Rick's b.log - entry 2025/12/21

Yule!

A pointless AI generated illustration because it is grey and dreary outside.
[image by CreArt AI, edited by Rick]

As is to be expected (because tradition), I am having a Fray Bentos "Just Chicken" pie. This will be backed up with broccoli, peas, and carrots. Afterwards, a lemon cake.
And, of course, lashings of ginger beer tea. 🫖

A candlelit meal for one.

My present to myself shall finally settle the question of "do I have a piece for this?". With many many pieces, including that Canadian square (instead of the common-over-here hex), I think I ought to now be able to open up just about anything.
And for things that this lot can't open, I have a pickaxe. Two, in point of fact. But there's only one of me and I'm not built like Dwayne Johnson so I can't dual-wield pickaxes. Well, I probably could, but there's a pretty good chance I'd have to go to hospital afterwards. Hang on, this is a bit of a mad detour, even for me. I haz pikax - let's leave it at that because it's not important. Screwdrivers. Plentiful. Yes. 👍

🪛 I think I have enough screwdrivers now. 🪛

I even pushed the boat out and made a video of all of this. Whoo!

Gift vouchers

You see, they (or maybe the people the make the vouchers) are clearly trying to get people to "buy local". Given what France is currently doing with Shein, I don't think this is a coincidence.

The problem is, as much as people might not want to accept reality, there is a good reason why a lot of us don't "buy local".

The vouchers were for €10 each. One of them could be used in local supermarkets. The other three were for use in a selection of local businesses (list printed on the back).

I made an excursion to a chocolate shop in a nearby(ish) town because, well, chocolate seems like a perfectly good little gift.
Oh my God!
I get it. It's organic. It is top of the range, hand-crafted by autistic unicorns or something. At any rate, it was all stupidly expensive.

I picked up a selection of little tablets, 24 of them (four of each). It is nice to have a selection, but it's a smaller selection than the other place I went to, but on the other hand this stuff is organic.
This cost €14,50.
I explained to the woman that I wanted to make up €20 exactly (the two vouchers). She tried with the pick-and-mix chocolates but unfortunately due to how they were priced they were something like €0,80 each. So it could come to €19,30 and sorry she can't give me any change...or €20,10 and she absolutely needs that final ten centimes, despite just telling me that the other way around they'd be keeping seven times that and tant pis.
After a bit of to-and-fro with the manager she said I could put it on my card. So I threw in a white chocolate ball (€3,50) because otherwise somebody was going to get screwed for ten centimes on a card. I'd do something like that at McDo because overpriced megacorp, but these women were at least trying to be friendly even if "it needs to be exactly €20" seemed a bit of a hard concept to grasp...though in their defence, looking at those prices, twenty euros was probably "pocket change" to them. I did briefly wonder if my new life goal should be to open a chocolate shop that sells stuff at prices normal people can afford, but then I realised that such places already exist - we call them supermarkets.

This is my haul, with identifying marks badly removed by AI to obscure where it came from because privacy (for me, not them).

This lot cost €23,60!

The tablets, interestingly, do not have any weight printed on the box. The whole lot weighs 165g. The chocolates seem fairly consistently 5g each for the ones I tried (including wrapping), so it's 120g of wrapped chocolate in a 45g carton.
The random-selection (you can see my personal preference is for white chocolate) was 72g (counted as 70g).
And the ball, also carrying no weight indication, is 48g in its wrapping.

Fair enough, it's cheaper than printer ink... but not by much. The pick-and-mix was all quite nice. The one dark one - I told her to surprise me. I know that snobby chocolate people look down on white chocolate because it's just cocoa butter with a hell of a lot of sugar...and that's precisely why I like it. Anyway, she figured I didn't look like a dark chocolate person, so went straight for a milk chocolate that... seemed like it had some sort of chopped nut paste inside. Praline filling? How rather pedestrian. I feel judged. Correctly, which makes it arguably worse. ☺

Now, the problem is that I - along with almost everybody else in the company and huge swathes of the French workforce make minimum wage with a few small perks thrown in. My take-home after all the deductions that turn Brut into Net is in the ballpark of €1,650 a month, or about €1,800 after the CAF throws some extra my way for inexplicable reasons (why not just bump minimum rather than... oh, wait, it's France, they can't do something simple when there's a really complicated alternative).
Minimum wage, which is called the SMIC in French, used to go up in January and July (more or less). It went up erratically during and following Covid when inflation became a problem. This year, it went up 1.18% on the 1^st of January and has remained at that level (€12,02 brut/hour) all year. Business "experts" have told the government that it's too high, French businesses are suffering, etc.

The thing is, these suffering businesses didn't think twice about jacking up prices. In part this is justified, business rates for energy consumption has jumped dramatically as have the prices of a lot of raw materials (such as chocolate...). But if businesses are folding price increases into the price of their products and adding their own inflation on top because they're used to a certain amount of cashflow and people aren't being paid more then something has to give.

I shop at a supermarket and I use Amazon. Why? Because I can get a better price. Large commercial chocolate companies (such as Lindt) can offer organic chocolate from Peru for something like €3,50 for a 100g slab. Rinse and repeat for all sorts of articles. I would be flat-out broke if I went to a greengrocer for my veg, the local butcher for my meat, the baker for my bread (where it's now €1,12 per freakin' croissant - WTaF!?)... there was a time when this was a way of life. But, then, there was a time when a middle class man would have a "job for life" and an amount of pay that would allow him to raise a family in the home that he is paying for and go on holiday in his car.
Nowadays, people who are flat out sick spread their pathogens all over the place because they can't afford not to go to work, the three work days I was off will cost me between €75 and €225 (depending on how it gets calculated). I can absorb that, there's no problem there for me. Some people aren't so lucky, and their bank account ends the month at the zero point, so any loss will be felt, to the point where they will drag their dead zombified arse into work because there just isn't a stay-at-home alternative for them. And, oh joy, part of the recent budget changes (that the French government has been losing PMs over) wanted to make the unpaid first three days become an unpaid first six days. Because screwing the sick is so much easier than asking rich people to pay their goddamn tax share.

Adding to this, the birthrate in many developed countries is plummeting because our social system concentrates money in the hands of very few people which means that two adults working full time may spend their lives renting and maybe have one child if they're lucky. Certainly some countries, such as the UK, have been penalising parents for having more than two - even though technically two adults producing less than two children is a net population loss. I cannot see that, in the future, this isn't going to end badly. Especially with the rise of nationalism and anti-foreigner sentiment. Yes, all these foreigners will dilute the Britishness (or Frenchness or Dutchness or whatever) but either you end up with a social catastrophe of a lot of old people you can't support and young people who will be looking to bail on the country as soon as possible... or you welcome, encourage, and integrate all these furriners because otherwise who the hell do you think is going to be paying taxes (and thus pensions) in the future? The whole pension ponzi scheme will collapse.

As for "shop local", we can't keep going on like this is some idealised version of the '50s and '60s that never actually happened. And while it was nice to have a little bit of chocolate as a treat, I can't help but think that I could have made much better use of that money if I had been free to use it where I wanted. There are things I need more than chocolate.

Another problem that has been identified - that doesn't really affect me - is that France is highly territorial. Part of the reason that I cancelled my local newspaper subscription, asides from the cost, is because it told me what was happening in Fougères which is something like 60km north of here, and sometimes would even tell me what's cool in Saint-Malo (about 110km and on the coast!) but it would say nothing whatsoever about Châteaubriant, Craon, Laval... all places much closer than Fougères but... not only were they not in the same département, they weren't even in the same region. So, you know, Laval, Paris, Antwerpen, Běijīng... it's all the same, it's "somewhere else".
Well, these vouchers need to be used in this part of this département. Which hasn't gone down terribly well with those people who live in other places. Which, given our proximity to the rest of France, is quite a lot of the workforce.

I understand the desire to encourage people to use local businesses. But forcing them to do so... if one feels the need to force people, then surely the battle has already been lost?

Misogyny

Lilith was basically written out of the bible entirely. She was Adam's first wife, and she ditched him because she refused to be subservient to him. In the Christian bible, she was referred to as "screech owl" in the KJV, "night monster" or "night demon", and even at one point "vampire" (Knox Bible, 1950). More recent revisions brough back the name Lilith.
Either way, because she refused to take orders from a man, she was demonised - in a painfully literal sense.

Eve damning women forever.
[image by CreArt AI, edited by Rick]

Meanwhile Eve didn't fare that much better - she disobeyed God by being tempted to eat the forbidden fruit (because God is the sort that puts juicy fruit right there and says "don't touch"). Since Eve disobeyed, women from that point on must suffer. The fact that Adam also disobeyed is glossed over. Proof that God is not a God worthy of any form of adoration comes in Genesis 3:16:

Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

In other words, because one woman got tempted, all woman henceforth shall suffer greatly in childbirth (not to mention the monthlies and the cramps) and shall effectively live in bondage to a man.

This is one of the earliest, and founding, concepts regarding woman found in the bible. It is as godsmacking as it is horrible, and it is straight up misogyny. There is no sugar-coating it - if God is real, he is an arsehole. But, then, God does have a history of tempting people and then doing nasty things if they succumb - just ask Lot's wife... What is really being taught here is that one must unquestioningly obey instructions handed down from on high.

Exodus includes this gem (21:4):

If his master gives him a wife and she bears him sons or daughters, the woman and her children shall belong to her master, and only the man shall go free.

And if a man sells his daughter to be a female slave, she shall not go out as the male slaves do.

The blurb starting at Leviticus 12:2 is... weird. A woman giving birth to a son is unclean for seven days. It's two weeks if a daughter is born. Then she must wait 66 days to be purified. And finally she must bring to the priest a year old lamb for a burnt offering and a young bird (dove or pigeon) as a sin offering.
Yes, giving birth apparently counts as a sin and needs a sacrifice. There's nothing sensible one can say about this.

Leviticus also has a lot of not very nice things to say about periods. Granted, it may have been somewhat ickier in the days before tampons and pantyliners, but still, it's a natural part of the reproductive cycle and is functioning exactly how God designed it to function, yet anything she touches and anyone who touches anything she touches will be "unclean" until the evening (even after bathing). You can see where some countries get those strange ideas about what to do with menstruating women, can't you?

If a man has sex with a married slave (referred to as "bond-maid"), then she shall be scourged. She won't be straight-up killed because she was not free, but "scourged" is another word for beaten. The man, however, just needs to rock up to the church with a ram as an offering. Yup, the guy gives an animal and the woman gets beaten senseless. Guess what, it's Leviticus again (19:20+).
...and Leviticus also states that a priest's daughter becoming a prostitute is a massive disgrace to her father and the only atonement is to burn her to death (21:9).

I could go on, a lot, but there's a point where it's just really depressing.

It is, in point of fact, a source of great confusion to me that any woman would want to have anything to do with this nonsense.
Through the years there have been all sorts of torturous logical fallacies devised to try to explain away some of this nastiness, though the recent rise in people using the bible as a reason to control women's reproductive right even though the bible actually says no such thing ought to be more than enough reason not to trust any particular "interpretation" of the text and simply read it exactly as it is written.
And as it is written, it is offensively misogynistic.

If the government is prepared to break the internet to stop children from seeing boobies, then may I suggest they also ban this nonsense. The bible (of whatever flavour) and all that has emanated from it, has no place in a society that is intending for there to be any meaningful concept of gender equality. By all means believe in a magical sky fairy with an epic heavy metal beard if that's your thing, but the moment you use it to oppress and control half the population of this planet is the moment you lose any moral standing whatsoever.

PS: To all the evangelical types and the equivalent in the other branches of the Abrahamic story: Y'all burst out from between the loins of a woman, without a woman you would not exist, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

Thunderbird Flush Synced Mail

Back in June 2019, I had decided to transfer my domain to be a .eu, and had sent an email to Rob asking if it was okay to have the two pointing at the same place. He said it was as the .co.uk would be set to redirect to .eu. So as mom was driving my to Châteaubriant to go shopping for the penultimate time we ever did, on the 15^th of June 2019, I set up an order for the domain. It took a few hours for the request to be approved, and some stuff was fiddled behind the scenes. As I was using an existing host and how OVH's own "starter host" (something like 10MB?), Rob guided me to what to do with the DNS. And he fiddled some other stuff behind the scenes and suddenly heyrick.eu was a thing.
We would go to Châteaubriant together for the very last time a month later on the 17^th of July. My summer holiday began on the 29^th July, and she was taken into hospital on the 30^th and it was rapidly downhill from there.

Anyway, this gives you some context as to what was going on back then. And when Thunderbird had my account info, it proceeded to synchronise itself with the entire mailbox. A few thousand messages representing six and a half years, plus archives/photos/etc attached.
When I found the option to "Only sync the last X days" (which arguably should have been asked at the beginning before anything was even fetched), it didn't clear out the rubbish. And I knew better than to use any of the "Delete" options, in case it interpreted that as "Erase from this machine and the server" (which, actually, looks like it may be the case).

So what to do? The Thunderbird cache reported that it was using 10.8MB, but I knew that was false as I had a little desktop widget to show me how much space has been used on my drive - and was showing a little over a gigabyte less than I expected.

Well, to rectify the situation, I had to quit Thunderbird. Then rummage around to find where it kept the cached IMAP data. On my machine, this was ~/.thunderbird/xxxxxx.default_esr/ImapMail (where the "xxxxxx" will be something seemingly random). This amounted to 1.2GiB of stuff.
I deleted the entire folder, and then restarted Thunderbird.
This time it downloaded the message headers for all of those messages, and the message bodies for stuff received in the past week. 976KiB is much better than 1.2GiB - as after all the messages are on the server if I need to access them.

NOTE WELL: This implies that you are using IMAP and are leaving messages on the server, not removing them once they have been fetched.

Ten thousand kilometres

Anyway, just passed 10K. At this rate they're going to get the car back with about 20K on it.
Maybe I ought to go out more this year? But... where? Going to Big Town by myself just isn't the same, you know.

Slop

The pictures are just there to tangentially relate to the content, but you don't have to pay too much attention. Like I said, it's there to be something to look at briefly instead of yet more text. Some variation is good, and since I have the drawing abilities of a comatose toddler, it's going to have to be odd AI art, now that I have a means to devise drawings that sort of resemble what I asked for.

But, yes, it is slop. You don't have to pay attention. Unless, of course, you want to ask yourself why Eve looks more like Anne Hathaway than somebody hailing from the Middle East? ☺ But, maybe, that's giving it far more thought than it justifies. It's an illustration, and I didn't feel like pretending to watch an minute long advert in order to try to tweak the ethnicity of the person featured (assuming the AI even understood the request and didn't do something dumb).

Speaking of which, let me leave you with a bit of festive frivolity.

Everything is better with cats.
[all made using CreArt; cropped if necessary, then collaged]

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Frank, 22nd December 2025, 13:09

Wait. In France they don't pay your wages the first couple of days you're sick? Seriously? Damn. I thought the whole EU had this covered by law...

jgh, 22nd December 2025, 16:01

Proving that my brain is still capable of learning, I had to install a 63A socket this week. Yep, SIXTY THREE AMPS. Never done that before - not even in training - so I went online to review how to do it and - importantly - confirm what tools I needed. Turns out the terminals are screwed with worm screws and needed a hefty allen key, which I confirmed I had in my tub o' tools. :)    The really scary thing about a 63A socket is because the plug pins have to be so huge to carry the current, the socket holes are so big it's impossible to protect against finger access a la BS1363 as the holes are *bigger than an adult finger*. It is verrrry disconcerting potentially seeing 240v of angry electrons just a slipped finger and 30ms of RCD away if the BFO isolator isn't off.

jgh, 22nd December 2025, 16:09

My reading of the background material is that Lilith didn't just generically disobey Adam, she specifically refused to have sex with Adam when Adam demanded and she wasn't in the mood. Hello Yahweh, don't like this one, get me a replacement.

jgh, 22nd December 2025, 16:13

I see your 10,000km and raise you: pics.mdfs.net/2025/10/251053.htm  :)

Rick, 22nd December 2025, 18:18

Frank: I think it is to dissuade people for taking sick days for dumb reasons. At work now, when we are absent without prior agreement we *must* provide some form of justification for why, and if we cannot it'll be written up as "unjustified absence". Three of those, and you'll have to go explain yourself to HR.  I have a suspicion that this may have arisen due to the number of people who just happened to be "feeling a bit poorly" on the days that just happened to coincide with important football fixtures.    If you can read French (or GTranslate it), it's all quite complicated, but described here: https://www.service-public.gouv.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F3053  N ote, also, that you have to have worked a certain amount before you even *have* these rights, like, at all.    JGH: Given that 63A is sort of in the order of what a typical home is wired up as (or ~16kW load), where on earth were you fitting that socket?  I would have thought such a socket with big scary finger-sized holes would have had a sturdy snap-down cover to protect fleshy appendages from the scary angry electrons.    As for Lilith - good for her. "No." is a complete sentence.

jgh, 24th December 2025, 03:43

48A pottery kiln: pics.mdfs.net/2025/12/251212.htm    Socket has a spring cover when nothing plugged in: pics.mdfs.net/2025/12/251218.htm    The sort of installation where you have to go back to first principles and calculate everything from scratch, not just use pre-calculated conventional circuits from the on-site guide.

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