup of water from the River Roding in east London, where he lives on a houseboat, and declared: “I swear by the river Roding, from her source in Molehill Green to her confluence with the Thames, that I will faithfully try the defendant and give a true verdict according to the evidence.”

Olympic swimming in pools of champagne

A century ago, some 350 American athletes descended on Paris for the Olympic Games, says Todd Balf in Air Mail. They sailed from New York, training on the deck of the ship as it crossed the Atlantic, and were extremely excited to arrive in France. When the rugby team were told they couldn’t disembark at Boulogne because of visa issues, they charged off anyway, “scattering the gendarmes”. Gold-medal hopeful swimmer John Faricy was so eager to get off a train at Saint-Lazare, in pursuit of a “young Frenchwoman hawking baguettes”, that he leapt off while it was still moving and broke his ankle. He never made it to the Olympics, and for the rest of his life said “the sight of French bread made him ill”.

The athletes who stayed in the Olympic village were unimpressed by the “spartan” accommodation. After just one night, the rowers from Yale – among them James Rockefeller – packed up and left for the Hôtel Ritz. The rest were housed in military-style barracks in the suburb of Rocquencourt, far from Paris’s “seductive diversions”. To avoid any difficulties getting home, they were each given tags that read, in French: “I desire to go to the Murat estate at Rocquencourt”. But as one correspondent joked, the Montmartre nightlife remained Team USA’s “biggest rival”: the clubs held Olympic-themed events until 6am, featuring girls in flimsy silk swimming costumes racing across the dance floor, and “swimming contests held in tanks filled with champagne instead of water”. As one gold medalist put it: “Paris, I can assure you, is one of the best places in the world to be a hero.”

The “small glories” of Britain’s heaths

There’s nothing more “magical” than a heath, says Helen Macdonald in The New Statesman. These open expanses of heather, gorse, dwarf scrub and scattered trees have long been dismissed as economically unproductive waste grounds. After crossing Surrey’s Bagshot Heath by carriage in the 1720s, Daniel Defoe described it as an area “given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful to look on”. How wrong he was. Lowland heaths look unspectacular from a distance, but up close they are “rich with small glories”. The patches of little tormentil flowers. The sharp angles of the grass seedheads, the wild scramble of minuscule veronica plants. The “tiny, jewel-like beads on the leaves of sundews”.

Then there’s the sound. Heaths aren’t melodic; they’re “percussive” and “electrical”. You can hear the sizzling grasshoppers and the “taut vibrations of dragonfly wings”. The rustle of lizards in the undergrowth; the “mechanical reeling calls of nightjars”. They’re a patchwork of microhabitats, like embroideries, “stitched together of innumerable small and intricate parts”. What’s more, heaths fill me with hope. We have got used to thinking of healthy ecosystems as places untouched by humans. But these bewitching landscapes have always owed their existence to people, from Neolithic farmers to their modern-day equivalents, using the land to graze livestock and harvest wood and heather. Long may it continue.