If you take the Heathrow express to terminals 2 and 3, you then have a lot more Crossrails to pick from :) (6 an hour instead of 2)

‘Deeply dynamic’ is a truly wonderful bit of euphemism.

YouTube recently threw up Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe reviews of 2007 and 2008. MAN what a time (I’d completely forgotten that the Celebrity Big Brother racism mess led to people burning effigies of Peter Bazalgette in India.

I think some of them may have told themselves in retrospect that it was a clever 4D chess move to appease Trump, but it was absolutely a jobs for the bots scenario.

(I both sort of think this and am acutely aware that it absolutely coincides with a moment where I had to grow up very quickly and become an adult and I’m pretty sure those two things are linked)

Britain’s trust crisis began with ITV Play and the Blue Peter cat naming debacle. In this essay I will…

I really want to know how much those music channel love match things brought in. Just constantly running at the bottom of the screen and giving one of about 10 pre-canned responses

Just in case you’ve always wondered what Ironic would sound like if a Canadian woman with a bit of a nasal voice sang it.

Minions Christmas Carol. Scrooge’s bookkeeping staff replaced by minions.

Isn’t a big difference between now and the 80s/90s that most people are on fixed rate mortgages of 2-5 years so interest rates are a less effective transmission mechanism than they were?

Desperately trying not to come to the conclusion that this would be better if it wasn’t televised but it’s really hard not to.

My initial assumption was that this had been clipped from some run through of the policy of all the main parties. If that isn’t the case, then it’s deeply misjudged.

I think a lot of people just assume a level of consumer protection that basically no longer exists. A sort of, ‘it must be okay or someone would’ve stopped it’

Hello! I have made the stupid decision to fall in love with someone who lives elsewhere in Europe. Does the government have a plan for making sure I’m still able to go and see him in a couple of months?

some noteworthy badly targetted ads i received in recent days

I spent several weeks getting adverts for model jet engines that seemed to do nothing except make a horrendously loud noise and I don’t understand who is buying.

That’s kinda okay though because those are things I would once have happily bought from a dodgy car boot sale or that weird market in a struggling provincial town. Tablets and electric blankets though, absolutely not!

(I don’t trust Amazon anymore for the same reason due to the proliferation of marketplace sellers. Basically, I shop at Argos a lot more now than I ever assumed I would.

Maybe I’m just paranoid but i basically assume that plugging anything I purchase from Temu into the wall would result in my flat burning down.

I once came across a business that will send out a retired radio host to record a desert island discs with you/your loved one, which I think is a bloody marvellous idea.

And what does this mass wage of unemployment do for demand for Verizon’s services? Like why is this reported as though it would be good for Verizon?

I really need to go back and dig out one of my Modern Studies essays from 2007 about Scottish voting patterns by age, class, religion, location etc. and see how wrong it now is.

In a hotel right now where they’re €4 and I’d be unsurprised if the bar downstairs isn’t more expensive but I’d still never touch it

I was so disappointed the first time I ordered room service in my late 20s because I’d basically been told for years not to even look at the menu and had somehow built it up to being the pinnacle of indulgence in my head. Turns out, it’s overpriced crap.

Yeah, knowing the person the story came from, there’s every chance it’s been embellished and crossed over with something like that at some point down the line but it had me doubled up with laughter when I first heard it, so well worth the share.

Slight tangent but was once told of a mix up at a wedding. Someone requested ‘the Robin Hood song’, wanting Everything I do, I do it for you and instead walked in to ‘Robin Hood, Robin Hood, Riding through the glen’

So much of this is also just ‘the burden should fall on people with my salary/wealth+£1’, which just gets us nowhere.

I mean I learned about some pretty unpleasant stuff in my introduction to IR module (Naziism, Stalinist purges, Cultural Revolution etc.) but offensive isn’t really the word I’d reach for. As you say, it wasn’t a debate!

It just seems deeply odd they the government has to do it? Like some example of 60s Statism that we forgot to dismantle?

Also US carriers tend to have far nicer standby policies than European and Asian ones, which encourages this sort of attitude.