ckn

Still on social media. Instagram this time. I’m now fed up of that sodding Book of Mormon advert that is on Instagram. Those people waving on the advert are getting into the Farage and Inverdale class of annoying. Imagine this but a moving version of them doing a very camp fast wave

AC/DC covered in a way many people haven’t heard

And a prime contributor to why life expectancy in Scotland is lower!

I'll have a look, thanks. Your post reminded me of the audiobook series of books by Dennis E Taylor starting with We Are Legion (We Are Bob) that were excellent listens. Might have to download them again for the trip...

Right, off on holiday next month and I intend to have at least a couple of down-days of doing nothing but sitting on the balcony overlooking the Bay of Naples and reading. I'm out of new books to read and the Amazon recommendations aren't exactly inspiring me to go buying. I'm looking for recommendations. I'm mainly a sci-fi & fantasy type but I do like the occasional thriller and crime novel. I have all the sci-fi books by these authors: Banks, Feist, Erikson, Jordan, Pratchett, Rothfuss, Brett, Canavan, Butcher and many of the similar ones. On the thriller side, I have all the Clancy books (the ones written by him, not the ones passed off as hum) and some of the Jack Reacher books. They're throwaway reads mainly for times I know I'll be distracted. On the crime side, I only really have the Ian Rankin Rebus books. I managed to get an omnibus of about the first 20 books for almost nothing on my Kindle a while ago and I do quite like them. So... any recommendations along those lines? Especially for newer books that I may have missed?

Organic body armour...

Facebook and LinkedIn are annoying me even more than normal this week. When I hit that filter button that says "sort by recent" then SHOW ME THE MOST RECENT THING FIRST THEN WORK BACKWARDS FROM THERE. It's not sodding difficult, every post is time-stamped. I don't want Facebook or LinkedIn deciding that an irrelevant post from someone I barely know that they posted yesterday should be shown first because their system thinks I didn't see it or hover over the image of them getting an award for sorting paper clips properly for long enough. If I wanted to see that sort of "ranked" stuff then I'd leave it on the default ranking of "top stories". I barely go on Facebook more than once every few days now because it's just so annoying and effectively non-user friendly. LinkedIn is rapidly going the same way.

Android based TVs. We have a Sony telly with an Android operating system and it’s abysmal. It’s slow, clunky and about as user friendly as trying to run Windows 10 on a ZX Spectrum. Turning off the abysmal Youview system helped a bit but there’s far too often we press a button and it takes 3-4 seconds to do something, by then I press the button again as I think it hasn’t recognised it and does the action twice, or randomly four-five times. Other Android tellies we’ve seen are just as slow and useless.

Ahhh, Strictly. Helped, of course, by lovely Nadiya and I may develop a soft spot for Vick Hope

The (dis)honour of the first Christmas email goes to Chef & Brewer pubs. No... go away, silly people.

I bet a litre of bottled water was still more expensive in that service station!

Does it really matter that Doctor Who isn’t a bloke? Bond as a woman wouldn’t be right to me but Doctor Who is a completely different thing.

Only a nightmare? Eee, you don't know how lucky you are!

We used to have this old guy doing the rounds every couple of months. I often spent a while talking to him on the doorstep (NEVER allowed in!) as he was a genuinely nice guy who accepted that my immortal soul wasn't for sale to a god who'd already closed the doors according to their absolute number in heaven idea. He was a bit confused to start with when I said that I'd be as well being an evil sod for the rest of my life as even if I became the best little Christian I wasn't getting into heaven anyway. We often just chatted about how things were going generally then he'd walk away happy despite knowing he'd never convert me. He retired and was replaced by a younger zealot couple who got quite snippy when I refused to engage with them but was being polite anyway. The snippier he got, the grumpier I got until I asked him where his brown shirt was to go with his copy of the Watchtower. He walked away before I got to close the door ?

I've just ordered new tyres for my car. The current ones are nearing 5 years old and starting to feel old and unstable despite them still having a good bit of wear on them, time to get them swapped out and worn in before the winter. Every tyre replacement website gives you the lovely tool to put in your registration number and it'll find the right tyres for you. Unfortunately, every single website narrows the options to what seems to be the tyres they're trying to get rid of rather than the best ones for the car. Manually putting tyre sizes in gave me a far wider selection on all sites, including ones that were safer, more efficient and quieter than any of the "optimised selections". Is it really beyond these companies to actually offer quality assistance rather than use it as another excuse to rip off consumers?

You can have both!

Blazing Saddles is in my top10 movies easily. We watched it again earlier this year and the humour is just as good. The easily offended lot today just don’t get the humour or the messages behind that humour.

Very topical

I had to have a chat with one of our neighbours that the turning circle at the end of our cul-de-sac was not for parking as I like being able to turn around somewhere in the road. He “didn’t think it was a problem” but wouldn’t do it again It’s a simple common decency to think about the impact of their sodding cars on small roads.

I blatantly plagiarised it from my own LinkedIn feed!

It's one of those minor annoyance things that really grates then is forgotten 30 seconds later. I only remembered yesterday because I saw a news clip with the flag upside down in the background.

I think I've said this before but it's worth saying again. I'd like to stop at every roadside cafe flying a Union Flag that is upside down, faded into a very light pink and see-through blue, or tattered into near rag status and make them sing GSTQ 100 times while standing in the central reservation for every day that the flag has been there in that state. If they get a word wrong, or they don't sing it in suitably patriotic way then they have their cafe turned into public toilets. It really does annoy me, made worse by every time I see the things.

As seen on Facebook:

I took today off with a view to having a nice relaxing long weekend. I went out for lunch today with the wife, something that we don't get to do much during the day. We decided that we'd bloody well worked hard recently so deserved a treat at a nice restaurant, we went to a restaurant we've been to a few times, it's aimed at moderately well-to-do folk but is most certainly not fine dining. Today's meal was just short of ridiculous though, the menu has been tarted up a bit with lots of pretentious stuff that impresses people who like showing off about their food but actually know nothing. I ended up not bothering with a starter as they'd sold out of the two choices I thought sounded good, the rest was pretentious rubbish that sounds almost like a parody by working class folk of the menu they think the Rees-Moggs of the world eat from. It's a glorified hotel restaurant that used to do good food that sat inbetween premium pub and good mainstream dining restaurant. I refuse to pay their new prices of £8-£10 for a starter that I don't really want to eat. The wife's main course came with fish that was so overcooked that she could bounce her fork off it and overcooked asparagus that an apprentice cook at a sloppy cafe would have been embarrassed to serve. I'm a rubbish cook and I could do better than that on everything. I opted for their premium burger as I've had it before and it's genuinely lovely. I asked for no pickles as last time it was overwhelmed by them. So, they decided that means I didn't want the special burger sauce or most of the other burger fillings. They served it with a seafood mayo type dip as an "alternative". They genuinely couldn't get why I would want the normal burger sauce if I didn't want all the pickles. Then we had a dessert, I had the creme brulee as I love the stuff. This one had the caramel topping taken so far that it was almost BARLA committee member discussing Super League bitter. It was just burnt and three hours later I can still taste the over-bitter flavour. So, that wasn't fun. Then, on the way back, I popped into our pharmacy (a large national chain) next to our GP surgery to pick up one of my wife's prescriptions that they've had for over a week. I've been in Tuesday, yesterday and now today, all times they've said "sorry, not in yet" and "come back tomorrow, it may be in then". My wife is down to two days worth so if they didn't get it in tomorrow that's her out for the bank holiday. I asked them how they were going to guarantee it would be in, apparently that was my problem for not ordering it in time. When I said that they'd had the prescription since last Thursday, they said "well, we only pick up prescriptions once a day and sometimes it can take two more days for us to look at them". I reminded them that it was an electronic prescription item and that it was near instantaneous delivery. "Oh no, THAT's not how it works, it's too complex for us to explain to you". I decided that I couldn't be bothered explaining that it was one of my teams in my last job who delivered the Electronic Prescriptions service to this area and I actually know the system very well. I decided that this was the last straw and I'd get the prescription re-done by the GP and take it elsewhere. Them: "the prescription is with us, they won't do that". Me: "yes... yes they will". Them: "No, they won't as it's in our system and we get paid for it". Me: "just release the prescription back to the surgery, do you need me to tell you how to do that?". Them: "whatever" and they walked away. Seriously. "Whatever". $deity wept, I almost went right into a Rab C Nesbitt style rant but decided against it as the aim of today was to lower my blood pressure after all! Went next door to GP surgery, they had me a replacement prescription within 2 minutes. GP receptionist said pharmacy hadn't released it but they reissued it anyway as a special authorisation. Took it to the local small independent pharmacy who issued it immediately. I went back to the GP surgery and changed my default pharmacy to the small independent one, no idea why I didn't do that sooner. A lovely stress-free day then. I'd have been better working today instead, at least I'd have been paid for it.