Chatting at work, at brew and lunchtime as you do, we got into the subject of celebrity death pools; pick a celeb you believe most likely to die. You know, harmless fun.

I've two:

• Ayman Al-Zawahiri
• Vera Lynn

Something of a contrast there.

#QuoteSunday (a tradition on pnut.io):

"It is a little known fact that Professor Stephen Hawking (RIP) invented all of the financial instruments backing the concept popularly known as Quantitative Easing, thereby saving the British economy from ruin during the dark times following the unprecedented and utterly-unforeseeable Great Squeeze." – Sir Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer (1924-1929).

A conversation about dog breeds (one of the family mentioned the noble 'Leerdammer') and this morning's terrorism news (they don't want their citizenship to be revoked) prompted a search for a once well-known cosmetics brand. Here's the statement from the Google summary of their web site (my emphasis):

"Coty is a global beauty company making cosmetic, skin, fragrance & hair brands. We positively disrupt to create a radically inclusive world of beauty."

What the Fark, how bereft of original ideas must their PR team be, swallowing a buzzword dictionary to get to those ridicul

I responded to this Fark.com forum post:

"The farkisms page seems somewhat put of date. Can we suggest some updates?" (Link goes to Farkisms, a somewhat stale list of sayings or memes used quite often at Fark.)

It was unfortunately redlit (not accepted for inclusion on the main page) so you probably won't see it.

My reply:

Of our times, a couple or three to spark comment:

• D2S / Donnie Two Scoops – the predisent of the Disunited States of America; known for his insistence on two (2) scoops of frozen dessert vs his guests' one (1). AKA 45, a sequential number assigned to him on not winning the popular vote in the 2016 Presidential Election. Compared unfavourably to even the 43rd holder of one of the numbers.

• Snekretary – a serpently figure of fun based on the one-time White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer, also a figure of fun due in no small part to his creativity with truthiness in behalf of his boss. Arch-nemesis: the Mongoose. See impaler

• Welcome to Fark – a phrase or pictorial meme offered as evidence, an easy rebuttal of sorts, of another poster's ineptitude in assessing a situation they advanced an opinion on.

If you're not a Farker (or work with me) this is probably as meaningless as my last-but-one post.

"Remember to look up at the stars."

• Stephen Hawking.

There is apparently a social convention that, when the adult in charge of a group of children in church repeatedly tries but fails to stop them talking, one must not turn round and tell them, other people's children that is, to shut up.

Well, that's a bit crap isn't it.

Today I achieved a lifetime's ambition, the middle finger of a man extended in my specific direction. It happens only after the phrase "Usual message", uttered (or blurted) in his presence; oddly the context is, unusually, utterly irrelevant.

Here, by the way, that precise combination of words is inextricably linked to the notion the man may, or may not, be most easily described by another word rhyming with 'crunt'. (But I've seen no evidence whatsoever of his 'cruntiness'.)

Thanks sir; even though mine was accidental, it still makes me feel good to be number one.

If you don't work with me this'll make no sense.

Regarding Donald Trump's uncanny ability to toss a word salad:

Someone ought to deaf-sign (BSL) what he says, run that through a round of Chinese Whispers, and translate back into English after filtering through a Khoisan language speaker without technical knowledge of, er… pretty much anything. When that's done, ROT-13 it and run it through a battery of mathematical transformations executed on a sub-120MHz Pentium.

See, nothing random there.

(First posted at Fark.com.)

How I explain Fark.com:

"It's a news aggregator site with a difference; people submit headlines and go to the forums to excoriate others for the smallest thing, like making a Brussels sprout burrito. Would you try one, just to humour me, please?"

Bradley Wiggins is the latest target in the establishment's moral crusade, a bunch of MPs being of the opinion Cycling's sporting ethics have been breached.

They're suggesting that drugs deemed to be legal by the sport's governing body have been used to artificially enhance Team Sky's performance in general and Wiggins' in particular. No mention has been made of the possibility that every team at the top of world cycling might be doing exactly the same; that'd be inconvenient, hackers won't have presented 'em the evidence on a silver platter.

This sad bunch, by the way, is drawn partly from the MPs awarded a pay rise approaching double that of the public sector workers they're tasked with awarding pay rises to. There's the ethics violations, the obvious lack of moral fibre.