The Lucky Donut

It’s a good few weeks since I’ve been in this part of town so this could be pretty old news.  But worth mentioning nonetheless.

The last remaining city on the giant coffee house bingo card can be crossed off.  Stoke-on-Trent finaly has a Starbucks!

I had to double-take when I saw this walking through the Potteries Shopping Centre in Hanley but the arrow did not mislead.  A few seconds later I was handing over two quid and change for a very, very large cup of coffee.  Bliss.

There’s a price to pay though.  It’s taken over the entire food court, so Stoke now has a different dubious honour: it’s the only city in the UK without a Burger King.

While next month will see the New Frontier become the 15th casino to be imploded in Las Vegas, Atlantic City had it’s first ever controlled demolition on the Boardwalk on Thursday when the Sands was turned to dust.

Several videos have hit YouTube.  This one has the best view I’ve found but skip in 1m15s if you want to avoid watching a dude with a hard hat talking about explosives and get straight to the action.

To see more of the preceding fireworks, check out the video of the live MSNBC coverage, with which you also get to listen to some fantastic analysis by the announcer. "Looks like the dynamite hasn’t gone off yet", he says, which clearly explains why the building is still standing.  Invaluable.

This amateur video is also worth a look.  It was shot from the roof of Bally’s and shows all the fireworks and a view of the tower collapsing from really close by.  The best bit, though, is right at the end where you see everyone legging it back into the casino approximately two seconds after it’s hit the ground.  After all, they went there to gamble…

A sign in my hotel room this weekend:

Surely they don’t mean these?

 I think they’d melt.

This weekend, I had my best ever result on the National Lottery.  All six numbers!

And the jackpot for that piece of good fortune: a whopper £38.

OK, so the six numbers hit across a combination of two tickets, but they’re the only two tickets I’m involved with.  Using the numbers that Claire and I have played for as long as I can remember – it wasn’t quite since the lottery started in 1994, but it wasn’t long after – we had a four-number (£28) and a three-number (£10) hit from the same draw.

Seriously.  £28 for four numbers.  Isn’t that pathetic?

The odds of matching four is 1031-1.  I believe this is only the second time we’ve had a four number win in over ten years, which actually feels about right for playing two lines on a ticket, each for two draws a week and 52 draws a year.  In fact, officially it was draw #1224 on Saturday, so I’m ever-so-slightly owed…

So you wait years for a winning ticket, and then two come along at once – and it’s so totally not worth it.  Take away the £2 stake and we’re looking at £36 profit – the amount I paid in stakes for just 9 weeks of draws – for this freak occurance.

OK, I know that hitting all 6 numbers from 11 picks (our tickets overlap by one number: 12) is still much more likely than actually winning the big one, but I just don’t expect to ever see six matches again.  Sorry, I don’t know the exact odds and I don’t really care enough (read: know how) to work it out.  It’s small though.

What I do know is that to have permed those 11 numbers every possible way in order to ensure that I’d hit the jackpot this week would have taken 462 different tickets.  I know that when Claire reads this she’ll reach for her calculator to check (and hopefully work out the odds of hitting 6 from 11 too…) but I’m pretty sure that’s right.  So if I’d actually made that £462 bet in the past 1224 draws, my total stake would have been £565,488 before it hit.

This week’s jackpot prize fund: £3,583,830.  If only I’d known!  Split six ways (there were already five other winners) we’d have scored £597,305 each.  Over thirty grand profit from my half-million investment – that’s obviously how you’re meant to play the lottery.

But I’ve come up with a another way: don’t bother.

I cancelled my subscription this morning.  I feel like a winner already.

EDIT: D’oh.  After a sleep I realised I’d already done the hard work for the odds of 6 from 11.  If the chances of hitting the jackpot are 1 in 13,983,816, then the chances of striking rich with one of my 462 combinations is 462 in 13,983,816 or about 30,000-1.  Actually it’s about twice as likely as hitting five numbers all on one ticket (55,490-1).

After I took the picture, I had to check.  Indeed, on my can of expanding foam it says "360 degree application" and "quickly fills large, awkward holes and cavities".  But it definitely doesn’t say anywhere, even in small print, "in zero gravity conditions".

Hence, I’m sure, the reason for this spectacular filling disaster on the side of a house in Longton:

This is not my mess, I hasten to add.  Admittedly, I could have been capable of overestimating the mighty power of expanding foam and trying to fill a high-up crack from the bottom, but I’d like to think that if I started off expecting to beat the laws of physics, I’d at least be smart enough to give up once I’d spotted the signs that I just wasn’t that powerful.

There were plenty of warning signs.  The footpath tells the story:

Clearly it’s someone else’s job to clean up stray filler once it’s fallen onto – or in the vicinity of – a public street.  Plus, the longer you leave it, the easier that’ll be.

I have to wonder whether the master craftsman actually used a ladder or was reaching up high to fill the gap from underneath.  So I’m going to keep my eyes open for a mysterious figure walking around town that looks a bit like this.

God bless Ikea.  It’s not really the job of a furniture store to offer practical parenting advice, but they’re doing it anyway.  Do not put your baby inside a plastic box and close the lid.

Interestingly, this label – officially my favourite warning label ever – only appears on the storage boxes that are large enough to actually fit a small child.  Or The Amazing Yen.

I thought maybe it was a Swedish thing, and that there might actually be a type of plastic box that can be used to store babies.  A way to flat-pack your family, for a quiet night in or for hibernation during the cold, dark winter.  But alas Google couldn’t shed any light on this: baby storage box only finds containers for the kid’s stuff, not the kid itself.

So there must be a gruesome back story, surely?

After a fabulous month in Las Vegas, what I really needed on my return home was someone to remind me just how great Stoke really is.

The Big Brother Twins didn’t quite manage it in this clip. Actually it’s two clips slapped together – I only just figured out how to do that, but I’ll be amazed if you can tell! They’re talking to Liam about ideal places to go on a date. I think it’s Sam that’s doing the talking, but it doesn’t really matter, let’s face it.

Transcript, because I know you probably can’t be bothered to play the clip, even though it’s only eleven seconds long:

Liam: What your ideal date would be is to go and just scrounge drinks off everybody all night.

Twin: No, we’d go Alton Towers. 

(Did you spot the splice?)

Twin: If we wanted to go anywhere it would take like an hour or whatever to get somewhere good, right?

They’ve deffo put Stoke on the map alright.  To find it, use a pair of compasses set to roughly the distance you can travel in an hour, stick the pin somewhere good and draw an arc.  Repeat.

Where the arcs cross, that’s home.

The Cheque Centre in Longton has been the best place to buy US Dollars lately, and I’ve used it a few times to change up money ready for tomorrow’s trip.  Today their rate was a very attractive – and very precise – $2.0000000.

This is a business that sprung up quite recently in a town that few others dare to inhabit – even Kwik Save gave up hope last month and bailed out.  Its No Frills boots have been filled by a brand new B&M store.  If I had to describe what kind of store B&M is, the best I could come up with is "cheap random crap".

In fact, those same three words could also be used to identify Longton town itself.  Perhaps a new motto for the precinct: Cheap. Random. Crap.

The Cheque Centre’s place is all nice and new, with both new paint and new carpets.  Quite unusual for the locailty.  So why go to this trouble, and still set your rates so much higher than the nearest competitor?  The second best on offer today was $1.96 at the Post Office, with the travel agents less than a full cent behind.

Today’s perfect two rate got me thinking.  Maybe it just a case of "two dollars to the pound is close enough, right?".  This is a business that deals only in money, and always in cash.  Perhaps maximising profit isn’t as important as getting the turnover.

Ever feel like you’re supporting organised crime?

Putting rude words as your name in the high score table on a pub quiz or "skill game" machine.

There should be a snappier name for this wholesome activity.  May I suggest "poo-tabling", derived from my very favourite – and almost always first choice – word to use?

It’s short, simple, slightly rude, a little graphic (if you think about it for too long) and obviously not a real name – but hardly offensive, even pre-watershed.

Some machines are poo-friendly, some are not.  Yesterday the mix-and-muddle-the-fruit game that I can’t even remember the name of didn’t like like poo, which is a little unfair when a different game on the same machine already had a big cock.  Really.

At least it’s clear to see that we are not alone in wanting to – nay, enjoying – testing the limits of a computer program’s profanity filter.

That’s Claire’s finger doing the honours.  This poo was a joint effort, and top score on the table won us a massive two quid, after an extremely courageous decision to gamble after hitting the £1 mark.  Even so, wanting our first choice of name to be immortalised for days, maybe even weeks, was too much to ask.

My computer died today.  I fixed it (because I’m great, obviously) but it was the strangest thing.

I’d nudged the base unit with my knee after I pulled my chair under the desk and there came a little strangling noise from the PC.  I don’t wish to mock the sound of an actual strangling where a person may really die, but if I had to illustrate the sound in a comic book, it would look something like this.

ZWIP-EEEE-GLUCK-EEEE-CLAK-CLAK-EEEE-VZZZZ-VZZZZ-THWUP-THWUUUUZWUP

On second thoughts, perhaps I’d hire a professional to do the sound effects.

Abruptly, the sound ceased.  I thought no more of it until a couple of minutes later when everything went black.  The PC powered down, and only then did I begin to notice the rather nasty cooking smell.

Out came the screwdriver.  I wanted to find out exactly what was burning, but almost everything was hot and it took me a few really sensible attempts at powering the machine on and letting it die several painful deaths before I noticed the CPU fan was not spinning.  Then I noticed the reason why.

Out came the camera.  The loose green cable in the picture below is looking a little mangled, but in remarkable condition considering it’s fate.  It had somehow managed to wrap itself around the fins of the fan.

So how does this happen?  I have no idea.  Effectively, someone shoved a stick through the spokes on my bicycle, except the fan spins a lot faster than a bike wheel – 3600 RPM, so the PC says.  I can’t even imagine trying to doing this by hand even if I wanted to.  It’d just be a painful way to trim your fingernails.