Read and digest. It’s why the economy is in the poo and why it will continue to go up and down unless we fix the banking system.

How Money is Made / Created: Ben Dyson Explains the Debt Crisis – YouTube.

1. Take one bubble packed 2.5-inch hard disk
2. Put it into a roughly 10 x 8 x 2.5-inch box
3. Do not add any other cushioning or packing material and seal
4. Allow the hard disk to bounce around all the way from ‘the norf’ to ‘the sarf’ under postie’s delicate attentions

Update (Weds 2nd September): Disk may be DOA. Now with Paul Silver, who is  trying to determine its health.

Update (Thursday 3rd September): Dabs.com have asked me to fill in a customer satisfaction survey. I have. I’m not happy, so we’ll see if they contact me in response to my comments.

Later, Thursday, Paul reports that the disk isn’t DOA. It’s amazing how much punishment a modern HD can be put through.

Posted via email from The People’s Republic of Worthing Telegraph

If you’ve been following the on-and-off story this year, you’ll know about the confusion of whether we can cycle in safety west of Splash Point.The good news came when the date of the 28th August was announced. Passed by the Government and handed on to Worthing Council to paint out a few ‘No’s on ‘No Cycling’ and stencil some pretty cycles on the prom – OK, OK, I’m making light of a very serious and complex process involving thousands of highly trained people who have a heap of other things to do.

After a bit of research via Twitter earlier this week, it seemed that no one had seen any evidence of any of this kind of activity.

To cut a long story short, my Tweeting led to me being forwarded the following e-mail from Cllr John Rogers, Deputy Leader and Cycling Champion:

———- Forwarded message ———-

Unfortunately it is not going to be possible for us to officially open the promenade for cycling on the 28th.

This is for the following reasons :

1. Stevens Funfair is occupying part of the busiest section of the promenade therefore the risk of conflict between cyclists and pedestrians is much greater,

2. The DCLG in granting us permission imposed conditions, the main ones being that signage and some white lining must be installed before it can start.

This was discussed at the Worthing Cycle Forum on 5 August and it was decided by the meeting that the Council should be asked not to open on this bank holiday weekend but wait until a date can be found hopefully in September by when all the necessary works can be completed.

I am currently in contact with the Officers who are dealing with this matter and it is being given high priority. We are however, in the hands of contractors etc. as to when the work can be done.

Sorry to disappoint you – I am just as disappointed,

If you have any query please do not hesitate to call me,

Regards

Cllr John Rogers
Deputy Leader and Cycle Champion

Oh bloody hell! This is so typical of bureaucracies everywhere. Any chance to do nothing, and it gets hung on to for dear life.

I have to point out that Stevens Funfair only occupies a small part of the western prom and there’s the rest of it for us to use. Furthermore, the council was presumably aware of the funfair booking when the date of the 28th was generally announced.

And then there’s next year. How does the council propose to stop the impending carnage as cyclists crash headlong into the carousing crowds?

I also note that it has taken from 5th August until now for the council to fail to even fix a date for the signage to be installed. What hope do we really have of seeing any change during September so that we can cycle safely along the sea front?

I hope we don’t see any injuries – or worse – to cyclists while the council dithers and looks to convenient excuses for not getting their fingers out.

We booked from LastMinute.com and got a double room for a mere £93 for the night. I completed the field for special requirements to advise that we cannot have feather pillows or bedding. When we arrived, with no prompting, we were told that feather pillows had been removed. What’s more we’d been upgraded to a river-view room – priced at somewhere around £350 a night, I later noticed. Result!

There was a special offer on breakfast of £25 for two that we later took up on – a good saving on the £17.50 standard price.

When we returned to the room after my friend’s 50th birthday party, we found that the pillows on the bed were all feather. Just what you need when it’s well gone midnight and all you want to do is crash.

One phone call to the desk resulted in a promise to sort things out. But no more than an empty promise.

I had to call a second time. This time, a few minutes later, a maid turned up with yet more feather pillows and had to go away again, only to return with three pillows instead of four. We gave up. We desperately needed sleep.

Next morning, breakfast proved OK, but disappointing. Not a huge amount of choice, average-at-best quality ingredients, amateurishly-cooked full-English and staff bumbling around ineffectually.

When we booked out we informed the guy behind the desk how disappointed we were at the mess-up over the pillows and were told the Customer Services Manager would be in touch with us. No offer of reducing our bill was made.

And, you’ve guessed it by, now haven’t you? We haven’t heard from the Customer Services Manager.

This hotel has pretensions. It tries to be trendy, but the service and processes aren’t up to its 4-star claims. At around £100 a night from Lastminute, it’s OK if you’re happy for your wishes to be ignored and don’t have high expectations for breakfast. At full price, it’s pitiful.

We shan’t be returning. And will be putting Park Plaza Hotels at the bottom of our shopping list when looking for somewhere to stay.

Tags: hotel, poor_customer_service, pretensions, bumbling

Well, last week BBC Radio 3′s Jazz Library programme solved the mystery. It’s not a who, but a what. ‘It’s very rude!’, said the guest.

Oops! That puts a whole new face on it!

“[Burroughs] was pleased to hear that during the war the school was sequestered by the government for the Manhattan project and it was there, in Bill’s old classroom, the atomic bomb was invented. ‘It seemed so right, somehow,’ he commented later.”

Jack Kerouac, a portrait, by Barry Miles, p53.

It can’t seem more right.

One thing I’d never done, though, is to make my own pasta. I’d kind of lumped it with making pastry as one of those things I don’t do so well, and there are perfectly acceptable alternatives available from the shops.

As you may have guessed, that argument doesn’t really rub in my kitchen, so I bit the bullet and bought myself a machine and all the OO flour, semolina and the nice fresh eggs that you need.

First mistake – I went against the advice I’d read in many places on the Web. I thought I’d dip my toe in the water with a cheapo Chinese copy of the Italian original from Argos, thinking it would survive long enough for me to figure out if I would use it. The machine didn’t last the day out. Clank!, it went. Crunch! Click, click, click as I turned the handle. But, most satisfyingly, Crash! as it hit the bottom of the bin.

Second mistake – not realising how many football pitch lengths of space you need to roll the stuff out. Just not possible in our kitchen. And it’s not the smallest around.

Third mistake – trying to clean the machine for the first time in the same session as we actually wanted to make and eat a meal of pasta. We finally ate at around 10:30pm, with me feeling exhausted and grumpy.

It’s back to the pasta from the deli for me.

How do they do it in restaurants? Or is it a variety thing like the strawberries we get these days in the shops that never give up their hulls cleanly?

I remember the days…

Any suggestions, oh knowledgeable reader?

So I’ve done the next best thing, and taken a long weekend off. And guess what I’m going to do? Yep – cook, eat, drink and be merry. And maybe even visit a restaurant or two.

Now, that’s a weekend