My first task after regaining the airwaves yesterday was to move a modest number - two or three - snaps from my telephone to somewhere visible from my laptop.
The first attempt was confused by what seemed like a change to the sharing tool provided by Samsung, whereby I was no longer able to use gmail to effect the transfer. The second attempt involved gdrive and that seems to have got lost in the ether. The third attempt (this Sunday morning) also involved gdrive and so far has only resulted in a notification appearing in gdrive on my telephone which I cannot access.
My second task was to track down the last time I noticed the bizarre custom in the US whereby the government runs out of money at about this time of year and all kinds of things have to be shut down, a custom which I feel certain I have noticed before. I failed on this task also, although I have learned that some deal has been struck, a deal which leaves out, for the present at least, continuing aid to the Ukraine. Maybe Europe is going to have to step up to the plate.
Having failed on the first two tasks, I thought a bit of relaxation with a YouGov survey was in order. The first part of which was a long stream of questions about social media. Their computer was clearly not very impressed with my answers as substantive questions were interspersed with ones like that snapped above, checking that I was still awake. While I was not very impressed as what seemed like a large proportion of the questions did not include appropriate cop-out answers like 'don't know' or 'not applicable', so forcing me to give answers which were either simply untrue or a guess. For example, by not including the answer 'never' to the question 'when did you last use tiktak' or not including the answer 'don't know' to the question 'do you think that tiktoe is more socially responsible that flipflop' - when you have not heard of either. Perhaps they call this 'forced choice' and think that they can extract useful information from me in this way. Not the sort of thing that the very serious people of the Government Social Survey would go in for when I had contact with them - although, to be fair, that was quite a long time ago - and a quick search suggests that this once highly respected organisation no longer exists.
This stream of questions went on for rather a long time and I was getting a bit fed up, when the computer changed tack and started on another long stream of questions about something else. At this point I shut the window down and I presume that all that useful information was lost to the world. Perhaps I really am collecting too many black marks and will be struck off the YouGov panel for not playing the game.
At which point I remembered that the co-inventor of YouGov was, at least until recently, one of the rising stars of the Conservative Party, one Nadhim Zahawi, for who see reference 2.
PS 1: failed by one minute to slip this post into the dying minutes of Saturday. So all in all, a most unsatisfactory start to the morning.
PS 2: I suppose that I should not talk about black marks any more. Maybe I should suggest to Mr. Starmer that when he gets into power that he should set up a quango to advise on expelling all this bad language, to come up with replacements for all offending locutions. Perhaps chaired by some Oxford professor with some resounding title. I associate to the French quango which has the similarly unenviable task of clearing out all the useful English phrases from their language.
PS 3: how about the Gorley Putt Professor of Poetry and Poetics in the Faculty of English at Cambridge University, Cambridge? For which see reference 4.
References
Reference 1: US lawmakers pass short-term deal to avoid government shutdown: Agreement to maintain funding until mid-November leaves out billions of dollars in Ukraine aid - Lauren Fedor, Colby Smith, James Politi, Financial Times - 2023.
Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadhim_Zahawi.
Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/07/fake-165.html. A previous outing for YouGov.
Reference 4: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/02/mubaraks-2.html.
Group search key: US, government, congress, money, shutdown, shut, down.
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