Happy Friday! This weeks links…

1) When I grow up I want to be Imelda Staunton, only taller.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose? 
A dodo, or the old Labour party.

2) Lionfish invasion. Fascinating and has one of the best phrases ever, eat them to beat them!

In 2010 scientists named the lionfish invasion one of the top 15 threats to global biodiversity. In the three years since, the invasion has only worsened. The only solution is to fight fire with fire, or in this case, pit our bottomless stomachs against theirs. We really do have to eat them to beat them.

3) Flag etiquette for displaying a US flag. I’ve always been intrigued by flag etiquette in the US, I come from a country where the Union Flag is often flown upside down and called a Union Jack (it’s only a Union Jack on a ship!). So of course I looked it up and turns out that it’s universal flag etiquette. Also we have a Flag Institute and an All Party Parliamentary Group, called the Flags and Heraldry Committee. Really, of course we do!

4) Hemmingway on drink (via Letters of Note)

5) Matt Seaton on the 4th of July and being British in the US.

Americans in 1776 liberated themselves from the monarchical principle once and for all. Thomas Paine emigrated to America – and with him went all those wonderfully seditious democratic ideals in Common Sense and the Rights of Man. He left behind a country that would never have a written constitution or formal bill of rights.

And this despite the fact that England did depose a king, in 1648. The year before that, during the parliamentary army’s Putney debates, Colonel Thomas Rainsborough anticipated Painite doctrine by more than a century:

“For really I think that the poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live, as the greatest hee; and therefore truly, Sr, I think itt clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.”