Wolfie

It's weird but every year, our Christmas shopping just seems to sort of do itself. The same happened with organising our wedding. I've tried saying to Mrs Wolfie how spooky it is but she just gives me a funny look. She probably didn't hear me.

It never did. At least not in my lifetime. It would make a good documentary film but how old is the saying "Today's news is tomorrow's fish & chip paper"? News is about the big, quick impact and twas ever thus.

Giving up smoking. Again.

First rule of Wummery: Don't talk about being a WUM

I was reading at the weekend about the annual royalties from Christmas songs and the ones I can remember: Slade: £1m Mariah Carey: £400k Pogues: £400k Wham: £300k East 17: £100k Wow.

Indeed. I could happily forgo everything all the other food and just have a big bowl of them, with cheese to follow.

You're being oppressed....

What we do in the Shadows - £1.99 to rent on Prime Video A strange mockumentary about house-sharing vampires in New Zealand. Quite chuckle-worthy. 7/10

Of course it is - but it is for everyone else (hopefully) on here too. Where I take issue with your stance: I was bullied for about 10 of my school years - mostly by my "friends". The reasons: 1. For being chubby for most of my childhood 2. For having a stammer 3. For living on a farm (seriously uncool in very middle class Baslow, then Bakewell schools) 4. For having free school dinners (see above) 5. For being smart And yet in your eyes, because I've never experienced racism directly, I'm complicit in the discrimination of others and part of the problem. BS of the highest order, I'm afraid.

Wigan 1-2 Derby Marriott

I once got stung on the doorstep by the RSPCA and signed up for their £2 a month appeal. When I checked the bank statement, they were taking £2 a week instead and when I cancelled the direct debit, I got a nasty letter with pictures of abused puppies etc. I also got bombarded with phone calls from other charities. Disgraceful Now I only give when I can do so anonymously (collection boxes etc). We've been sponsoring a Gambian boy to go to school for a few years but that's through a local charity, so we don't get any hassle from that. Mrs Wolfie takes all Miss Wolfie's old clothes (mostly barely warn) and toys etc to work, so they can be given to kids in care who've got bugger all. I think anyone can probably do this by dropping stuff off at Social Work offices.

There's a noise reduction setting on most TV's, designed to remove visual "noise" from the images. It almost always improves the picture to turn it off, though.

I knew about the noise reduction thing & to turn that off but had never heard of this before.

Turn off the Motion Smoothing, boys & girls...... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46449906 “If you own a modern high-definition television," he said, "there’s a good chance you’re not watching movies the way the filmmakers intended, and the ability for you to do so is not simple to access." Motion smoothing, or interpolation, is a technique that artificially adds additional frames to the moving image in order to prevent blurring - most effective when watching sport. But many in the film industry hate it, however, as it can degrade the image quality of the original film, and alter colouring.

This is it, isn't it. It's all about the context, which is never explained at the time. People get "offended" and jump all over it, then the clickbait news sites (inc BBC) do their normal thing of reporting what's currently trending on Twitter or whatever as "Breaking News". It's dangerous.