Walking. Gossip. Travel.

Tag: Random

  • Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 299, 300 and 301

    Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – Day 299, 300 and 301

    Scald Miserables

    Grose’s dictionary refers to this as “a set of mock masons, who in 1744 made a ludicrous procession in ridicule of the Freemasons”.

    © The Trustees of the British Museum

    As this print from 1742 shows, this procession had been going on for a few years and it took place just outside of the boundaries of the City of London. I can’t imagine that the Freemasons were much impressed by this little show, but there were many even at this time who treated the organisation with some disrespect.

    Schism Shop

    On the subject of disrespect, those involved with the dissenting religions in the eighteenth century were often vilified by those who couldn’t believe anyone couldn’t accept everything that the Church of England said was true. The dictionary definition of this is “a dissenting meeting house”, whether that be Quakers, Baptists, Congregationalists or Unitarians, to name just a few. There’s something quite charming though in the abusive term, I like to think that some of the groups would have adopted it almost as a badge of pride. Looking at newspaper archives, the dictionary was ahead of its time, as the term was relatively rare at the end of the eighteenth century, but it became much more commonly used towards the end of the nineteenth century before it died out during the early twentieth century.

    Scourers

    There’s a myth that there used to be a lot more respect for the law in centuries gone by, but there were plenty of robberies in churches in the nineteenth century and no shortage of anti-social behaviour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That is also evident from this dictionary definition, namely “Riotous bucks, who amuse themselves with breaking windows, beating the watch, and assaulting every person they meet: called scouring the streets”. Crime as a whole was also high in the eighteenth century, partly through increased poverty but also through a greater opportunity given the newly wealthy classes. Much as I like city living, I think the rural life was probably safer and more peaceful back in the late eighteenth century when Grose wrote his book.

  • Random Post – European Word Translator on Map

    Random Post – European Word Translator on Map

    As another of my random and pointless posts, I’ve found this handy web-site which shows the translation of an English word across Europe. Hours of fun typing in words, although, for example purposes only, I went for beer.

  • And the Blog is Changing…… All Good Things Must Come to a Sort of End….

    And the Blog is Changing…… All Good Things Must Come to a Sort of End….

    This blog has reached nearly 5,000 posts and it’s becoming really quite difficult for anyone to easily navigate around it. Topics veer between Good Beer Guide pubs to British Airways, from random museum exhibits to Wetherspoons, from Norfolk churches to walking group trips. Eclectic, absolutely, but for search engines and those who drop in occasionally, it’s too difficult to find anything.

    I accept that this blog isn’t the most important media outlet in the country, however much I think that it should be. But, if something is worth doing, then it’s worth doing right. And just to reassure anyone who is concerned (goodness knows who) that the blog is closing, then that definitely won’t be happening. In the future, there will though be just one daily post which encompasses everything exciting (or what I consider exciting, which is very different to what others might define it at) that has taken place in the previous day that I think is worth writing about.

    Which means that there will also now be a series of new web-sites where I’ll focus more specific content on. Over the next few weeks I’ll be creating entirely separate web-sites for:

    Accor Hotels

    British Airways

    Good Beer Guide Pubs

    Long Distance Walking

    Poland

    Random Museum Exhibits

    UK Churches

    Wetherspoon Pubs

    Which will free this blog to become a more navigable site with its one post per day, linking to the above external sites when I think it’s necessary to do so.

    I think it’ll be very lovely and I’ll be making the shift this week to the new style.

  • Random Posts – Booking.com Genius Level Three

    Random Posts – Booking.com Genius Level Three

    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….

  • Burger King – Burger Roulette

    Burger King – Burger Roulette

    Back to my entirely random posts again….

    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.

  • Reviews – The Old Smithy in Ambleside

    Reviews – The Old Smithy in Ambleside

    Apologies for yet another random post….

    Clicking on the above image makes it larger and easier to read, although the language is NSFW. The replies from this fish and chip shop owner are certainly direct and punchy, which makes for some interesting reading. He only replies to Google Reviews I think, or at least not to the TripAdvisor ones at https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Restaurant_Review-g186319-d7780294-Reviews-The_Old_Smithy-Ambleside_Lake_District_Cumbria_England.html where his restaurant is rated at 17/17 in Ambleside which isn’t entirely ideal……..

    Anyway, certainly something of a slightly different style to read on Google reviews…..

  • Max Hawkins and Living Randomly

    Max Hawkins and Living Randomly

    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.

    So, here’s to the random. It’s the future.

  • Random Posts – Pret Hot Shot Drink

    Random Posts – Pret Hot Shot Drink

    Although anyone sensible would likely have a blog that concentrates on just one thing, it’s quite handy to be able to write about any drivel. On that vein I’ll shift over to food & drink issues, and this is a rather lovely little product from Pret. It contains orange, but to that is added turmeric, ginger and cayenne. It does give quite a kick, it’s an inventive product from Pret…..

  • Random Post – Words Usage of Pub and Inn

    Random Post – Words Usage of Pub and Inn

    As an another irrelevant aside, I just noticed this on Google Ngram, which is how frequently the words ‘pub’ and ‘inn’ have been used in literature over the last two centuries.

    It’s no surprise to me that the word ‘inn’ used to be used much more frequently when the word ‘pub’, but I’m puzzled how it is now used more frequently in writing once again.

  • Random – Scarborough’s Railway Bench

    Random – Scarborough’s Railway Bench

    Just as a random post, but I quite liked this story in the Scarborough News about the longest railway bench in the world. Despite having been to Scarborough on numerous occasions, I hadn’t managed to notice this 139 metre long bench which dates to around 1883.

    It’s rather lovely that it has been preserved, although I note that Network Rail have replaced all the nuts and bolts, as well as an undetermined amount of wood. There’s something about Trigger’s broom here that there’s going to be nothing old left other than the original iron supports, but it’s still a very worthwhile project given how so many railway stations and structures have been allowed to crumble.

    NB, as I’ve haven’t been to see this bench, the main photo above is at the start of my very brave second coast to coast walk a few years ago I did with Liam (I was the bravest). Might as well advertise that again here, here are the links  🙂  Coast to Coast Two  [ Day 0 | Day 1 | Day 2 | Day 3 | Day 4 | Day 5 | Day 6 | Day 6+1 ]