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

Here's another one.

Since when were there two Channel 5s?

Seems that if you accidentally find yourself watching Channel 5, and you press 'channel down'...you stay on Channel 5. Programmes like 'My Teenager Has Halitosis' and 'When Nazis Go Bad'.

I've got one.

What's the story with all these ads on TV for sofas?

How often do people buy sofas? If I buy as many as six sofas in my lifetime, I'll die a very surprised man. Yet they are advertised more than any other product in existence.

Tonight I was invited to Friend the Facebook pages for Aero (if I did this it would help make the world a bubblier place) and... Dettol.

And probably a few more, only I wasn't really paying attention.

Also, it seems that if I see a video on Facebook and press the Like button it will do...something or other...about child soldiers in Uganda. Can't quite work out what.

In my childhood, I was often in the UK over Christmas. And since we didn't have a TV at home, we watched it on holiday. And the Boxing Day Sales were apparently half sofas. You're right. It is weird.

The past two Christmasses I've spent at home alone with BBC Radio 4. It avoids the sofas, anyway.

TRiG.

It's a plot to keep poor people poor. Every time they manage to put a bit of money by, they're brainwashed into buying a new sofa. Classic capitalist subjugation of the proletariat.

And speaking of sofa...

In the sofa ads before, after and during Corrie, there are two women on (guess what!) sofas. One hands the other a bowl of something and says what sounds like, 'Orange ciggie?'

What?

I sTRiG - BBC radio four is for life, not just for Christmas actually I manage to avoid all commercials by just having radio four on... and all that reality stuff... and cooking programs... and... adverts mainly...
I'm always supprised when at my Dad's and I catch up on the new adverts, each time there seems to be more and more really dodgy illegal looking stuff being advertised... especially late at night, dodgy we'll loan anyone money then break your legs when you don't keep up with the payments, type stuff...

Actually, not just* sofas, now I remember, all those adverts for kitchens? all the time? I know I need a new kitchen... but its (judging by the look of it), been there since some time in the 70's so its not exactly the sort of thing one replaces that* often

the main thign I don't get with popular culture, of the past few years, is people shouting. Rather than talking, they shout, as they walk down the street, in teh shops, in the town center, in cafes, pubs, resturants, they just shout...

2legs - your a man after me own heart. I take back all I've ever said about you.

All my radios are permatuned to R4. Admittedly I don't enjoy all of it by any means - but sometimes you can have a good old shout at it.

I've started to *detest* 'Gardener's Question Time', though. t seems to me that the presenters are always making snide little digs. Does anyone else get tat or is it just me?

Maybe it's me you can hear shouting. I'm at my loudest when those gobshites Melanie Philips and Clifford Longley are on.

Gardeners - I speak as a "gardener in remission", if you like - can be incredibly bitchy and dismissive of anyone with different ideas from their own. Garden designers, even moreso.

They're snide towards the folk asking the questions, too. All very jokey, you understand, but snide.

GQT isn't really a gardening program though... Not for actual gardeners... Its more like those TV cooking programs, which people watch, and drool over the food, as they crawl their bodies out of the sofa in front of the TV to make their daily walk to the freezer to take a plastic wrapped pile of frozen stuff and place it into the microwave... I think GQT is a bit like that now... Its just 'entertainmen't, I guess they'd say, less to do with what its seemingly about...

Oo... tell... what was this you said of me?

Shouting at radio Four, should be an olympic sport....

Actually. talkign of which.

does radio five, and five live sports extra still exist? I think* they do...
So.
why.
when there are two dedicated publically paid for radio outlets for sport, do they have to bluddy subject us, regular folk, who might wear the occasional python boot, to having to endure programs, on BBC radio Four, about sport of all things

They've been getting me quite shouty at the radio recently... Then of course there are the useual good, standby, guarenteed to get a shout programs, namely You and Yours, and of course Question time, with that little stuck up stupid Dimblbee who doesn't even know what his job description is, constantly butting in, and trying to twist and turn the origional question, into his own take on it, then twisting and putting words into teh mouths of the panel, both distroying the question itself, and hence the person who asked it, and then also underminding and preventing any actual answers most of the time from the panel, unless they happen to be ones he's happy with hearing

Shouting at radio four is my main cardiovascular exercise mind, well.. cept for ...

Have discovered the car can find Radio 4 thus it keeps me company on the way to and from work. Actually wanted to stay in the car park and listen to Melvin Bragg discuss 14th century poetry but had to go evacuate the liquid nitrogen tanks.

Meanwhile - and speaking of plots to keep people poor - I am convinced areos are really, really cunningly disingenuous.

Pay snack premium for less chocolate. I mean it's genius, and yet I feel a certain moral outrage is justified.

"All very jokey, you understand, but snide." Yes, I know just what you mean. There's an undercurrent of "If you weren't such an imbecile you would know that x, y or z won't do well on a north-facing wall".

GQT - dig - I see what you did there!

Actually, I might need a new sofa. Any idea where's the best place to pick up one cheap like?

I'm taking advantage of the 4-years interest free credit deal with a popular furniture show room dealership in perpetual sale mode with a three-letter initialism to acquire my sofa bed.

Was delivered just the other week. Didn't like most of what was on offer but this met all my criteria, and splitting it over four years made it so affordable I won't notice the monthly repayments and I can save up in the meanwhile and pay it off sooner,

ahh... yes, the one where the January sale 1985 is still going today.... Just like those strange high street shoe shops that have been on their final reductions, closing down sale, since the late 80's...
I found it almost impossible to find a sofa to buy when I got the current one, which replaced a sofa bed style sofa that had fallen to bits
Pretty much every sofa I looked at was so low to the floor, and thereby uncomfitable... and of course when I did find one, it was like the only sofa in the entire shop which wasn't on some fabulus discount... still glad I got it though, Its probably done nearly ten years now, maybe a bit less, and oughta handle another ten or fifteen years of misuse without too much trubble..

I'm afraid Debanham's sale ended yesterday, Bea. We bought one.

Pippa Greenwood's nice, I have to say.

The thing about sofas is this: I needed to buy one about four years ago. I went to Damn Fine Sofas, or whatever that stands for, and I'm now convinced that that showroom is evidence we've been visited by aliens, because I'm damn sure nothing in that showroom was designed for, or by, anything with human anatomy.

Unless you have EITHER four inch long thighs, knees that hinge backwards, or four shoulders, it's physically impossible to be comfortable on anything they sell.

Don't get me wrong - they LOOK great. I just can't ever imagine anyone with a conventional skeleton ever sinking into one and going "aaah". More like sitting down on one and immediately bobbing back onto their feet with a baffled "wtf?".

I ended up getting one from Super Cool Sofas, or whatever the hell that stands for, that looked conventional to the point of old fashioned but was, and is, lovely to sit on.

Also: who the hell buys a sofa by mail order? It's possible.

"They and the Kardashians live in Nancy Pelosi's Congressional district, iirc she represents the most Armenian Americans of any Senator" [HonestIago]

Nancy Pelosi is not a Senator.If she were, she would not have been able to be the Speaker of the House of Rerpesentatives.