I actually knew someone who died of that parrot disease. Psittacosis? He caught it off a budgie.

Here it is: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psittacosis

Thanks for posting this. I’ve got an Oppo Find, a few years old now but it’s the best phone I’ve had in terms of keeping up its speed, battery etc with age. The camera is a little sub-par though, so it’s interesting seeing how much better this new Oppo’s camera is. I would never have considered buying a foldable, but I’m curious to see one in person after reading this. I reckon my current phone has another good year in it though.

It’s even more mildly infuriating for us across the pond… we don’t have Thanksgiving but we now get the Black Friday/ Cyber Monday nonsense. Grrr!

I’m trying both Outlook and Proton. I’ll probably go with Proton, but aaaaargh, the thought of all the tedious work involved… I’ve got better things to do!

I stopped using Chrome a while back, but still use Gmail because I’m lazy. Every time I crank open Gmail in another browser, Google whines at me to use Chrome. That grizzling pop-up is now the main reason I don’t use Chrome, and it will eventually drive me to migrate away from Gmail. DON’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO!

Oh this gave me a nice nostalgia hit! Back in the late 60s I think it was, there was a similar scheme where you sent a dollar to the address at the top of a list of ten names, added your name to the bottom of the list and sent the list to ten other people. There were various other chain letter things going around, threatening a curse if you didn’t pass them on, but this was a specific cash one. I had quite an argument with the idiot who sent it to me - he said the chain wouldn’t work if I broke it. You were supposed to end up with hundreds of dollars.

Two things helped me: learning not to listen to the “noise” (it’s not truly noise, it’s a kind of nerve damage), and hearing aids. When I first put the aids in the tinnitus vanished. The downside is that all the work I’d put in to not listening was overturned, because I “heard” the sounds again when I took the aids out. Still nice to have that respite though.

Training yourself to not listen to the racket isn’t easy, but it is so worthwhile. Turn your attention away to something else - a smell, a photograph, your pet, anything. Focus away. Just thinking about tinnitus is making it “audible” to me, lol! It’s not real sounds, it’s your poor abused nerve endings firing off random signals. White noise works for a lot of people, but it never has for me.

Visit https://tinnitus.org/ for more info. There’s a download section where you can get a pdf of a scientific paper describing the method.

My bad knee is now titanium and my good knee has become my bad knee.

AI is so bad at hands.

My favourite is the Royal Bank fiver with mackerel on one side and Nan Shepherd on the other. Apparently there are clouds of midges that only show under UV light, but I’ve never had a UV light and and an RBS fiver at the same time to check.

That’s how I get WhatsApp on a desktop browser, have done for years. Sometimes I’m sending a photo that’s only on the hard drive. Also it’s easier to type.

I was adopted by a stray kitten and had her spayed when she was old enough. A friend told me I had taken away her “choice” to reproduce. I asked her how many of my cat’s hypothetical offspring she was willing to adopt - there would be I guess an annual litter of four or more to choose from. Yeah no.

In the end I moved countries and gave the cat away. I would never have another one, nice as she was. There’s a family of voles living in my garden, half a dozen frogs in the pond and lots of birds visit my trees. I support them mainly by leaving them to go about their business.

He’s the reason I left the Co-op Bank - he was chairman. I figured if they had a loon like that at the top they couldn’t be trusted with my money.

England, Scotland and Wales are all there though. Northern Ireland… I don’t think they have a national flag they all agree on.

I’m sharing this with people I know who are having a hard time (bereavement). It’s lovely, thank you.

I honestly think I’m immune or something. I pretty much followed all the lockdown rules, though I didn’t go disinfecting my groceries like some people I know. After things loosened up I went on a day trip with a group of friends, and we all had dinner & drinks together afterwards. One woman unknowing had COVID, and over the next few days everyone else came down with it. Except me. Last Christmas I spent with close friends, lots of kissing and hugging - COVID for them but not me. I still get all my shots (five so far), I’m scared of long COVID more than anything. I’m too busy to be long-term sick.

Edit just to add that I tested negative every day for a week after those exposures.

I’d love to know why they moved the kalamata olives from the section with pickled onions, gherkins etc to a section of shelving next to the pet food, along with other Greek foodstuffs such as antipasti, pesto and Bolognese sauce. Because that one really had me scratching my head.

We had a test of the national emergency system here in the UK a couple of months back, a broadcast message via your phone. I knew it was coming so it wasn’t a total shock, but a) I was driving, b) my phone is Bluetoothed to my hearing aids, and c) I was on holiday in north Wales, so the message was in Welsh. Nearly shat myself.