I’m really old, so it was in the mid to late 1980s, for work, and I’m struggling to remember the details. I had a Tandy device that fitted over the handset of a landline phone, you dialled the number and the data (from an electronic word processor) went chirping down the line. I once had to do it in a public phone booth, that was fun. Several times I was in a hotel room and had to ring reception first to explain I was going to make a data call, and please not to interrupt it.

My least favourite is when you’re swimming laps and a woman in the next lane is shedding an oil slick of perfume into the water. Gag!

No idea - I assume there’s a deal done with airlines, tour operators etc.

I was agonising over booking a long, complicated trip I did last year, and a friend who works organising corporate stuff told me to shut up and go to a travel agent.

A nice fellow just rattled away at his keyboard and came up with an itinerary that was cheaper than anything I’d come up with myself. No charge - they scrape from the airlines I guess - and I got a free ballpoint. After decades of planning my own travel, I am converted.

You might be interested in deer management on the Isle of Jura, in Scotland. The human population is a couple of hundred; there are 5,000 red deer. https://www.juradmg.co.uk/

Personally I applaud hunting for food. We are animals too, part of the ecosystem. Hunting just for trophies is disgusting though.

I had gone through a couple of bars before I realised it was ChocoLONELY.

Very good chocolate though.

From the Oyokogawa water park, in October last year.

None of these has a layer of grated cheddar on top that’s gone all brown and delicious in the oven. You start with a very buttery roux while the macaroni elbows are cooking. Make a super cheesy sauce with a spoon of mustard in it, using full cream milk. Drain the macaroni, add the sauce, and pile it into a buttered oven proof dish. Cover with that layer of cheese. Slide it into the preheated oven and distract yourself somehow for ten or fifteen minutes. (I mean, you could use that time to make a salad but who are we kidding.)

So good.

I use FeedFlow for a local beekeeping guy’s blog - he posts by email, so having an RSS feed means I don’t have to go ratching through looking for a particular article, I can just scroll.

https://www.feedflow.dev/