- entry 2025/04/26

The Pope's funeral

• This really wouldn't have been possible five years ago when being closer than a metre and a half to anyone was a huge social faux pas.
• I'm looking at the sea of red, white, gold, and black gowns and... not one single woman. While this isn't exactly unexpected given that it's a branch of the Abrahamic beliefs, to have such a visible reminder that half of the population is so clearly excluded means that we still have a long way to go; and thanks to the likes of Trump and Tate it's as if we're now going in reverse.

I have nothing further to say on the Pope. I was brought up the other side of Christianity (CofE) that rejects the existence of the Pope and papal supremacy. According to CofE, the Bible teaches that one should not offer prayers to idols, figures, graven images, etc and that there is nobody and nothing in between you and God. That's why the Archbishop of Canterbury is basically a glorified administrator. That's why Protestants don't have any time for all this Vatican rubbish (some of the more extreme branches consider him essentially the antichrist, which is maybe a little over the top given that it's just a man in a fancy outfit and not an actual supernatural being), and it is also why they might be rather aghast at the number of Catholics who light candles and prey to wooden figures of saints. Saints are a big thing in Catholicism, one doesn't pray to God, one prays to an intermediary. But not just that, one must pray to the correct intermediary. It's all very beaurocratic.

Unfortunately, as is the way with religion, splits and schisms beget further splits and schisms, until you end up with ideas such as the Jehovah's Witnesses that believe 144,000 people will ascend to heaven at the time of the rapture (which has been incorrectly predicted six times so far) with that number being taken from Revelation 7:4 (note that the next two verses specify that it is exactly 12,000 people from each of the twelve tribes of Israel, though clearly that part is overlooked when they are prothletising in other countries!).
Misinformation and misinterpretation abounds, with every proponent of every one of these beliefs thinking that their way is The Truth and everything else is heretical.

I think that the person who becomes Pope generally means well, but he is just a man, and a man at the head of an organisation that uses superstition to oppress, subjugate, and discriminate. So for that reason I'm just kind of "meh" about the whole thing. For me, a more important story is the sad end of Virginia Giuffre.

Washing machine

A fancy washing machine.

It is a fancy Samsung with LCD and loads of options. To my mind, this is greatly overcomplicating things. There really only need to be three knobs and three options, like this.

A simplified washing machine control panel.

After all, what is a "Bedlinen" wash other than an intensive 60°C cycle? So the first thing we should have is a knob that specifies the amount of washing to do from a very gentle single direction wool/handwash cycle to a cycle called "Brutal" that speaks for itself.
The next knob should be to select the water temperature.
And the final knob is for the spin speed. Don't waste time with 800rpm, 1000rpm... those values may be technically correct but they are meaningless, only useful in knowing that one is more or less than another. Words can be descriptive and mean the same thing.
The first button is to select a prewash if necessary.
The second button is to rinse a little more. I find that my machine, in its quest to reduce water consumption as much as possible, is not great at rinsing away the wash solution. Therefore there should be an option for people who want a better degree of rinsing.
As you can see from the photo above, the wash cycle about a third of the way through and it says 1h25m. I just did a 60°C hygiene cycle on my machine (for pillowcases, etc) and it took slightly over two hours. So there should be a "don't dawdle" option to hurry things up. This should apply to all cycles, not just a select few. So you can set the machine to Normal/40 and choose "Don't dawdle" to have an hour-long cycle instead of the usual 2-3 hours. Think about it - you do the family washing on Saturday morning. First load, 9am to noon. Then noon to three. It's the middle of the afternoon and you've only done two loads. Does stuff really get so dirty that it needs to sit and churn around for so long? If your family aren't monsters that roll in the mud, a cycle that takes an hour-ish mean that before noon it can be all done and hanging on the line to have all afternoon to dry...and you doing something far more interesting.

The final two buttons are a Start/Pause to get the machine going and interrupt it, and a Cancel button for when one wishes to abandon the current programme.

Above and beyond that, it's just taking variations on a theme and giving it names. It reminds me of the Silvercrest pressure cooker that essentially had two settings - Low/High and for how long. All of the many buttons on the front were basically shortcuts that set up a predefined amount of steam and time.

Rinse and repeat

Does this all sound worryingly familiar? Because I am talking about Adolf Hitler.

Mowing

Trundling around with the mower.

Well, the grass was dry and I had seen the coming weather forecast. At about 1pm this afternoon it chucked it down. Only for about ten minutes, but it's enough that everything is quite wet, so no mowing today. I should probably go out and plant corn. Maybe later...

Crisps

Buy one get one free. ☺

The vending machine at work does have something of a habit of failing to correctly dispense the goods...

Crisis averted!

How much postage?

If we assume that the tea is 2.5kg (the tea is 2.2, that leaves 300g for packaging), then UPS Express will do a 1 day transit from Aldershot, UK to here for £29,79 (before noon) or a saver version for £25,29 (by end of day), or a two day transit for £17,29. I didn't pick this as a cheapest price or anything, it's literally the first quote of the first carrier that came to mind.
So how they can justify that sort of postage fee is... frankly beyond me. It's not even a joke, it's a scam.
Oh, and there will likely be import fees not just on the tea price but on the total price. It should be exonerated because it would be under €135, but as is the case with the scam artists at La Poste, they can stick on a flat minimum of €1 in taxes to allow them to load on their "handling fees". If you raise a complaint, you can claim back the €1...

Thankfully, however, a couple up in the village went to England to see family over Easter. I asked if they could bring back "about twenty five quid's worth of tea". They did that, plus remembered a Fray Bentos, and threw in some Pink&White as a gift. 🥰
I handed over €30 in return for all of this.

Tea, pie, and cake.

The tea was loose in a box (seriously, why doesn't anybody wrap tea to keep it fresh any more?) so each of the boxes is now sealed in a large size zip-strip freezer bag.

Giving up personal information "because children"

Bait and switch

Netflix costing less with adverts.

I didn't expect it to last long, but I didn't expect the price to jump by a third, or two whole euros, just half a year later. Here's a snippet of the email I received a couple of days ago.

Well, that didn't last long, did it?

I think, when I first signed up with Netflix, the standard level subscription which was SD at the time (SD these days seems to mean 720p) was less than the advert-supported offering is going to be. It's also in danger of taking Netflix from a monthly expense I can ignore to one that I'll have to keep an eye on. Granted, it'll be about €2 a week but on the other hand it's nearly €100 a year.

Chip weight

A family size bag of chips.

The only thing that comes to mind is that maybe once upon a time it was a pleasing 1.75 but then some shrinkflation happened (it is just off 1.75kg minus 3%) which is how we arrived at such a batshit crazy number.
It isn't simply an artefact of metrification, because 1.69kg is about 3lb 11⁹/₁₆oz.

But, please, McCain, think of us neurodivergent types and consider adding ten grams - which is quite literally this - in order to arrive at a much more pleasing number than one point six freaking nine.

This ten grams would make all the difference.

Maths fail

Of course I sent a very snarky feedback.

I actually have no idea how much an ounce is though I was pretty suspicious of nearly sixty thousand of them; in fact anything over about a hundred would feel wrong.
I am, however, aware of a "pound cake" (a pound of flour, a pound of eggs, a pound of butter, and a pound of sugar) so I knew at that point that 372½lb was comically off the mark.
That being said, a bag of chips for ninety three cakes is a trade-off I'd happily make...provided it's in that direction of course. ☺

Get used to it, folks. With the big tech players hellbent on pushing their "generative AI" products in any and every way, I have a feeling that soon our entire species will be dropping IQ points like a tree drops caterpillars in the springtime. Google just told me that a little under two kilograms is just under sixty thousand ounces. Google must be right therefore it is true. 🤦🤦🤦

Your comments:

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Too Late to F**k, 27th April 2025, 00:25

You're a sick puppy.

Rick, 27th April 2025, 08:29

🤔   [oh, and I've edited your pseudo, a modicum of decorum please...]

Joseps, 28th April 2025, 07:05

I'm in metric Spain, and stuff also started to get down to silly non rounded amounts in weight, some time ago now. Everything. from crisps to toothpaste.    Shrinkflation over 9000

jgh, 28th April 2025, 22:23

NAE PRIESTS, NAE BISHOPS, NAE HIEARCHY! :D

jgh, 28th April 2025, 22:34

Working in today's post office, a customer came in to post a parcel to Martinique. I had to spell it for the Postmaster as she'd never heard of it. Weighing the parcel and checking the prices resuled in 5.1kg for £99. EEEK! The customer had another parcel at 3.5kg which came to £75. I suggested she repack them as three sub-3kg parcels and they'd each go for around a tenner, but unfortunately they were going to different destinations.

Rick, 29th April 2025, 21:54

How would ~3KG go for a tenner? The cut-off for all of the cheaper tariffs is 2KG (it's the same problem I had with my cake mix). ParcelForce GlobalEconomy to Martinique for 3KG is given here as £74.05.    UPS from Aldershot to Fort-de-France quotes 3.5KG for £50.99 and 5.1KG for £85.99; delivery in four working days (so currently end of day of the 6th of May). Marginally cheaper, likely a heck of a lot faster, but it's two heavy parcels to a far-flung place so it'll cost unless you use one of those "you'll be lucky if it ever arrives" carriers.    Evri quote £111.14 for the 3.5KG parcel (I set the size to 20cm cube) and £144.02 for the 5KG parcel (40x20x20, though size doesn't seem to matter much). Delivery in 18-20 working days. So, yeah... clearly Evri aren't interested in sending stuff to Martinique.

jgh, 2nd May 2025, 19:22

Yes, brain fart plus typo. 2kg not 3kg. sHOWS HOW KNACKERD i AM WHEN i GET HOME.

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