It's Always More Complicated

I'm pretty sure this is some kind of phishing scam, because I think an email from Esteemed Academic Publishing Conglomerate would have a more professional style about it:

[Nothing in the way of branding heading or footer...]
Hi [Name],
Welcome to the [Name of Publisher] GCOP! To get started, go to https://[name of conglomerate].my.site.com/gcopvforcesite
Username: [part of my email address].netmya

Bizarre.

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Also bizarre: partner has signed up for a hearing test in conjunction with forthcoming eye-test, and has received this upselling email (does not at present have any kind of hearing-aid) for an exciting new model on which they are offering A Deal:

Key Features:
Advanced Voice AI for natural, personalised sound
Waterproof design for everyday confidence
Built-in Smart Assistant & Telecare AI, providing on-the-go adjustments and support
Language translation & transcription capabilities
Step tracking, fall alerts & balance assessments
Customisable reminders for daily tasks
Hands-free phone calls for complete convenience

The Case of the Missing Romani American History:

The history of Romani Americans is missing. Although the experiences of other marginalized and immigrant American groups are now well-represented in mainstream historical scholarship, Romani Americans remain absent from American history. This absence has detrimental effects to Romani Americans who are placed outside historical time. It also harms scholars whose work could benefit from the placement of Romani people in the histories they tell.

A ‘new Canterbury Tale’: George Smythe, Frederick Romilly and England’s ‘last political duel’:

In the early hours of 20 May 1852, six weeks before polling in that summer’s general election, two MPs travelled from London to woodland outside Weybridge in a bid to settle a quarrel provoked by the unravelling of electioneering arrangements in the double-member constituency of Canterbury. Frederick Romilly, the borough’s sitting Liberal MP, had issued a challenge to his Canterbury colleague George Smythe, whose political allegiances fluctuated and who had notoriously been embroiled in four previous prospective duels. The pair, accompanied by their seconds, who were also politicians, exchanged shots before departing unscathed. None of the participants faced prosecution but neither Smythe nor Romilly was re-elected.

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Do not foxes have the right to enjoy the facilities of the public library system? London library forced to briefly close after fox 'made itself comfortable' inside - this was a London library, rather than the London Library.

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Two entries in the People B Weird category:

Sylvanian Families' legal battle over TikTok drama:

Sylvanian Families has become embroiled in a legal battle with a TikTok creator who makes comedic videos of the children's toys in dark and debauched storylines. The fluffy creatures, launched in 1985, have become a childhood classic. But the Sylvanian Drama TikTok account sees them acting out adult sketches involving drink, drugs, cheating, violence and even murder.

And

I'm 16 and live entirely like it's the 1940s (I bet he's not eating as though rationing is still in force, what?):

"I liked the clothing, how they dressed, and the style," Lincoln explained. "Just the elegance of how everyone was and acted... with the time of the war, everyone had to come together, everyone had to fight, and everyone had to survive together.
"Most people back then said it was scary, but it was quite fun to live then, and they could go out, help each other and apparently there's not that much stuff today that is similar to what that wartime experience was."
Lincoln said he loved the music of the time, including Henry Hall, Jack Payne and Ambrose & His Orchestra.
The teenager's wardrobe was also entirely made up of clothes from the era, which he said he preferred to modern-day clothes.
He even cycles on a 1939 bike when out and about researching and finding items for his collection.

(I was thinking that I had seen a narrative of tortoises down trousers, for smuggling purposes, before: but in fact, on checking, it was pythons down the strides - take it away, Bazza McKenzie!, the tortoises &/or turtles were in suitcases.)

TSA finds live turtle concealed in man’s pants at New Jersey airport:

The turtle was detected on Friday after a body scanner alarm went off at Newark Liberty international airport. A TSA officer then conducted a pat-down on the East Stroudsburg man and determined there was something concealed in the groin area of his pants.
When questioned further, the man reached into his pants and pulled out the turtle, which was about 5in (12cm) long and wrapped in a small blue towel. He said it was a red-ear slider turtle, a species that is popular as a pet.
The man – whose name was not released – was escorted from the checkpoint area by Port Authority police and ended up missing his flight. The turtle was confiscated, and it is not clear if the turtle was the man’s pet or why he had it in his pants.
....
["] I believe this is the first time we have come across someone who was concealing a live animal down the front of his pants,” said Thomas Carter, TSA’s federal security director for New Jersey. “As best as we could tell, the turtle was not harmed by the man’s actions.”

OR

Wot abaht bestiality??? - though not sure that I have ever, in the sexological literature, come across turtle-luhrv.

I see that it was a red slider, which is considered an invasive species, and also carries salmonella. (So probably not destined for turtle soup....?

Barely have I recovered from Irvine Welsh's hardman claim that reading for comfort ur doin it rong, when I came across this: Why Men Are ‘Rawdogging’ Flights. This edgy, edgy expression means: 'staring silently at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them, for the entirety of a trip':

“I am a nervous flier and generally cannot focus on anything on a plane—movies, TV shows, books, articles, whatever—with any success,” says Luke Winkie, a 33-year-old staff writer at Slate, who has used the flight map as his only in-flight entertainment for years. “For some reason I don't like processing new information when I'm in the air. I want to stick to things that are predictable and safe.”

West and others have also come to see rawdogging flights as a kind of challenge, like the Tough Mudder or No Nut November, the goal being to see how fully participants can deprive themselves of creature comforts, up to and including free snack and drinks and even bathroom visits. A true rawdogger takes no indulgences.

....Taking flights raw seems to be a “masculine thing,” he says. “Everything's about looking cool. Most guys embrace it as a joke or like, ‘We are so hard. David Goggins has nothing on us.’” Winkie agrees. “I don't think men have the same ‘treat culture’ that women do, which is frankly a shame,” he says. “A long flight, for women, is the perfect venue to organize an entire itinerary of treats, and I do think men tend to be more stoic and weird about the spaces in which they allow themselves to receive pleasure.”

I am reminded yet again of dear Dame Rebecca's apercu in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, (quoting from memory), that men think that one day they will be called upon to do something supremely effortful and unpleasant, after which life will proceed on an entirely different plane altogether.

We wonder, just a little, whether these men who deprive themselves of indulgences, ever mildly inconvenience themselves for the benefit of another person (I am thinking of those men who are all prepped up to defend their families against some external threat Like In the Movies but are not notable for helping in the quotidien tasks of household maintenance).

Ignore or elide how truly dreadful people are being? Before, that is, they do something really egregious?

(I mean, it was really only when Previous Line Manager remarked that Former Line Manager had had issues with me and my side career as historian that I went, oh, not just me then...)

But honestly, I was looking at this over on AITA, and honestly, even before this delightful guy who is engaged to her cousin tries to set up the OP, who is married to a woman, with a male friend/relative of his, claiming that the marriage is breaking up -

Even before that, he had apparently been in this habit, when visiting the couple with his fiancee:

[H]e makes snarky remarks about my wife's traditional dishes, and no, we've never forced them to eat any of them.... But he compliments everything I make, even something as simple as coffee, and he keeps telling me that I'll make a good man happy one day.

We think rather poorly of cousin, who has been brought up with OP as younger sister, as well.

He is mega-miffed that she is - finally - now refusing to pay as she originally agreed towards their wedding.

Am really surprised that she was offering to pay towards their wedding in the first place. The cousin is a grad student, they're living on her research funds in accommodation fiance's parents are paying for. He doesn't have a job. Very stable basis for mattermoney, what?

One reads these things here and there, and everyone goes about the person doing/saying Awful Thing that It's Only Pretty Fanny's Way, or it's A Joke. But then going berserk if there are consequences like, sorry, not splashing out on your wedding.

Jacob Bloomfield: ‘They helped win the war’: the surprisingly mainstream history of drag. (As some of us knew already, but I have really really yearning for a decent study of the subject, could really have done with one when alluding to the Boulton & Park, Fanny&Stella case in a recent piece: there was a not very good one, 1979, Peter Ackroyd, Dressing Up: Transvestism and Drag: The History of an Obsession, that title is not propitious...). His book is just out and although it's from a university press, not eyebleedingly expensive as these things go.

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Weird religious beliefs (well, specifically Christian beliefs) on sexual practices 'against nature':

Most bizarre and extra-biblical of Western Christian claims about ‘sodomy’ was that the baby Jesus killed all sodomites, simply by being born in Bethlehem; he would not come into a world where there were people doing things ‘against nature’. This story is to be found in a couple of standard texts read or heard by the devout throughout the medieval West, and medieval England in particular. First was the thirteenth-century Latin anthology of saints’ lives by Archbishop Jacobus de Voragine known as The Golden Legend. Second was the Festial, a fourteenth-century compilation of vernacular sermons for English parish priests to use throughout the liturgical year, by an Augustinian Canon John Mirk, who drew much of his material from de Voragine.... Distorting a remark in a sermon attributed to Augustine of Hippo, de Voragine and those echoing him claimed that at the birth of Christ all the ‘sodomites’ in the world had suddenly died, as committing ‘sins against kind’ [nature]. Christ delayed entering the world till they had all gone.

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And in more general weirdness, ‘My ultimate goal? Don’t die’: Bryan Johnson on his controversial plan to live for ever. Apart from the massive tedium of the regime he follows, am by no means convinced that this individual life maximisation path is the way to go, not just out of sheer ethical cringe, but because (okay, dash of schadenfreude here) suppose he does achieve immortality?

Perhaps he should read de Beauvoir's All Men are Mortal: 'the meaninglessness of daily life, rituals, style from the perspective of an immortal man' - and the vision of him, alone except for the immortal mouse he tested the potion on, at the end of the world.