The Anonymous Widower

Rules For Athletes At The Games

There used to be a whole set of rules for visitors to London, mainly made up by Gerard Hoffnung.  The only one I can remember is the one, that said that all brothels had a blue light outside of them.

Some of his rules and those who have parodied him are very appropriate for the Olympics.

  1. Have you tried the famous echo in the reading room of the British Museum?
  2. Winston Churchill’s favourite branch of Starbucks was the one in New Oxford Street, because he considered it to have the cleanest toilets
  3. All buses are actually like taxis, and the driver is legally obliged to take you wherever you demand. All you have to do is climb on and declare where you wish to be taken in a loud voice.
  4. It is important to shake hands with everyone in your train compartment.

If you type Gerard Hofnung into Google, lots of more inappropriate suggestions will be found.

I did find one for hurdlers and high jumpers, that it was OK to jump the barriers at Underground stations.  On the other hand, after what happened to Jean Charles de Menezes, I wouldn’t try it.

July 17, 2012 Posted by | Sport | , | Leave a comment

Verified By Visa Revisited

I have moaned about this crap before.

I have been fighting it for a couple of hours and in the end I managed to buy two extra Olympic tickets. Can the reason that so many people find buying these tickets difficult is you must use a Visa card and you can’t fight your way through this awful system?

I have just written to my credit card company, saying that after the Olympics, they can put their Visa card in a place where it will hurt.

Today I was adding a new password all the time and then when I tried it the next it was rejected, so I had to start again. Surely entering a new password every time you use the card is the most insecure way to use a credit card on line.

It might well be that the US version of this system works because everybody uses the last four digits of their Social Security Number.  In the UK no-one knows theirs and anyway it ends in a letter. So perhaps the problem is that the system has not been properly rewritten for the UK.

Anyway it’s crap!

July 17, 2012 Posted by | Computing, Finance | , , , | 2 Comments