"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.

That expression ‘it never rains but it pours’ is very much in effect right here right now.

The washing machine died yesterday, with my work shirts inside, undies and socks, and a couple of irreplaceable t-shirts. The door locked, no water drained. Yes, I did indeed turn it off and back in again!

I also turned off the cold water inlet valve. Yes I did. Yes.

No, not entirely.

It’s surprising how much water can accumulate in a short timeframe on a tiled utility room floor. And how long it takes to mop it up!

Even the guys who replaced it couldn’t get into the machine, even after taking the back off.

This post should have been entitled ‘The Tale of the Lost Undies’.