UK here. I’m part time, I earned about £1k last month, and my National Insurance was £3.93, my income tax just under £10. 🤷🏽‍♀️

I can tolerate Mariah, the one I can’t stand is the band aid one, patronising crap. Every damn year I gotta put up with those muppets telling me how nothing ever grows in Africa. Dammit, now I have it in my head!

Iowa? I hardly know 'er!

I got my ears vacuumed the other day at the ENT clinic. Unfortunately I’m one of those people that gets a lot of wax build up. Copying the grown ups using cotton buds to clear the wax just meant I was constantly getting ear infections as a kid. As an adult, I’d get wax build up, I’d try olive oil as my GPs would always recommend, only that would make it clog up more and muffle my hearing. Then the only way to get that big plug of soggy wax out was either to fish it out with a bit of screwed up tissue or a cotton bud, or to blast it with the power shower to dislodge it.

I finally perforated my ear drum in September from an infection that went to the middle ear. Anyway, I got my ears vacuum cleaned on Thursday and was told by the ENT doctor to use a pharmaceutical grade olive oil spray (not drops) every day forever to stop the wax clogging. So let’s hope that works.

I think I was given peroxide based ear drops once when I was 12 or so, but it made my jaw swell so much I couldn’t even eat.

Yes! I was in Walthamstow last week and the difference between their cycle lanes and my area is like night and day. A proper delineated cycle lane, separate from both the road and the pavement. Compare that to my area where the cycle lanes abruptly cut off and are just a line of paint separating them from the pavement, therefore pedestrians walk all over it and I have to use the bus lane to cycle. Walthamstow is like cyclist heaven.

It depends on where you are, of course. Here in the UK, the Murdoch press is a massive influence.

Where Rupert Murdoch? I’d put him as even worse than Bezos.

I have chronic ear problems, and I’ll usually get someone telling me I should try ear candling. Luckily they stop when I tell them to look up the videos of people using the candle with a jar and getting the same “wax” extracted.

Man, that sounds rough. I hope you’re okay now. I suppose the rider got away?

Those delivery riders with their often illegal e-bikes are a scourge. They’re like that in London too. I’ve seen them on pavements with their throttle modded bikes, even though we have both a bus lane and a cycle lane.

I’ve had a black screen of death on Mint. All I was trying to do was crop a video on kdenlive. It black screened on me and somehow even messed up the boot menu so that my Mint was showing up as just Ubuntu. I went straight back to Shotcut after that. I really wanted to switch from Windows to Linux, but so far, Linux, or at least Mint, really hates me. Up till recently, I was still using Mint for my music storage, but it has trouble even moving files onto my phone now. I’ve pretty much given up.

In London about 95% of the ones I see running reds are the uber eats etc riders, pretty much all the modded e-bikes don’t stop at reds. My colleague saw a woman knocked down by one ignoring a red light at a crossing, the woman had kids with her.

I’ve also had a cyclist effing and blinding at me because I stopped at a red.

I thought the term was trumpanzee, but then I suppose that’s insulting to chimps.

👁‍🗨🫦👁‍🗨

The fact that she gets so butthurt every time it’s brought up just makes it sweeter.

Fun fact, Monopoly was in fact plagiarised from the Landlord’s Game, by Liz Magie, which was actually against monopolies. And now it has a monopoly on the format.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord's_Game

I prefer Anti-Monopoly.

8 years? Phhht. Liz Truss wants you to hold her lettuce.

I can confirm. I use Mint and I don’t understand it.

A TFL-run rickshaw service is also something I’m hoping for. I used to see a lot of tuktuks when I worked in central London about 10 years ago. I think a lot of them weren’t licenced or something?

Every time I walk through that car park, half the vehicles are those awful 4x4s. And I always think how nice it would be if all that tarmac was replaced with grass and wildflower beds and footpaths and cycle paths and bike stands and trees. But instead it’s just a rogue’s gallery of these monstrosities.

I wish there was some sort of e-cargo bike taxi service or something so that the “but how will I carry my shopping home” crowd don’t have an excuse.

Ridiculous things.