McCockup

So what do you do when someone accidentally takes £1.30 (or thereabouts) from you and you don't know about it until you are 3 miles away?  That's what has just happened to me, and to make it worse, the £1.30 was in the form of a blueberry muffin.
The story is that I ordered by wrap of the day + McFlurry thing from Ronald McDonald, then at the paying window was informed that McFlurry things were not available, so I opted for the muffin at a higher price, money taken, so far so good.  At the next window I was presented with my purchases in the obligatory brown paper bag (brown = eco friendly = good feeling), drove up the road to my favourite layby and hey presto, no muffin.  McAnnoyed.
Not only was I out of pocket, I was cheated out of my second course, and put into a quandary over what to do about the missing item.  That's the second time this week, the first being a stale out of date pain au chocolat (see 2 day ago) which did not get resolved.  So should I call in on the way home or not?  What will they do? Apologise and give me a muffin that I dont want probably.

Papering Over The Cracks.

It seems that you can't offend a group of people who are not defined as anything in particular, or at least that's what IPSO have decreed in the case of Katy Hopkins comparing migrants with cockroaches.  If the migrants were e.g. Syrians than she would have been in hot water, so as long as you generalise you'll be OK.  I guess I'm OK if I call a publicity seeking nobody a publicity seeking nobody.

Meanwhile, in other media news, the '24 - The Northern Daily' (or similar) will stop being printed tomorrow.  It hasn't done too well, lasting 5 weeks as it lined the bottom of bird cages and cat litter trays.  One of my Facebook acquaintances (I refrain from using the word friend) posted an update where they had to resort to a sock when they realised that toilet paper had run out.  This is a direct consequence of the drastic reduction in printer reading matter over the last few years.

Snakes In The Grass

North Korea has accused the South of sending snakes across the border as part of a 'cunning scheme'.  The snakes were obviously trained to keep moving North and not return to the safe haven of South Korea, thereby disrupting life in the idylic world of the Peoples Republic.
..or it could be tosh dreamt up by a paranoid dictator who will grasp at anything to prove 'they are out to get me' such as when the stick insects plagued the harvest recently, it was western forces at work.  Still, keeps us entertained.

I'm not one to moan, but...
Seriously, I'm not.  However, I'm a bit torn over my pain au chocolat that I purchased this morning from the local garage after filling up the car.  The thing is, it was one day out of date and dry, so not the freshly baked offering it purported to be on the wrapper, so it went in the bin.  The thing is, should I go back to the garage and complain?  On the face of it, of course I should, but...
It would mean going out my way, but only slightly; it would delay my journey home, but only slightly; it would (probably) result in them giving me a freshly prepared one that I don't really want.
What a dilemma.

Hurrah! Yowzers! Yahoo!

How comfortable do you need to feel when you go out on your bike?  I'm sure you've asked yourself this many, many times.
This morning, as I left the house dressed in my summer lycra, this question did cross my mind.  Would I be too cold?  was the most important point.  Never mind the pointy seat or hunched over riding position one has to adopt leading (sometimes) to a sore back, would I be warm enough?
As it happens, I was OK even though my jersey was one of my more 'airy' versions with quite a large amount of mesh.  I pondered going back inside for my gilet, but that would have been a bit pointless - this summer after all!  There's a shower or 2 forecast around home time, so I might regret the no gilet option.
Anyway, as it turns out I was comfortable, thanks for asking.

Yahoo has finally be sold - to Verizon, which I think I am correct in saying that it's a big US mobile phone company.  Yahoo has always been a bit of an podd company in that what it did it did well - i.e. a portal into the wworld wide web, but no-one really hung around to look what it was passing through.  I mean, you might think to yourself 'nice doors' as you enter a building, but its not what you went for, it's what is on the other side that matters.  In the UK, BT used to automatically add a 'Yahoo  desktop' when you installed their router software, much to my annoyance, and even now some people still have this as their homepage thinking it's the only option.

They Think It's All Over.

There's a reasonably entertaining article about the 'Stroop Test' in today's Guardian.  You can create this at home and time yourself, but I'm not going to reproduce this here - you will have to buy the paper/look online yourself.  I have never come across this before, but it's quite an interesting insight into the way we work things out - or at least I think it is.

I think it was the BBC that ran a quiz at the weekend about Pokemon stories - True or False?  This listed a number of media stories that purported to be about playing Pokemon, and then exposed the false ones.  I managed to got half correct, but what amused me was how extreme even the true stories were.  Or were they?   - How do you verify a story is really 100 % true or not?  For example, the New Zealand man who has left his job to play Pokemon full time.  I was told about this one last week by one of my colleagues and pondered at the time if it was true, but (according to the BBC) it was false.
..or was it?  I don't suppose we can ever be 100% sure that that sort of story is true, so my score might be slightly better..or worse.

Big Names

The US Republicans have gathered and are proclaiming themselves happy with their nomination in the form of Mr Trump.  He is trying to sell his 'safety will be restored' slogan if he is elected, bit I assume this relies on a wall around the US and booting out anyone who looks a bit suspect, a bit like the airline staff yesterday who told a Muslim gut to get off an aeroplane.
Realistically, he has no chance of achieving his goal if we assume there are probably as many American nutters as there are in the Middle East.  I don't see many Muslims involved in the many school campus shootings.

Meanwhile, poor Michael Caine has had to change his name to his stage name - Michael Caine.  This was news to me given the numbeer of times I have heard 'My name ... is Michael Caine' which has become his catch phrase.  But now we know it wasn't, but is now.  Now we know.  Thank goodness.

Sporting Life

We have a new football manger of the English team and it's Mr Allerdyce.  I'm no expert on English football, or expert at anything actually, but my general impression of this bloke is that he's a bit of a chancer who has winged it with a large number clubs, gets the sack and does the same with the next.  Should fit in well then.

Meanwhile, it looks like Russia has lost it's last chance to go to the Rio Olympics as the court for arbitration on sport (CAS) has ruled against them.  The IAAF said it created a level playing field for competitors, although that failed to explain why Kenya or Somalia have not been banned for very similar offences.

Hot Stuff.

It's been a very hot week.  It peaked around 31 deg C yesterday, just as I was cycling home and had to detour via a shop to invest in a cool drink.  I had put a filled bottle on my bike in the morning, but thought (incorrectly) that it would be reasonably cool in the evening.  Big mistake, it was like drinking luke warm water out of the hot tap.
Today is not much better although it is forecasting to be cooler at 'only' 27 or so.  Whether I can really tell the difference between 27 and 31 I'm not sure but it actually feels hotter at the moment.

Protection.

The 42 condoms per athlete at the Rio games does seem a bit high to me.  I hope they are on a sale or no return basis.  However, it's looking increasingly unlikely that any Russians will be taking up the offer of the 42 condoms as extensive doping cover ups are uncovered.  If the WADA report is accurate (and they say there is more to come) then it's clear to me that they don't have much of a defence.
Interestingly, one of the main Russians whistleblowers who won 2 x London marathons has been ordered to pay back her £377,000 prize money.  I'm not sure that's such a good idea, it will surely be a disincentive to confess (assuming you are one of the winners), and it's only a whistle blowing winner that has the credibility so they might have shut off one form of investigation by doing this.

Sinking Feeling.

On some holiday resorts, you can pay for subterranean trips to get close up and personal with the sea life, or just a glass bottomed boat if you don't want to actually be under the water.  Most of these 'submarine' vessels just have a submerged part where you appear to be under water, but it's actually a normal boat albeit with a transparent hull.  I always shy away from these trips, usually when I see the exorbitant price.
Mind you, the new nuclear submarines being considered to replace the Trident system are a tad more expensive - they will set you back around £31 billion, although that is probably an underestimate, but you would get four of them.  Total operating cost over their 30 year life is estimated at £205 billion.
Needless to say, there is some debate whether this represents value for money.

In the Labour party, Jeremy Corbyn is quite an outspoken anti-nuclear voter so he will bring quite a lot of his fellow MPs to vote against the renewal.  He says he has campaigned for peace all his life, but it is an interesting argument that states that voting for a deterrent is actually voting for peace.  I'm afraid this 'peace' thing is so far away from reality I struggle buy that line of thinking.  Not that I'm for war, far from it, but we have to defend ourselves from all the nutters around the world at any one time, and who's to say what is around the corner?

Sweet Child of Mine

I have 3 children, all of them born before I was 30.  Many of my peers waited a while and are still paying for university fees years after I felt that pain. 
Mind you, none of them waited until they were 72 to father a child like Mick Jagger has.  Admittedly it's not his first, but I figure parents evenings will be difficult for him to get to.  I hope thay have a wheelchair ramp.

Dirty Work

We have a new PM and some of her new cabinet have been named.  The biggest surprise to me is appointing Boris as foreign secretary, which will ruffle a few feathers, but at least it gives him a proper job where he will do or die.

More locally, down my road in fact. I have an intrigueing problem with what are commonly called 'wipes'.  For the last 6 months or so, a number of these wipes have started to appear on the roadside, probably 2 every week or so.  I can't quite remember when it started, but when I'm out on my runs, I dutifully pick them up and fetch them back to the bin - for instabce this morning I picked up 3 which were not there before my hols, so 3 in the last 2 weeks or so.  They are sometimes a bit dirty, sometimes they appear untouched by any grease or grime.
I originally thought they had blown off one of the many tractors that frequent our road (there are 4 houses in 2 miles, so not very populated) and tut tutted that it was a bit careless, but now I have concluded that they are deliberately dumped out of a vehicle window.  I studied the 3 picked up this morning, and one was quite dirty - it looked like mud on it whilst the other 2 were fairly clean.  My good wife thinks there is something sinister involved such as drugs or sex, but I'm not so sure, it's not often you need to wipe away mud before you get down to it.

It's My Party and I'll Cry if I Want To.

The Labour party have finally decreed that Jeremy Corbyn does not need to get the 51 nominations that is a prerequisite for his challengers so we will have a leadership vote that also includes the incumbent My Corbyn.  This is exactly what his challengers didn't want.

My interpretation of the issue is this...
The problem for the Labour parliamentry party (which is generally centre left rather than far left), is that there have been many new members join due to the Ed Milliband £3 'come and join us' plan, and these are generally left wing Corbyn supporters.  Therefore, when the next election comes around, some (probably a large proportion) will not get selected due to the local party selection process and subsequently end their political careers, bringing in new left wing condidates who will lose the election without trying.  This has been brought into sharp focus with a new Tory PM who might call a snap early general election, which is why they have acted like they have over the last few days, trying to get rid of dear old Jeremy.
My prediction (which has been painfully wrong of late) is that Jeremy will win by a huge margin, thereby causing angst amongst all the existing parliamentarians who know they are on their way out and switch to Plan B - new Labour party mode, a bit like the Lib Dems in the 80s.

All Made Up

'Brexit means Brexit' says Mrs May, the new Tory leader and therefore the new Prime Minister.  Only it doesn't mean brexit, because brexit is a made up word and therefore means nothing, or 'mothing' if I was to use the same rules.  There is a tendency to shorten words to help us capture the phrase in one word which probably took off alongside texting as we tried to cram a meaningful conversation into 160 characters.
If you have ever wondered, and I'm sure this often crosses your mind, the 160 character restriction was because the orginal text messages were sent down 'spare' 128K capacity of a digital GSM phone line and the encoding at the time would not allow any more data to be sent.  So now you know.  What has always interested me is that this meant that sending SMS messages cost nothing to send but we were charged substantially more than that.

Our new PM gave a good speech yesterday, sounding quite statesmanlike and concilatory so it will be interesting if she can keep this up over the coming EU politics - and that is going to take up so much of her time.

Holiday Blues

Another week's holiday completed, and unfortunately not much more to come for the year.  We had a pleasant week on the Med in France, but I coudn't help but think I was wasting my time sat on the beach or wandering round the city streets doing the tourinst thing.  It must be to do with 'interest'.
Although I can find most things interesting if I dig into the minutiae, it seemed to be more difficult on this holiday.  I can only stand so much sat on a beach getting hot, and insist on soe form of shade as much as possible.  This holiday we invested in a parasol which (fortunately) fitted corner to corner in the suitcase so we brought it back to languish in the loft for a few years as food for the moths.

Yesterday saw me compete in a standard distance triathlon, beaten into 2nd place in my age group by the usual guy, only this time he wupped me by about 11 minutes.  No chance of gaining that time back, so I need to pick races where he doesn't take part.  Less hassle.