Week 202: two kinds of mop

Sunday 29 January 2023

My dentist had a sign outside with a chalked message, something like “is your day as smooth as your forehead?” Thanks a lot, until this point I’d never considered whether I had a rough or lumpy forehead, and I’m still not sure if it’s better to have a smooth one. (But I guess they’re branching out from teeth into Botox, etc? Weird.)
Was so taken with a sign outside a church

A new start
to a new year with
renewable energy
from the son
– Jesus

(spotted from a moving bus) that I went and walked for some miles to take a picture the following day. (Went to Lidl on the way back.) Just great copywriting, and possibly the first time the son/sun pun’s been thought of. But it’s a little late to be going on about new starts to new years now, we’re past the statute of limitations.
Last week when I mentioned the leaking wool detergent bottle, it had actually been months since any spillages. Spookily, just days later the bottle got knocked over again and it took two goes with two different kinds of mop to get the slick slippery surface off the surface. But it smelt lovely.
🎦 TÁR. The pencil cupboard! I wondered why her Porsche Taycan had a Stuttgart registration plate, but it was a never explained. ~
Went to see and hear Police Dog Hogan. They’ve updated Shitty White Wine (it tastes like turpentine/a kangaroo on the label is never a good sign) to account for inflation, Threshers ceasing trading, and Ice Road Truckers ending, but there’s still an outdated reference to “buy one get one free” which is a rarely seen sort of offer these days. When in Scotland, do they consider the minimum alcohol unit pricing?

Week 201: wool

Monday 23 January 2023

Happy year of the rabbit.
Got some wool detergent last year, because I respect wool. I want to say the bottle bore the Woolmark, the seal of approval of the International Wool Secretariat (Brian Woolnough, Glen Wool etc), but I’ve checked and it doesn’t. Anyway, obviously you don’t want to place the bottle on top of the vibrating washing machine and have it fall off and crack open and ooze on the floor, and think disgruntledly “this is what I get for respecting wool”, although after you’ve cleaned up the mess your mop and floor will be rather nice and fragrant.
Went outside to put out the recycling, then one thing led to another and I found myself on a bus, and then another bus to the seaside. (On the 6A between North Walsham and Cromer it was just me enjoying the Edinburgh landmarks depicted on the moquette, but otherwise things seemed busy enough.) Have been thinking for a while I would benefit from the some salty sea air, and now I’ve had some, and I don’t feel particularly different.
Hate the Observer’s Sunday With column more than expected. Jack Dee’s got a clay oven barbecue.
🎦 M3GAN, an excellent bit of nonsense.

Glad the Odeon’s got rid of the smug disembodied voice who’d say “ooh yeah the trailers … all specially chosen for this film, actually.” Maybe the poor voice actor is now destitute and unable to shoe his children, now he’s lost that work … I don’t care.

Week 200: wrap

Monday 16 January 2023

Ugh, this time of year. The animals, with their hibernation and their seasonal migration, have the right idea.
Some work. Made an experimental new sort of map – one interesting thing about it is the use of Ordanance Survey’s vector map tiles, which are pretty and detailed and accurate but:
- I have doubts about how free-to-use they really are. They’re allegedly free to use for at least some purposes, but nothing’s free these days, and you know what cartographers are like, I can just imagine one of the mapping agency’s flat-nosed geezers at my door with a baseball bat.
- Obviously they only cover the island of Great Britain, so you’ve got to do something clever to automatically switch to a different source for other parts of the world.
  
  Incidentally, the planned upgrades to the (Irish) National Transport Authority’s GTFS-R stuff are taking their pretty little time … the Attention Developers article has been quietly updated, “the third quarter of 2022” has gone down the memory hole and now it’s “early 2023”, which is fine, it’s actually comforting that all IT projects everywhere always overrun.
For years I’ve had a sensor in the outdoor letterbox here that uses two AAA batteries and the obscure Sigfox wireless network and sends me an email when a letter arrives through the flap. It actually works brilliantly, most of the time.

Then last month it stopped working, as if in solidarity with members of the Communication Workers Union, and I guessed the batteries had lost their fizz – they’d had a good innings. But new batteries made no difference, so the electronics must finally have succumbed to the ravages of the weather – the 3D-printed case is all cracked and hardly waterproof, so it was only a matter of time.

Well, just as I was coming to terms with having to go downstairs and check the letterbox myself like a low-tech animal, the sensor rose from the dead and sensed something. (A flyer advertising an estate agent, boring.) So that’s good. But one day it will be truly dead, and I won’t be able to replace it – the online shop says out of stock, and I pessimistically think it’s unlikely to be replenished – and it will be a sad day.
Went to great lengths to reset my Nectar (Sainsbury’s loyalty card) password just to find out that I was Norwich’s eleventh most prolific buyer of halloumi and roasted vegetable wraps last year. It might have been higher, but once or twice I carelessly bought a horrible chicken and tzatziki wrap by mistake instead, also I’m not sure if it counts the wraps I bought in other cities. Needless to say, I’d love to meet the ten people above me in the league.
Steve Easterbrook, a former high-ranking official in the McDonald’s Corporation, was in the news. A lot of news outlets used the same picture of a man in a suit grinning next to a clown, and I was disappointed that none were thoughtful enough to clarify who was who, because that’s always a little bit of fun. None but Forbes…

🤡👨🏻
Steve Easterbrook, right, pictured here in 2015

…so well done Forbes.
I like the short squat pint glasses they have these days. It can be a stretch to get your hands around them, my thumbs can’t even play guitar, but maybe with practice they’ll stretch bigger, like how in olden times naturalists thought giraffes’ necks got like that just from the effort to reach the tops of trees.

Week 199: chunky and classic

Sunday 8 January 2023

The reviews are true, Tesco Chicken & Vegetable Soup (chunky and classic) (600g) is not nice soup. Bland, resistant to the effects of added seasoning, watery, not sure where it sits on the Bristol stool chart. I don’t like being so negative, but it’s bad soup, so at least I can save you the disappointment. Sad to think of the chickens and vegetables who gave their lives for that.

(In fact, it looks like the online reviewers have given short shrift to all the Tesco fresh soups. What’s going on there? I know we’re more likely to review things we have strong opinions on, which skews the ratings, but it seems like Tesco’s fresh soup product development team have really screwed the pooch.)
Stepped on a bus for the first time under the £2 fare cap. It was fine, my main preoccupation was the engine so vibrating at idle that I imagined my teeth coming loose. They’ve been quietly installing tap on tap off hardware, which will speed up boarding when it’s eventually switched on. The award-winning First Bus app is still selling some expensive network day tickets here for up to £14, which is a bit cheeky, maybe taking advantage of the information-poor – I know there’s someone who’ll make more than seven journeys in a day, but who?
📖 Tim Key’s He Used Thought as a Wife. I’m not wild about the poems but it’s not just poems. I keep misremembering the title as He Used Time as a Wife, silly me, that would be a different book entirely.
📺 Happy Valley, oh lawks a lordy. Also Search Party, well done to the BBC programme acquisition team.

Week 198: glass spider

Monday 2 January 2023

Some work. At last, integrated Transport for London’s disruption messages/status updates/whatever they’re called. I have some complaints about the TfL API, but it speaks to the power of APIs that even an imperfect one is good enough to have inspired dozens of apps etc. I wonder about the line breaks in the Bus Stop Closed messages, like they’re some kind of poem:

Bus Stop Closed
Please use the next stop
or the previous stop
to catch your bus

whereas the other, longer messages are unbroken streams-of-consciousness about how a bus route has been diverted.
Finally made some mince pies. Making the pastry, I used a food processor (really a Braun MultiQuick blender with a food processor attachment) and by jingo, it took a matter of seconds to combine the butter and flour – it’s true what they say, food processors are great. I enjoy the delicate rubbing in by hand, reckon I’m good at it, but just think of everything I’ll be able to achieve in the time saved by using a machine instead. In the end, the pastry was disappointing, but that could just as well have been because the flour was a bit old and I hadn’t an egg yolk to hand.
Best bit of this peaceful video showing the restoration of a dilapidated stand mixer is the use of the relative pronoun “who” for a centrifugal governor. It’s a matter of style, but I feel strongly that “that” is always less elegant somehow, and I’d love to meet someone who feels that as strongly as I do.
I had conflated a glass onion with a glass spider in my mind. Intellectually, I can tell the difference between a spider and an onion, but you know how it is.
And so we say goodbye to 2022. A few of the things I did in 2022 without mentioning on here: harboured a crush, tried jellied eels, grew mushrooms. I had a better time than many, but still a bit less misery would have been appreciated thanks.
Looky, slightly different type on this website. I was attached to the old particular cut of Futura, with its quirks and bad kerning, until I learnt Jost has a stylistic alternate with a single-storey a and I was sold. I think 2023 is the year I get into stylistic alternates.

Week 197: festivities

Sunday 25 December 2022

Stopped coughing in time for the festivities. Covonia Chesty Cough Mixture (Non Drowsy) is one hell of a drug, but also deploying goblin mode for two days helped.
There’s a rich vein of tweets etc saying baby Jesus was the original nepo baby, but think for a moment, what about King Herod? Herod’s father wasn’t a king, but it seems likely his friendship with Julius Caesar got his son the job, and that has the stink of the old boy network.
Did all my shopping on Christmas Eve, and it was quiet, so I recommend that, and I hope all the smug organised people who spent the preceding weeks queuing and elbowing their way through the crowds now feel silly.
All the buzz about how great The White Lotus is was slightly annoying, but you know, they have a point. A thoughtless internet poster slightly spoilt the ending of the second serie, but really spoiling things isn’t a thing.

Have a nice week. I might get a new ice cube tray.

Week 196: decongestant

Sunday 18 December 2022

It’s been icy out. Today the thaw began and I never thought I’d be so happy about something melting. In the countryside, the frost only turns things pretty and stops the mud being squelchy, but in town slippery pavements are a menace.

So walking gingerly, sometimes in the sort of way you’d walk (I imagine) if you’d pooed your pants and were trying to make sure the turd didn’t fall down the trouser-leg chute. I may have improvised some little dances, arms flailing to keep my balance, but I’m pleased to say I didn’t fall over once.
Caught another lurgy. Congested orifices (nose, ears) gave way to coughing. The worst thing is worrying the hacking cough cough cough is disturbing the neighbours, because who can tell if I’ve never heard them cough because the soundproofing is good or they’re really healthy.

I’m dubious of the branded medications that are just paracetamol + caffeine + a marketing budget, although if the “Nurofen” branding has a placebo effect that’s still a useful effect. Perhaps I should consider a Beechams or a Night Nurse, maybe there’s something to them. I had some phenylephrine, which I now learn is an pretty useless decongestant – I might go as far as calling it a so-called decongestant – offered only because you can’t make crystal meth out of it.
Just noticed that a prominent bit of the Mastodon website, the “Insert emoji” button, is a picture of the awful Face with Tears of Joy (“crying laughing”) glyph. It’s next to the text “What’s on your mind?”, which takes on an obnoxious undertone. Of course it’s federated so I’m free to fork the software and host my own instance, but who can be arsed with that.

I don’t think I’ll ever have have a thought important enough to toot – I’ll keep writing here instead – but scrolling is a fun way of filling time until we all die so it’ll be a shame if the car salesman who tortures apes bans me from his website (not that I think he’ll dare).
Moved the weeping fig into three spacious separate pots – soaking the roots in water makes disentangling easier. So now I’ve three pathetic spindly looking things, it’s easy to see why they needed to huddle together to appear bushier, but this time next year, just wait.
🎦 Aftersun.

Week 195: get back, lametta

Monday 12 December 2022

There’s something not quite right about the keys on the left-hand side of this laptop keyboard. It’s like someone spilt a bit of ginton on them a few months ago, and that’s exactly what happened – interesting how long it’s taken for it to congeal, or for me to notice. The keys all work, they just feel ineffably wrong, cheap, mushy, compared to their right-hand side cousins. Woe is me.

Alas it’s not one of the bad keyboards covered by Apple’s service program. And the keyboard functionality is not compromised, so involving a professional technician seems like an overreaction. So. Would a slimline tonic have been less sticky? Should I spill distilled water on it now? What exactly is “rubbing alcohol”? Could I get one of the sucky nozzle things dentists use?
A slightly interesting bus journey. First I attempted a two-minute connection – in ideal conditions I’d have had two minutes to cross a road; in practice, I had an hour to walk around a market town keeping warm until next bus, calming down after the thrilling jeopardy.

The next bus was running early. At one point the driver paused for time to catch up, but it was a narrow road with cars parked on the other side and a horn-honking man in a Honda Jazz grew impatient with the blockage created. Later, as we approached a stop, I noticed someone running up a side street, and the vibe they gave off was that they were running for the bus. We stopped at the stop, a man got on carrying a folded Brompton, and very efficiently he had a ticket ready on his mobile telephone, how selfish – better to take your time fumbling with coins in case someone’s running late behind you.

A better man would have made a scene, got the driver to wait a moment, but I am not a better man. Oh well, maybe the Brompton man was fleeing from the running person – maybe even had stolen their Brompton, in which case good luck to him. Then later, we spent 20 minutes in an interminable traffic jam – roadworks, they’re building a new bus lane – and I thought thank goodness I’d not delayed us any further. Cool story.
Only a dusting of snow here. The main thing is the pretty frozen cobwebs everywhere, how odd that I don’t remember noticing them during previous cold snaps.

At this magical time of year, starting to think about festooning the weeping fig with lametta etc. Turns out the plant is actually three plants in one pot, a cruel trick played by the shops to give the illusion of a healthy bushy plant. I think they would thrive more vigorously in their own separate pots, but how to separate them without damaging the roots?

Have a nice week.

Week 194

Sunday 4 December 2022

The DAX advertising platform is convinced that I’m in Wales. None of the IP geolocation providers can locate me correctly – great for getting away with cyber crimes – but only Ipregistry places me in Wales, so I guess that’s who DAX use. Anyway, it means I’m hearing lots of audio ads from the Welsh Government, even some in the Welsh language, and it sounds bloody great – apparently they can help with the cost of childcare and help my business export things.
The Ensignbus Heritage Running Day was a lovely day out, just like last year. I wasn’t very hardcore about maximally exploring, but there’ll be other years.

Gravesend. A brass band dressed as Father Christmases was playing Get Lucky (the sound of the summer) on the street outside the empty shell of Debenhams. I feel like I’ve heard more brass band covers than the original by now, but the crowd was greatly enjoying it. Then they played Let It Snow and everyone lost interest.