Tbf, he had tea until the Vogons arrived... but fair point.

That is a stroke of genius. I shall adopt this plan, at least for December.

Kebabs are great but I just never know what sauce goes with what, kind of thing. I don't mind, it's all mostly lovely anyway, but I do sometimes wonder if I'm doing the kebab equivalent of pairing Sauternes with tuna.

Oh no, am I Arthur Dent? I'm Arthur Dent, aren't I?

Sometimes I just get a cup of tea on the basis that ordering tea is life on easy mode, plus tea is an immensely reassuring substance for some reason, possibly because there is so little to the idea (water plus tea bag plus time...)

Same, but also same re the second bit.

I've also felt bewildered in various shops (coffee, sandwich, kebab, blah blah) and so on but it never occurred to me to blame the shop for it, since mild confusion about perfectly everyday stuff is reasonably normal for me.

I guess it could go either way depending on, y know, what was on and whether the angel in question liked to watch the news. I feel like Aziraphale would be more of a documentary fan if any tv at all, whereas I could imagine Gabriel being the kind to watch the headlines at least twice a night...

We had

"While shepherds washed their socks by night
All watching ITV
The angel of the Lord came down
And switched to BBC."

Last line of this for us was "smoking a cheap cigar". No idea why. Maybe some tv reference?

Yeah, I really think it would be interesting to dig in detail into the ways the term is used. That said, whether the intended meaning is "this is BS" or "my mind refuses to accept that this could be a thing" etc, I'd still be rethinking the use of the term in product marketing!

One hearsay anecdote I heard is that elementary studennts are starting to use "That's AI" as an alternative for "that's BS"

My hairdresser told me the same thing regarding how the term is used by her friend group (granted she is a bit older than the elementary school crowd, but still). I would love to see linguistic studies of how the term is used, as it trends towards synonymy with "low effort", "false" etc.

"1900, 200 persons were killed by horses and horse-drawn vehicles. This contrasts with 344 auto-related fatalities in New York in 2003; given the modern city’s greater population, this means the fatality rate per capita in the horse era was ~75 percent higher"
www.accessmagazine.org/spring-2007/...

I remember once reading that in NYC before cars (1900) the per capita fatality rate was higher from horse drawn carriages than cars in modern times (2000)