I've been known to enjoy an occasional glass of cheap Chilean Merlot, but this 1.5 litre bottle of raffle-won posh Iberian pop is way out of my league.
I don't know whether to store it, donate it, drink it, cook with it or fight with it:
Archive for December 2016
Quantum parcel
For many years some of the world's most eminent physicists have laboured hard to prove that some objects can be in more than one place at the same time, thus proving Einstein right even though he thought that he was wrong.
Well, they need not have gone to all that trouble. All they had to do was to use eBay to order something from the States via USPS for delivery in the UK, and then use the internet to track it.
According to the tracking tech, here are all of the places where my parcel was known to be at the same time this morning...
According to eBay, it had been with me for 2 days:
According to the Royal Mail site it was at their international mail centre at Heathrow "being made ready for despatch overseas"...:
but clicking the "Where has my item been?" button told a different story:
And the good old USPS site deemed it to have been delivered, but didn't state that they had delivered it to the Royal Mail and not to me:
I printed off all of the pics above and thrust them into the hands of the counter-jockey at the local sorting-office. He looked from one print to another, and another, and another, and back again, with a look of incredulity on his face.
They had my parcel. There was no Import Duty or Excise Duty, but it would cost me a Royal Mail International Handling Fee of a tenner plus V.A.T. to possess it, which was more that I'd paid the USPS to transport it from Port Saint Lucie to Heathrow via Miami, and more than the cost of the item inside.
But hey, cutting-edge science doesn't come cheap!
And I suppose that paying a burly sorting-office bloke £11.23 to handle my small package has some comedy value 🙂
Standards
Sometimes I despair:
All who tell people that good SPAG isn't important should hang their heads in shame...
before being crucified, shot, buried, dug up and then shot again just to be sure.
And no, I'm not BillC45, innit.
Four notes for a twig?
Seriously?
Four quid?
For a stick?
There's nothing posh about it, there's no special treatment, it's not expensive Amazonian hardwood or a cutting from one of the Two Trees of Valinor.
It's just a stick with a bit of steel studding stuck in the end, two washers and a wing-nut.
Buyers of these probably know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
