Category: Miscellaneous / Insane

  • Shopping online: will you still do it?

    How many different companies have your credit card details? How often do you shop online? This week, we learned that a major data breach left 62,500 SuperValu customers at risk of having their payment details accessed by fraudsters. Customers who paid for SuperValu Getaway Breaks between January 2011 and February 2012 are affected. Around 8,000…

  • Tayto Chocolate: A Thing That Exists

    The evil geniuses at Tayto recently pulled off a PR masterstroke while simultaneously going into bold new flavour combination territory, with their Tayto chocolate bar. This bar is milk chocolate with shards of cheese and onion crisps throughout it. The combination of salty and sweet is long established; and works beautifully with things like salted…

  • Supermarkets: stop wasting our energy and cash

    Were yis born in a barn? People who stand in twos on escalators, lattes served in glasses, and men who wear trainers with business suits, rank alongside open fridges and freezers in shops as my top petty gripes. When the fridge has no door, it wastes huge amounts of energy. They’re all at it, and…

  • Why are you waiting? Just eat!

    Some people are so rude. As in, mostly all of you. Out to dinner in a party of six, four people have food and two are waiting; at home, you serve your guests as fast as you can, but some plates will arrive at least two minutes before the rest. The hungry guests eye up…

  • Student “food” – the best and worst memories

    Rice, peas, and ketchup is the “dinner of champions”. It’s okay to eat pizza that’s been under a pile of unwashed clothes for five days, as long as you pick off the mould. And  Rancheros sandwiches represent a nutritious meal taking in at least two of the major food groups. Ah yes, student food. I’m…

  • Game: Restaurant Smartphone Chicken

    Those of you who are enraged by excessive phone use might enjoy proposing a fiendish new game to your friends.  A Californian blogger, sick of his friends spending meals engrossed in their phones, came up with this challenge: when a group sits down to eat, everyone has to place their mobile in a stack on…

  • Signs of our times

    Minor grievance #7,763,985: you see them here, you see them there, you see them everywhere. They’re the bored-looking souls employed as human signposts, sitting or standing in the cold holding up an ad for a nearby restaurant. The restaurant is always 100 metres that way, or just around the corner. For some reason, I find…

  • Splitting the bill

    Let’s go out to dinner. Let’s have Christmas lunch. Party of ten. Table of six. I’m not drinking. I only had two glasses of wine, everyone else polished off a bottle. Back in the good old days – were you there? I’m struggling to remember them – people went out to dinner and split the…

  • Tesco clamp down on free speech, thought

    This is spooky. A journalist from The Guardian newspaper reports that he was accosted by Tesco staff last week for the “crime” of writing down prices on a notepad. The manager told him that Tesco policy forbids people writing down prices. Presumably, they’re afraid that people will discover they’re not such good value after all.…

  • Guest post: The smell of food

    This is our 1,960th post on this site.  I think it might be my favourite so far. Liam Moore, a friend of mine with a sense of smell that would put a hound to shame, writes a very gorgeous blog about the scents of this planet, and he kindly agreed to write a guest post…