Blackcircles.com: Worth a click if you’ve got a car

Just a quick plug if you’re in the UK and have a car needing tyres or a service: I’ve just used Blackcircles for the first time, and I’m seriously impressed. As with most online things it saves you money, and if you go for the full fitting option it’ll book you into a local indie place you probably wouldn’t have known about otherwise.

My two tyres were £30 less than the local Kwik-Fit was charging, and I didn’t have to put up with anyone trying to talk me into paying for wheel alignment, new brakes, aircon recharge, etc etc etc. Worth a click if you need car things done.

Homeopaths told to dilute their website claims

The Advertising Standards Authority’s remit has been expanded to include online marketing, and it looks like homeopaths are among the first organisations in the firing line: the Authority is telling them to remove “marketing claims that refer to, or imply, the efficacy of homeopathy for treating or helping specific health conditions.” The ASA isn’t entirely toothless here: it can order the removal of paid-for and sponsored links to offending websites, and intends to name and shame offenders online – which could play merry hell with search engine marketing.

Being a parent is great/shit [delete as applicable]

My friend Squander Two is unhappy about parental negativity.

If someone is about to go on holiday and looking forward to it, telling them it’s going to be shit is considered rude. Telling children that Father Christmas does not exist — especially in December — is the mark of a true bastard. And telling people how The Sixth Sense ends is enough to get you rejected from polite society and roundly slapped.

Yet for some reason it is not only considered OK but is in fact the norm to tell expectant parents that having a child is going to be utter hell.

It’s a good point, but what he’s describing is quite the opposite of my own experience: with the exception of one individual, who appeared to take great pleasure in the thought of the many privations I’d soon endure, I didn’t hear how hard it was going to be, how painful it’d be for my wife, the effect it’d have on my life and so on.

All I heard before becoming a dad was how easy, rewarding and downright delightful parenthood is, and how I would spend my days skipping around like a freckle-faced child in a meadow made of gingerbread and giggles.

Which, of course, is how I generally spend my days anyway.

There’s fraud prevention, and there’s sheer stupidity. Guess which one my bank’s going with?

I spent some money at the weekend. I bought some food in the same supermarket I always buy food. I got some diesel in the same petrol station I always get diesel from. I got some cash from the same cash machine I always get cash from. And because of this, my bank put a fraud prevention hold on the same debit card it always puts a fraud prevention hold on.

I understand the value of fraud prevention, but my bank puts a stop on my card roughly twice a month – and the first sign anything’s gone wrong isn’t the phone call from the bank, but the refusal of your debit card. It’s embarrassing, inconvenient and utterly ridiculous, and apparently there isn’t a single thing I can do about it.

Is anyone else getting annoyed by overzealous card protection systems, or is this just another part of the Giant Global Conspiracy To Piss Me Off?

Dear Casey

This is incredible. Harper’s Magazine:

From hundreds of letters sent to Casey Anthony, a twenty-four-year-old Florida woman arrested in 2008 on charges of murdering her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. Florida’s state attorney’s office, which released the letters in June, has said that it will seek the death penalty in Anthony’s trial, scheduled for next year.

Here’s the first one.

My name is Leon. I’m doing a twenty-year bit for involuntary manslaughter, tampering with evidence, abduction, and abuse of a corpse. It sounds worse than what it really is.

Scottish blog roundup: trumping Trump, climate change and cBeebies

I volunteered to do this week’s Scottish blogging roundup, which – as the name suggests – is a digest of interesting blog posts by or about Scots.

You can’t accuse the Scottish blogosphere of parochialism: this week alone it’s been pondering matters of life and death, architectural vandalism, online identity, climate change, gender politics, coalition cuts and which one of the In The Night Garden characters you’d do if you really had to.

SpiderMonster, the musical

Sesame Street does it again:

A letter from Butlin’s made me laugh

This was on the envelope:

“Nothing else is worse than going to the cinema”

Luv & Hat is a funny blog by Stuart Heritage, who writes for The Guardian, and Robyn Wilder, who is a woman. Each post takes a single subject and one of the duo praises it while the other damns it. Today’s post on cinemas made me laugh.

Nothing else is worse than going to the cinema. Nothing else in the world. Having a nosebleed is better than going to the cinema. Falling down the stairs is better than going to the cinema. Catching a sexually transmitted disease from a zoo animal, then drinking a pint of someone else’s sick and then taking a naked tour of a wasp factory while a crying pensioner describes the last ten minutes of Requiem For a Dream to you in graphic detail is better than going to the cinema. The subtext of this paragraph is that I don’t really like going to the cinema very much.

A visit from Bat Hound

My daughter is a little bit obsessed with the Cartoon Network’s Krypto The Superdog, a cartoon caper featuring the titular Krypto – Superman’s childhood pet, apparently – and Ace the Bat Hound, who goes up against the Joker’s hyenas and various other supervillains’ super pets.

It’s funny stuff, but the funniest thing of all is that my daughter *becomes* Bat Hound. Her eyes become slits, her back straightens and her voice thickens. If you’ve ever wondered what Christian Bale’s Batman would be like if he were a dog played by a three-year-old girl, then my house is the place to find out.

As a result of all of this, I was woken the other day from a perfectly pleasant late afternoon nap to discover Ace the Bat Hound on my bed. “Time to get up, daddy,” the Bat Hound snarled. I said something groggily, and the Bat Hound’s eyes became narrower still. “Time. To. Get. Up.” And with a swish of a cloak – actually a pink raincoat, its hood hooked over a three-year-old’s forehead – the Bat Hound moved to the end of the bed. Two front paws were raised, superhero-style, and a single command was barked: “Doggy slide!” And then the Bat Hound was gone.

Children are weird.