• Robert Popper’s promotion of his new book led me to have a nice listen to The Timewaster Diaries (since the earlier Letters wasn’t in the catalogue of my chosen audiobook provider). The diaries are sweet and Paul Whitehouse does a good job of reading them aloud. It’s an unrelated coincidence that, this week more than ever, the only things I can think of to write about here feel particularly boring and pointless.

• Started paying for a bank account, because of the “free” “perks” – a monthly cinema ticket, a Railcard, an interest rate, and go on then a weekly Greggs item from a limited selection. The other thing is they send you a subtly fancier-looking new debit card with a new number, a mild inconvenience I’d’ve preferred not to endure, but I could have simply not activated the new card and kept using the old one.

  Perhaps I will walk to a different Greggs each week, yes, that would be a nice little project to add some meaning to my humdrum life.

• Previously:

  Had tofu two nights on the trot. Not quite explicably this led me to seek out the Brass Eye–esque title sequence of the Piers Morgan programme, as I recall phrases like “woke insanity” appear in large geometric sans serif lit up by lasers, but pfft/I couldn’t find it.

  Reader, I found the title sequence, with its giant brain spinning around a globe among laser beams, and can recommend Gifski as a most excellent app for making animated short GIFs from longer videos. Yes I know that GIF is an imperfect format. Here are “the world’s gone nuts”, “woke insanity” (perhaps that could do with being shorter), etc., to use as one sees fit. But it’s hard to be unserious/ironic on the internet without being mistaken for being serious/unironic.

• For weeks/months, I’ve been being haunted/plagued by a sound. A muffled bleep, but not a swearing-on-TV kind of bleep or a voicemail “speak after the beep” beep, more like a bleep test one. (You know bleep tests, in which you run increasing-in-speed lengths of a sports hall, in time with a series of bleeps, to test your cardiovascular fitness?) Actually not really a bleep at all, maybe a cross between a chime and chirrup?

  Clearly, the sound was coming from an electronic device, but which one, and where? I began to think it was coming from next door, until I heard the sound in a hotel room miles from home, which narrowed it down to the devices I had with me, and eventually to the AirPods (Pro).

  There are YouTube videos with titles like “every AirPods sound effect”, but they’re lying. But eventually I found a Reddit post by someone in the same situation, with a video of their AirPods case making, yes, the same sound. It’s so heartening to read all the comments there, and this MacRumors forum thread, to know I’m not alone, but it’s troubling that no one’s sure what the sound means apart from some people who reckon it’s for calibrating some microphone or other.

• :( (It’s not the main thing, but I lost £9.86 – proof, if proof be need be, that gambling is for mugs. No one ever went bankrupt running a casino!)

• Ew, twice to London’s glittering West End. The second time to take in the Dr. Strangelove play in which Steve Coogan plays four of Peter Sellers’s three roles from the film … I didn’t mind it.

• A man came to replace the dribbly tap, and best of all he fitted some isolation valves for an easier repair next time (although I hope I’ll have moved before then). Actually, I’d gotten used to the maddening, interminable drip, drip, drip, so now the place feels too eerily quiet and I’m more aware of the emptiness within.

• Was I prepared to change my devices’ language settings to United States English for the sake of being able to sample the new Apple Intelligence features? Was I buffalo. But it turns out that on a Macintosh it’s just the Siri language setting that you need to change. Anyway, I hate it but I quite like the turns of phrase of some of the generated summaries of emails.

• A fellow has been tweeting some strange, legally actionable things about me and others – certainly an unexpected consequence of running a bus timetable website. I was perturbed for about a day, which is why there are libel laws I suppose, but part of me also quite liked the attention, and I remain fascinated by his barely intelligible stream-of-consciousness writing style and all of his varied political views etc.

• 🎦 The Apprentice. The more I learn about Trump, the less I care for him. It’s an unnecessary film and would have been better if it was about Alan Sugar. (Danny Dyer plays a Sugar-like character in the slightly naff Disney series The Rivals, which is mostly about a load of rubber-faced nobs.)

• The Substance. Dorian Gray for the Brazilian butt lift generation. Thirty thousand gallons of fake blood.

• Last week, the bonce of Stanley Tucci appeared in my Instagram feed and I really thought it was Gregg Wallace. (As a phillistine I don’t really know who Tucci is but I’ve watched several episodes of Wallace’s Inside the Factory.) Days later, in John Lewis, there was Tucci again, printed on cardboard, advertising his own range of pots and pans, and I have to say that having a cookware brand is surely Gregg Wallace–coded behaviour and wonder if the pot and pan industry executives also conflated the two bald white men.

  This week on Instgram, my swiping and scrolling was interrupted by an advert for Lee Kum Kee Chiu Chow Chilli Oil, a cheap video soundtracked by a looping, strangely truncated and yet still compelling bit of music (it appears more completely in a video on TikTok). Did you know that the Lee Kum Kee company, probably best known for supposedly inventing oyster sauce, also owns 20 Fenchurch Street (London’s so-called Walkie Talkie building) and has a venture capital arm that’s invested in things like the annoying proprietary geocode system what3words?

  Months ago on Instagram I saw someone doing something revolting with biscuits and tea or something, and I let out an involuntary yelp that was the same as the noise I made that week upon seeing (maybe imagining) a mouse scurrying across the carpet of a holiday rental.

• After my Megabus experience last week, it cannot be a coincidence that they’re scaling back operations due to low passenger demand.

• Felt sick for most of the week, but now I don’t feel sick and I’ve finally done a normal poo so I’m pleased about that.

• This week I was mostly in the Liverpool City Region. Lovely.

• Broke one of those expensive Serious Readers reading lamps you see advertised in print media. Then I managed to fix it – gluing a little ceramic component back together, re-inserting some little springs after finding them in the deep pile carpet, etc. – so proof if proof be need be that if you believe in yourself you can do anything.

• Saturday: back home via the Megabus from Birmingham. It seemed to be going well until the driver revealed he’d not driven this route before and needed directing to the various stops; fortunately, help was capably provided by some capable passengers. He had some kind of satnav, but I’m not sure what it was smoking as it later directed him a long way north along the ring road. (Aside: to pass the time I was experimentally using my mobile phone to track the journey, and began to feel bad about about broadcasting such lostness.) Still, it was better than the time we drove cluelessly all around Oxford.

  Then for the last hundred or so metres it fell to me to direct him into the bus station and to the correct stand, and I’m terrible at that sort of thing despite, you know, making a website with maps of all the routes and stops. My minute as navigator was enough for him to be exasperated by my “I think”s and “should be”s – and fair enough, he was having a bad day at work, as if being from Birmingham wasn’t bad enough! And uncertainty is one of my most annoying features, but then I think of the few times I’ve been certain about something – I did tick that box on the form, the London Palladium is that way – and I’ve been quickly proven wrong.

• Sunday (content warning: disgusting). Noisily and horribly sick a few times, also diarrhoea. A novel experience, really – I’d wondered whether my gag reflex was, I don’t know, either too weak or too strong, but no I’m definitely still able to vomit. Not sure whether to blame some fishy soup I had last night, or I caught something from a young relative. Anyway, the post-sick relief is great and I can almost understand why Bruce Parry’s Amazonian friends do what they do.

What a lot of cultural highlights of the week.

• To the local cinema for the first time since they yassified it, recarpeted and installed huge recliners. It would feel wrong to watch something about man’s inhumanity to man while sitting so comfortably, but that’s nothing that (I imagine) really needing a pee can’t solve.

• 🎦 Lee (2023). A war is only as good as its correspondents! The accent Alexander Skarsgård does in it is a bit distractingly weird.

• The Outrun (2024). Devastating, not a dry eye on my face.

• An evening with Adrian Chiles. Some say Chiles is a clown and a bore, but not me.

  I really thought the architects of Kings Place had named each room of the building after a different time of the day, how quirky, but no it’s not half two it’s hall two etc.

• Ms. Lauryn Hill, etc. The reputations of both the venue (Co-op Live) and artist precede them but the show went ahead!

Friday: I resigned myself to having missed a train, then realised the train was late so I could catch it if I was quick, and in the end it was even later than that so I hadn’t even needed to be quick. I the rush I forgot to pack my toothbrush, then later forgot to pack the hastily bought replacement, so that’s the shortest amount of time I’ve owned a toothbrush, what a funny story.

Saturday: Since I happened to be in the same city at the same time, I too-briefly stopped in on OggCamp which is a lovely thing. (Today I saw a toot disparaging the smell of one of, and the social awkwardness of some of the attendees, but that can’t be about me cos I wasn’t there today.)

• In the liminal state between awake and asleep I had a fantastic idea. I can’t remember the idea now, just that I was jolly impressed with my half-conscious self for being so brilliant, but it was probably some nonsense.

• Went for a corona jab in a Wellbeing Hub in a shopping centre I mainly associate with feeling slightly unwell while searching desperately for a toilet or an exit. Now my shoulder feels satisfyingly sore like I’ve been pumping iron, and maybe coincidentally my tongue’s gone a bit funny, and that’s OK.

• As I walked along, a chap cycling past slipped and fell off his bicycle (he was OK), then minutes later I passed a child bawling his eyes out after falling off a scooter – it was like an omen foretelling what would happen to me if went cycling in these moist, early autumn conditions with my Continental Gatorskin tyres.

  Then I bought a pie, which had been praised by YouTube nutter who’s sure to be played by Michael Sheen when they make the film of his life. It was a good pie which I might have enjoyed more if I wasn’t Obtsobering again this month (unlike the bibulous vlogger). Also tried the “chicken curry” version, which was too underwhelming to have been worth killing a chicken for, oh dear.

• If our devices etc. are really all listening to us then I feel sorry for them, we’re so boring going on about this and that.

• Grew a record three tiny tomatoes on the balcony this season. Going “they actually taste like tomatoes”, claiming that supermarket ones don’t, is witless bollocks, but these did taste like tomatoes. Alas I didn’t take the time to slice them finely to make the world’s tiniest tomato salad, just ate them. Maybe next season will be the season I try using Tomorite.

• To leafy leafy London (to watch a RHLSTP). On the way home, overhead wire problems – I was at once excited about the delay repay ramifications and concerned about being stranded. Thinking myself clever, I took an alternative route – a train to Stansted, then a coach. There followed some drama as the train I could have caught was cancelled, reinstated, and eventually arrived quite late but still I’d’ve been much better off (as in both time and money) catching it and having faith in the railway gods. But never mind, I got to spend a charming hour at Stansted airport coach station so who was the real winner?

• Outside the Liverpool Street Marks & Spencer a man said “wait” or “hold on a minute” or words to that effect, and I thought he was telling me not to go into the shop but no he was speaking to an unseen someone on his telephone. Then I was too caught up with the selection of prawn sandwiches and the temperatures of the drinks cans that I didn’t make a note of the exact wording of what he said, so I can’t be sure, which I don’t like.

• Amy Gledhill (h). A visit to the Playhouse is worthwhile for the novelty of the push-action paper towel dispensers they have, but she was good as well.

• Some work. To save a few pounds I migrated a database to a slightly smaller server which was actually the same size, price and everything as the old one.

  I’ve been using Visual Studio Code a bit, although I often go back to Sublime Text out of force of habit. VSCode is tantamount to an integrated development environment, and I don’t really like its heft, and the most egregious thing about it is the icon depicting a conical flask (sometimes called an Erlenmeyer flask) to denote “Testing” (like we’re supposed to think it’s a test tube).

• Found an earwig on the soap dish (I know/I know it’s serious). Thanks to AI for identifying it … I used to know what an earwig looked like without deferring to a computer, it’s like something’s making me more stupid.

• Terry Reid (h) at the arts centre. Part of me wanted to stay at home, and I couldn’t remember if (according to TikTok witches) that feeling means a protective spirit is trying to save you from something bad, or a malign one wants you to miss out on something good.

• The Envy apples mentioned last week turned out to have an unpleasantly pappy texture, but maybe it was my fault for storing them improperly and for too long.

  The new Apple Watch with the Jet Black finish is nice. I don’t understand the metal-snobbery of anyone who pays the extra for a titanium one – oh is recycled aluminium not good enough for you? Grow up. But maybe the extra durability is worth it.

• I’ve become someone who brushes his teeth before breakfast, not after. Doesn’t it make the coffee taste minty? No it doesn’t, grow up.

• In the Sainsbury’s loos, a man dressed like a police officer was using the hand dryer, standing in the way of a washbasin, so I had to use the other, lower washbasin whose lowness contributed to me splashing water on my (fairly light-coloured) trousers.

• The Apple event, the coverage thereof and especially people’s toots about it, are a bit like when Alan Sugar tweets the Tottenham score. Anyway after all that I bought some Envy apples; I wanted to try some RedPop but I could find none.

  John Gruber, who I increasingly worry has been kicked in the head by a horse, has been making some disparaging noises about the European Union, to which I counter: here in Europe we can still get an Apple Watch with a functioning blood oxygen sensor, and an iPhone with a physical SIM slot. (And I was going to say gambling apps in the App Store but not sure how good and/or special that is.)

• Due to an oversight, and the visual similarity between the numbers 3 and 8, the URL slugs for weeks 284–286 here were numbered 234–236, and it’s too late now. But in several weeks’ time they’ll have dropped off the RSS feed and maybe I can fix them then.