bitful

To throw into a state of confusion.

To pass off as genuine, valuable, or worthy. To impose (something or someone unwanted) upon another by coercion or trickery. To insert fraudulently or deceitfully.

To whine; whimper.

Composed chiefly of rock fragments of volcanic origin.

Dr B.'s parents are coming down from Staffordshire tonight, then tomorrow morning the four of us are hopping onto the Eurostar and spending the next forty-eight hours in Paris.
He has organised this as a present for his dad's birthday, and getting his mother to come along took some planning and presentation skills, as in the [...]

A beam, as of steel, wood, or reinforced concrete, used as a main horizontal support in a building or bridge.

A few weeks ago I got into the habit of picking up a Del Monte ice smoothie on the way to work every morning. The perfect refreshment after a stifling tube journey.
'Only 96 calories', it says on the packaging, as well as 'No artificial colours, flavours, preservatives or sweeteners'. Well, they had me at '96 [...]

To howl, wail, or lament loudly.

(Chiefly British) Odd; strange. Presenting danger or difficulty.

Recent comments on my pictures on Flicker left by Chig have made me realise that things are not always the way they look.
First of all, I so wish my phone (an HTC Hurricane, which is usually a particularly smart smartphone) geo-tagged pictures. Alas, although yes, it does have sat nav software, I would need to [...]

(Sports) A tournament in which each contestant is matched in turn against every other contestant. A petition or protest on which the signatures are arranged in a circle in order to conceal the order of signing. A letter sent among members of a group, often with comments added by each person in turn.

I have absolutely no idea how I came up with the idea of making a Finnish sweet bread for a picnic with friends on Hampstead Heath.
I seem to remember waking up at stupid o'clock, wanting to impress people with my culinary skills, then going to the supermarket, and the next thing I knew I was [...]

A broad flexible part, such as a flipper. A young woman, especially one in the 1920s who showed disdain for conventional dress and behavior.

You can resize your insanely ginormous desktop icons in Windows Vista by clicking on the desktop, then holding down the Ctrl key and scrolling with the mouse wheel. Faster than right-clicking on the desktop, then View > Classic Icons.
Arcade Fire are from Montreal. Watch two acoustic semi-improvised sessions for Neon Bible and Wake Up at [...]

A protective covering for the backs of chairs and sofas.

The purchase of an iPod nano (three days before the announcement that the hundredth million iPod had been sold - yes, that was me) changed somehow my Last.fm profile, so much so that it prompted David to exhult
PopBitful is Back! Back! Back!
when he saw the string of madonnabritneygwengirlsaloud in my 'recently played' list a few [...]

To habituate to something undesirable, especially by prolonged subjection; accustom.

My ex-flatmate is coming to dinner tonight.
My ex-flatmate is a chef. I should therefore probably be all stressed out and produce a repeat performance of our recent overcomplicated dinnerparty that was not particularly successful taste-wise.
Maybe I should worry, but I don't. You see, I lived with that man for two and a half years and [...]

Instructions are for Google Reader, but you can probably play with other aggregators.

Refrain from checking your feeds for a day or so, until most blogs you read have had a chance to update.
Switch to the 'List view' setting.
Hide the blog titles in the left hand side column with a piece of card.
Read post titles and [...]

By a small amount at a time; in stages: articles acquired piecemeal. In pieces; apart.

I always happily give away any pretense of privacy and let people access my data for a quid or two.
It is therefore hardly surprising that I always, always use my Tesco ClubCard, even when I but a stick of chewing-gum at a gas station. Then, every three months Tesco points turn up on my doorstep [...]

Retention of juvenile characteristics in the adults of a species

I have been running Windows Vista Home Premium for a couple of months now, and the biggest annoyance is that it refuses to retain your email account password(s) if you are using Outlook 2002.
Windows claims you need to enter your email account passwords every time because of security reasons. I say they do it to [...]

Alcoholic liquor, especially inferior or bootleg liquor: “bootleggers smashed on their own hooch� (Christopher Hitchens). Marijuana.

I have installed Show Top Commentators, a quick and easy WordPress plugin to show who left the most comments on this website. You can see the top five from the past 365 days under 'Top commentators'.
The current top five is:

David (16)
mike (10)
Dr B (9)
Justin (7)
Chig (5)

At last, something where Dr B. is not number one [...]

To make decorative additions to; spruce up.

I always find that whenever I put together a meal with the only few ingredients I can find at home, it turns out quite well.
So on Friday night, after a short but hard week at work, the last thing I wanted to do was to fight for a trolley at Tesco. I knew we had [...]

While preparing to install the Add-Meta-Tags WordPress Plugin, a quick way to automatically generate XHTML meta tags with existing post categories and blog tagline, for the first time I feel the need to put something in the Options > Tagline field.
I never felt the need for a tagline before. To be honest, I probably never [...]

Small freshwater fish, often silver-coloured.

I knew you made fish batter with beer. I did not know that you can replace it with sparkling water, must not mix too vigorously and should add a bit of fizzy water or beer at the very end, because it's the bubbles that make the batter go crisp and puff up when it cooks.
You [...]