Week 243: bunged

Monday 13 November 2023

• Caught a cold again. Once may be regarded as misfortune, twice looks like carelessness … am I particularly bad at washing my hands?

• A tiny bit of work. Maybe next week I’ll make a thing that turns a long bus route “number” like “Connecting Communities Suffolk Coastal East & West” into a handy acronym like “CCSCE&W”.

• The 13:00 news and current affairs programme The World at One is known as WATO for short, but that would be the acronym for the completely different World at One, and the definite article is an important part of the programme’s name. But actually the The doesn’t appear in the logo or anywhere on the programme website.

• The “Amazon Kindle Kids” electronic reader is quite good even if you aren’t or don’t have a kid: small and light and comes with a free case. The setup process forces you to invent a kid, but then it’s only a one-time pain in the arse to delete the kid and turn off “Kids’ Mode”.

  Alas, the power button still being on the bottom is a recipe for it turning itself off when it’s propped up on an easelly lecterny thing. And I got mine a while ago, before they changed from the dreaded Micro-B to the lovely Type-C socket.

• The shower and the kitchen sink hot tap both leak very slightly, just enough to form patches of mildew and limescale. Alas, I can’t see any way of stopping the flow of hot water – a prerequisite before disassembling a tap – without draining the hot water tank, and I’d rather not bother. I have learnt that, in the cupboard with the washing machine and other electrical things, there’s a lever on a pipe that, when turned, makes all water spurt out the end of the pipe.

• Has anyone chosen Mastermind as their specialist subject on Mastermind?

• 📺 Finished enjoying Starstruck (a New Years’ Eve or two ago, someone suggested starting the first episode some minutes before midnight, so the Big Ben bell bongs in the screwball comedy at the same time as it bongs in real life … fun if you like that sort of thing) and the first series of the extraordinarily cast Julia.

• Baked the last of the cooking apples. (Cored, bunged with sultanas, filled with brown sugar.)