Day: July 28, 2006

See, there I was, just innocently trying to pay off my credit card, when I entered a bizarre world of circular logic:

So I try to email them to let them know that there may be a teeny weeny bug in the error-checking logic here. The web form that they give you for typing messages to them is about 1 inch square, but I write a detailed summary of the problem anyway, knowing this will more than likely be read by an idiot somewhere who won’t actually understand me (and/or care). I click send. Gah! For some ridiculous reason they are limiting the number of characters your are allowed to type in the message to 255. (Why? How can you say anything in 255 characters?) At this point I have already written 4 times as much as this, and consequently end up spending the next 10 minutes editing this down into increasingly incomprehensible txt spk. I click send again and despair. I’m still waiting for them to respond with a form response addressing some entirely different issue. I dunno why I bother.

Just a quick one (again): so I’m reading Metro on the train this morning (yeah, I know) and there’s an article in there about some power cuts in the West End yesterday: after I’d finished cringing about their use of the words “Dunkirk Spirit”, I was intrigued to read about the chefs at Aldo Zilli’s restaurant, who apparently had to walk out after “temperatures in the kitchen reached 150 degrees C”. Er, surely shome mistake, Metro? Maybe the temperatures in the ovens had reached 150C, but in the whole kitchen? Really? 50 degrees above the boiling point of water? Perhaps they meant Fahrenheit…

Elsewhere, Amazon have emailed me with some helpful recommendations:

“As you’ve bought similar books from us in the past, you might be interested in one of these great titles–available with fantastic discounts for one week only:
Marley and Me
Billie Piper: A Biography

Wayne Rooney: My Story So Far”

Er, what? Sorry? What books could I possibly have bought that led your computer to believe that I might be interested in this tosh? I mean, honestly…

Elsewhere, I see that TV Hypnotist Paul McKenna has won his libel case. Now, I’m slightly confused by this, but if I understand correctly, the crux of the case was that the Daily Mirror’s Victor Lewis-Smith had insinuated on a number of occasions that McKenna, like “Dr” Gillian McKeith before him, had bought a fake degree off the Internet. McKenna sued for libel claiming that he had been the victim of a con. So presumably he thought that he was buying a genuine degree off the Internet, then?