grumpyf1

Wait... is this Strictly Front Room? Some days, when faced with random stupidity, I can just shrug my shoulders, sigh, and get on with all the important things in life – like eating HobNobs, enjoying a Scottish person say “Curly Wurly” or pondering the bleak reality of my existence. This week, one of those annoying stories hit Peak Stupid. According to an article on the BBC’s news website, the BBC (irony klaxon!) are telling a Dance Teacher that she has to re-name her dance group, as Strictly Curved might mislead people into thinking it’s something to do with their spangly, over-the-top, dance-fest, Strictly Come Dancing. Yes, a 50 year old lady from Essex, Teresa Brady, is being told she must stop using the name for her classes, “dedicated to people with curves and a fuller figure”, or risk a financially ruinous court battle with the media behemoth. The Beeb say they’re “fully supportive of someone running dance classes” – how very generous of them – but believe it’s “import...

Streaming? Er... I watched an episode of Top of the Pops from 1986 earlier. At the time it was originally broadcast, I was 18. Yes, I am that old. At that point in my life, I’d grown up absolutely loving music. TOTP was one of my essential sources of the all important new songs and chart placings, along with Radio 1’s Top 40 show. I was buying lots of vinyl. Recording lots of cassettes. Things were fantastic. But I was just getting the first inkling that there were new styles, bands and artists appearing that – and this was quite a shock to me – I wasn’t particularly enthralled by. Why? Well, up to that point I’d assumed my love of all types of music would be everlasting. To discover otherwise was a bit of shock. Still, the years rolled by and there was still a lot of great music around. True, Rave/House never did anything for me, and most Rap doesn’t float my boat. Sections of the 1990s were rubbish, from my point of view. I was buying lots of CDs. And still recording tapes...

Fire? Just down there on the right... If someone more senior than you at work does or says something that you feel isn’t respectful towards you, what do you do? Point it out to them - they shouldn’t be allowed to do that? Brush it off – it happens? Sulk for a bit? Light a fire and cause £8 million of damage? The latter was exactly what Amazon employee Adris Ali did back in November. He had been working as a picker in their warehouse in Rugely for around three months. Feeling disrespected by a team leader, he set light to a pile of papers and wandered off. By the time the subsequent blaze had been successfully extinguished, £7.3m of stuff had been damaged. Add in nearly three-quarters of a million to clean up and sort the mess out afterwards, and that’s one expensive episode of feeling a bit slighted. Ali will have a bit of time to ponder the damage, and risk to life, his actions caused, during the 48 months he’s going to be spending behind bars. I’m sure he’ll get lots of r...

It's very unlikely that any of this lot just killed a man... Do not adjust your set. It is NOT Christmas yet. It’s easy to see why you might be confused, though. It seems to have become an eagerly anticipated signifier that it’s OK to start the festivities when the John Lewis advert arrives. So when one suddenly appeared on Tuesday during that other institution, The Great British Bake Off, it’s easy to see why some of us might have had a sudden hankering for eggnog and mince pies. Although the lengthy spot, featuring children performing Bohemian Rhapsody as the centrepiece of the world’s most elaborate school play, had no branding until the very end, it was pretty obviously from the same people who give us the heartstring-tugging Xmas epics. But this one had a twist. At the end were not one, but two logos. Different, new, logos. For John Lewis & Partners and Waitrose & Partners. Brace yourselves, everyone – it’s a rebrand! As both are employee owned, the inclu...

Why oh why would anyone not like little Donny? Apparently, chief Oompa-Loompa of the USA, Donald Trump, has no limit to his paranoia. This week, he’s declared that Google are “left-wing” when it comes to search results for “Trump News”. By this, he means that they are being rigged so that the vast majority are negative. Wow. Google have understandably denied this (not the negative bit, but that any political viewpoint is used in the complex algorithm that decides what to bung in front of you when you type something in that little box in your browser). Analysts have pointed out that extra weight is probably given to pages that a lot of other people linked to. There’s no point in asking Google that, though. If they explained that appearing higher in search results could be achieved by putting ice cubes down your pants, there would be a simultaneous water, electricity and freezer shortage as everyone in charge of a website attempted to cram extra frozen water into their underwea...