Week 206: no-chicken salad days

Wildlife spotted, in descending order: two foppish Dulux dog–ish dogs in the back of a tricycle trailer (outside Lidl), one heron (down by the river).

Some work. Had noticed Google indexing pages with a query string like ?date=2023-02-19, ignoring the <link rel="canonical", which is bad especially when the date is in the past. Tricky to prevent without making more stuff not work without JavaScript, or obscuring the useful ability to bookmark or link to a particular date. Finally I realised you can do all sorts of stuff with a robots.txt like Disallow: /*?date=*, so let’s see if that helps.

A relative is fond of saying so-and-so is “no chicken”, as in “no spring chicken” but maybe the “spring” is redundant? There are at least two recorded cases of English learners being confused by a bit in A Study in Scarlet where Inspector Lestrade says “I am no chicken”, which these days means “I am no blend of water, vegetable proteins and rapeseed oil”, so the publishers will probably rewrite it, which is fine.

🎦 Cocaine Bear. Not quite silly enough, but there’s a cool bicycle in it. Realised I was hungry when some entrails looked to me like a string of tasty cartoon sausages. Everyone’s made the same joke that – ha ha – I suppose the bear goes on about its app, screenplay, business, gameshow format idea etc – and why not.

The cinema emailed a survey and I went yes, a chance to say the staff are excellent, and maybe win a voucher, but also to complain about their computer system not distinguishing between occupied seats and unavailable-for-other-reasons seats. There was a text box for answering “why are you extremely satisfied?”, and I reasoned that there’d be an opportunity later to expound on my little complaint, but no, it was just multiple-choice questions after that, no “is there anything else?”, I should have shooted my shot while I had a chance. If there’s a questionnaire about the survey I won’t make the same mistake.