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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I just had a phone call from someone I normally communicate with via Zoom. I realised how much worse sound-only is compared to the sound and vision of Zooms.
I am now determined to try out a new medium everyone's talking about: face to face with both of you physically present. It's a scary thought but everything has to be tried at least once.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Talking of algorithms and teetotalism, Tesco sent me four offers in their weekly come-and-get-it:
* One was for The Wine of the Week (£6, Wiley)
* Eighteen cans of Fosters for a tenner (no thanks, cobbers, I can drink my own piss)
* 25% off F & F womenswear (you can F & F, my transvestite days are well over)
* Cadbury's Fingers at 'better than half price' (go on then, I don't want to be too negative).
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Despite everyone accusing them of being money-grubbers, British supermarkets operate on profit margins of one to two per cent of turnover.
Or do they? I just did my weekly Tesco shop and the bill came to £65.50. However, when I fed in my Tesco Card this magically fell to £49.39. How is this possible? I wasn't particularly aware of buying stuff marked with a yellow sticker announcing they were a special buy for Tesco Card holders, so the mark-up for non-yellow stickered items must be stupendous.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Academia.edu wrote: | Michael, Find out who visited your profile.
View profile visitor |
Blimey, they didn't tell you when you look up who's giving you grief, they tell the geezer you were looking them up. Noted.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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How do they manage to make the top half of a family-sized bag of Bombay Mix perfect and the bottom half all broken up into barely edible shards? I can see the basic marketing idea:
* Dad buys family-sized bag of Bombay Mix
* Dad decides to have a few on the drive home
* Dad reaches the bottom half
* Dad thinks he can't possibly inflict this rubbish on his family
* Dad sits in layby to eat them himself
* Dad returns to shop for another bag
* Dad finds himself trapped in an endless behavioural loop.
But that doesn't make it right.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Rolling Stock Quiz Question
| Which benighted branch line is running the oldest (fifty-year-old) trains in Britain? |
The Bakerloo
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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As is usual I got this from Medium
Your most-viewed stories this week
Organised Crime in the Tory Shires 7
A Cure for the Third World 6 |
In other words, my most recent story and my Organised Crime story of three years ago. (About a crime that happened thirty-five years before that!) What was unusual was I also got this from Medium:
Your story has a response.
Mike Selby responded to Organised Crime in the Tory Shires: |
When I duly looked it up, it was
| Mike Selby wrote: | | Is this the same Bruce Cousins who ran a limo service, and who worked for some time at a bakery in NW London? |
To which I replied
| I have no idea. It sounds both likely and unlikely. A limo service might be a cover for organised crime but surely not a bakery. I would hesitate before making further enquiries. | |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| Mike Selby wrote: | You say yourself in the piece that Cousins was small fry, so maybe not so unlikely that he'd take up some regular employment once out of the nick and off the police radar...
This was in the later 1990s into the 2000s, so after the events you describe. This burly, tattooed and certainly somewhat dodgy guy, who was pretty funny, well-informed and entertaining to chat to, did have business cards for his own limo service even while working early morning baking shifts at the Broadway Bagel Bakery (long gone) in Cricklewood. He also did occasionally hint darkly at his connection to a serious event like the one in your story. So, maybe the same person...?
Anyway, ancient history. |
| Mick Harper wrote: | | It is now the Director of Public Prosecution at the time of some of these events is no longer our Prime Minister. Whether anything has changed in the various constabularies involved, I cannot say. |
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I'm trying to work out how much time I will need for the annual spring clean of my flat. The Chief Inspector is due at Heathrow at 11 am Wednesday. Cut half an hour off for a favourable jet stream, add it back on to get through Immigration without a recognition doodad. She always has forty-five minutes in the Terminal Three Starbucks for re-orientation purposes. Then the Elizabeth Line and the 23 bus.
I reckon I can start around lunchtime, Wednesday. I'll leave the hoover out to show I was expecting her the next day but got the International Dateline the wrong way round. That generally works. She only won silver at the Sibling Olympics.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Resident: Who said you could set up an industrial-scale catering operation for the duration of Carnival in my front garden roughly six feet from where I sit at my computer and which may, if it is reported to the landlord, result in my being evicted from a cherished home of fifty years?
Dude: Somebody in your house said it would be all right.
Resident: Fair enough.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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How to Take Trickshots (nos 237 and 239)
| You want to have a train going out of frame, stage left, and then coming back into the frame, stage right, while it is still going out of frame, stage left. |
That's an easy one. Go and live in America. They have railway lines that have to loop around themselves in order to acquire altitude sufficiently to get over rather than through Rocky Mountains and have trains sufficiently long that, if you set up your camera inside the loop, the front half of the train will come into view while the back half is still in view.
| You are the sort of seriously disturbed twelve-year-old who wishes to appear twice in your school's annual photo. |
You stand at one end of six hundred schoolboys and thirty masters sitting/standing in serried ranks. As soon as the camera has taken your end you dash round the back and take up position at the other end, just in time for the camera to arrive at that end. You may have to do this c 1960 when the technology dictated such photographs required a panning shot using a portrait camera on a tripod with a little motor on it and a long exposure time.
N.B. Your claim-to fame will come to light when the School Portrait c 1960 is offered for sale to proud parents and you will be soundly thrashed by the headmaster, so take that into account.
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