Week 218: Bristol

Monday 22 May 2023

• You know some sickos vandalise Wikipedia and get a kick out of their made-up falsehoods being out there, maybe even tricking hurried journalists into copying them. But it’s even better to add well-sourced, true facts and later read similarly-worded things in the newspaper etc, and convince yourself that they’ve borrowed something you wrote.

• Friday. The Quantcast consent management platform broke for a few hours, affected a lot of websites. You must know it, it’s the pop-up dickhead who says “We value your privacy”, drones for a bit, then offers the choices “MORE OPTIONS” and “AGREE” – hardly the “enthusiastic consent” one should strive for – I hate it, but on the other hand it’s helped to pay for all the yoghurt and cheese knives I could ever want. Anyway, all those websites slightly broken for a few hours, quite something.

• 30-ish hours in Bristol, which I didn’t hate despite my best efforts.

  There and back by Megabus. Who knew sitting down could be so exhausting? ComfortDelGro my arse.

  A problem with travelling by coach is sharing the roads with private motor cars, who tend to crash and generally cause congestion. Opening the railways to motorists would level the playing field. The poor driver hadn’t been told about some roadworks in Oxford, got a bit lost … maybe double-crewing would help. It’s really poor that, in 2023, the Prospect Coaches–operated services don’t track on the tracker.

  On our late arrival, a waiting man was irate to learn he’d have to wait even longer before the driver could legally drive the next journey. If the authorities were truly pro-growth, there’d be no need for breaks, after all there are amphetamines instead.

  That’s probably enough character-building slow travel for a while, I just checked how quick and reasonably priced the train would have been and I was humbled.

• 📺 Billions, in which Damo Lewis plays a rich fellow, the titular Robert “Bobby” Billons. I know he’s been in lots of things, but I’ve only ever seen him guest-presenting Have I Got News For You, so I’m still impressed by his adopted American accent and ability to do things other than reading-aloud some mildly satirical but establishment-friendly jokes. The rest of the cast has an high number of actors one recognises from other things too. Anyway, Billions is OK and apparently the later series are even better so that’s something to look forward to.

  Have watched all sorts of other things in recent weeks, of course, but didn’t feel like I had anything to mention about them here, which is fine.