Mr Mist’s Blog

Another mass panic is at least partly underway here after the government skillfully told people not to panic buy fuel in advance of the upcoming tanker driver strike. Amazingly, it appears, the govenement is too stupid to have learnt from previous panic buying. The two things that it should have learnt are firstly that a whole group of people are actually too stupid to be told anything at all, and secondly that the absolute worst thing you can do is to say “don’t panic buy”, because - of those people who aren’t too stupid to be told anything at all - some of the rest just hear the word “panic” and act on it. The even more absolute worst thing (if such a thing exists) is to announce “don’t panic buy but by the way some stations are going to run out of petrol“. That truely displays mastery of communication.

Oooer. We were most rudely awakened at 1am this morning by the entire house shaking back and forth for a good few seconds. Apparently the quake measured 5.2 and was felt across the country [news.bbc.co.uk]. The last one I noticed was about 6 years ago now in the West Midlands, but this one was much stronger than that. I thought the house was about to blow up, mainly because the heating was making funny noises earlier in the night. Or I probably imagined that, who knows?

A random story surfaced on BBC News today that Ebay is going to remove the ability for sellers to leave negative feedback about buyers. Yep. Buyers can still leave neg feedback about sellers, but not the other way around. Apparently the reasoning behing this move is that buyers do not leave neg feedback for fear of retaliation. Errr, ok, so fix the system so that you can’t leave realiatory feeback then, don’t break the system by removing one side’s ability to leave feedback at all. That’s just unfair and a nonsense. Poor show I think.

Breaking cow news! Flooding caused a herd of cows to have to swim for their lives in the Scottish Highlands. All 25 animals were rescued successfully

It was revealed today that Terry Pratchett is suffering from a rare form of early onsett Alzheimer"s. Typcially his announcement of this was given in his own amsuing style, treating it, like his books, as a work of comic genius.

In completely unrelated news, I just read that washing your turkey before cooking is actually more likely to result in you being food poisoned than if you do not wash it. This, apparently, because washing is unlikely to actually remove all the bacteria (only proper cooking does this) but will splash it around onto your worktops and utensils, where it will then sit around for ages.

Thirteen days to go!