davidcook

Be afraid. For possibly the first time ever, I think I've noticed a fashion trend.
Around here, at least, women's hair has gone Straight. Dead straight - not a curl, wave or perm to be seen. A few weeks back, we were out with the fencing club bunch (at a pub, of course), and a group of 10-12 women came in wearing Saturday-night-going-out clothes, and every one of them had loose, straight hair. While out on NYE a large number of the women I saw, possibly the majority of them, had straight hair. Straight hair, but never longer than shoulder length - perhaps a legacy of following previous hair trends ?
On TV, too, there are ads for shampoos which supposedly leave your hair straight, and if your hair is too non-conformist for the shampoo, electrically heated hair-squishingstraightening gadgets.
Meanwhile, rwrylsin has never had her hair cut, and her hair is blonde, straight, and below-waist-length. She's accidentally trendy :-)

Does anyone know a good site that has daily rainfall stats for the UK ?

The Bureau of Meteorology site is the obvious place ... but I can't find it there. Neither the Glasgow observations page nor the hourly observations page for the UK include details of rainfall. There's a summary page which shows the top 10 rainfall totals, but (amazingly) Glasgow is often not one of the 10 wettest places in the UK on a given day. It looks like the BoM want to charge for anything beyond basic weather data, but surely rainfall is pretty basic ?


Obviously I've been spoiled by Australia's BoM site, which will happily give you the past 72 hours of observations (including rainfall) from any of their automatic measuring stations.

Any ideas ? Would anyone other than the BoM actually keep weather data ?

A week ago, I received an invitation to join NetHalo. Looks to be another keeping-people-in-touch networking thing ... maybe. Has anyone dealt with them before ? Did one of you lot send this ?

Recently, I expressed my amazement at the faulty mathematics in an ad.

Amazingly, another company has been advertising their January sales lately, with the same "Half price, then a further 10% off" line[1], and the same dismal grasp of simple arithmetic ! They list three prices on screen for a kitchen - £3259, £1959, and £1759 [2]. I see no combination of 50% and 10% reductions that can connect those numbers. Gah !

Meanwhile, with the new year has come a rash of ads promoting the first parts of various weekly collectable series which teach you to draw or let you build a radio-controlled car or the Cutty Sark or suchlike. At least two of these series have 100 parts, at a regular price of £5 or £6. So, for the low, low price of £500 or £600 ... you can try to cobble together the model, assuming you don't miss any parts. A model that couldn't possibly cost more than £100 in one go from a model shop (even there, I'm erring on the side of caution, and I'm fairly sure they'd actually be under £50). Yet, you imagine that they must get suckers customers for these things. Who ? Who are these people who'd prefer to spend £500 rather than under £100 for the same thing ?

. o O (and what have I got that I can sell to them ? Must be a way to make a profit here :-) )


[1] Yup, once again, us poor viewers can't handle such difficult concepts as ... 60% off. It's just too hard for our poor little brains.

[2] The "59"s in those prices could well be 79s or 69s or 99s, two of the numbers are struck out , and they flash by quite quickly. My point stands ...