Mr Mist’s Blog

Mostly found in Denmark.

So now you know where to go

Oh yes. Kaboom!

We’re back from Rome! Also, our luggage has managed to make it back from Rome just now, too. It did not make it back with us yesterday. We almost did not make it because our first flight out was delayed a lot. We had to run across Frankfurt airport to get the next plane. I guess our cases were not running quickly enough. Some photos to follow, once they’ve all been sorted out.

The Chinese Olympic Games opened today with an amazing opening cermony that was an incredible spectacle. It defies belief as to how the London show will be able to come up with anything anywhere near as impressive. Some useless mish-mash showing how “multi-cultural” the UK is will just pale into insignificance compared to such a lavish display of Chinese cultural passion. It was very easy to forget the bad press happening around China and simply stare in awe at the opening ceremony. Most impressive.

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.