almostwitty

If, like us, your household has been sucked into endlessly shopping at Sainsbury’s in an attempt to get more golden Lego trading cards, then you’ll also have amassed a huge collection of duplicates.

In case you want to swap one of your duplicates, for one of our duplicates, then here’s our list of Lego trading card duplicates. Please comment below if you want to do a swap!

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I was at my local Tesco’s lunch queue, patiently waiting with 30+ people ahead of me in a long snaking queue that goes right across the store. Then a little old lady walks up and down the queue, holding aloft one of those new Tesco tablets, going on about how they’re cheap as chips at £60 and great toys.

A few huge problems with what’s happening:

• You already have 30+ customers waiting patiently to be served. Instead of trying to sell them something they’re NOT going to buy casually in their lunch hour, why not put your resources into serving your existing customers, before they get fed up of the queue and go somewhere else?
• You can talk about the new Tesco tablet all you like – it’s NOT something people are going to casually buy while waiting to buy their sandwiches in their lunch hour.
• The little old lady, bless her, has zero idea what a tablet is. She is obviously just repeating the selling points by rote

The list of failed big companies is littered with examples of where they went chasing after a new product, while in the process totally forgetting about or taking for granted their existing customer base (Blackberry etc.) Looks like Tesco are going the same way.

Harumph.

* Well, ok, not EVERYTHING wrong. There’s the fact that rampant consumerism is burning up what’s left of our planet’s resources while we’re simultaneously still in one of the worst economic recessions ever, while the 1% are still well-off… but hey ho.

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So as you may not have noticed, I’m one of the performing volunteers for the London 2012 Opening Ceremony, in front of a total of 200,000 people in the stadium over three nights, and one billion TV viewers worldwide. Which, oddly, isn’t that daunting – probably because I’ve got a relatively small role.

You won’t get any particular spoilers from me (unless you want to know precisely where I’ll be, in which case just ask!) – but you may want to carve out 90 minutes of your life on Friday to watch the ceremony. I’ve seen most of it four times, and there are bits that still manage to either draw out a small tear. Or have me playing air synth with gusto.

So get in front of your TV just before 9pm UK time (or 4pm New York, 1pm California time). You’ll love it, I promise.

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Decades ago, when I was a mere media student with dreams of doing something great, I used to stare lovingly at a huge coffee table book about the work of Industrial Light & Magic. Then one day, I saw it on sale at a discount bookshop, and grabbed it immediately despite being a poor student (though obviously not THAT poor if I could afford to waste it on a discounted heavy coffee table book).

Then for the next two decades, it’d follow me from room to flat to flat, down to London, across to Cardiff, North Wales, Manchester, and then back to London. And each time I struggled to lift the box that I’d put that book in, I’d curse its heaviness before eventually finding a place on a heaving bookshelf. Where it would stay, dusty and unread but peripherally loved, until the next move.

Earlier this year, in an Hyperbole-and-a-Half-style attempt at rationalising bits of my life and sorting stuff out, I listed it (amongst many many other things) on Amazon for sale.

Now someone’s bought it for £60 or so. And I’m sitting here putting off the decision to box and ship it, mostly because I don’t want to let it go, for purely selfish reasons. I’m never going to get round to reading it – the best I’ll do is coo at the pretty pictures. But it’s a huge hard heavy book, and really it ought to go to someone who’s willing to pay out £60 for it.

But I haven’t sent it yet. And now I’m getting nagging emails about it.

What would you do?

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Now that we’re getting rather unseasonably warm temperatures for September/October across the UK, the old stereotypical mutterings are cropping back up about how we Brits are obsessed about the weather, and how we didn’t have a summer at all. Allow me to blow away at least one of these often-muttered statements.

Sure, maybe the British are occasionally occupied with the weather. Maybe the best way to start off a ridiculously casual and pointless conversation with a random person at the bus stop is to mutter something about the weather. But we British have nothing, as per usual, on the Americans.

They have a weather channel on every cable station that pumps out nothing but weather news 24-7. The local news goes into excruciating detail about the local weather conditions. Americans will often mutter on their way to work “Oooh, it feels like a high 70s today” or something, without having actually left their house or checked the news forecast. Ironically for a nation with wild temperature extremes, they can tell when you turn up or down the air conditioning by ONE Farenheit. The only reason they don’t get the reputation about being weather-obsessives is that generally, they don’t talk about it to random strangers on the bus. Mostly because they don’t really have buses. We British don’t really do any of that.

Of course, this may well be down to the extreme weather conditions Americans get – deep snow in the winter, scorching heat and tornadoes in the summer. In contrast, Britain gets temperatures of 26 Celsius or 80 Farenheit, and to us, it feels like we’re in Arizona.

The other thing that the British mutter, every summer without fail, is that we’ve never really had a summer, ie a sustained period of hot weather with sunshine. Given that most weekdays during the summer, I’m stuck in an office, the appeals of sunshine are somewhat lost on me but it usually feels like we’ve had the same summer as we have every summer. One year, I want to maintain a daily log of whether today is summer or not, and then collate the results at the end.

Of course, it’s one thing having sunshine and summer weather. But what do you DO with it? It’s too hot to actually stay out in the sun for more than a few minutes – and sure, it makes biking more fun, but the days of sitting in the back garden of a pub with a nice pint of beer are alas well beyond me these days.

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Our household currently has a Playstation 3 and a Wii – both game consoles acquired before the arrival of the baby. Oddly enough, aside from the odd spurt of gaming (mostly Portal 2, Wii Fit, Goldeneye and Crysis 2), the game consoles have mostly sat in the corner unplayed, due to the lack of time available. Who knew that dealing with a baby was a time-sucking vortex?

Now we have the opportunity to buy a brand-new XBox 360 with Kinect at a relatively cheap price. I’m severley tempted, mostly on the grounds that we could play Dance Central (my wife tends to prefer the active dancey-type games) and control the TV using our voice – something that would undoubtedly come in handy since the baby has taken to playing with the TV remote control at all times.

What other arguments can I deploy to persuade my wife that we simply must have all three game consoles?

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According to the Media Guardian, BBC News executives lived in fear of a major breaking news story during the Royal Wedding – and that any decision to break into said coverage would have to come from the very top. I’m guessing they’re rather relieved that the US didn’t move against Osama till Monday as opposed to Friday…

On the slightly annoying front, we’re off on a plane to the United States next week. Oh boy….

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Every so often, I have ordered (online) a pizza from Pizza Hut. I must have spent at least £100 with them over the last few months alone – what with having a pregnant wife with cravings, and then being a family too tired to actually cook anything and craving some sort of treat.

So it was in this atmosphere – as well as being my wife’s birthday week – that we ordered a pizza online from Pizza Hut on Tuesday. I duly entered my credit card details, and got a receipt number. Then waited for my pizza. And waited. And waited.

After an incredibly hungry hour of waiting, I called the relevant branch only to be told that as they had never received my order, they wouldn’t be doing anything at all. They just told me to contact customer services, who of course aren’t in on a hungry Tuesday evening.

So I filled in the web form to complain, and got an email with an apology and that they’d refund the cost. No mention of whether they’d try to make it up to me, or offer me vouchers or discounts on my next order. Despite the fact that I’ve been a loyal customer in the past.

Since Pizza Hut don’t value me as a customer, I won’t be valuing them as a company.

Besides, in my furious hungry anger, I ordered with Domino’s instead – who sensibly take payment when the pizza is delivered – and their pizza was, it has to be said, far more delicious.

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So, bijziend and I were watching the news reports about yesterday’s violence by some anti-capitalist demonstrators in Central London yesterday. Up flashed an image of a McDonalds being attacked.

The next thing you know, she has a sudden craving for McDonalds, and if it wasn’t the fact she had a baby strapped to her bosom (and she maintains that the taste of British McDonalds’ meat is sufficiently different to American McDonalds’ meat as to make it inedible), she’d probably have gotten up and biked over to our nearest McDonalds to get a burger.

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Like many people born around Christmas or New Year, I’m rather loathe to publically celebrate my birthday. Most people are usually far too busy shopping, or being drunk, or being hungover, or being poor, to even turn up for a pint, let alone anything else – so over the years, I’ve stopped grumbling and made no public acknowledgement of my birthday. Indeed, on my various social media profiles, I’ve put in fake birthdays just to ensure nobody actually knows when my birthday is.

Aside from my lovely wife HyperHam of course. In previous years, she’d organised a surprise birthday video and even a surprise pre-birthday dinner gathering, which turned into a bit of a social faux pas disaster. But this year (2010) would be the first time we’d actually be together for my birthday.

So she baked me a cake. But not just any old cake. Nope.

A Weighted Companion Cube cake from one of my favourite games, Portal. (If you haven’t played it, play it – it’s the best physics puzzler you’ll get, with a sardonic sense of humour).

Of course, baking a cake isn’t easy – baking a cake that’s the size of a cube that requires three layers is even harder. After spending 5 hours making the cake – bearing in mind she was 8 months pregnant at the time – she literally presented me with a glorious cake, and then collapsed on the sofa and fell dead asleep. I had one slice, and the ensuing sugar rush also sent me to sleep. But it was delicious and looked gorgeous – and what more do you want from a cake?

Anyway, here’s Hyperham’s instructions on how to make a Weighted Companion Cube Cake.

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