CABINET OF CURIOSITIES (NEW CONCEPTS)

[Mick Harper]

Spare a thought for drug dealers and their johns in these trying times. It's no fun practically bellowing your order for all to hear then having to catch the crack wraps coming back like some demented performing seal. When oh when are they going to recognise that these people are front line staff.

[Mick Harper]

It's a savanna out there.

[Mick Harper]

Sainsbury. Anchor Spreadable. Four pounds ten! One for the Profiteers Hotline, I think. Don't worry, I've already reported This Tory Government.

[Mick Harper]

If all opinion surveys were not done by phone before they are now, so I must report an interesting statistical wrinkle. I have had, shall we say, a complex series of adventures with my gas engineers recently so when I was asked whether I wanted to take part in a "five-to-ten minute evaluation" of it, I was unusually receptive. After a minute, however, the woman at the other end urgently suggested we stopped and 'did it another time' after the first two questions elicited from me, "Well, do you mean 1 to 5 for the first abortive visit or etc etc." I got the strong feeling that "Respondent unresponsive" got entered rather than "Gas engineers scored one where one is exceptionally poor."

And, since they're in the news at the moment, the last time this sort of thing happened was when my hospital doctor used to ask me to "rate my treatment" whenever things went well, but didn't mention there was a system of doctor rating whenever they didn't.

[Boreades]

[Mick Harper]

This was clearly a bureaucratic scam. Maybe even internal to this hospital (trust). There seemed an inordinate number of people criss-crossing wards without an obvious medical purpose, sometimes with and sometimes without a clipboard. The listlessness of these people was eloquent enough testimony that they knew they were going through the motions. No pun intended.

There is no doubt in my mind that the NHS is an appallingly inefficient service and squeaks by by delivering a product that appears to the consumer to be free, and to be quite a good product as well, as far as I am able to judge. The obvious solutions are two fold

1. To make it genuinely local and let a hundred flowers bloom. Certain to be rejected because of fatuous parroting of 'post code lottery' -- people will always rather everyone suffer than someone else might get a better service than themselves.
2. Privatisation. Certain to be rejected because ... oh, where to begin.

One other possibility occurs to me. Make it genuinely independent of all government control (something like the BBC) appoint a Health Czar (not a Brit) and see what happens. I fear Britain is no longer capable of such radical action.

[Mick Harper]

A typical piece of wallydom from Sainsbury. My giant short crust steak and kidney pie is all ready to go in. Remove all packaging. Does this include the foil tray? With pies, sometimes you should, sometimes you shouldn't. No other supermarket would leave you with your ambivalence. Not that I'm complaining, I like fretting. It's others I worry about. Enough on their plate etc.

[Mick Harper]

My usual Thursday crowd didn't turn up, presumably because of this bug that's going round, so I had to eat it all myself in the end. Quite nice. Filling you might say except obviously it's the crust that's most affected by the in-or-out, foil tray question. None the wiser really. A bit crumbly perhaps. I should have got two and done some sort of trial but you don't think of that at the time, do you?

[Mick Harper]

You wait weeks for a Dominic Cummings story and then one comes along.

[Mick Harper]

I haven't reported on my daily dancing for some time and many of you will be growing anxious. There's no point in sugaring the pill, things are in crisis. On Day One, as soon as I had installed my MP3 Best of Rock Steady I got a pop-up saying that some nice people called Driver Reviver wanted to improve the sound quality for free! I wasn't born yesterday so I pressed the button and sure enough the sound improved. After that it was just a question of ignoring their pop ups hectoring me to improve everything else in my computing life for £29.99 a year to continue dancing the night away. (© Sam Cooke, not on the tape.)

Until two days ago when a pop up said that my actual sound system could be improved free. Again! I didn't know how they knew but I pressed the button. Now my actual half hour tape freezes every seven minutes and will not restart unless I do this, that and something else which ruins the entire experience. I have spent the last two days installing and re-installing everything in sight, including two hours of Realtek High Def Audio software patches (my God, you would have been proud, I could easily have been mistaken for a fully functional software engineer), but it looks as though there is nothing for it but to pay my £29.99 annual tribute to Driver Reviver. Cute. They'd been watching and waiting all the time.

[Chad]

Read this:

https://forums.malwarebytes.com/topic/208430-removal-instructions-for-driver-reviver/

[Mick Harper]

I have. It's misleading. Not to mention above my pay grade.

[Chad]

Download and install the free trial version of ‘Malwarebytes’ and ‘Spybot Search and Destroy’. Re-boot into safe mode and keep running each of these two apps, alternately, until no more crap is detected, then reboot as normal.

(Send cheque for £29.99 to my address.)

[Mick Harper]

I understood the bit in brackets but precious little else. Don't waste your time on me, I'm not worth it.

[Chad]

That’s ok... just follow the bit you understand.