The final Bank Holiday before Christmas has been and gone (now there's a thought to make you want to boil your own head) but we kick off the learning recall back on Thursday, when I discovered that you can't a gas emergency callout until your meter runs out entirely. I imagine if the house was slowly filling with gas and your twitchy cousin was coming round to play with lighters, they might pop round, but otherwise, they will actually advise you to waste natural resources until you are left without heating and hot water, at which point they will come out immediately (between 8 and 1, anyway). It's quite a society we live in - but what does that matter when we've got Olympic heroes? They're plastered all over the papers lately, looking every inch a group of people that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable with the notion of celebrity, and the BBC even published a hugely tedious list of details about the medallists - the most surprising piece of information therein was that Herne Hill in South London has a velodrome.
From track cycling to a less confusing and more commercial sport - Subbuteo. I can remember when the flick-to-kick game was at the cutting edge of kids' entertainment (OK, that may be pushing it a bit, but it was popular) and I was building quite a good collection, pitching Wolves/Blackpool against QPR/Reading on my bedroom floor in front of a shiny new plastic Main Stand. Then, from nowhere, it disappeared - I feel it is long overdue a retro revival, mainly because I've still got that Main Stand in my attic somewhere. The name Subbuteo is Latin for 'hobby', and was another reason I liked it - they could have called it Kick, or Offside!, or Goalaroo, but they gave it a non-footballing name under the brilliant pretense that it wasn't actually a football game. Bring it back, toymakers of the land. The comeback starts here.
Sunday's discovery really speaks for itself - there are more air molecules in a balloon than there are stars in our galaxy. By the way, the figure is several trillion - a statistic so mind-blowing and wondrous it makes me want to stick my fingers deep into my ears and repeat pointless facts to myself until the giddy feeling subsides.
Back to the comfortably trivial, if you thought a football-based game that didn't allow you to just play football reached surprisingly dizzy heights, you may also be shocked to discover that Oxo, purveyors of garden variety stock cubes, were at one stage successful enough to build a ruddy great tower on the South Bank, complete with their name emblazoned on the side - except it isn't really. The OXO tower simply features a series of windows arranged to spell OXO - apparently this didn't contravene advertising laws at the time, whereas having an Oxo sign would have done. The Oxo windows represent perhaps the most fragrant flouting of advertising laws of all time - until McDonalds started sponsoring the Olympics. Wherever the book on appropriate advertising is kept, it seems it can be held there with a fat enough cheque.
And finally, today's bit of tat... the theme music from Tetris is taken from a Russian folk song. I know how the first 10 seconds go, before the screen begins to fill with a central pile of descending shapes, and the giddy feeling returns.
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