Toy Boy

Just a picture of two circles....

I was surprised by how accurate this one is, it probably covers about 90% of the posts made on my home-town FB groups. Including the 'Delete if not aloud' one, lol.

One for the artists, lol.

Each to his own, but I've never seen the attraction, especially for Thai women. Most of the younger lasses have really great skin quality, I'm quite happy with it au naturel, as it were, there's no need to cover it in ink to appreciate it. I could have a long rant about the GF's daft, but I won't bore you and will leave it there...

Let's see you build one for your kids, lol

Don't ask me why it's in USD and not GBP, but I suspect it might well be the truth.

Do you remember your first visit to a McDonald's? For me it was when I was in university in London, probably 1976 or 77. I'd been somewhere with a Welsh-Polish mate for the afternoon and we were starving, somewhere near St. James's Park, and he took me to the nearby McDonald's which must have been one of the first to open in London. I was impressed with the quick, cheap and tasty meal, even as a regular at the take-away KFC by Gloucester Road tube station and the Turkish kebab shop 'The Bosphorous' near South Ken tube station.

I don't know what Wise did to their website yesterday, but having used it a hundred times before it had a different appearance. The 'Send Money' button didn't work, so I messed about with the 'Add Money' button and that worked, but it just took my £1,000 and added it to my account on Wise instead of converting it into THB and sending it here as I thought I'd asked. Eventually, I managed to send the balance of £1,000 in my Wise account (which I've never used before) to my SCB account, but then it was asking me when I was going to send it the £1,000 I'd wanted transferred into THB? So I cancelled that transfer but this morning they've sent me an e-mail congratulating me on having a balance of £1,000 in my Wise account, even though I transferred it to THB yesterday. Talk about disconnected idiots, why did they do this? It made me think of this short but amusing article by Martin Samuel in this morning's Times about his Mercedes EV.

Whoopee! At last, £1,000 resulted in a total of ฿46,152 being deposited into my SCB account. Anyone else finding that Wise on the PC has changed for the worse yet again? This time, it refused to let me send money but insisted on adding it to my balance. I used that to send the £1,000 here, but then it seemed to think I still wanted to transfer another £1,000. Bunch of fecking eejits.

Conn Iggulden's 'The Abbot's Tale' was a fascinating story, covering 7 kings from Athelstan to the early years of Ethelred the Unready. He recommends also reading Tom Holland's 'Athelstan - The Making of England', so that's what I'm doing.

I was surprised by the reaction this one got on FB, it stimulated quite a heated discussion.

I spent a while trying to figure out where the hotel we'd stayed in had been, and I finally remembered that it was the Delta Hotel in Vlaardingen, not Maassluis. This was a fun time, I was working week on/week off with another engineer and he'd found the hotel but had been told by Personnel (what we call HR these days) that it was too posh for the likes of us. It was a weird area, with the river and harbour to the south, while to the north it was mostly greenhouses kept warm by Groningen gas to grow all those Dutch fruit and vegetables. When you got to the sea you had the Hoek van Holland ferry terminal, and north of were some cheap and cheerful beach resorts like Monster. He'd argued the toss with them and eventually they relented, as nobody could find a suitable cheaper alternative. We were on 24-hour duty for the week so had to be able to get to the rig fast when called, but this hotel was 20 km from the wellsite, way too far in normal circumstances. Just north of it, though, was a very fast dual-carriageway that went to De Lier, so we could get to the rig in under 15 minutes if need be. The best part was that we were paid a generous mileage allowance, and driving to and from the rig 4 or 5 times a day meant a lot of extra Guilders in the bank account when the expenses claim was filed. Lovely jubbly.

I recently had a couple of Thai craft wheat beers. Definitely not cheap at around the 150-odd Baht per half-litre can mark, but both were a lot better than the crap that the two big breweries started foisting on an unprepared and unsuspecting Thai public some years ago. The Thai Myth wheat beer was smooth and not unpleasant, but excessively fruity for my taste. I can well imagine the Thais, especially the women, liking that, though. I'm a bit doubtful and suspicious, to be honest, as to whether this degree of citrus flavour is entirely due to the brewing process, or has it been chemically enhanced, or simply had lemon juice added? The Full Moon brewery version had a better balance, at least for my palate, but early on I detected something a bit excessively yeasty in the background. It disappeared after a few minutes, anyway, and that's not a bad drink at all. Given the price, though, why would I choose either of these two when, for the same (or even less) money, I can drink Belgian or German wheat beers made by breweries with half a millennium of history and a global reputation?

Back in the early 80's, I stayed for the best part of 3 months in a fancy hotel in Maasluis, on the northern bank of the river, while we were doing some recompletion and abandonment work on old oil wells in the De Lier field. Looking at the Google map of the area, it seems to have changed enough in the last 40 years that I can hardly recognise it, no need to go back 500 years, lol.

We've all seen those silly maps the Euro-zealots have on their living room walls after Brexit showing the world without Great Britain. Here's a map showing only the world's islands, Oz omitted, I guess, as it's a continent. I like this one for some reason, it's kind of peaceful, lol...