Perhaps Christians Ought to Be Sorry!

Imagine growing up in a society where Christianity wasn't really open to question and, if you were controversial enough to do so, then the chances are yours would be a voice that was deliberately ignored. I don't have to imagine growing up in a society like that, because that's exactly what I did. Clerics were seen as authority figures, there was no such thing as the Internet and so no means by which alternative ideas could flourish and take root away from a form of control that was universally applied and stifled nearly all opinion that would have been regarded as controversial. The same society, that I grew up in, had an unreasonable prejudice against Roman Catholics. To this day, I have no idea why this was and I can only assume that the same mistrust and prejudice was applied to Jews, although I confess I didn't see or hear any of this. Such was suburban life in south-east London during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

 

Looking back, there was an astonishing amount of Christian religious content in my primary school education. I'd like to think that (these days) you would never get away with state school education that included content like this as a huge part of its curriculum. If there were voices of dissent, I was certainly too young to know about them. The next school was not quite so overt in the amount of Christian content, but there was a religious assembly, every morning and attendance was mandatory. I can't have been the only person who quietly wondered about this. The only exception seemed to be a bunch of boys who occupied a rank closest to one of the main doors out of the school hall and these would file out, excused (by the headmaster) as "other denominations" and with what appeared to be a palpably peeved attitude. To this day, I'm not sure of all the groupings involved in this. I do know that some Jews formed a part of this group and I suppose it's just possible (albeit unlikely) that some parents had made it their business to make sure that their kids were excused religious assembly, because they were atheists.

 

I was dimly aware of a group of people who would relentlessly proselytise you, if you happened to have ideas that seem to wandered dangerously far from Christianity, although I've really only came into contact with these in early adult life. People who would stop me on the street and want to engage me in conversation about Jesus and so on. By this time I had started to wonder about just what right anybody had to get in anybody else's face with their religious beliefs.

 

I would have been unaware of the contemporary Christian religious history that had started to grow up around me. There wasn't the easy access to information afforded by the Internet and its unrivalled way of facilitating like-minded people getting in touch with each other. I would have been unaware that, as early as 1911 there had been a movement, in England, of a group of people who seriously regarded the Bible is something that contained no errors. That was the smallest and earliest beginnings of the group and it only seemed to pick up some pace at the end of World War II, presumably in the face of those people who, after the end of hostilities, hoped they would come back to a world that they could forge for themselves and I suppose at least part of this came to fruition with the electing of the first Labour government.

 

There was already a growing tendency, by the time I was in my early adult years, of people who were drifting away from Christianity for all kinds of reasons, some of them due to other religious alternatives and still others, that weren't organised, by their very definition, there were people who wandered off and went nowhere in particular (or maybe tried something from each of the growing panoply of alternatives, never really settling anywhere). Unnoticed, by me, a schism had opened up between the so-called high and low churches of the Church of England and I certainly wouldn't have been aware that the latter was well populated with what came to mean owners born-again Christians. This would have been the first of many attempts at reviving interest in Christianity, none of which seem to work to any great extent.

 

I can remember a poster advertising a Billy Graham rally that somebody had defaced with a toothbrush moustache and hair draping down over the forehead, in the style of Adolf Hitler. Some time later, a visiting evangelist named Luis Palau held a series of rallies, with the subtext of "bring your doubts." At the time I was making jokes about not having a suitcase big enough and, although this was still an age well before they even the earliest beginnings of the Internet. There was at least a common perception that it was now okay to have opinions that differed widely from Christianity. Indeed, Luis Palau had a huge rally at a rock concert venue at London's Chalk Farm. It was necessary to cross a bridge between the nearest London Underground Tube station and the venue and some wag had added some graffiti to this bridge that read "there's one born-again every minute!" Of course, the inference being that the only people taken in by these rallies would have been dummies!

 

The writing was on the wall in more forms than simply graffiti and defacing posters and there was a changing mood amongst clerics, who were getting noticeably angry about and because of the very idea that there could be people wandering about their lawful occasions and pretty much treating their churches as places that they could wander in and out of at will. There was, of course, the very beginning of an openly gay community, much to the chagrin of people like Mary Whitehouse and, of all people a deputy Chief Commissioner of police, named James Anderton, who had an openly anti-gay stance and, for quite some time was able to prosecute something of a fundamentalist Christian agenda without too many people objecting to it! Indeed, you would be forgiven for thinking that he ran the whole of Manchester, at one point!

 

There wasn't much of a need to organise, the paranoia with which the clerics responded with such that you would be forgiven for thinking that there was a deliberate and orchestrated attempt to undermine Christianity, when the real truth was that a lot of the wheels were starting to come off.

 

Finally, the Internet did come along and a lot of the material that objected to the stance taken by born-again/fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, that studied their claims and exposed many of the institutionalised lies, came into being and have never really gone away. You could say that a large gulf opened up between those people who now felt free to self define as atheists and the evangelical That espoused views that started to sound increasingly desperate and appear to favour noise over substance. What substance there was, had foundations in some shaky and rather circuitous reasoning, that would convince you only if you were prepared to ignore some rather compelling evidence to the contrary (and this was now increasingly easy to find). It's fair to say that evangelical/fundamentalist Christians have had to close ranks to the extent of excluding a great deal of academia and many of the most vociferous proponents of the evangelical take on Christianity have published books that include numerous sideswipes at college professors that are usually not named (neither are the academic institutions that they come from) but are nonetheless characterised as blustering and ineffectual opponents of a truth that will overcome everything (even if that truth happens to crumble into dust if you subjected to fairly minor amounts of scrutiny.

 

I can't remember when I first heard the term "Apologetics" coined, in modern times and as a means of trying to encapsulates the thrust of the previous born-again/evangelical/fundamentalist Christian ideologies. I can tell you that I have met many people who now identify as apologists and then seemed to launch into an almost immediate definition of what an apologist is. It's possible there are some people, out there, who still don't know and still fewer who would readily identify such people without knowing the right label to use. Just the once, I did interrupt somebody by telling them that I was fully aware of what an apologist was and why apologetics exists.

 

For my money there is one inescapable truth coming out of Apologetics that does stand up to examination (apart from the singular lack of substance to what it represents). If apologetics is supposed to be something that you sign up for in order to defend Christianity, then it does seem to me that they may have overdone it a bit. If there was ever a group of people who richly deserved a long-running and comprehensive beating up, purely as retribution for all the years of having to suffer under its excesses, then it has to be the closest thing that Christianity has to offer by way of fascism. Despite having done just about everything to provoke a nasty backlash, most of what Apologist Christianity has received is nothing more extreme than some rather well placed reasoned argument, which it hasn't much liked (and, arguably, with good reason).

 

So, apart from apologetics seeming to consist mainly of Christians who preach to each other and sometimes pretend that they have got cogent arguments that go outside Christianity and can touch the hearts of nascent converts, what has apologetics got to offer. A rallying cry against an opposition that isn't trying its best to tear Christianity to shreds, given enough time, it will probably do that to itself. The most that can be said for those people who hold views that differ from Christianity (not all of them atheists) is that they might provide robust arguments to refute the claims of Apologist Christians who decide to engage them in debate. As the very best that seems to be on offer is the likes of Lee Strobel and William Lane Craig, the non-Christian community has not got a great deal to worry about. This doesn't leave a lot, saving just than one point, the irrefutable truth that apologetics does provide a platform for Christians to play the victim, to howl and scream about how it is that they are being ill treated by people who are, for the most part, slightly more than in different (but not by much) to the fundamentalists claims put up by Christianity.

 

Christian Apologetics, why this idea fails

I've heard Apologetics described as explaining the ideas underpinning Christianity (or even a particular understanding of it), with the goal in mind that the dialogue will have the outcome of something akin to conversion. The linguistic roots of the term suggests something else entirely, merely defending Christianity if it is attacked, for any reason. Some of the rhetoric coming out of the Apologetics camp suggests that they sea battle lines being drawn up, where none exist.

 

It's probably easier to refer to those people who appear to worry fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, as simply non-apologists. This would have to be a rather crude and disparate grouping of people who believe in God, but don't align themselves with any one religion (including Christianity), atheists, agnostics, Christians who don't want to be described as Apologists and so on.

 

In truth, I think you only have to behave in a way that slightly out of the ordinary to be viewed as some kind of threat. This has certainly been my experience. So, who has the leading edge in defending Apologetics? Well, you have people like Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig and Frank Turek. It's interesting to note that the only people who appear to believe that these gentlemen do a sterling job of convincing non-apologists (non-Christians in particular) are people who are already convinced Christians! At one time Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ" was reckoned to be the go to publication. Hand a copy of this to somebody who wasn't a believer and they would go away, read the book and come back ready to join the fold. Unfortunately, this reputation was purely mythological and it took some time before the Apologetics community woke up to the idea that this was something that not only didn't work as advertised, but was far more likely to turn a simple non-believer into a slightly more entrenched and pissed off non-believer.

 

The reason for this response is so simple that it might sound trite. All of the arguments used to support Apologetics do not make a good case for them being correct. If something sounds as though it won't stand up on its own, you cannot add to its substance or veracity, by quoting from the Bible.

 

I had a discussion with a cleric, just recently, about how it was that Christians seem happy to break the fourth commandment (this is the one about keeping holy the Sabbath day and refers to the Jewish sabbath, meaning Saturday). Along with some boilerplate concerning the new covenant (none of which mentions changing to Sunday is your day of worship), I got back a couple of biblical quotations that was supposed to support the use of Sunday in place of the Jewish Sabbath day. I have a feeling that it's enough to include a couple of biblical references, as a means of knocking over an inconvenient point of view. In this case, as with a couple of others, I bothered to look up the quotations in question and discovered that neither one of them supported the idea of having a day of worship on Sunday.

 

My original reason for contacting this cleric was that he had opened up an evangelical church in my area, and I wondered whether this was one of those places that I couldn't visit, by reason of people seizing upon me as not only are likely convert, but for the purposes of a miraculous cure. I haven't had any body want to smear soil into my eyes and spit in them, although this is one way in which Jesus is supposed to have cured blindness! However, I have heard of other blind people being offered a cure, for there to be lots of praying and then, when the cure doesn't work, the blind person is blamed for not having enough faith. It's hard to imagine something worse that you could do, to a blind person (with the possible exception of the soil and saliva thing)!

 

I'd had a brush with being "cured" when I was offered such a thing by a Pastor, hereabouts. I declined as gracefully as I could (at the time, knowing nothing about these other cases involving blind people and following my own instincts, which turned out to be right on the money)! The preacher was down on me straight away "so, you don't believe it would work?" he asked in a way that sounded rehearsed. If I'd had time to think through my attitudes, then I suppose I would have admitted that I didn't think the cure would work. As it turned out I had an honest answer that brought the rehearsed progress to a screaming halt. I wouldn't have the first idea on how to play a crowd and I was only dimly aware that there was a group of ladies busily making the tea and in earshot of the conversation that I was having with this cleric. I said that I preferred to exchange my failing eyesight for increasing vision and the Scot a chorus of quite spontaneous hallelujahs from the ladies that I mentioned earlier. The pastor found himself flat on his face. He did tell me, in passing, that he would convert me to Christianity and it did seem as though I would have little choice in the matter. Of course, I did have a choice and I didn't go back for a very long time.

 

The failure of Apologetics can be traced to a single cause. Apologetics is not something that appears to have been put together with the purpose of doing anything more than preaching to the converted. If you try to use it for anything else, then it just plain doesn't work. Unfortunately, there seems to be no convincing Apologists that they are not under attack, don't need to defend themselves, we have all got better things to do with our time and that the arguments contained in Apologetics will not work on those people who have either no belief in God, or some kind of belief system that doesn't include Christianity. You cannot use verses from the Bible as though they are forensic evidence and yet Apologetics seems to begin from this flawed premise.

 

This didn't stop Lee Strobel from misquoting an Oxford historian, (named A.N. Sherwin-White) in advancing a non-existent crackpot theory that there was some kind of minimum amount of time, in recording historical events, inside which you could guarantee that legends and other apocryphal stuff couldn't creep in. The theory is made up balderdash and the historian was at pains to point out that stories passed on as an oral tradition could be corrupted in the re-telling and in the process of writing down. There is convincing scholarly evidence (not even argued with by Apologists themselves) that later additions and insertions have been made, to the Gospels. Yet, the idea of Evangelical Christianity is that you ought to regard such writings as inerrant. I can't help feeling that there's something wrong with this picture.

 

Sandisk Clip Sport Go and Audiobooks

USELESS AT PLAYING AUDIOBOOKS

Chapter mode is missing:
Imagine a folder full of files, each one a numbered track (or chapter) in your book. You would expect an MP3 player to get to the end of a chapter and then play the next one, wouldn't you? Earlier models of Sandisk players possesed this function. For some unaccountable reason it's gone! Sandisk have removed the function. The audiobook player needs every chapter to be started manually. Why do this? It makes no sense!

MP3 File compatability:
Best described as brittle or flaky. Be prepared for nearly identical MP3 files to either play without a problem, or throw up an utterly unexpected file type incompatability error messga. There are clearly some forms of MP3 file that are not recognised. Why would you make a device this way. Earlier Sandusk models didn't have this problem. It makes no sense. It's as though unnecessary changes have been introduced.

Equaliser function:
In theory, it is possible to use this to adjust the bass/treble. In practice, there seems to be a bass boost as part of the firmware and you can TRY adjusting the sound quality, but it won't get you anywhere. A strong bass response is not useful, when listening to speech and a hindrance, if you have a hearing loss.

Conclusion:
In theory, you can use the Sandisk Clip Spirt Go to listen to audiobooks, in practice, it has so many obstacles in the way that you would need a lot of patience. With file compatability, chapter playback and sound quaility all issues, you would be better off looking elsewhere. A good question to ask is where else you might look ...and that's anither issue entirely!

SanDisk Bluetooth mistake (Clip Sport Plus)

SANDISK's BLUETOOTH BANANA SKIN!

I'm publishing this because, the last I knew, SanDisk had done a very strange thing indeed. If you go looking for the full technical description of the SanDisk Clip Sport Plus, you'll find one technical detail manifestly missing (at least at the time of me writing this). Try as you might, you won't turn up what version Bluetooth is being used, as a transmitter, on this MP3 player.

I suppose if I'd dropped the ball in quite the way that SanDisk has, I might try to keep it quiet. It's true that the company can legitimately claim to have included Bluetooth functionality in this MP3 player, but its version 2. So, anything you are thinking of pairing it with had better be extremely backward compatible (or so old that it's not much short of a miracle that it still working)!

It's puzzling that such an old and useless version of Bluetooth should have been baked into one of their more recent devices and I suspect you wouldn't get any sense out of them, if you ever tried to ask them why on earth they decided to use such an ancient version of  Bluetooth.

My sole reason for publishing this posting was to make potential customers aware of what they could be buying  and the likelihood of them having the hassle of returning the product, once they discover that the damn thing won't work with much that is current technology.  It's not the first time that SanDisk have screwed things up quite so badly. I was one of the unfortunate individuals who bought the earlier model of Clip Sport, when it first came out. I discovered, somewhat latterly, that this had a reputation for locking up for no apparently good reason. Fully aware of this design flaw, SanDisk (nonetheless) carried on selling the product.

TravelPharm and Trustpilot,review censorship collusion

A couple of weeks ago I ordered some antihistamine tablets from a company called TravelPharm and the idiots sent me somebody else's order. When I called the company to try to straighten out what the hell was going on, I found myself talking to a woman who decided to get both precious and rude with me (a winning combination, as you can imagine). Eventually, I did manage to speak to somebody with fewer personality problems. My order arrived a couple of days later in an envelope so light that the packaging inside had been squashed in transit. Altogether, the sort of performance that you couldn't write a good review about, without lying your head off. Consequently, when a company called Trustpilot (you'd have to ask them why they decided on a daft name like this) contacted me, asking me to review my experiences in trading with TravelPharm, I didn't have a good thing to say about them. I think Trustpilot went ahead and published my less-than-complimentary review and then I think that TravelPharm read what I had written and (some days later) had asked for my review to be withdrawn (otherwise known as censored)! Don't get me wrong, I can understand a company wanting nothing that good reviews, but you have to provide good enough service that you deserve them!

PERSONALISED SOUND! SKULLCANDY CRUSHER ANC HIDES CONFIGURATION SOFTWARE!

PERSONALISED SOUND! SKULLCANDY CRUSHER ANC HIDES CONFIGURATION SOFTWARE!

The Skullcandy Crusher ANC headphones come with the ability to customise the sound to your own hearing. Unfortunately, it's entirely necessary to find how and where it is you do it. The Skullcandy website as a video that tells you that this feature is available, just not how to access it. I had downloaded the Skullcandy app to my android compatible phone and I honestly thought that all it did was reproduce what you could find in the hard copy of the instruction manual (white on a black background in really tiny print). Not finding the means by which I could customise the sound, I reasoned that there had to be a separate and entirely different app for doing this and I was keen to use this feature because I happen to have a moderate hearing loss as well as living with a severe sight impairment. The more I looked around for information, the more I encountered angry fellow users who had also failed to be able to use this feature. At one point, I honestly thought that the app that operated the customisable sound must be only available for Apple handheld devices! I also found myself going back through all the packing material, wondering whether there was a handheld device that came with the headphones. Nothing appeared to make any sense.

Squirrelled away in just one piece of information that I managed to find, was a reference to a button that you could very easily miss and was part of the Skullcandy app. This is what you do. You run the app and get as far as Bluetooth being logged in (see left-hand screenshot below). Two thirds of the way down the screen you will see a small faint line of text that is also a link and enables you to skip the instructions, click on this. You then get as far as the right-hand screenshot and there is a teeny-tiny button with a silly wavy line graphic, at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen (I have drawn in a red arrow to help you find this). You click on this and then you can begin the whole process of performing the hearing tests on yourself. One other thing, at the end of all the tests there isn't anything that tells you that your settings have been automatically saved to your headphones, the test just comes to an end, with no way of quitting out of it. Don't worry about this, just close the app in another way!

The Buffoon in the Bully (Johnson and Cummings)

There was a programme on TV, a couple of nights ago, about a guy called Dominic Cummings. If the programme was to be believed, then this is a guy who had a fairly lengthy history of either being chucked out of or walking away from a whole series of attempts to get into a position of influence in British politics. That, in and of itself, wouldn't be anything new or worrying. However, this is a guy who comes across as not only wanting control, but out of control. There are accounts of physical bullying and the like. Blow the froth off and you have a description that psychologists would most probably recognise as psychopathic! Politics has a habit of attracting those people who are, by their very nature, least suited to hold public office (although there are some notable exceptions to this (dangerous politicians with a grasp of something called integrity).

There is just one current problem about Mr Cummings' love affair with politics, he seems to be the chief adviser to Boris Johnson. Let's face it, Boris doesn't come across as the sharpest knife in the drawer. Most politicians would have taken the opportunity of polishing up their oratory skills, but perhaps Boris thinks that beginning the same sentence two or three times and stammering make him seem more endearing. Sort of the lovable idiot kind of image!

Political advisers are nothing new, neither have they been absent during various crises (Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell were shadowy figures at the back of Tony Blair, during the Gulf War… remember the total absence of weapons of mass destruction and the cover-up that is the record-sized Chilcott report)! However, it does seem as though we've got an idiot being utilised by a psychopath during a global pandemic. An opportunity to break the rules, mess around with legislation and generally do whatever you like that is a perfect gift to somebody who has always wanted to be a supreme control freak!

We are now conditioned to accept daily briefings, courtesy of our TV set! You've probably noticed how things are being closed down left right and centre and yet there is no government money (to speak of) being pumped into the situation to keep the economy from collapsing. Watch this space, taxes are about to go up, but this won't be reckoned into any inflation index.

It's not exactly a closely guarded secret that the National Health Service has been haemorrhaging staff, in recent times. These are not people that are just simply retiring. My local GP has been quietly making arrangements to retire early and it's because he's now more of an administrator than a doctor. This wasn't what he signed up for! Now the government wants to entice nurses and doctors, who have left the service, into coming back. This will include a whole raft of people who probably breathed a sigh of relief when they finally got out of the NHS. Ever since Margaret Thatcher, our national health services had far too many managers and the biggest casualties have been patients. I had a stay in hospital, last year, and I was treated appallingly. I was given a lot of painkilling drugs, that were guaranteed to cause constipation and not a laxative or an enema to be seen, even though I kept on asking for them. I was the blind guy in the corner and I could be ignored!

It's possible that Mr Cummings didn't figure on being the power behind the throne during a national/international crisis and it's likely that his ability to bully people will only carry him so far. If nothing else, people distance themselves from bullies and this does seem to have happened to Mr Cummings on a number of occasions. Bullies usually have something of a fragile personality! Maybe Dominic Cummings will go mad, crash out and be fed on a diet of largactil in a private psychiatric hospital, in leafy suburbia. In the meantime we do seem to be edging our way in the direction of martial law, perhaps freedom of speech will be another casualty, quite soon!

So, what's to be done. Could there possibly be a way out of this situation that we are heading inexorably towards? Do we need a buffoon being run by a bully, in charge of the country? My guess would be that this wouldn't be the finest combination! Any dissenting voices in the Cabinet could be given a good kicking, after all! It's not legally possible to get crowd Funding together to finance a hit. But I suppose it's just possible that something like it could be arranged, unofficially! I don't have the connections to set up anything like this, but you can bet that somebody does.

Vanishing Shopping Trolleys at Tesco, Sunderland

I'm one of those older people who relies upon being able to use the shallow draught style of trolley pictured on the modified wild West wanted poster (below). As a blind person, it isn't so much getting the products off the shelves and into this trolley, it's getting them back out again, once I've got as far as the checkout. It's only me that can do this and, if I'm forced to use one of the deeper trolleys, I can't always guarantee to find everything.

Some time back, the manager of my local branch of Tesco decided that she would have some kind of customer survey as to where it was that customers most felt that they wanted their trolleys to be stored. If you stop and think about it, this is a bit of a weird survey to hold, in the first place. After all, there were well used trolley collection points all around the customer car park and one specific area immediately adjacent to those parking bays are set apart for people living with some kind of physical disability. When we arrive at Tesco, it's my job to go around to the back of a car and unship my wife's mobility scooter. The next job should be going and getting a supermarket trolley. To this end, there is an area set apart for putting all the supermarket trolleys together, immediately adjacent to the aforementioned parking bays for people living with some kind of physical disability. Sounds okay so far, doesn't it… but there's no accounting for the insanity that can creep insidiously, into so-called ordinary life!

Imagine my surprise when all of the supermarket trolleys mysteriously vanished from the aforementioned area (near all the disabled parking). The trolleys had been whisked off, safely indoors and corralled around the bottom of one of those moving walkways that slants up or down depending on whether you're entering or leaving the store. As these walkways were a goodly distance away from the accessible parking, I had to wonder about the sanity (or apparent lack of it) underlying this decision.

I tried asking some quite reasonable questions about this and was informed about the survey as though it was the answer to everything! It didn't seem to matter that there was now a lively trade in the shallow draught trolleys favoured by people living with mobility problems, as they made their way back and forth between the disabled parking and the lifts (a lot nearer than the moving walkways and more often used by people with mobility problems).

I don't have mobility problems of my own, but neither do I have eyesight that is all that good. My wife can, of course, send me off in the direction of the moving walkways and hope that I might come back with an appropriate design of trolley, but there would be no guarantee of this!

Getting nothing by way of a sensible answer out of the local management, I did try going as far as the store customer service, only to have the store policy recited to me, as though it made the greatest possible sense. What I the only sane person around? Had all of the staff at the store collectively taken leave of their senses? All questions that I felt I was entitled to ask not only myself, but anybody else who might listen (although they did seem to be remarkably few people who fell into this category and owned any responsibility). There were, so it seemed to me, a comparatively large number of inconvenienced people with physical disabilities that were getting a rough deal out of all of this nonsense!

Taking the matter still further, to the Chief Executive Officer, brought new hope and this was short lived. Again, it seemed as though there was an initial impetus and this faded away to nothing, apparently without anything like a reasonable answer.

I tried raising hell at the customer service desk, in this very store, today and I started to get answers that I hadn't received previously. Apparently (according to one manager) trolleys kept going missing from the area that they had been entirely removed from. This was blamed on the local student halls of residence! Apparently Tesco staff had done some kind of foray into these premises and had recovered something like 80 shopping trolleys left around the inside of this building. It's hard to imagine this staggering quantity of supermarket trolleys being left abandoned in any building without them getting in the way of life going on as normal! This story didn't exactly ring true, but I didn't know what else to make of what was going on.

According to the aforementioned manager, they had yet more of these shallow deck supermarket trolleys on order and the idea had been kicked around that perhaps the store or to abandon the idea of not having any kind of coin-operated deterrent to removing the trolleys and not bringing them back! Clearly the whole situation has been running for some time and without anything like a workable solution being arrived at (and all through this time, of course, people living with disabilities were being inconvenienced in a way that they truly didn't deserve)!

Having discovered at least one reason why Tesco supermarket trolleys were going missing (apparently being taken away by students and not returned), I decided to post an appeal on various student and university Facebook pages (using the wanted poster, featured below). I have absolutely no idea how this will work out, but something has to be tried!

The Alexa gift and ongoing puzzles

It's a funny old world and here I am trying to re-purpose my old blog! I've just spent absolutely ages deleting all the old entries, so that I can (more or less) start afresh.

Apart from the usual church-free christmas, which is the normal and usual way of things for me, I got one rather unusual and unexpected gift. A good friend bought me an Alexa Echoed Plus and I've spent about a week messing around with it. I've discovered that my main use for it turns out to be as a wireless loudspeaker! It's ironic, because (as I understand it) this electronic device is mainly used as a means of driving other devices (and not the other way around). As far as I can make out, configuring in and using a Bluetooth transmitter as a means of playing the output of your MP3 player, through the Alexa speaker, is an undocumented function.

I got too clever for my own good, a couple of days ago and tried using the very same transmitter in conjunction with another kind of receiver. I then discovered that the Alexa unit could no longer locate the transmitter. It took me awhile to realise that there was quite possibly a command that got Alexa to go looking for existing Bluetooth devices, and this worked!

I know I can play stuff from my Audible library on this unit, but there isn't a viable way of doing the same thing with audiobooks in MP3 format, not that I've been able to find (so far), although I've only been hunting around for a few days! I'm not surprised that Amazon want to try and shut out other sound formats as much as possible, so was to retain their jealously guarded exclusivity. There are normally weighs around Amazon's attempts at generating a monopoly, but they are not all that easy to find (in my experience).