Back to my niche content…. A new rewards scheme from IHG was announced today, although there are nearly no details other than the above structure of the new scheme, and it doesn’t come into use until March. I’m not sure why a company would launch a rewards scheme during the calendar year as it appears to have even confused them in their own FAQ, let alone card holders. The reduced tier qualification recently announced and confirmed is now only in place until March, so if anyone is quick they can get their status before the changes take that reduced status away.
It looks like a muddled mess to me, not only have their increased their requirements in terms of nights (which I assume means they’re hopeful about the outlook for the hospitality industry for later this year), they’re encouraging people to get status without any clue of what that status looks like. There’s nothing here that looks exciting, but perhaps they’ll surprise and delight me and other card holders.
As another random post, I never knew booking.com even went up to level three until they e-mailed me this, but apparently it’s a new thing. It seems quite clever, they’re saying to hotels that people in level three cancel fewer bookings and are more loyal, so it’s best to offer them larger discounts. I don’t use booking.com all that much, but this might be a slightly handy benefit for when I’m in an area without Accor or IHG hotels….
This is another one of my irrelevant posts, one in a long series. If I’m being honest with myself, the audience for this sort of post is low, even by my standards. Anyway, I won’t let that stop me. Pret have introduced a new loyalty scheme, which replaces their long-standing one where staff give free things to whoever they think looks attractive. I wanted to see what ‘Perks’ I could get, and I did Google it, but no-one seemed to know and a few people were asking. So, with the aiming of getting another two views, here’s one of the answers.
It’s a choice of snack…. Or at least, the first one for me was, I’m sure that they vary.
The list of possible options that I could have had.
And what I went for, as I really quite like these. I know they’re fruit, but they’re dried them out and so that counts a little less as fruit in my eyes. The staff in the busy London Pret said that they hadn’t anyone claim one of these perks to their knowledge, so they weren’t entirely sure how it worked, but it simply involves scanning a QR code and that worked fine.
Anyway, irrelevant post aside, I’ll get back to writing about pubs and history now.
The Good Beer Guide 2022 edition is now out and the CAMRA app has been updated, so I can see which of my favourite pubs have made a reappearance. My delight is mostly reserved to see that the brilliant Hop and Vine is back in, although I’d have refused to have acknowledged that the book even existed if it hadn’t….. (I admit to copying much of this text from last year, but I did check the Hop & Vine first!)
I saw this stupid promotion a few weeks ago and meant to check review sites to see if it worked out. The idea behind it was that customers could go into Burger King and get a random burger for £2. There were very clear warnings all over the Burger King web-site that this wasn’t suitable for vegans, vegetarians, anyone with an allergy, anyone who didn’t eat bacon, anyone who hates halloumi and so on. Realistically, that’s a huge number of people ruled out of the entire promotion.
I thought initially that users of the app could see what random burger they would receive before committing to purchase it, which I thought was quite clever before I went to the web-site to read more. Burger King has had to add to their web-site policies explaining that customers cannot refund these burgers or request any changes. If you don’t like it, the burger has to be binned which doesn’t strike me as the most environmentally friendly option.
Anyway, I’ve gone to look at the reviews and I can’t find a single positive one (and I’ve scrolled through a lot of pages other than the pointless press releases they dumped out at the start of the campaign. I’ve found tens of negative ones though. This one probably sums the whole thing up:
“Burger Roulette is a fake game. 1. Every time I try, I get the same burger… NO surprise, NO roulette 2. They never show you the result in front of you. 3. The roulette is not transparent and kind of cheating roulette. 4. ALL roulette MUST reveal and show to customer in front. This is fake roulette, at least I never seen any fair roulette in front of me!”
How on earth this was Burger King’s big idea of the summer I’ll never quite know. Perhaps people loved the concept very secretly. Anyway, random post over.
[I’m pleased to say that EDF have now resolved this to my satisfaction, although they made it very hard to do so…..]
And a personal rant, but since it’s my blog I’m allowed….
My electricity usage is low, it’s fair to say. For the best part of ten years I’ve been paying British Gas about £10 to £13 per month and all was well. I stupidly switched to EDF, who don’t burden themselves with competence, because I greedily wanted to claim a £50 joining fee. Anyway, they charged me £13 per month for electricity as well, so all remained well.
To cut a long story short, they didn’t read my meter when they said they did, so I had an estimated read and a big bill. We’ll ignore why they told me they had read the meter, but there’s another long story of incompetence there.
They’ve now produced a new bill with my actual meter read that I sent them. My electricity usage is £53.51 from March to October 2021 (thrifty eh?) including standing charge and usage. That’s not per month, that’s in total.
That means that my annual usage is going to come in at around £120 per year, probably slightly less.
How much have EDF decided, with this new bill taken into account, to charge me per month? They’ve gone for £133 per month, so over ten times my actual usage. I don’t know whether they think I have a huge Christmas party for the entire neighbourhood where everyone plugs in lots of devices or am planning to start a cannabis farm or something. Although on a more serious note, reckless actions like this can push people into severe financial hardship and it looks to me like a desperate dash for cash from EDF.
This is Max Hawkins, a programmer who spoke at a TedX event. I’ll use the text they provided as it sums his talk up as well as I can:
“For two years Max let a randomized computer program determine the course of his life. Everything from what he ate and the music he played to the city where he lived was determined by the whim of the computer. The randomizer sent him everywhere from a shopping mall in Japan to a goat farm in rural Slovenia. He tells the story of his randomly generated life: how he stumbled upon the concept of chance, why it became an obsession, and how he discovered that refusing to choose can be a radical act.”
I’m very engaged with this whole random thing, which is partly something that I’ve been doing with GeoGuessr in selecting random locations to visit. Max has a web-site at https://maxhawkins.me/ and he has randomized huge sections of his life in what I consider to be an inspirational manner. He started by writing software to pick him up in an Uber taxi and be dropped off at a random food venue, which even he himself didn’t know the location of until he arrived. He then chose to live in random places, go to random Meetup events and listen to random music. Having the opportunity to live in different places around the world for a month or so brought him so many new perspectives and life experiences.
And there’s something in this. I followed Max’s Spotify playlist, which is 30 random songs generated every day. I found more stuff that I liked on that playlist than I did on Spotify’s own algorithm of recommended music. When I’ve used GeoGuessr locally, going to random places is like a chain reaction of finding other things I never knew existed and then felt the need to investigate. And it creates adventures, such as the national GeoGuessr challenges that Nathan and I have done. On a simple level, just going to read random Wikipedia articles can be an interesting way to pass the time, so many new things to learn and become intrigued by.
I’m not sure that I’ll take the element of the random as far as Max has, but he has managed to be taken out of his comfort zone to try almost endless new experiences. Algorithms can perhaps limit our lives, we follow the recommendations of Google or whoever, but they are really just keeping us within our comfort zones and never showing us anything really new. Often, we might think that our experiences are new because we’ve visited a new pub down the road, but is that enough for a meaningful life?
This was an alert I received from Google a couple of hours ago, they’ve decided that I like notable coffee and notable beers, so they’ve suggested this location. It actually looks pretty decent, but Google has also decided that I don’t seem interested in notable tea (which is probably true to be fair). And this is the danger, it’s sending me to what look like new and interesting locations, but they’re the same sort of places. I will visit, as I see no need to not go to places that I like, but the joy of the random is going somewhere I wasn’t sure I’d like, then discovering it offered something very new and exciting. And, I can quite like innovative teas, so I shouldn’t rule those out.
For my friends, expect a wave of things being done randomly in the future. I don’t think that many of my friends find me particularly predictable anyway (I have a lot of “good ideas”), so they might not be too surprised. Without getting too deep, there’s some sort of order in the chaos as well, so many coincidences and things which felt inevitable. Meeting people and having experiences which were random, but which seemed to be destined to be, as if the universe meant for that to happen.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…. And to catch up after getting behind with these posts, and because I’m getting towards the end of the book, I’m doing three days at once now. How lovely….
Rot Gut
I like the drinking definitions that Grose comes up with, this one is “small beer; called beer-a-bumble – will burst one’s guts before it will make one tumble”. The phrase has been used since at least the late sixteenth century and initially was made with reference to beer, but it later evolved into also meaning wine, whisky and anything vaguely alcoholic. The phrase was also used during the Prohibition period in the United States, where it’s fair to say that the standards of alcoholic drinks fell somewhat.
The Google Ngram of how “rotgut” and “rot gut” have been used over the last century, having become more commonly used in recent decades.
Round Robin
This is another phrase that I hadn’t realised had such a long etymological heritage, being defined by Grose as “a mode of signing remonstrances practised by sailors on board the king’s ships, wherein their names are written in a circle, so that it cannot be discovered who first signed it, or was, in other words, the ringleader”.
The phrase was in use from as early as the middle of the sixteenth century, but the word origins are lost. There’s a theory, which seems to be the most common, that it derives from the French “ruban rond”, when petitions were allegedly signed on a round ribbon. That suggestion doesn’t seem to be very likely to me and it’s also the wrong way round. There is though an interesting blog post about an example of one of these round robins from 1760.
A newspaper article from 1730 about an example of a round robin in use, not entirely successfully on this occasion. There’s a reference to a round piece of paper and I wonder whether the origin of this phrase is just ’round’ because it’s a petition that needs to be presented in that way to give anonymity and ‘robin’ as that’s sort of the shape of the bird.
Today, the phrase is more commonly used with regards to sports tournaments and Christmas cards……
Rum Bubber
And back to the licensed trade, Grose defined this as “a dexterous fellow at stealing silver tankards from inns and taverns”. Customers stealing glasses from pubs can by annoying today for the management, although at least they aren’t as expensive to replace as silver tankards. The word ‘bubber’ is from the seventeenth century and originally meant a drinking bowl and which evolved into a word used to describe anyone who stole plate. This is also one of the definitions that Grose has just lifted out of Nathan Bailey’s “Universal Etymological English Dictionary” which was published in 1721.
The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue was first published at the end of the eighteenth century, and given that the current health crisis is giving too much time to read books, I thought I’d pick a daily word from it until I got bored…. And to catch up after getting behind with these posts, and because I’m getting towards the end of the book, I’m doing three days at once now. How lovely….
Rigmarole
This is defined by Grose as “roundabout, nonsensical. He told a long rigmarole story”, and it was a phrase that would have been new at the time as its earliest recorded usage is from the middle of the eighteenth century. Oxford Languages Dictionary gives an explanation of the origins of the word, which is “apparently an alteration of ragman roll, originally denoting a legal document recording a list of offences.”
Google Ngram helpfully charts the popularity of the word over the last couple of centuries, it’s perhaps a strange word that has persisted in usage as it’s not necessarily easy to spell. In around 1880, the alternative spelling of rigamarole comes into usage, which remains relatively common today.
Roast and Boiled
Back to the military with this definition, which Grose gives as “a nick name for the Life Guards, who are mostly substantial house-keepers; and eat daily of roast and boiled”. The Life Guards are a regiment in the British Army and their heritage goes back to the middle of the seventeenth century. This web-site has details of other nicknames that the regiment managed to acquire, which included The Bangers, Lumpers, The Cheesemongers, The Fly-slicers, The Piccadilly Butchers, The Ticky Tins, The Tin Bellies and The Patent Safeties. That’s quite an impressive list of nicknames that they’ve secured for themselves….
Romeville
A short and concise definition here, simply given as “London, cant”, with cant meaning the criminal community. This sounds all rather exotic, but there’s an alternative version from the eighteenth century which is “Rumville”, although ‘Rum’ here means good. Although there are different spellings, the meaning was the same, which was the canting community felt that London was a city of great opportunity to them. The word fell out of usage in around the 1850s, although New York then took on the same nickname. I think I quite like the idea of London being referred to as ‘Rumville’ though…..
