What most irritates me about this - plus layoffs to increase profits- is that the corporate numbnuts overlook the fact that every employee they stiff is a customer. Everyone is someone’s customer. A customer who has a shrinking amount of disposable income to spend on white goods, new clothes, eating out etc. They think hurrah, with AI we’ll be able to sack our creatives! Next thing they’re whining because there are so many homeless people on the streets. There’s a link! It’s exasperating.

These two:

One is hot, one is mild. It’s a lottery whether I can remember the right word in Hungarian when I open the fridge.

The bees don’t attend planning meetings during the winter. We relay all decisions by shouting through the hive entrance. It makes life so much simpler - taking 30,000 opinions into account per hive is a complete pain in the fundament. Especially if, as you say, they haven’t done their prep work. “Too busy”? Yeah, whatever Ethel.

Nothing planned for tomorrow (apart from a kedgeree), but on Sunday we’ll be checking in on our bees and having a planning meeting for the spring.

With silent films the soundtrack was provided by musicians in the cinemas. https://www.sfsma.org/music-for-early-film/

Ow ow ow ow

That’s wonderful and you are heroes.

I’m also keen to learn colourwork so I’ve been boning up. Top tip so far: don’t use full balls of the additional colours. Instead, wind a goodly length on to a bobbin. https://fullywoolly.co.uk/products/clover-knitting-bobbin-set-332 This makes it easier to control the yarn.

Also, there’s a technique of holding the main yarn in one hand and the colour in the other. Knit one using English method (throwing) and other using Continental. https://youtu.be/JOYBE11s640?feature=shared

The big caveat here is that I haven’t actually done any of this! I have the yarn to make a fair isle hat, but my one attempt was a terrible failure, because I had done zero research. Once I’ve finished my current project I’m going to have another go. Keep us posted on how you get on…

In my 40s I went back to my home town, not having lived there since I was 18 (none of my family still lived there). First shop I went into the woman said, “Hi MrsDoyle, how’s your mum?” In the bank, the teller clocked my name and said, “Aww, I used to babysit you!” I got a big hit of the claustrophobia that drove me away in the first place.

A funeral I attended recently had a plywood coffin and a bunch of felt-tip pens for people to write messages with. At another one a while back, the coffin was wickerwork.

I want this too. I saw a documentary about a dying man who took this option. They interviewed him about the decision, then after his death filmed medical students dissecting him (from a distance, it was discreet) and interviewed them about the experience. They were grateful for his gift, and incredibly respectful when speaking about him.

The thing is, the inside of a body looks nothing like the nice tidy diagrams. It’s a mess in there! I’d like these kids to practise on dead me before they start cutting into live people.

I’m thinking coin sorter. You start by sorting the smallest coins through the littlest holes, and work your way up.

I’m a knitter, and making gloves with it just doesn’t compute for me. It’s too clumsy, with too many extra steps. They’d be making gloves from fabric or leather.

I visited Bhutan in 2008 when democracy had just been introduced. I asked someone what he thought about it, and he kind of sighed and said, " People were happy with the old system, but the king wanted this so we’re going along with it." Big shrug.

A good tip for bread machines is that a lot of people buy them but then don’t like them, so you can get good secondhand ones cheaply. I love my bread machine - it was about £120 new, but I got it in a charity shop for £10.

Not in the trash, but I regifted something a friend sent me the week before Christmas. Wrapped it in fresh paper and gave it to another friend on Christmas Eve. No-one need know…

Car carrots! Genius.

Thanks for the chickpea recipe! To add to your carrot tip: when I buy them I peel them straight away and store them in a sealed container in the fridge. They stay crispy and juicy that way.

It was a build-up of something or other (carbon?) on the microphone part of the caller’s handset. You could fix it by tapping the handset sharply on a hard surface. Source: I used to work in radio back in the 80s.

Part of the 49% the bot left out: "Employed by the now-defunct Omani private firm Dahra Global Technologies and Consultancy Services, they were contracted for providing training and related services to Qatar’s armed forces.

“While the charges have never been made public, media reports hinted at the possibility of their being charged with espionage.”

I wonder if that’s the one child policy biting them in the bum. They ditched it nearly ten years ago I think. It ended up causing a few social problems - like the one child left looking after aging parents and grandparents, and the “little emperor” thing of spoiled brats. Also skewed the ratio of men to women quite a bit.

It’s like when they decided sparrows were stealing grain, so they set about killing sparrows in their millions - only to have crops devastated by the insects the sparrows had previously been eating. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign (A billion sparrows, apparently. Idiots.)