Participation by accident

I’ve been reading the newspapers from the centre forward to the back page and then from the centre backwards to the front page. I find it helps to give me perspective amid all the doom and gloom of the initial pages.
    There can also be a lag in reading the front pages. Today, for instance, I got to the front of Tuesday’s Daily Mail, which told me that NHS wanted a minute’s silence @ 11 a.m. on that day.
    I realized that I had probably joined in inadvertently by still  being busily, and silently, engaged in doing the puzzles on the centre pages at the appropriate time. Funny how things work out.

Worst of all possible worlds

The Universe must hate the crew of Deep Space Nine nearly as much as the rest of us if the inhabitants of an alternate universe full of evil counterparts have free access to the station.

Talking point

As the Prime Minister returns to work, the nation is busy debating whether it is better to have had and recovered from the Chinese plague, or avoided catching it in the first place.

Reality bites back

Inspector Banks, in one of Peter Robinson’s cop/crime series, decides that what’s in his glass in a pub tastes more like cold dishwater than real ale.
    How would he know? I found myself wondering after reading this pearl of wisdom. Or maybe dishwater is considered a delicacy in Yorkshire and that’s why the inspector knows what it tastes like.

Putting the world in harm’s way

Warehouse 13 (Syfy channel, last night) had an episode about a virus spreading death around the world [series 4, episode 11, originally shown on 29th April 2013]. So that’s where the scriptwriters for the Chinese plague got their ideas.
    Shame the cure in real life ain’t so quick and simple and done in a hour of TV time.

Pauper-taunting advert!

iPhone – (you’re going to have) less to spend.
    There’s a real incentive to get one. Not.

Corona question

“Parents can’t hide if they’re stressed”, said the headline. But where are they going to hide if they’re locked down?

Lockdown discount

Video chats with friends are great for spreading daft ideas. One of my mates reckons the next time he’s in his local Aldi, he’s going to ask for a discount for shopping in person and lessening the load on their website and delivery service. No one is expecting him to be successful, though.

Lockdown Exception

I also had someone else telling me that the government is trying to encourage people to go and shop at supermarkets in person to relieve the strain on their internet ordering and delivery services, which can’t keep up. Weird, or what!

International daftness

A mate was trying to tell me that North Korean bossman Mr. Kim is dead – he blew himself up when doing one of his ‘notice me’ missile launches.
    Like he’d get close enough for that to happen.

Corona profiteering?

We nearly got some Mars bars today. Until an eagle eye spotted that the 4 for £1 packets of 40 gram bars now contain only 3 x 40 gram bars. Mars Wrigley sneaking in a 33⅓ price rise while they hope no one is looking? Shameful.

Life all over

As far as improvised face masks go, I’ve been told that anything you can breathe through easily won’t keep the virus out. Now, all I have to do is find out if it’s true or not.

Reaching for the mute button

Never in the history of TV advertising have the apologists for grasping bastards tried to sound so pious, giving and ‘on our side’ – and failed so miserably.

With any multi-car cover, we’re not told in the TV adverts, the more cars you cover, the more you spend. But the company hopes you’re too thick to work that out.

No, thanks!

I have been advised that I need to watch BBC One TV if I want to be included. But that’s a price too high to pay!

Bad guys everywhere

It’s sad to read that some of the lockdown protesters in the United States are protesting about burrocrats telling them they can’t go out into their own garden to tidy it up. Shame that the public sector attracts so many petty dictators and outright fascists.

Lock down, miss out

I’m reading the delivered newspapers a lot more thoroughly whilst my movement is restricted and I’m discovering that I am totally unrepresentative of the nation as portrayed in them. I’m not being uplifted by the broadcasts by various personages because I’m generally not aware of them when they go out and it doesn’t occur to me to race to the internet to try to catch up. Not that it bothers me, at all!

Summa culture

Does one have to stick to the rule of red wine for red meat and white for fish, chick’n, etc.? As someone who likes a drop of red with his fish ‘n’ chips, I’m leaning toward the ‘summa’ culture – just having some of what’s open.

Locked in the real world

Apparently, there was a WiFi Woodstock last weekend. It’s amazing how much you can miss – or avoid – if you don’t spend your days hunched over a computer, glued to the internet.

Alternative needed

The Chinese plague has shot rather a big hole in the put-down: “You need to get out more”. Shame.

No barrel left to scrape?

Crumbs! The last Sunday Post must have been really short of people to write for it if there had to be a piece by that Blairy monstrosity Alastair Campbell alongside Mad Mandy’s contribution.

Chomp!

It’s amazing what people are supposed to be doing during the lockdown, as reported in the newspapers. Snacking every 30 minutes is something that would never have occurred to me.

Playing pointless politics

It has been observed that the people who suffer the worst cases of corona are the poor and people who don’t look after themselves. And the working class; bus drivers, care and supermarket staff, etc.; are ending up in intensive care but working age professionals, like lawyers, are getting away with it.
    It’s also true that the elderly and the sick are doing most of the dying. So what are the people complaining about this imbalance going to do about it? Silence. If so, what was the point of mentioning it?

The unacceptable alternative

One of the Mansion’s staff did an on-line supermarket quiz for some free Nectar point and she noticed that the questions were very sniffy about the ‘discounters’ Aldi & Lidl.
    Which set me wondering how to describe Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and the rest. Inflaters? Profiteers? Jumped-up rip-off merchants with an over-inflated self-fullness?

Not much help

An expert playing politics is never a pretty sight. On Saturday, the Daily Mail’s city editor was too busy having a go at the government for failing to conjure ventilators out of thin air on page 77 to read a double-page spread on pages 14 & 15 saying a doctor in New York had found using a ventilator is entirely the wrong treatment for a corona patient.
    Which just goes to confirm that an alleged expert in the field of finance knows about the square root of bugger all when it comes to medical matters.

Bit of a waste of effort

It’s a national media obsession to create a rainbow poster and to encourage people to create their own poster to display in a window. But on the rare occasions when I venture out and about, the last thing I’m likely to do is look at windows to see if there’s an exhortative poster there. Especially if the domicile I’m passing has a substantial hedge @ the road end of the front garden.

Lorst and gorn

If you were wondering why you haven’t seen the wrestler trading as R!V!D! on the WW recently, it’s because he was eaten by the left head of the 3-headed shark in that film.

Gold-plated lugs to go with them?

A hundred and fifty-nine quid for a pair of earphone buds!?! There must be far more suckers around than I ever suspected.

Relief is at hand

When the other channels let you down, head for Horror! A stroppy giant squid followed by an equally stroppy 3-headed shark and loads more human lemmings. Just the job.
    The cat slept through all of it, but she did spend most of last night out on the tiles.

BORING!

Blade Runner 2049 is 3 hours & 20 minutes on TV. I recorded it, meaning to skip the adverts but I got three-quarters of an hour in then deleted it. Slow, tedious, and not a patch on the earlier film without the date.

More gore

The TV series Moonlight is more vampires, one of them a private eye, 4 disks in 1 box vs 5 disks in 3 boxes for Blood Ties, and just as well worth revisiting.

More education needed

One of the staff has read that wearing a face mask doesn’t stop the wearer from getting a dose of the plague, it just stops someone with the plague from spreading it around.
    What was lacking was an explanation of how the virus can go through the mask from the outside but not escape from the inside once it has infected the wearer.

I’ve been educated

A lady of my acquaintance has explained (@ a suitable separation!) that women don’t wear sweatpants (coz they glow rather than sweat?), they wear trackies or trackieb’s (track suit bottoms).
    I’m now wondering if I’ll ever have a chance to drop my new knowledge into a conversation.

Shame about the language

I’ve just been reading a newspaper sketch of a briefing by government experts, and the colourful language set me reaching for my dictionary to confirm that when the journo wrote about ‘a hoard of Tomahawk cruise missiles’, he really should have written ‘horde’ – a multitude rather than a stock of treasures.
    It really blunts a good rant when the reader stops thinking about what the writer is complaining about and starts to wonder if he failed his English O-level exam.

Lost world

There’s the poor little cat, sitting on a windowsill with a view of the road, looking out and waiting for something to happen. But nothing is right now.

Showing imagination

There is no limit to the ingenuity of crooks. Like the Polish bloke who came up with the idea of sticking 15 kg of cocaine in a shipment of face mask. Vital medical equipment, rush it through, don’t mess with it. Wrong!

Quite deceptive

I glanced out of a window and saw what looked like snow falling through bright sunlight. Turned out to be apple blossom blown off the trees by a stiff breeze rather than winter arriving at last.

Fake advertising

Low carbon, low cost electricity? How the hell does EdF get away with that bollocks in its TV ad? Nothing low carbon is low cost. Ever.

Realism? Who needs it!

Will a SF TV series ever have a realistic asteroid field? That’s one where the mass of a planet is distributed around a suitable orbit and the fragments are so widely dispersed that a spaceship can fly right through it without having to dodge flying rocks 10 times per second. Probably not.

Moving on . . .

You’d think there has to be some deep meaning in watching the finale of the TV series of M*A*S*H while the world is in a state of combat with a pandemic. Just as long as the Chinese plague  doesn’t stick around for 11 years, like the adventure for Hawkeye and his comrades in combat.

Hardly VFM

Still on Wrestlemania: I hope they didn’t pay The Beast all that much for his miserable 5 minutes before lying down in a very limp ending to the proceedings in the ‘flagship’ show. Not much to follow that pantomime John Cena did with Mr. Wyatt-Looney.

Something we’ve always wondered

Anyone who has watched what passes for wrestling on TV has to have wondered this. We’ve watched the referee wave his arms in the air, do a spot of meditation, then wave his arms again. But just how long does it take a WW referee to do a 10-second count-out on a wrestler-showman?
    One of the staff who watched part 2 of Wrestlemania put a stopwatch on the count-out for Randy ‘Veins’ Orton. 10 real-world seconds = 34 WW seconds.
    No wonder the contestants have time to recover from what looked like a bone-shattering impact!

What’s the point?

Why are we coyly told that Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Michael Gove is self-isolating because ‘a member of his family’ might have plague symptoms? Especially when his wife has no problem with telling her readers in the Daily Mail that it was their daughter who might have had it (but didn’t).

Well Done, the WW showmen & women!

You have to give the WW an ‘E’ for Effort. Everywhere locked down and no chance of an audience, but they make their biggest show of the year, Wrestlemania, a biggest of all time event, which needs 2 nights to get through it.
    We might have seen the second half of episode 1 if BTSport hadn’t buggered things up.

A fair question

“Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple”, is the title of the TV series. Is that to avoid confusion with someone else’s Miss Marple? I found myself wondering that whilst watching Joan Hickson in action, sorting out a body which some litter lout had dumped in a library.

Nature fights back?

We have the Chinese plague bringing the human race to a standstill; except in China, of course; and the Krakatoa volcano and more in Iceland erupting and putting sunlight deflecting junk into the atmosphere. Never mind global warming, the net effect has to be to hurry on the next Ice Age!

How can you tell if you’re old

If you’re not reading all the gush about the anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission to the Moon because you were around when it happened and you know the story backwards, that’s a good clue.

No internet access?

You have to wonder what planet some people live on. Like the lady who wrote to the Daily Mail Answers to Correspondents wondering which German general tried to kill Hitler in July 1944, as mentioned in Anne Frank’s diary.
    She obviously never saw the film and doesn’t know that Graf von Stauffenberg was a colonel.

P.S. to the Xperts:

There are these things called stoppers, which can be inserted in to the neck of a wine bottle which doesn’t have a screw cap to preserve its contents. Something you lot obviously haven’t come across.

Pull the other one, or Bog off, you experts

The Xperts would have us believe that buying wine in a 50 cc bottle rather than a 75 cc one will trick us into drinking less.
    News flash for the Xperts: you pour wine into your glass until the level is ¾" below the top. Thus a smaller bottle will be emptied sooner. Worse, they are difficult to find and the price is a total rip-off compared to a 75 cc bottle. Even worse, there is little hope that you will find your fave tipple in the smaller size.

Bogus claim

The Daily Mail reckons that it is the Newspaper of the Year. But it really has to be the newspaper of last year if the award ceremony, the Newspaper Oscars, is held in April; barely one-quarter of the way through the current year.

That’s me informed!

Wireless bra sales are reported to be up 40% on last year. So that’s where all the 5G music is coming from.

Just bloody boring

The really appalling thing about TV news broadcasts is the way they tell you exactly the same thing three times or more in succession. First, there’s a summary by the main newsreader, then the original quote as it was delivered by the politician or official, and them some reporter in the field says exactly the same words yet again. No wonder people prefer newspapers.

Thanks a bunch

Another cheerful letter yesterday from a savings company; the Nationwide this time; your interest rate is going down next month. Translation: You’re fuk’n lucky we’re not charging you for looking after your money.

Neither is this

Try to buy groceries online for the first time and the chances are that your bank’s ‘security’ system will decide that the transaction could just possibly maybe might be fraud and won’t make the payment. Leaving the customer back at square one as far as trying to place another order is concerned.

Not really progress

According to research in Australia, creating cars which can navigate unaided won’t be much of a benefit to human beings because it will only encourage motorists to drink more and develop all sorts of diseases from excessive alcohol consumption.

Missed opportunity

Miracle Cranberry tablets are 50% off from Amazon!! Makes me sorry I’m not suffering from miracle cranberries . . .

Didn’t think?

I’ve come across a website called newzit.com, which offers collections of news stories. Did no one point out that a new zit sounds like something that afflicts teenagers?

Anachronism

Glancing through an old newspaper in search of puzzles I missed, I noticed that the Health Secretary was described as looking like someone who’d lost a Pools coupon. Does anyone still remember what they are in this age of the National Lottery and no football?

The opposite of under pressure

All these people stuck at home is having a noticeable effect on water pressure. It still comes out of the cold tap but it doesn’t gush as vigorously as it used to.

Sheer incompetence

What is Weather Control playing at? Brilliant sunshine first thing, the cat went leaping out to explore a warm, summery day. Next thing you know, it’s bloody raining and the cat was back, wet, bedraggled and complaining.

Usurped

What is the point of HM the Queen recording a message to the nation when the BBC newsreader at lunchtime does her script whilst telling us what time HM will be on telly?

People are weird

It seems there are nutters going round trying to set fire to the masts for 5G phone systems. Why? Because they read on the WWW that they spread the Chinese plague!

Casual reading

“Bookies drafted in to enforce lockdown” I read from the front page of today’s paper in passing. Bookies! Doing what? I asked myself.
    When I took a proper look at the story, it was about aid rookie police officers, not bookmakers.
    The stuff you make up yourself is so much better than mundane reality.

Things you can’t do any more . . .

Nip out to the shops. With the queues, my staff report, it takes two, three or more times as long to get some simple basics.

Sci-Fi Metaphor

Is it really a coincidence that the Alliance in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which includes the Earth (a.k.a Western civilization) is under threat on the Syfy channel from  the Dominion of the Gamma Quadrant (a.k.a. China)? I don’t think so.

Relevance Lost

If I ever get really hard up for something to do, I’ll look out for a TV programme or advert that is about life as we’re experiencing it with the Wuhan plague around us. I’m willing to bet that an all-day search will remain unproductive.

Big problem

I’m surprising myself by finding lots of things to do now that we’re not supposed to go out and about to avoid catching the plague and destroying the NHS. The only trouble with that is where are all the extra hours needed going to come from when I can go out and about again?

Cross purposes

“How do you work out?” I was asked by someone who wanted to tell me about his gym-freakery.
    “Tend to use a calculator most of the time,” I replied. “Unless it’s really simple mental arithmetic.”

Today’s counterblast

The thing about being locked down/self-isolating is that you are perpetually self-checking for symptoms of any sort in idle moments. Of which there are rather a lot.

Idle thought from yesterday

Tuesday afternoon, sitting reading a book of Inspector Morse short stories with a cup of tea and with Mahler’s Fourth playing, it’s possible to forget you’re locked down.

Not even close to true to life

I’ve noticed that the Syfy and other TV channels have been slipping films about a global virus attack into their listings. But none of these films includes a character saying: “The world is being wiped out by an unstoppable virus. Quick, dash out and buy 10 packs of bog rolls.”
    No doubt, in the light of recent experience, this omission will be repaired in future disaster films.