

My friends know not to ask me about bees. Ten-minute illustrated lecture guaranteed.
Go on go on go on go on go on
My friends know not to ask me about bees. Ten-minute illustrated lecture guaranteed.
Famn, PugJesus beat me to it. I love you Pug!
I had a good laugh standing on top of the Arc de Triomphe watching four/five/six 🤷 chaotic lanes of traffic swirl around it. And then a gendarme turned up and started pulling people over for no apparent reason - it was wild.
Video from some Czech tourists: http://youtu.be/-2RCPpdmSVg
Wellington has had a heated property market longer than most places - it’s hilly for a start, so can’t just sprawl like Auckland, and it’s the capital, so a lot of well-heeled bureaucrats who don’t want to commute from the hinterlands. I don’t live there any more, so I don’t know what the rental market is like now.
No worries - life is always a struggle for some, no matter where in the world you are.
Way to make me feel like a bloody dinosaur!! 😂
My flat cost £43k in the early 90s, nearly three times my annual income at the time, and all my savings went on the deposit. I had previously lived in a shared house, the only way I could afford to save anything.
More nostalgia… Looking for a 1br flat to rent in 1980s Wellington (NZ) was a trip. Demand far, far outstripped supply. Among the gems offered to me for top rental (can’t remember how much, but it was crazily high), was a place that stank of damp and had rat-holes chewed in the bathroom wall - which was just soggy softboard against a dirt bank. There were three couples viewing at the same time. Another place I was told was fresh to the market, no-one else had seen it yet. The stove had been dismantled and the toilet was piled high with human shit. When I shouted at the agent she said, You don’t want it then?" and hung up.
I eventually lucked in with a “granny flat” whose owners, an adorable elderly Polish couple, lived upstairs.
I’m sorry! Truly.
Didn’t work for me… in my 1972 bank job interview I was told, “I’d hire you if you were a man, but you’re not. If I hired you, you’d just get pregnant and leave.” It wasn’t against the law for him to say all that.
And for what it’s worth I didn’t buy a home - a small one-bed flat - until I was in my 40s. Cost me so much I couldn’t afford proper furniture. Yes, my current house is worth a lot more than what I paid for it (mainly because I bought a wreck), but so is any other house I could afford if I sold it.
I discovered that a dehumidifier is really good at drying clothes cheaply. The one I bought has a specific button for laundry.
Neil Stephenson’s “In the Beginning… Was the Command Line” (1999) touches on this. He compares Microsoft to a station wagon vs Linux as a free tank. People keep buying the station wagon because no-one wants to learn how to drive a tank, even if it’s free. (Apple is a luxury car in his analogy.)
My first computer ran on MS-DOS, and I’ve seen Windows hiding DOS deeper and deeper behind the GUI. And now AI… ugh. I’ve been tinkering with Linux on old laptops so I’m ready for the move, it’s just finding the time.
It’s true. A friend asked for help on his new laptop and after a confusing conversation I realised he was upset because the web browser had “lost” his “bookmarks”. No, those aren’t bookmarks, those are shortcuts to your most recent web pages. Looks like you don’t have any bookmarks. Let me show you how to make a bookmark…
He’s not dumb or even inexperienced with tech, he just has a different mindset.
Yeah yeah, I will get round to it, stop bloody nagging me.
The London plane tree is particularly suitable for urban areas, it’s resistant to air pollution.
I discovered when I joined a volunteer litter-picking group in my town that some people really hate trees. And I must emphasise HATE. They hate the shade they cast in summer, the way the leaves block the all-important View. They hate the fallen leaves in autumn. They hate the bare branches in winter. They hate the risk of branches falling in storms. They hate the racket the birds make. I was astonished - it never occurred to me that people would feel so strongly.
Turns out I’m a bloody tree-hugging extremist.
From an earlier report:
Wright said Carruthers sent Graham a Facebook post from a man called Kevin Hartness saying: “Some weak people that walk this earth … disgusting behaviour.”
Two minutes later Graham replied to Carruthers with a voice note saying: “That Kevin Hartness comment. Weak … fucking weak? Does he realise how heavy shit is?”
Carruthers replied with his own voice note saying: “I’d like to see Kevin Hartness launch an operation like we did last night … I don’t think he’s got the minerals.”
Pretty much everything. See “Bee Movie”.
Fiction: Daddy bee goes to work in the honey factory every day.
Fact: Daddy bee has glorious sex once and immediately dies. Bachelor bee is booted out of the hive by his sisters in the autumn and dies.