Don’t you find it remarkable that after 12,000 years of agriculture, the same questions keep cropping up (pardon the pun)? Is a strawberry a fruit? Is a pea a vegetable? Is a potato a root vegetable? And does it really matter, as long as you eat them all up? (more…)

I’ve just received a message from a friend, warning of a dodgy WhatsApp scam that’s about to land offering an upgrade to WhatsApp Gold. If you fall for it, the message says, the malware will take over your phone and you’ll never be able to play Wordle or swallow clickbait again.

But there was something about this warning message that didn’t ring true. It claimed that it had been on BBC radio, but didn’t say what programme or give a link to it. It said it was called Martinelli, which to me sounded like an obvious pop at Arsenal for failing to win the title for three seasons in a row. Then it mentioned a video not to watch called Dance of the Pope, which is clearly someone having a laugh. And then it said forward this message to as many people as you can. Hmm.

So I did some research. Apparently this message has been circulated before. And it’s a hoax. A hoax about a hoax. Why would anyone do that? Well, the more a message gets circulated, the more it becomes a potential vehicle for actual malicious hacks. So if you get it, folks, don’t pass it on.

My scamdar is on particularly high alert at the moment after falling into a trap that was all the more annoying for being apparently legal and above board. I’m not talking about the TfL ULEZ scheme, nor the parking enforcement at Morrisons. I’m referring to an online shopping platform called greatlook.site.

I was checking my bank statements the other day, wondering where all the money goes, when I found out. Greatlook.site had been helping itself to two payments of €26.95 a month, costing me six hundred odd quid. And there was nothing I could do about it.

Here’s how it works. You become a member of greatlook.site, make regular payments for which they give you credits and you then spend your credits on clothing at a bargain price. There are two reasons why I know I would never knowingly have signed up for this: 1) I never knowingly sign up for things like this; 2) Clothes? Me?

Nevertheless, they informed me that I must have signed up for it as that’s the only way they could have got my bank details. Not entirely true but hey. Their customer service was very responsive, even if it did rapidly descend into that now familiar tactic of responding to my questions with answers to a different question. So I thought OK, if I can’t get my money back, I’ll log in to my account and spend my 600 odd credits. Guess what? There were only about 150. It turns out that your credits expire after 90 days and you lose your money.

And this is legal!

The verb to mug originally meant to punch in the mouth, mug having become a term for the mouth or face around the turn of the 18th century. This undoubtedly would have come from the mug you drink out of, which in turn probably came from Norse words like the very similar Swedish ‘mugg’ (a drinking jug), rather than a portmanteau of ‘mini’ and ‘jug’. There was a fashion for mugs of the time to be designed with grotesque faces, and before long the meaning of mug and face became one. A face, to pull a face, to punch in the face…

The noun meaning a gullible or foolish person was thieves’ slang for a person or ‘face’, not necessarily the victim of a mugging.

So anyway, I spent my remaining credits on a hoodie and a pair of trainers. It seemed appropriate. But to cap it all off, there was no way to specify my size, so of course the trainers came three sizes too small and now I have to send them back. What kind of fiends are these people?

This week I was planning to write about the word geometry but I couldn’t work out an angle. Was that a groan I just heard? Listen, this stuff doesn’t write itself, you know! Anyway, instead I’m turning my thoughts aways from geometry, past trigonometry, algebra and slide rules, towards poetry. (more…)

If you’re one of those peculiar people who regard football as a silly pastime involving 22 men (or women) chasing a ball around while thousands of other people get really worked up about it, as opposed to a religion that brings meaning and purpose to life and teaches us about love and loss and hope and despair, apologies for what follows, but this is a story bigger than football. It’s a story of human frailty and the quest for redemption. It could be a metaphor for something, you never know. (more…)

There’s a frog in South America, the tadpole of which is bigger than the finished frog. Yes, you read that right. Because of this Benjamin Buttonesque approach to adolescence, it goes by the name of the paradoxical frog. The tadpole of the paradoxical frog grows to 11 inches in length – one big tadpole. Then, during metamorphosis, it shrinks to leave a dinky little frog that measures barely 3cm from bum to beak.

Not that it has a beak. (more…)

Today is not a day for logic. It’s a day for romance. If I’m a little late posting this it’s because I’ve spent the day in a wistful fog of whimsy, floating on a featherbed of flowery fancy, powerless to focus on anything but love. Such is the intoxicating effect of Valentine’s Day. What would we do without it? (more…)

Every so often, LinkedIn prompts my connections to congratulate me on a work anniversary, which is nice (thanks Kenny). The funny thing is, though, it happens several times a year and never on the same date. What are they up to? So I take it with a pinch of salt. If they sent me a gold watch or offered to pay for a year-long sabatical so I could go and study the sand grains on the beaches of the Seychelles, now that would be welcome. Instead, it’s just reminders that life hasn’t moved on.

(more…)

The strange chip shop phenomena continue. Following my uncanny pavlovian experience of a couple of weeks ago, New York Brian messaged me asking if I was ever planning to make ‘saveloy’ Word of the Week. I replied that Saveloyhad already been Word of the Week, way back in 2017, to which he shot back, “What about Sausage in Batter?”
(more…)

As part of my New Year effort to stave off the ravages of old age, I’ve started going to yoga classes. I booked in with my wife for a session called Warm Dynamic Flow, which sounded pretty soothing to me but wasn’t.

(more…)

I don’t know if it’s a start of the year thing, but this week I’ve been experiencing some strange psychological phenomena. For example, on Wednesday evening I went to my local chippy to get dinner and found it shut. That wasn’t the strange part – they often go back to Turkey for the month of January – so I walked away and focused instead on making a sausage sandwich. That’s not particularly noteworthy either, but wait. It gets better.

(more…)