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Travelodge: A New ‘Blind Date’ Scheme ?

  Followers of the now somewhat beleaguered hotel chain may have noted an item in the news recently regarding several instances of occupied room keys being issued in error to unauthorised persons. Rumours abound as to why this might have happened, citing lax hotel security policy, poor staff training, etc. However, an interesting alternative explanation surfaced recently on social media, based on the possibility that it wasn’t actually a mistake after all…. The theory advanced is that in attempt to ‘spice up’ their hotel offering, Travelodge’s Marketing Development Department have come up with a ‘blind date’ type scheme whereby rooms occupied by single travellers are selected at random and a surprise additional occupant, also selected at random, is issued with a second pass key. Presumably neither 'victim' is aware of what the hotel has in store for them.... This is apparently designed to ‘make life more interesting’ for the unwitting participants and encourage lonely...
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Burnham: The Raid on England's Personal Wealth

‘Middle England’ is worried…and so it should be.... In his new role as our PM, Burnham has, in his own words, ‘hit the ground running’ in his project to 'Manchesterise' Britain (or at least the non-devolved English part of it). He is looking hard for new revenue-generating 'targets' to fund his many and varied 'projects' without 'spooking the markets' with a lot of extra borrowing.   His left-leaning socialist ideology naturally points him towards across-the-board redistribution of the UK's wealth. Since most of the UK’s private money and assets are held by so-called 'Middle England', Burham sees this large, disparate and normally compliant group of electors (particularly those over 50), as a potential soft-touch....and they are therefore firmly in his sights as a potential 'cash cow'. One of the problems our new PM faces, however, is that he is severely constrained, as was his predecessor,   by the wording of Labour’s 2024 manife...
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Why Did Louise Haigh really resign as Transport Minister ?

 Editor's note: Given the chnage in fortunes of the two principal players in this political saga, I though I'd wheel the blog out again with an update..... ---------------------- The rather unexpected announcement on 29 th November 2024 that Louise Haigh had resigned as Transport minister inevitably precipitated much speculation about ‘goings on in high places’. The party line explanation she offered for her 'resignation' was the bog-standard   ‘I don’t want to be a distraction’ recipe, accompanied by the usual weasel words of support from the PM for the decision and good wishes for the future….which, if course, tells us precisely nothing about what really happened. To establish what really went on, we need to look at the background. Several pertinent facts emerge: 1)        *  Starmer knew about Haigh’s 2013 conviction for ‘making a false report to the police’ about her mugging when he appointed her to the ministerial posts she has occupied. This...
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Travelodge and the ‘Escapist’ Robot – A New Development in Artificial Intelligence ?

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In view of the current reflections on AI and what its consequences are likely to be, I couldn't resist revisiting an early blog I'd written on the subject early it early days in 2022....  Could it be that AI has been evolving for some time - without us realising it ? Enjoy.... Travelodge and the ‘Escapist’ Robot – Is it cleverer than we think ? An entertaining news story took my eye last week and brightened things up somewhat amidst the anticyclonic gloom of late January in UK…. Apparently a cleaning robot being used by the Travelodge hotel in Cambridge went AWOL, and was later found under a hedge nearby. ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cambridgeshire-60084347 ). Having checked my calendar to ensure I hadn’t managed to hibernate without realising it,   thus missing February and March this year and landing on 1st April, I then verified that other news outlets were also reporting the story. After reading a couple of them, I wiped my eyes and started writing… As y...
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Amazon withdrew support from their older Kindles on May 20th - Is yours now defunct ?

  Amazon’s Kindle eReaders were ahead of their time when they first emerged in the late noughties, and were the first of the specialist eReaders with e-ink displays and long battery life to hit the mass market. They have amassed a large following of dedicated reader fans over the years since then, and have proven themselves to be robust and long-lasting devices. Dedicated e-readers are also the preferred vehicle for reading eBooks, given the eyestrain probems associated with long-term use of the LED screens typically used in phones and tablets.  Amazon have been steadily phasing out support to their older devices 'on the quiet' for the past couple of years, with increasing restrictions on registration and downloads for their oldest models. There has been considerable concern voiced recently amongst the Kindle fan-base over the recent 'final' announcement   by Amazon that they were withdrawing support from all of their older devices from May 20th 2026. Arguably some...
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