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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 occupied room keys being issued in error to unauthorised persons. Rumours abound as to why this might have happened, but 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 occupied rooms are selected at random and a surprise additional occupant, also selected at random, is issued with a second pass key. This is apparently designed to ‘make life more interesting’ for the unwitting participants and encourage lonely single travellers to ‘interact more’, thus making their stay more memorable and hence likely to promote re-bookings. If successful it would also increase revenue, with two people paying for th...
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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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Statins – The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

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  Many of us find ourselves prescribed one or other of the Statins by our GPs nowadays, often as a result of a routine health check. But are they really necessary, and what are the risks of taking them ? In this article, we’ll try to explain exactly what the statins, as a group of pharmaceuticals, actually look like, how they work, and why the medical profession are so keen on prescribing them for us ‘en masse’. I’ll jump ahead a bit and start with the ‘why’, to try to put the need for these key drugs into context…. Our modern diet is rich in carbohydrates and fats, and often takes the form of highly processed ready meals, which also contain a lot of salt. The problem is that this type of ‘challenge’ to our digestive systems and physiology on a continuous basis is an issue – our guts, brains and metabolism simply weren’t designed for it, and the excess salt that most of us consume in our modern diet is likely to compromise our circulatory health. The explanation for t...
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