(Ln(x))³

The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

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8:30am on Tuesday, 17th March, 2026:

Dangerous Job

Weird

It seems that 1950s firemen had a more dangerous job than they realised.

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8:37am on Monday, 16th March, 2026:

RRR

Anecdote

Three years ago, I went to a restaurant and spotted a typographical error in the menu:

I went again yesterday, and was curious to see if they'd fixed the spelling when they increased the prices (which they were sure to have done).

Sadly, however, it was a special "Mother's Day Menu" that didn't resemble the regular one in the slightest.

I see this as a plot to make me go back in another three years. This is how these places drum up custom.

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8:38am on Sunday, 15th March, 2026:

The Lion

Weird

While scouring the web sites of assorted pub restaurants recently, I came across this:

I think it's fair to say that they didn't use AI to create that image.

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9:39am on Saturday, 14th March, 2026:

Boss Street

Weird

I don't know who designed this end-game raid in London, but they could have been a bit more subtle with the naming convention.

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8:21am on Friday, 13th March, 2026:

Scrape

Anecdote

Back in November, I went to pick my daughter up from the garage where she'd dropped off her car for a service. Unfortunately, I went to the wrong garage, and upon entering its car park there I found it full. Furthermore, it was extremely tight. Rather than risk reversing out and scraping my car or hitting a jutting-out Mercedes, I decided I'd better do a three-point turn, except with more points.

I must have done around seventeen points in the turn, but when I started to head out it transpired I should have done nineteen and I scraped a door on a wall. Looking at the wall afterwards, in case I'd caused it any damage, it was apparent that I wasn't the first driver to scrape a door on it.

Annoyingly, my wife was in the car with me at the time, so I couldn't invent someone else to blame. It was my fault.

I asked MG if they did bodywork repairs, and they said no; they did, however, recommend a repair shop not far from where they were based, so I went to that. They said they could replace the rear door for something like £2,700 — more, if I claimed it off my insurance. This seemed excessive to me, so I looked for some other places. The first one I found would do it for a thousand quid less, so I went with that.

I booked it in for the next week. It would take five days to fix, because they had to do a colour match. On the second day, I got a call telling me there was a problem. Apparently, the 2025 MG ZS+ Trophy hybrid has a different rear driver-side door to the 2024 MG ZS+ Trophy hybrid, and the replacement door they'd bought was falsely advertised as being 2025 when it was 2024.

They also said that there was a problem with supplies of this door. They're made in China, and are shipped over to the UK somewhat sporadically. I was told they'd keep a lookout for one, and would contact me when they found one. They warned that it could take anything from a week to a year for one to appear.

Come February, three months exactly after I scraped the door, I hadn't heard a peep from them. I emailed, asking if they'd forgotten me, but they hadn't. There were still no doors available.

I wasn't impressed by this, so did an Internet search myself for a 2025 MG ZS+ Trophy hybrid rear driver-side door. Immediately, a match came up on one of eBay's car-parts sub-sites. It looked fine, so I asked the body repair shop if it would do and they said yes. Their own eBay search was somewhat more general and didn't pick it up, apparently. Anyway, they ordered it, fixed a dent it acquired during transport, and last week they painted it and installed it.

It looks pretty good, although it doesn't have the fancy protective spray on it that the rest of the car does.

I wonder how long it would have taken them to find a door if I hadn't looked for one myself.

I wonder how soon I could have had my car fixed if I'd looked for a door earlier.

I wonder how long I'd have had to wait to get my door fixed if I'd left it a week before looking for a replacement myself, given that the boss of the company split from his wife and went on holiday to Egypt.

Oh well, it's nice and smart now, except for the dirt splashes it picked up the moment I drove it out of the repair works.

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8:20am on Thursday, 12th March, 2026:

Rowdy

Anecdote

Sometimes, the words that come up randomly on Plaitword make some kind of bizarre sense.

So what are you going to do with it once you have it, eh? You don't know, do you?

Stupid program, bossing people around....

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8:31am on Wednesday, 11th March, 2026:

Worshipful Company

Weird

The UKIE awards were held at Glaziers Hall in London.

It turns out that Glaziers aren't the only people involved, though.

I'm hoping those aren't money launderers, but this is London so I could well be wrong.

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9:46am on Tuesday, 10th March, 2026:

Houses

Weird

On the main street in our village is a row of houses. They started off identical, but have since been extended in assorted ways.

Pictures from Google maps, because for reasons for personal safety I didn't want to stand outside other people's houses taking photos myself.

House 1 is the basic model. They all started out looking like this.

House 2 is almost the same, but you can see they've built a discreet single-storey extension behind the garage.

House 3 has a two-storey extension behind the garage.

House 4 has an entrance porch with a fancy sloping roof.

House 5 is harder to see because of the van and the tree, but it's the same as house 4 except it has solar panels on the extension roof.

Finally, we come to house 6. It has a single-storey extension behind the garage, along with a porch at the front, plus an entire two-storey extension to the right of the house and a second garage to the right of that.

This kind of thing is what gave people the idea for building modular, player-constructed housing in MMORPGs.

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8:20am on Monday, 9th March, 2026:

Cell

Anecdote

The rooms in the hotel I stayed in in London last week used to be holding cells.

Mine was surprisingly spacious, so maybe it was carved out of the court part of the building.

Disappointingly, it didn't have bars on the windows.

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9:35am on Sunday, 8th March, 2026:

Chaos

Weird

In the milieu of The Secret World, the Dragon faction is the agent of chaos.

This strange, Latinesque text appears in the tabletop RPG version of the game, in its description of the Dragon faction:

It looks as if it's some kind of alternative lorem ipsum dummy text, but I'm wondering whether its inclusion might actually be intentional.