Every now and then I post an update about how many words there are on this Blog. The last such piece was in January 2018, when the word count for all Blog Posts and Menu Items had just passed 300,000. Thanks to some additions made yesterday to this piece about ITV quiz show “Tenable”, the… Continue reading Another milestone: 500,000 words
Do you recall the early days of mobile phone technology, back in the 1980s? The way I remember it, a disproportionate number of calls began with the caller (usually a man in a suit) exclaiming, “I’m on a train!” It became a cliché, but there was a practical purpose to it. As soon as the… Continue reading Word of the week: decompression
In recent weeks, repeats of the quiz show “Tenable” have been shown on ITV on weekday afternoons. Episodes from Series 3 were being shown until earlier this week: S3Ep50 (Series 3 Episode 50) was shown on Monday 8 July 2019. Since then episodes from the start of Series 2 have been broadcast, beginning with S2Ep1… Continue reading “Tenable” Series 2, repeated July 2019
At various times in the last three years I have posted pieces about songs that were “Stuck at 2”. They made it to #2 in the UK charts but no further. The original piece, from June 2016, is here. Over the last year I have been posting lists of the songs that were “Stuck at… Continue reading Stuck at 2: the lists are complete, and a BBC Top 40 revisited
You will find very few statements related to politics on this Blog. There are hints and occasional oblique references. There may be enough material, if you look really closely, for you to work out my political views. But if I really wanted you to know my views about politics, here in the UK and elsewhere,… Continue reading Word of the week: miscarriage
It’s been a while since I posted any music trivia, so here are 21 questions, mostly gathered from Pop Master, the weekday quiz hosted by Ken Bruce on BBC Radio 2. The theme here is “Same title, different song”. In each case there’s a shared song title which has provided different hits for multiple artists… Continue reading “Same title, different song”
We have become Netflix subscribers, for a month at least. As you probably know, Netflix is a streaming service, allowing you to watch films and TV programmes via the internet. It also produces new content, dramas like “The Crown” and movies like “Murder Mystery” starring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler. Over the weekend my daughter… Continue reading Word of the week: Netflix
Greetings to anyone reading these words thousands of miles from West London, where they have been drafted. Over the last few days this Blog has had 23 Page Views in the Falkland Islands. I have no information about the people (or maybe it’s just one person) reading these pages, just the fact there have been… Continue reading Greetings to readers in Nepal, Palau, the Falkland Islands and other distant places
When I was born, back in the 1960s, there was only one World Cup: the men’s football (or soccer) tournament, first held in 1930 and held every four years, without a break, since 1950. The first one I remember was in 1970, hosted by Mexico and won by Brazil. In 1975 a new World Cup… Continue reading So many World Cups, and the longest World Cup of all
I have a touch of writer’s cramp. I have just typed that sentence, and am typing this one too, because the Speech Recognition feature of Windows 10 has interpreted the phrase “I have writer’s cramp” in the following ways: I have written square Only when writer’s cramp I can wreck it’s a I her writings… Continue reading Writer’s Cramp, and more about Voice Recognition
The Compartments 