too much football for a month

london 6.32pm 22.3C sunny 2018

its hari raya puasa today, but you wont notice it here in uk as they dont celebrate it. however, the malaysian group here have organised a dinner tomorrow, in a restaurant in harrow. harrow is way out west of london, but i guess it is better value than if they hold it in one of the central london malaysian restaurants. i think it is also a good thing to give some business to the outlying restaurants outside central london. there are 24 people booked to go, and there is a waiting list. i am not one of them, haha. too lazy to go there.

today is also the start of the world football matches for the world cup. the opening ceremony and first game has just been broadcast live on bbc. i did not bother to see it, but simon saw it. i dont know who won. haha. and not bothered to find out. i think this world cup happens every 5yrs, 4yrs, ( i found an entry i made in 2014 about it)but i dont recall it was so much featured on tv the last time. that must be in 2013. 2014. perhaps the bbc had not paid so much to televise it live that time and so lost the rights in the bidding to broadcast it live. this year they have got lucky and got it. perhaps with all the controversy of it being held in russia and russia being so hostile to gays, so much so that they are advising gay fans to not go there to see it, so maybe it is not so attractive to the tv stations to bid high price for the rights to broadcast it. whatever, we are now getting a lot of these matches being broadcast live by the bbc and clogging up the program guides. this year i know usa lost the qualifying matches so are not going to be in the running for it even. it just goes to show the usa is not really that big a fan of soccer. i wonder if there are live matches of the football being broadcast elsewhere in the world. maybe it is over the internet so people from other parts of the world can watch it. the time difference with russia makes these matches happen in  daytime in uk, rather than in the early hours of the morning.

the newspapers are so short of news, they are all printing out the timetable of matches and giving it as a free supplement. newspapers are always on the lookout for news to print. but summer time, everyone is not making news. 

 

 

local news

london 12.38pm 18.8C hazy bright victoria library wednesday 2017

very surprised to read in the dailymail newspaper that lady lucan had died. none of the other papers reported it. and when i went to look at the website i find more details. even pictures of her mews house. much more details than in the newspaper article. i think this is a scoop for the daily mail to report her death before all the other papers. and it reported that 

She spent her days going to library, listening to LBC radio and walking in nearby Green Park.

i have seen her as a regular at this victoria library. she comes in to read the daily mail, and to use the library computers. i saw her a few days ago, can’t remember howlong ago… but it seems she had  missed her usual activities 3days ago. she had been estranged from her children for a long time. 50yrs it seems, and have not seen her grandchildren at all. 

 we tend to leave her alone, and not pester her with recognition. esp when at one time the daily mail was doing a big spread on her talking about her ex husband, the former lord lucan who tried to murder her and murdered the nanny instead. it is a bit strange to read of the death of someone when u feel you ‘know’ them vaguely because u have seen them in your daily life and is so much in the news.

so she had died at 80yrs old. if her ex husband had been alive he would be 82yrs old. 

added. 14.1.17 sunday 4.8C 00.44am this article about lady lucan’s will, she gave it all to shelter, a homeless charity. it seems she committed suicide by drinking a lethal cocktail of drugs mistakenly believing she has parkinson’s disease. 

following the news has become a habit

london 2.41pm 7.6C cloudy wednesday 2017

7.16pm 2.9C dry. forecast to be -2C in the early hours tomorrow. would be interesting if it really did get to those temperatures.

things are uneventful here in uk. so much so that they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel of news by reporting an earthquake of 3.8 , 100miles at sea  from scarborough. hardly anyone noticed it. the headline says this is  the biggest earthquake in uk for 10yrs. all sounds terrifying and all that doesn’t it? you can tell,they are really desperate to fill the pages of the newspapers, or news websites if they have to drag this in.

 to me it is just very nice to have no news to angst over. but i can see those whose business is to report news dont like it.

 there is a dearth of news, because the newspapers are all very thin. haha. dont seem worth it to buy them when they are so thin. i read them in the library of course and skim through them quickly. only the daily mail seem to be full of news. i read it online, as the local print version is being hogged in the library by one of the regulars who hang about the place. he sleeps over it like a dog in the manger. silly man really. it is really surprising that no one has shopped him to the librarians and get him kicked out. people are not allowed to sleep in the library. i guess people are really quite tolerant.

i have seen quite a number of the other users have stopped going there. i think he is the cause of it. they are similar to myself, because i too have stopped going to that branch for a bit. until the other libraries stopped buying  the full range of newspapers. this one still continue to buy them.

i suppose i got a love hate relationship with the news. haha. some times it is so depressing to read any news. but it can be very compulsive to do so, like watching something so horrific that u are kind of transfixed to watch even though u want to stop.

it’s a bit like a habit. now and then i can stop myself so i stop going to the library for a bit. in fact, i have loosened up a bit, in the past i would go first thing when it open its doors in the morning and spend the whole morning there. thank goodness i got out of that habit.  but i still check the news online.

it is a harmless habit, i think, so i continue with it. it does me no harm, at least i like to think that… because i know how to keep the news in perspective and not get too carried away by what i read. i take a lot of stuff reported with scepticism. and usually it is justified when they later report the incident with further details and u get a more rounded picture of that event.

at least it keeps me away from the alcohol. haha. though i think it is me not having a addictive personality. i can never get myself so addicted to anything that i do it obsessively.

i think boredom may be the biggest reason why people drink or overeat. it starts with boredom and then they get hooked.  i can see people being so bored that they resort to drink, or to food, and make gluttons of themselves and grow fat and then angst over it, and create something to worry about. 

 

 

daily mail is not that bad really

london 2.19pm 10.5C drizzle saturday 2016 marylebone library

i have said that the newspapers are all having the same news stories, and mimicking the internet in its sameness, but this morning i was reading the daily mail and it has a few scoops that the others dont have. one about a mother buying baby milk, another about a grandmother being jailed for defying the secretive family court.  

and then there are those asking lego to stop advertising or linking  with the daily mail to giveaway free lego toys; because they object to the mail’s reportage of those children who are allowed to come to uk who look like adults and other immigration issues saying the daily mail is  racist for doing so. well, that is the usual accusation when these things occur.

yet i think it perfectly reasonable to ask that the children taken in are really children and not adults otherwise we shall put at risk carers and children who mix with these ‘children’ who are really adults. that is why i think those asking to boycott the daily mail are wrong. they are trying to censor articles about immigration, and trying to say all those people are refugees. nothing could be further from the truth. why they cannot say vet those illegally entering the country to make sure they are genuine refugees, and send the rest back. it seems the common sense thing to do , dont u agree? 

like now i read of a article saying the authorities did not prosecute those who abort their female babies, for fear of being called racists. 

the uk gets itself all in a twist trying to not appear to be racists, when we should condemn such  barbaric practises, (like getting rid of girl children from being born, or circumcision/genital multilation), that custom or religion make them do it to their children. no one says anything against it simply because it is their religion or custom and u are not supposed to object to someone’s religious beliefs or custom. talking of killing girl foetuses , i can understand why people consider abortion on demand is in the same category. killing unborn babies just because u dont want them. when there is contraception to prevent it, women who use abortion as a form of birth control are taking advantage of the abortion laws that allow abortion on demand. 

it is the same with the rochester asian gang of child groomers. the authorities overlooked their activities,or dare not pursue them for fear of being accused of being racists. 

i read of that tesco bank being hacked and accounts have money taken away… and i dont hear of any of the newspapers writing outrage articles condeming tesco about it, and yet when talk talk got hacked there was this huge anger and blaming. why is that? just because tesco bears the cost of all the money stolen they think it is allright then. it seems double standards here. 

 no one directly lost money from the talktalk hack. only a few people who foolishly gave the crooks who phoned them up with their details telling them to change their bank accounts and to transfer money to them to open another account. i dont hold a brief for the daily mail, but i can recognise that they do some good investigative stuff, as well as ask questions about immigration, and eu stuff that are not in uk interests. 

Digital StillCamera

Digital StillCamera

can we believe the news nowadays

london 1.34pm 13.6C sunny friday 2016 pimlico library

i could not find the times newspaper in this library. at first i thought someone had taken it away but then i looked at the previous days shelf and found there is no cardboard holder for the times.

so i asked the librarian and he said yes they have ceased to take the times paper. and showed me a notice , with its face turned to the wall, saying  they have stopped taking in the times and i newspapers. it is the first time i seen that notice, but maybe it had been there all along but with its face to the wall, i have overlooked it.

 hmm, i wonder if it applies only to this branch. different branches have their own policy as to what newspapers they take.

they still take the sunday times though.its the only sunday paper they take. i have noticed that the telegraph website is now introducing premium articles which wont allow u to read it unless u pay. previously they would give u a quota of articles that u can read free but i think they realise it can be side stepped by anyone clearing their computer cache.

so now we have the times website completely shut to non paying readers, and the telegraph website restricted certain articles. hmm, will it make a difference i wonder? i doubt it, in that i dont think it will make people want to pay. after all there are lots of other papers which are still free. i have in front of me the evening standard, and they are free. in fact they got the trump win ahead of all the other papers  because they come out in the afternoon. 

the library shelves, now even the news can be fiction. what can u believe nowadays… there is no single authority one can turn to for true news.

actually i have noticed the websites of the free newspapers have a lot of click bait articles, usually with titles like ’10 things that …’ or ‘you would not believe what so and so did …’ just to get u curious to click on it to read it.

also it seems during the american elections they have lots of news websites that publish false news. and that fools so many into retweeting them or re posting them in other social media , like facebook.  and even facebook has taken to posting these false news websites and not differentiating them from legitimate news sources. so nowadays one have to take everything one reads with a huge pinch of salt and not automatically believes it. it seems the false newswebsites are paid for by advertisers who unwittingly have their advertisements placed in them by agencies who place ads. and this link says macedonian kids are setting up these news websites and making money out of it. can we believe that report? what is true nowadays… i dont know anymore. 

that seems to be one consequence of this free for all, and newspapers losing their place in people’s source of news. now anyone can post news items, and there is no way of knowing how true they are.

now newspapers are only good for telling me which supermarket is selling food cheap, or having special offers, or  giving away freebies.

 this twitter feed showed some of the false news seen by facebook users. i did not see them all, as i dont follow facebook, but even myself saw the one about hillary’s body double being reported in the dailymail. and that one about trump saying republicans will believe anything. it was in a mainstream news paper website . i was fooled by it and thought he did really say it and she did really use a body double. it makes me cross that i was fooled by it. so even the legit news website can get fooled by these false news enough to repeat it.

i get cross too when i read news articles where  some girl saying she  was kidnapped and  raped, and then i find another article saying police now say all that was false. i hate that girl and i really wish  that girl to be jailed and fined and the full weight of the law fall on her  for giving false evidence. i really do… and they still name her ‘victim’. grr. 

added. 10.29am 9.4C rain saturday 2016. this morning i saw this in my wordpress newsfeed, it was reporting that facebook had bought crowdtangle. and inside there was this quote

 Among other things, tools like CrowdTangle explain the eerie sameness you find on much of the web these days. When every publisher can see that a zero-effort post on the latest Game of Thrones trailer is outperforming everything else on a competitor’s site, soon every site is posting the latest Game of Thrones trailer.

that comment that there is an eerie sameness in the web is something that now they mention it, i begin to notice. and it is crossing over into the printed newspapers too… they all seem to carry the same news.

 i wonder if all these programs to find out what is most popular also are self perpetrating, and cause the very thing it is monitoring to gain in popularity, just in the very act of it being mentioned and picked. 

15.11.16 added. 6.29pm 15.2C wet tuesday  found this link that says google and facebook are finally stopping their ads from appearing in these fake news websites. 

news items

london 9.45am 14.1C cloudy tuesday 2016

some bits of news this morning which came up in my wordpress newsfeed that i find interesting .

this one showing that dna testing is not all that great , it is fallible. i too have fallen into the idea that it is accurate and taken its result as conclusive .

another article in the same website, theatlantic.com is interesting too. about donald trump’s eldest son and the hotel he is supervising between the capitol and the white house in washington dc. 

 

Digital StillCamera

this is a new child’s contraption i see outside my neighbours flat. he has two kids, and over the years i have seen him with different stuff, prams changing as the child grows up.. , to his most recent one, a two children pram, now this. i shudder at how much all this must cost him. though that two children pram i saw earlier that day at the recycling bins, so i think he may have got it from there. so quite possibly a lot of stuff he got from charity shops or second hand. well,  there are so many of these children stuff to be had, because when the kids grow up, those things are of no use anymore and are discarded. at first i thought it was a child’s tricycle, but on closer look, it is a push chair shaped like a tricycle. what will they think of next? all these useless things to make parents part with their money. it has pedals on the front wheels, so maybe when the kid is old enough, the back push handle can be detached.

added. 8.04pm 14.6C cloudy . it has been rather a dull day all day.

i got an email from john, who lives in bournemouth, telling me he just got back from a holiday in sicily with his friend. from his pictures, it showed a deserted town… so i asked him is it really that empty of people or did he deliberately pointed his camera away from people. sicily is quite remote , at least where i am sitting… but it did look very sunny. they hired a car but seemed to have got trouble driving it, because he said they broke a sidemirror and got a parking ticket. haha.

i got this in my wordpress reader, an expat in the telegraph talking of her move from the city to the countryside. she used to live in abu dhabi, and said there are no flies there, but she had a plague of them now. 

One of these is the plague of flies.  I don’t think the Egyptians could have been more sorely afflicted than we have been.  It seems strange that in a hot place like Abu Dhabi flies are very rarely at all bothersome whereas here in (still pretty chilly) Suffolk they are driving us to distraction.  They swirl in clouds in the kitchen, you find them floating in the bath and in the loo bowl – I found a dead one in my hair the other day.  I don’t want to spray and poison my family so we’ve had to resort to fly papers which are gruesome, obviously they look disgusting and you also have the constant whine of flies in their death throes – especially unpleasant when you’re eating (though I have to admit to a certain grim satisfaction when I hear it).  I’m hoping the problem relates to cycles in the farming year and will calm down. that link is to my wordpress reader but if u cannot get it this is the link to the telegraph.

it makes me realise that the rest of uk is not like london. i would think the countryside would have more flies … all that manure they scatter in the fields must be a huge fly attraction. not to mention all those cattle and sheep, and pigs and chickens all pooting away. haha. another reason not to live in the country if u ask me. haha.

news

london 6.35am 14.4C cloudy wind from south. friday 2015

last night i slept at 7pm, thinking i shall take a short nap and wakeup at 9pm to see the last kingdom, a tv program based on a book by bernard cornwell.(the library had displayed his books on the shelf, and this book was there, but i did not borrow it).  

but i slept right through and woke up at 12.30am, and decided to go right back to sleep again thinking i shall most probably wake up at about 4am, but its great that i woke up at about 6am. can it be possible i slept for 11 hours?

wonderful!, its been ages since i slept for so long. its a thing i do when i was young. its like being young again. haha.

it’s quite warm this morning, i think because there is a south wind blowing. but the sky is overcast. 

last night the fireworks was cancelled because of rain, they said, but i think it is overcast, and with low clouds, so no one can see the fireworks anyway, and it would have been wasted. that is why i think they cancelled it.

and last night there was a live broadcast in the guardian about the mass protestors wearing the guy fawkes mask, as they plan their world wide demonstration. not sure how many attended.

the news online this morning did not say because it was full of the fallout of the plane crash  in sharm in egypt. now we know why the british govt did that unusual step of stopplng all flights… because their intelligence point to a bomb in the luggage hold. and that is why the returning tourists being brought back without their luggage.

at first i thought it was a missile took the plane down. if so, the planes can just be diverted not to fly there,but it is a bomb in the luggage. that is quite difficult to stop, as any one of the luggage handlers can put a bomb there, even if security is very tight with the passengers luggages, it has to extend to vetting all the luggage handlers as well.

the news says it is the price putin is paying, for his bombing of isis. that is the big fear that openly opposing isis will bring down this kind of bombing terrorism on your citizens. it is something that might make a lot of countries keep quiet and not support attacks on isis. if so, that would be a shame.

i think saying if u support war against isis, your citizens will be targetted is a false conclusion. if your security is poor or u give any of these bombers a chance, and they can be from any terrorist organisation, not necessarily from isis,  they will take it. 

somehow  the fall out has affect the russian boeing 737 fleet, as they are all grounded. it might be a coincidence, and have nothing to do with the sharm incident.  i have a feeling that they should have been grounded as long ago as 2013 when one crashed and its tail control was at fault. but it took this long for the russian authorities to be convinced of it.  i suppose you could say russia’s troubles are piling up,  it never rains but pours, what with the oil price so low now. 

added. 7.19pm friday . as usual u get the whingey brits on holiday there complaining. i rather like this katie hopkins article telling them to .stop whinging .

news aggregators

london 7.56am rainy 12.5C wednesday 2015

i get my news from google , as well as other aggregating websites, so this news that the germans are sueing google and others to make them pay for linking their pages makes me wonder if they might not be cutting off their nose to spite their face.

after all, they tried to ban google from linking to some of their sites, and had to reverse that decision because the traffic to those sites dropped drastically.

so if they win this case, google and all the other news aggregates will stop linking to them and then they will be dead because not many will find them.

its one of the dilemmas that news websites have to contend with. give free content and u lose money, but charge viewers and people wont go to you. stop news aggregators from linking to your site, and you lose viewers. so what to do? if someone can come up with a formula which pleases everyone, they would win a fortune.

i wonder if they could do this. tell people that they cannot see everything on the website if they dont pay. i noticed now that the print newspapers contain stuff that is not seen in the website of that same newspaper. so allready we get the message that to get to see everything, u will be better off buying the print newspapers. 

for now, they have been pushing more and more intrusive ads on to viewers. i am beginning to notice it, but all it does is to irritate viewers. apple got a app that blocks ads, but it was too effective and they must have got a lot of complains because they took it off the market. their app blocks other adverts but allow adverts from apple. maybe there is some legal issues here that might make a successful case for sueing apple. that may be the only reason why it was pulled.

its a battle between viewers who want free content but dont want to see adverts that pays for it, and websites that need income to maintain their sites. in the end, perhaps viewers will have to tolerate more intrusive adverts just so they can still get the contents free. i can see a future when more and more power will be given to those sites that facillitate interaction between users. like google, or facebook, or twitter, search engines, the middle men as it were. its hard to call really, because the internet is evolving, and someone somewhere will invent something else that changes the game entirely. its rather exciting in a way. 

daily telegraph

london 6.28am thursday 2015 16.9C

yesterday i find that i have reached my limit for reading the daily telegraph website. they do have interesting articles that make me want to click on them to read. the other websites dont seem to have that. i got a pop up from them asking me to fill up a survey. i thought it will be just another survey asking me how much i like them, but no. it was a very interesting survey, asking me where, in which category, i would find the headlines they suggest. so it is asking me to place the headlines where i would expect them. and i found it quite difficult to do so because many of them could be placed in 2 or more categories and i am undecided which ones take priority.

for eg, there was the headline about drugs in athletics, i thought i shall put it under sports and athletes, but there was no athletes listed, so i had to return to the main menu to try to place it. actually to me i would just put it under news, uk, and put it on the front page. this is because whenever i enter the website i just read the front page where they put a lot of stuff, rather than go individually into the various categories. i think i may miss quite a lot of stuff because of that. but i find it rather tedious to be going into each category as most of it is quite boring really.

at the end of the survey, they ask me if i would like to be included in future surveys, but i said maybe better not, as i am clueless about these things and might inject errors in their samplings. i said that is why i like reading the printed newspaper. i just turn the pages and read from start to end. haha.

i wonder if that is the biggest downside of the websites… it may be difficult to find articles that might interest u, unless u can search for it by knowing the headline. in fact that is how i find articles, i read of it in the printed newspapers, take note of the exact words in the headline, and then type it on the search box of the online website and get to the online article that way. this i do if i want to link that article to my blog and comment on it in my blog. 

 that is why i like google news,(or other news aggregator websites) because it sifts through all the news of all the news websites and bring to my attention things that i might be interested in. and i can go to a lot of different news websites reporting on the same thing and get different versions of it…

in the end, i do like to read the news in a newspaper. it is  a perfect way to find new news, items that i do not know have happened, or interesting articles written that i would normally not know of if and hence miss, if i were to just browse the online news websites. the daily telegraph do have interesting articles that other newspapers dont have. that is why i have used up my quota this month. i find it quite difficult to resist clicking on the headline , because it is so seductively worded and the topic is of interest to me.

take for eg one article showing how you cannot just bring food from home to eat in certain venues or a seaside pier which wont allow u to bring your own food… most of us might suspect it, but they go out and find these places that wont allow u to bring food in and talk about it. 

added 8.12am. i saw this article about long scroll pages. so that is what it is called. i have liked that the telegraph, (and the dailymail website) have front pages that carry a lot of stuff, and scrolls down a long way; so on that one page u can read lots of stuff without having to move to one of their subsections. i like that, and i had thought that is the reason why the daily telegraph and daily mail websites are so popular, and this article says it is catching on with others as well.

 added 21.8.15 8.57am i re read that about the long scroll, and i think in the past with slow internet connections users hated long scroll, because it took ages for the page to appear due to the slow connection. esp when u click on something to expand it to read, and then return to the page and it starts it slow upload again…  but nowadays we have fast broadband, so that is not a problem. 

Newspaper headlines: Middle class drink ‘epidemic’, aid ‘giveaway’ and a galactic cousin – BBC News

Newspaper headlines: Middle class drink ‘epidemic’, aid ‘giveaway’ and a galactic cousin – BBC News.

the front pages of all the newspapers in uk at one go. gives u an idea of what people are talking about.

the bbc website gives such a comprehensive news coverage, and all free.

as for middle aged alcoholics, it does not surprise me . i have noticed the british drink alcohol without meals. it is a british phenomenon. other places associate wine or beer drinking with meals, but not the british. i think it is the pub syndrome. people are used to drinking without any food in pubs. so when the wine industry makes it popular, it is quite a easy thing to add wine to the beer and carry on.

it is a fact that i have found out myself that there is nothing to spend money on really when you grow older.  most of the middle aged are lucky to have bought their houses cheap, before the big boom in prices so their mortgages are small in relation to their income. and the children are all grown up, and there are only so much u can spend on holidays or eating out. in my case, i  dont drink nor smoke and sometimes wonder what i am saving my money for haha.

if i were a drinker i might just spend it on drinks, might as well get some pleasure in life since we are all going to die anyway. haha. so i am not surprised if a middle aged person just quietly drink away. instead what i do is drink a lot of tea.  i figured if i have to pick up a drinking habit i might as well chose drinking tea, without suger or milk.

when u are middle aged, there is nothing that gives more pleasure than drinking.