Britain's got talent but the tone deaf electrician working next door certainly has not got any

Maybe they teach it at trade schools: here's your plaster, here's your trowel, now whistle like a demented bird with a wing trapped in barbed wire and intersperse it with out of tune warbling of some song that you only know one line to and no one else has ever heard.

Plasterers, electricians, plumbers (I once had the misfortune to have a plumber arrive with what at first appeared to be a huge tool chest but was, in fact, a sound system big enough to host a party in the average urban park) and of course brick layers.

Maybe he's fallen down a hole in the floor and is actually crying out in pain. It's hard to tell above my own screams of Munchian anguish.

Whatever happened to Milk-in-a-Bag?

Some milk. In a bag.
Still popular in Canada apparently.

I was having a beer-fueled discussion the other day and we decided the point of differentiation between being old and young was whether or not you remember when milk came in bags. The teenaged-studenty types who work behind the bar thought the whole concept was ridiculous, but us potential-summer-wine-cast-members remember the sopping wet mass of leaking milk bags you used to get in supermarkets and corner shops which had a tendency to completely lose their structural integrity as soon as you snipped a corner off. If you were lucky, and you strategically positioned your cup of tea and cereal bowl you could catch at least some of the milk on it's inevitable downward journey to the floor.


Spar. Guilty as charged.

I seem to remember this fantastic example of packaging technology was particularly prevalent in Spar shops in Wales and Ambleside and other such places where you'd be buying the milk for camping purposes. Which somehow made the whole thing even more inappropriate.

Along then, came the evil Tetra-Pak, and milk in a bag was no more.

RIP Milk in a Bag.

Or is it?

Because while pootling around on t'interweb the other day I stumbled upon this fascinating bit of footage on the BBC's website.

It seems Milk-in-a-bag is to have it's renaissance, and shall grow to be known and loved by a whole new generation. Unfortunately however, it seems the current manufacturers have not quite grasped the concept and have tried to create a boring plastic jug system to enable easy pouring and mess-free opening. Certainly no fun in that.

Kids, ditch the jug, wrestle with the polythene-clad-liquid and enjoy Milk-in-a-Bag for it's sheer pointlessness. This is the stuff memories are made of.

so good they posted it twice

Something to ponder

Do grass and road side leaves taste as good to a sheep as a bacon and egg sandwich does to me?

You know you're middle aged when...

...you don't lust after a Porsche or M3 BMW, your desire is for a push along German lawnmower.

Another fly in my statistical soup

While I'm on one about misleading statistics let me congratulate yell.com on a job well done. Your mailer landed on my desk today. Once I'd figured out where the copy was I saw that the average new business enquiries for businesses in our category of Yellow Pages is over 85 per month. Now we all know that over 85 means 86 but hey! 85 new biz enquiries is bloody good. So I read on. It seems the average of 85 was based on a survey of 3,000 UK adults per month (I'm starting to think we need a bigger ad in Yellow Pages)...over a ten year period. Excuse me? Why do I care how many new business enquiries people were getting in 1996? In a week that has been filled with shysters and snake oil salesmen, Yell you are a shining example of why Bill Hicks told anyone who works in marketing to go kill themselves.

It's a small world (or so some people think)

Above: A Post Office Telecoms researcher giving it large

Post Office Telecoms have found the perfect voice. This may come as a surprise if you consider yourself to have a good voice and weren't approached to be part of their rigorous study but they decided that they only needed to listen to 50 voices to find perfection. Since they were searching for the perfect male and female voices they hopefully listened to 25 of each though being the Post Office they probably told the researchers that 1 woman and 49 men or any combination between 1 of one and 49 of the other would suffice.

Given the world's population is around 6.7 billion, even allowing for mutes and babies, a sample of 50 doesn't quite seem enough to qualify your findings as the perfect voice.