bunn

Bought a pile of Tesco socks, despite my objection to Tesco on their strategy of absurd drama-mongering press releases, like the Marmite thing. Honestly, Tesco always run that kind of story and people always fall for it and share the latest story that is 100% calculated to catch the eye by being zeitgesty and a bit controversial,  support the Tesco brand narrative that they are the champions of cheapness and then softly and silently vanish away afterwards like a boojum.  All Tesco news stories are boojums, except for the odd one that they'd prefer you not to know about, involving accounting scandals.

Anyway, I went to the women's sock section, and it was full of small, elegant and often rather frilly or decorated socks.  None of them looked warm.  You could buy plain black ones, but they were thin and clearly designed for wearing with Smart Womanly Shoes, not stomping through mud in boots.

So I went to the mens section again and stocked up on thick, warm socks in attractive shades of blue, purple and green, for noticeably less than it would have cost me to buy thin chilly Woman Socks.  Fortunately I am blessed with relatively large feet.

FEET HAVE NO GENITALS, TESCO.   I really don't understand why all socks are not presented in one row, going from Very Small to Very Big. I don't object to the existence of thin socks with sparkly kittens on, but I reckon that at least 80% of dogwalkers I meet are female, and there was not a single sock in the 'women's  section' that was well-adapted to that sort of life.


ETA: yeah, yeah, I know.  Don't give them money and then go away and moan about them on the internet : take the money elsewhere to someone who does it right.  But I'm SO lazy and also I have this internet right here to whinge into! 

Generally we only get the cheapest Google promotional gimmickry sent to us, so this does beg the question of whether out there somewhere, a big London agency has received, say, the Gift of Alstroemeria Seed*, the Gift of Unusual Basil*, or perhaps even, the Gift of Exotic Mushroom Spawn.

* a quick look at the Chiltern Seed Catalogue suggests that Alstroemeria plants and novelty basils are right up there when it comes to expensive seed.   I can see why with the novelty basil, every time I grew the weird exciting ones they always got greenfly.  Stick to plain old basil, is my advice. 

I can, in fact, recycle just about as many 'Small Business Surveys' as you care to post to me.   No matter how many you send, it's always going to be quicker and easier for me to fling them straight into the recycling than to open, check figures, tick boxes and put the damn thing back in the post. 

I'm guessing this is also the case for every other small business you are sending these to.  This is why nobody is returning them to you.  Stop!   Instead, perhaps there is an incentive you could spend all that postage money on that might induce small businesses to tell you the stuff you want to know?   An incentive other than 'We will stop sending you surveys' preferably. 

 Daily Mail article about dog that has learned a bunch of words. 

This paragraph took my eye:
"Children pick up vast amounts of language as they go along. For instance, a child of two understands the phrase “I love you”. I don’t think Chaser would know that. By three, a child would say: “Mummy, I love you” and know the meaning. Chaser couldn’t do that.’"

I'd love to know how anyone can objectively test small children for 'comprehension of love' and compare against an animal that cannot actually speak any human language - whether or not it can comprehend it.  Or any human, for that matter.

I feel that a test that can accurately tell you if 'I love you' is being fully understood and appropriately used would have *considerable* value on the open market.

It doesn't pander to the slow of reading, it gets straight to the point. It's clever in how it tells a story, and it showcases a clever technology that really does something, while simultaneously requiring no complexity in the technology that does the marketing.