28/12/2019

Dry January Could Get You A Free Holiday

Now is the ideal time for you to think about doing Dry January.

Well, I say that. January 30th might be the best day to think about it if you want to set your target low.

But for many drinking less would be a good idea, and a team have done some maths to try to convince you to try. They have worked out how much money you could save by not drinking.

Before we get into the stats, the actual amount you could save depends on hos much you drink and where you live. If you are Pete Dougherty or you live in London these figures would be a lot higher. If Pete lived in London and he stopped, he'd kick Jeff Bezos off the richest man list.

The headline is "Stopping drinking for a year could get you a holiday in the Caribbean".

Wow, let's break it down.

If you do all of January and a little bit more, so five whole weeks off the booze you could save enough money for a two-night stay in Amsterdam.

OK, yes, two nights in Amsterdam might lead to activities that are worse for you than drinking, but the maths doesn't judge.

If you stayed dry for ten weeks they say you could save the equivalent of five nights in the Algarve. Ah, Portugal. Known for it's green wine, beers and… man-alive, you can't get away from the stuff. It's all very well saving up your beer money to spend on a holiday but it just concentrates the drinking while you're away. Technically this is making binge drinking worse.

That's what Dry January does any way, isn't it? People stop for a month and at the end they celebrate by going out for a session. Why? That's like doing a diet and celebrating by eating 4 trifles.

The top prize in this research – that's if you did Dry January and then stayed drive for the rest of the year – they say it would save you enough money to have a week-long all-inclusive stay in Montego Bay, Jamaica.

Again, what's the point in "all-inclusive" if you're drinking water? So the temptation is to drink on your holiday when your tolerance has dropped.

In a bid to cut binge drinking maybe the headline should be, "Giving up just one a holiday in the Caribbean could let you drink for a hole year!"



The new book by Steve N Allen is out now. Lasted Yet Another Year sums up the happenings of the last 12 months. It's available on Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Google Books and paperback.

While you're here, subscribe to the Steve N Allen podcast. It's free! Find it on BBC Sounds, iTunes or Spotify.

📕READ (the new book) | 🎧LISTEN (to the latest podcast) | 👀SEE (Steve's live stand-up)
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27/12/2019

Regifting Is The New Recycling

In the post-Christmas glow, as we sit with belts on a wider hole, I bring one final news story of the year to make you feel happy.

A new survey has found that around half of us say we will re-gift items we have been given. That is an important number. Not only because numbers that around around half, like 48% and 52% have had a big impact on our lives, but because this survey should make you feel better.

If someone gave you a gift that you don’t like, don’t worry. It’s not because you are ungrateful, half of us are thinking the same.

Give it to someone else. The new recipient might like it. At the very least it means someone gave you “the gift of not having to shop for someone in the future”. And isn’t that what Christmas is really about? No, it’s not, but you get my point.

And if you are worrying that your gift wasn’t appreciated, this survey tells us that half of all people loved their gifts. If you have bought something for at least two people rest safe in the knowledge that you have made someone happy.

I also think this survey should help us remove the shame from the act of re-gifting. It’s 2019, a year that feels like it was mainly filled with people talking about Greta and her angry boat trips. Re-gifting is the ultimate in recycling. You have cut your carbon footprint. It’s like you’re giving a Christmas present to the planet. If someone always buys you something you don’t like, don’t even take the wrapping off. You’ve just saved a bit of a tree.

All of which is a long way of me saying if I got you something that has an SA monogrammed on it, you know what happened.



The new book by Steve N Allen is out now. Lasted Yet Another Year sums up the happenings of the last 12 months. It's available on Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Google Books and paperback.

While you're here, subscribe to the Steve N Allen podcast. It's free! Find it on BBC Sounds, iTunes or Spotify.

📕READ (the new book) | 🎧LISTEN (to the latest podcast) | 👀SEE (Steve's live stand-up)
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18/12/2019

Kentucky F***ed Chicken

I always love a story where some worker accidentally swears at a customer by writing something that they don't think the customer will see. Normally it's on an order where they didn't know how to describe the customer so they put "Fat state with sh*t perm" or someone at a call centre leaves a note on someone's account saying "b*st*rd".

This is the reason we have account numbers. It's so you don't have to accurately describe the customer. And even though I have never worked in a call centre I presume more than one customer would fit the description of "b*st*rd" so it's a flawed system.

This time the news has told us of a KFC customer who was shocked to see that someone had put "f***ed at 18.03" on his gravy pot.

Let's break down what this could mean. Maybe the customer looked like he was totally shattered in the early evening and that could be a spot on way of explaining it.

Normally we would say someone more of a morning person, but "f***ed at 18.03" is another way of putting it.

It could be a frank way of getting sell-by information across. "Best before" implies the item would be OK after that time but "f***ed at 18.03" tells you it's time to throw it away.

The worst possibility is that someone has gone round that branch of the chicken shop having sexual intercourse with the pots of gravy like a Northerner porn parody of the American Pie films.

If it's the last one we have identified another of the Colonel's secret ingredients.

It's bad enough that someone would make love to a sauce but what really turns my stomach is that they would keep a log of the time they did it. Trying to make sure they you don't sleep with the same pot of gravy twice doesn't make you a player. Tut, men.

There could be someone out there who enjoys having sex with things you pour on your food but only likes it if they haven't been made love to before. In which case we really should lock up our virgin olive oil.




The new book by Steve N Allen is out now. Lasted Yet Another Year sums up the happenings of the last 12 months. It's available on Amazon Kindle, Kobo, Google Books and paperback.

While you're here, subscribe to the Steve N Allen podcast. It's free! Find it on BBC Sounds, iTunes or Spotify.

📕READ (the new book) | 🎧LISTEN (to the latest podcast) | 👀SEE (Steve's live stand-up)





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05/12/2019

Deleting Twitter

Social media comes in for some stick. It's blamed for increasing hate in political debate, for making us feel ugly and ruining our sleep patters. And if we're not sleeping we probably don't look as good, which makes the second point worse.

There was a story recently that linked using social media to getting piles. No wonder people are so angry on there.

Many people rant about how evil social media and often they do it on social media, without spotting the irony. It's like sending a "Royal Mail is Sh*t!" postcard.

Twitter is cleaning up its act as it announced a cull. Sadly it's not a cull of the hatemongers and spreaders of fake news – they don't want to lose Donald Trump as a user – they have said they'll be getting rid of inactive accounts.

Why? The inactive people on Twitter aren't the ones issuing death threats to people they disagree with over Brexit and telling anyone on TV that they're crap. They don't fill your timeline with retweets from Russia Today (RT RT) and they're not posting conspiracies about the media.

The inactive users don't make the world worse and yet they still boost your follower figures. On social media, inactive users might just be my idea target demographic.

In the last few years we have had elections and referenda, footballing events and some terrible acts on Britain's Got Talent. If you have kept your opinions about those things to yourself we should send you a gift basket.

The reason behind the thinning out of the herd is all about the usernames. Some people signed up and got a great Twitter handle and if they're doing nothing with it you may feel annoyed.

If you wanted to open up a stationery shop called The Pen Is Good but were upset to find that @penisgood was taken by some adult actor, this could be good for you.

The cynics will say that this isn't anything to do with freeing up usernames, it's an easy trick to get more people to log in. It's like when Harvester threatened to stop serving peas. No one really cared about peas but the threat of losing something you assumed you'd always have made you want it more.

So log on, spread some fake news, row about Brexit for a while and follow @mrstevenallen.



The new book by Steve N Allen is out now. Lasted Yet Another Year sums up the happenings of the last 12 months. It's available on Amazon Kindle, Kobo and paperback.

While you're here, subscribe to the Steve N Allen podcast. It's free! Find it on BBC Sounds, iTunes or Spotify.

📕READ (the new book) | 🎧LISTEN (to the latest podcast) | 👀SEE (Steve's live stand-up)

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02/12/2019

Lasted Yet Another Year

Congratulations, you have made it through another year. Yes, we do that every year but take a second to rejoice.

As the memories of those great 12 months start to fade you can get the perfect summary of it all in the new eBook from comedian Steve N Allen.

A lovely compilation of the newspaper columns you can find across the UK along with some other writing, Steve looks at a selection of the year's events. From Brexit to an angry Neighbourhood Watch to probably Brexit again, take a look back through the year in this comic take on things.

"Lasted Yet Another Year" is available on Amazon Kindle. It's the follow up to Lasted Another Year that summed up 2018 nicely in ebook and paperback.

It's also now available on Kobo reader.




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