B. Henderson Asher's Moments of Mirth

I wonder why they've gone after this one specifically? All the supermarkets do a Colin rip off - Sainsbury's have Wiggles and Tesco have Curly and all the other ones do too.

When McVities sued Asda over their Puffin biscuits, which are Penguin ripoffs the outcome was that they could carry on making the biscuits, but they had to change the packaging to look less like Penguins, so perhaps Cuthbert has the most Colin-like packaging? Here's Cuthbert:



I can't find a picture of Colin's packaging in isolation, but the M&S Colin page¹ has it in this picture of the Colin Gift Bag:



Pretty similar, but more so than the Tesco or Sainsbury's versions?





Hardly. Here's a thing too - when Cuthbert went on sale in 2019 Metro wrote a story about it because the people who work for Metro are real journalists covering all the most important stories. This picture featured:



At that point, the Colin packaging, as you can see, is a much darker green than the Cuthbert packaging, but at some point between then and now Colin's packaging has been changed so that it's more like the Cuthbert packaging. Perhaps Aldi should be suing M&S?

¹on which the Colin the Caterpillar trifle recipe looks pretty sweet

Yes, you can. So, Ruth Davidson is trending on the twitters and man, the takes are bad. The tediously predictable horror of the child being brought up wearing dresses. The iamverysmarts rising above it all. The snide political points. The sanctimony about the snide political points. And the desperation to be angry about something, anything

Genuine question here, see that Ruth Davidson and her partner had the bairn today, what happens if they split up? Will the woman have to pay child maintenance?

— John Wood (@johnrw1979) October 26, 2018

Ah, the genuine quiestion! That makes no sense. At least try to veil your misogyny grammatically dude.

I miss livejournal.

— Bobson Dugnutt (@ruudboy) October 26, 2018

So, when I briefly got all livejournally in your faces at the end of last year, many of you were very kind about my mis. 2014 which involved, among other things, not having a job. I repaid this kindness by taking up regular Facebook use, which isn't very good really, is it?

Anyway, just to keep people here updated, I've now got a job! I'm working in the city for one of the clients of my previous employer, and I started yesterday. That was just an induction day in their swanky Mayfair office, so didn't involve any actual work, just a succession of people telling me (and Nick and Gemma and Sophie whose first day it also was) about the company. Today was my first real day, and I did some actual work, and spent some time trying to get my PC _just so_ and went out and bought some lunch in a sandwich shop on Aldgate High Street. (Have you tried walking round Aldgate recently? It's horrific, almost as if they don't want you to get from one end of it to the other. I'm going to go and hunt for lunch in the other direction tomorrow.) The people were all very nice, which is what you expect on your first day really I suppose, but I think they might carry on being nice. Some of them will for sure, because they also worked for my previous employer, and they were nice then. AND it's something of a change for me, because I get to be a C# programmer in my new job, which is going to require a certain amount of bluffinggetting used to, as I've not done a whole lot of that before. I was introduced to something called LINQ today, which is apparently supposed to make code more readable, but in the programs I was looking at it seemed to require the use of triple nested ternary operators. If you don't know what that means, then just be thankful.

Anyway, it's tiring all this work business isn't it? I'm off to bed.

I don't think I've ever even done this meme before. But there's a first time for everything.

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Hmm, that died a bit of a death, didn't it? Anyway, I had a lovely Christmas thanks for asking! I spent it at my parents', and in contrast to everybody else I managed to travel from London to the north of England and back without a single travel issue.

I mostly spent the time doing not very much, and eating too much food, but on Saturday I met up with lots of old school friends and went for a lovely walk here:



which was a lot of fun. Fresher air than you generally get in London too.

So I'm just watching yesterday's Pointless¹, and the question is "Football teams who have played in the Scottish Premier League". Someone has just said "Glasgow". Now, I follow football so it's obvious to me that this is wrong, but am I being harsh in expecting that just existing and vaguely paying attention to what's going on around you should allow you to absorb the name of at least one Scottish football team?

So, another poll. I'm not trying to look for clever answers here, I'd rather you gave an obvious correct answer than a wrong one.




Ooh, it's the next round now, and the category is "Radio 4 programmes". I suspect my readers here would probably do okay on that one.

¹In case you don't know, Pointless is a bit like Family Fortunes in reverse - they ask 100 people to give as many answers as possible to the question, and the contestants have to predict the correct answer that the fewest people gave, ideally a correct answer that none of the 100 people gave.

This isn't going as well as I'd hoped. Here, as a placeholder, have a poll like it's the olden days.

Left it too late to do a proper substantive post again, so I'll do a brief report of the Darwin's Dream exhibition at the Crypt Gallery in St Pancras church, which I visited this week. It was all chicken related stuff - part of the artist, Koen Vanmechelen's ongoing project, The Cosmopolitan Chicken, which involves crossbreeding chickens for the purpose of art. It was interesting, and it's free and on until next Sunday so it's worth checking out if you're in the area with some time to kill.