h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Kind of hard to tell from my window whether there's a low pressure belt moving in from the Atlantic, I must admit.

And another thing....why is every other weather event a record of some kind? Its either the wettest, hottest, coldest or something day since [insert date here].

PH of the day- and I may have mentioned this before, but I'm too lazy to look at the moment...

When people, especially in a captive environment like on the train or at the office, refuse to use a handkerchief or tissue and rather will sit and snuffle and snort non-stop for the duration of the journey/ the entire workday. After about a half hour I am ready to either slap someone, or tie them down and forcibly flush them out with a Neti pot.

I was on the tram the other week, and there was a sniffer a few seats in front of me. Not just the gentle little sniff here and there, but huge great snorts.

The little old lady sat next to him, bless her, turned and offered him a paper hankie saying "Would like like a hanky dear, or are you going to continue to be a disgusting pig?"

There were a lot of sniggers

Translink are on Twitter?!

PH: the talent show story on ITV at the moment. WTF?

Yes...t'was kind of amusing. They were trying to start some game called "Summertime Sammy", or something. They gave clues and people had to guess what station Sammy was at.

Not one single person was playing along.

This one's more than a PH: when you write something original, which is then plagiarised in a number of places around the web. It then makes it look as though, rather than bothering your arse to research and write something, you're one of many cutting and pasting the same tired crap all round the web.

Agreed. I was seriously annoyed that something I wrote for h2g2 was nicked and sent to Guardian Notes and Queries as if it was somebody else's idea. Some bugger had the brazen brass cheek...

All of those adverts that come as leaflets and little booklets in newspapers and magazines. I've never bought anything from one and over the years must have had pounds of the things to re-cycle.

PP

non-stackable ramekins

I've sorted that one out. Mine lay on their side in a drawer with teatowels and oven gloves padding the space out to prevent them rolling around. But they are irritating aren't they.

PP

My petty hate of the day is the new Chukkit I've bought for the dog. It cups the ball more than the old one and for the life of me I can't master the art of throwing it. The ball either goes straight down to the ground, straight up in the air, or off in a completely different direction to the one I intended, resulting in the loss this morning of a ball in the undergrowth. It's not the loss of the ball that bothers me but the time I then had to waste distracting the dog, who was determined to find it despite the spare one I was waving at him!



Deb

Advertisements on web pages that include audio. Very annoying, very jarring.

I can picture all that in my head, deb.

re: adverts with audio - doubly annoying when you're having a quick skive at work over a coffee!

Deb

Heaven forbid that H2G2 comes with audio then!

PP.

Websites with audio that you're not expecting is bad enough, but adverts with audio!? The people who think that's a good idea should be tied to a chair and made to listen to the UK Parliament channel non-stop for a week.

Anything else is too good for 'em.

I hate auto-play audio and video. I open up several tabs that I want to read, and then go through them one at a time. Auto play is pointless.

Which leads me onto a petty hate of mine: News websites that seem to think the best way of reporting on a news piece is to just put in a video clip and a brief bit of text. Sorry, but not everyone who *reads* websites is able to sit and watch a badly edited, badly presented short video. And when they make you sit through an advert first before you realise that the article isn't of any interest to you? Well, that goes onto my list of sites never to visit again. BBC News take note, I like to *read* my news!

Agreed. This is one of the reasons why people still buy newspapers: for some things, text is pretty hard to beat. Particularly when it comes to critical thinking.

Animated billboards are a particular problem, distracting drivers. Some of them are also a rather bright too, usually a bit brighter than a supernova.

This is, indeed, a problem. It's a driver's job not to be distracted. It is advertising's job to be distracting.