2013 — 30 November: Saturday
Strikes me there's an air of desperation1 in overnight emails whose opening gambit is along the lines of "In case you missed it, we're extending our 10% discount until Sunday just for you". Or am I becoming just a teensy bit cynical?
How's this, grasshopper?
My latest in an occasional series of Sudoku times, that is...
I hafta say, I find it...
... hard to believe that the artist Lucian Freud and I would ever have been chums! And, if the Irish Times really thinks Helmut Newton was the King of Kink I can only wonder at the state of the Irish firewall.
Brrr. It's a brisk 4C out there, and a bracing 20.1C in here. I shall linger longer in here, I think. Still, the sun is shining. Yesterday's "Gravity" showed the sun as yellow, by the way, whereas it should have been rather whiter if I believe that colour temperature chart. Is that better, or worse, than the 'goof' with the drinking straw in Kubrick's "2001"?
Being an idle...
... sort of chap, I read what my online bank had to say about "Vishing (Telephone Scam)" — a new one on me — this morning, and was rather taken aback by the third (of four) bullet points in their "How to protect yourself" advice:
Always check the caller's identity. Hang up and call back on the official number that you know and trust for that organisation. It's important that you do this from a different telephone line, such as your mobile phone as the fraudster can stay on the line once you hang up.
"can stay on the line"? How does that work, I wonder? Should I simply revert to pigeon post? [Pause] Hah! Zeno has just kindly straightened me out by chipping away another small piece of my massive technical ignorance. I simply didn't know that the connection between two telephones isn't broken until the caller hangs up... Blimey! (Example scam.)
Sometimes, when I...
... read too much "Private Eye" in one dose, I start thinking I might be running out of ethical banks in the UK.
What kind of mad fool am I, I wonder?