Essential historical metaphor no. 43

Genuine dinner-table conversation:
My son: Are there any European countries that haven't kicked the Jews out?
Me: Probably not, at some point in history
My son: So Europe is basically musical chairs for the Jews?
Me: Erm... Yes.

Weirdest warning ever

OK, so this is a picture of the packet of Tesco cotton buds in our bathroom. There are some warnings on the side, saying that plastic bags can be dangerous, etc. There are also some storage instructions. The first one says "Store in a dry place." Fair enough, I suppose. You don't want damp cotton buds. But look closely at the next one.

It says "Keep away from light."

Yes, "Keep away from light."

Maybe I've missed something here, but I really don't understand why Tesco's cotton buds should be kept in the dark, or what might happen to them should they accidentally be bombarded with photons. Short of adding "Do not feed after midnight," it's hard to see how this could get any stranger.

Crazy Special Offer! (More Tesco madness)

Can anyone explain to me how, unless you want three jars of Oregano, 3 for £1.60 is a good offer?

Consumerist Christmas

I went up to Tesco yesterday and in the reduced section there was a huge stack of cut-price mince pies. Now I know that mince pies (unlike hot cross buns) are a year-round food, but they are associated with Christmas, and indeed Mr Kipling, the manufacturer, has thoughtfully put a design on the box that features a gas lamp, snowy fir trees and a cottage with lighted windows. They've even adapted their trademark "exceedingly fine" phrase, and called them "exceedingly merry" mince pies. I don't think that it's unreasonable to infer that these are mince pies that are particularly designed to be bought for Christmas. "Just the thing," you may think as you buy your seasonal provisions, "some mince pies in an attractive Christmassy box." So why, in the name of heaven, do these mince pies have a best before date of 20th October? They're a food associated with Christmas in a Christmas-themed package and they are going to go off a whole one sixth of a year before Christmas even starts!

I know that retailers make a lot of money from Christmas (though I have my own opinions about that) and I understand that they want to start selling Christmas-themed goods as early as possible to maximise profits, but it just seems bizarre to sell things in Christmas packaging that won't even make it into November.

I get by with a little help...

I have been having a bit of an emotionally up and down time recently, and there are some habits and personal issues in particular that I think that it would be helpful for me to write about. I don't want to keep a journal, but I have thought several times about starting a blog. "But," I hear you cry, "you already have a blog - you're writing it now!" Yes indeed, but here's the thing: I know that only a few people read this blog, and most of them are accidental visitors via search engines, but I think that a couple of people who know me read this occasionally, and I wouldn't want to tell them any of the stuff that's on my mind. In other words, if I genuinely feel that I have some emotional stuff to talk about, friends and family would be the last people I would want to share it with. I'm sure this isn't uncommon: there would be fewer therapists if everyone talked to their friends and family. Nevertheless, it struck me that the people that I think of as closer than strangers friends would be the people to whom I would be most wary of telling the truth about myself.

Coarse phishing

This is probably the worst phishing email I've ever seen.


It's difficult to pick a favourite aspect of this. Not knowing the bank is called Alliance and Leicester is good, as is Aeicester. I think that I'd probably go for the close proximity of the words "veifry" and "verication".

Armageddon, popularity of

Don't ask me why, but I was looking on Google Trends and I did a search for "Armageddon". I'd love to know the reason for this: there's a spike in searches for Armageddon just before the end of every year. It's not right at the end of the year, when people might change the calendar and be reminded of the eventual end of time, and it doesn't seem to bear much relation to related news stories.

The sermon for Advent Sunday usually looks forward not only to the coming of Christ at Christmas, but also to his coming again. Either the eschaton is being preached so widely during Advent that lots of people are going home and using Google to find out what to expect (it is, after all, easier to understand than Revelation), or the Church's traditional seasonal liturgy fits with the zeitgeist rather better than I might have expected.

Twitter Grader

This is a bit sad. What's worse is that I look at this and think "How could I get more followers so that I can move up the rankings?" And then I get depressed because I'm less interesting than the Red Funnel Ferry.

No, it's OK, life is not a popularity competition. It doesn't make any difference to my self worth whether 6 or 60 or 600 people choose to be informed about the minutiae of my life. (But if you are reading this and use Twitter, please follow me, please please please)

Thanks to James for the link and helping me realise that the world is, in fact, madder than I suspected.

Facebook friends

I quite often click through to the page on Facebook that shows "People you may know", and then delete any people I've never actually heard of until I'm left with a page of people who I do know but wouldn't ask to be a Facebook friend.

Is this odd?

Oh dear oh dear oh dear

I managed to have a genuinely psychotic experiene the other day: I was driving along when I saw a silver Espace pulling out of a junction ahead. Often when I see this I forget that we only have one car, and I think "Oh, there's Katrina" (usually followed by looking to see if it actually is her, then remembering that in fact I'm in the Espace). On this occasion though I clearly remembered that we only have one car, because I saw the other vehicle and my first thought was "Oh, there's me."

I offer no excuse for this (though I was tired, distracted, etc, etc).

Family lives in haystack for four years

I saw the headline for this story in the "most popular" sidebar on Reuters and I just loved it, especially the detail about keeping a child off school so he didn't have to draw his house. The world is full of fantastically wacky people.

Eschatology escapology

We were joking in the car last night about the possibility of escapochatology: the study of how to get out of the end of the world. Weirdly, today I followed some random links and found this.

The non-attractiveness of ownership

As I was walking through town today a woman with a clipboard resolutely ignored my lack of eye contact with her and asked me if I could answer three questions. I thought that actually three questions would be OK, so I agreed. She asked me "If I could do any job, what would I do?" (she sneaked in a supplementary question by then asking "Is that what you do now?"), "What would you most like to change about yourself?" and "If you could own anything in the world, what would you like?". Now call me weird, but this last one really stumped me. There I lots of things that I see in shops that I think I'd like to own, like books or DVDs or some clothes, and sometimes I see a sports car and think "I want one of those", but when it comes down to it there's nothing that I really desperately want, certainly not in a "more than anything else in the world" sense. The way she phrased the question kind of excluded metaphysical answers like "What I want most is world peace" or "God's Kingdom to come", and I ended up walking away feeling slightly odd about my lack of participation in the consumerist ethos.

Mind you, I'm having an introspective and unsettled day anyway. Maybe if she'd caught me at a different time I wouldn't have given it a second thought.

472 peaches and 2 apples

The Australian reports on a survey carried out for findmypast.com on parents naming their children after celebrities. This is nothing new, of course; my friend Julie got her name because her parents liked The Sound Of Music. Girls seem to have come off best in the list: Kylie, Keira and Shakira are all OK, nothing to get beaten up for in the playground, which will probably be the fate of some of the Dres, Gazzas and Tupacs; I should advise all three Snoops to change their name to Michael or James as soon as possible.

Strange pronouncements on Scottish smoking

BBC news carries a story that Scotland's Chief Medical Officer has said the country's smoking ban will reduce the number suffering from lung cancer. I'm not sure whether a ban on smoking in public places is any more effective than other measures in stopping people from smoking, but I was slightly taken aback by the comments by Neil Rafferty, from the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco (FOREST - a desperate attempt to get a good acronym if ever I heard one), who said that there is no conclusive evidence that lung cancer is caused by second hand smoke. Just out of curiosity, I put the phrase "conclusive evidence that lung cancer is caused by second hand smoke" into Google - perhaps Mr Rafferty should try the same. The winning bizarreness, however, has to be this: "Mr Rafferty said that by claiming such good results from the policy, the public could be misled into entrusting politicians with more power over people's lives". I'm sorry? Are we to assume that the Government should only deliver inaccurate and negative public health messages, in case the populace foolishly decide that they will hand over all responsibility and control to elected officials? "This Government has done something helpful: I must give them complete power over my life." Any evidence that smoking causes brain damage?