Small Beds and Large Bears

We’ve finally spent all of our wedding-gift Ikea vouchers, thank Christ. Not that we weren’t grateful for receiving them in the first place, of course: the final bill was reduced by an order of magnitude, which was a welcome surprise. And not that I don’t on one level like Ikea: the remarkably well laid-out showrooms [...]

Buying a house is simultaneously dull and fascinating: dulled by the sheer weight of process and documentation you have to wade through; but enlivened by the way that it impinges on faintly esoteric matters of property law and rightful ownership, and provides you with the sort of in-depth knowledge of where you’re going to live [...]

Late last night I ran out of time and, fearful of the onset of a migraine, didn’t commit this to blog publication. Political bloggers far better than I— especially septicisle—have summarized events better than I might.
Much as feminism is first and foremost about equality and not about misandry, the anger at imported labour at Lindsey [...]

… is present in the myth of consumer empowerment:
Capitalism is about power. That’s why so many elements of it are inexplicable. It is not, and has never been, about rewarding hard work. It’s about using a system that pretends to reward hard work in order to reinforce power relations between employer and employee. It is [...]

monkeyhands discusses real consumer confidence:

… When I hear about “consumer confidence” being low, I think that’s completely the wrong way of framing it. Shopping isn’t a confidence-affirming act.
Real confidence comes when you say “Fuck it. I know how to make bread, so I’m not going to cycle five miles going to three different shops in [...]

Ten minutes later: this, this, this and this.

hatmandu mentioned recently that I have strong Google-fu under certain circumstances; he’s also witnessed the ability of his own LiveJournal to draw in the search rankings. I think all we’re seeing is that Google’s algorithms still work well with trusted, coherent content (false positives notwithstanding).
There’s no easy way to cash in on it, Hat, so [...]

The new Smashing Pumpkins album has pitted my no-sell-out mentality against my desire to avoid nostalgia for its own sake, against my wish for Billy Corgan to write a decent, whistleable album (Courtney Love managed that, if nothing else, with America’s Sweetheart: you’d think the two of them, gosh, after all they’ve been through, they [...]

The local branch of HSBC have no record of the appointment we made with the Indian call centre last week. A day wasted for K, an hour or two wasted for me, because HSBC want to save money and don’t think our custom is worth paying UK wages for telephone operatives.
The call centre, which is [...]

The Radio 4 broadcaster just managed to avoid the normal tautology of “PIN number” in return for saying “personal, four-digit, personal identification number or PIN”. I don’t think that counts as an improvement.
Quite how PINs on credit cards are a great leap forwards for security, I don’t know. People will inevitably change them to something [...]