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The boots were fine. The GripGrab gloves much less so. I had to put my gloved hands in my jacket pockets. Whenever I stopped to take a photo the gloves had to come off. My hands were immediately painful in the wind.
I took the verges and moved well back as every vehicle approached. This saves them having to avoid me. While I save being splattered with slush as the vehicle leaves the clearer tracks.
Thanks to the wind, a solitary Kestrel turned up and hovered without visible wing movements. The breakfast prey must have been absent. Because it never dived. Nor even reduced height.
Are sales website owners mentally ill? Are you? You search online, find a promising website and ...as soon as the site opens they throw up a cookie permissions box. BORING! They want your inside leg measurement and promise to constantly spy on you and your kids and grandkids 60x60x24x365x1000 years. You haven't even bought anything yet.
Having survived that hurdle we move onto the goodies. AND then, before you can read the first dollop of lying, sales patter. BANG! Another damned great box hides the screen. Some pointless bullshit about special offers on something costing pennies and totally irrelevant to your original search.
Meanwhile, in a parallel universe: You are walking down the shopping high street and see a selection of objects in a brightly lit shop window. You pause to examine the goodies and check the prices. Hmm. I might just...BANG! An opaque shutter drops like a guillotine! You can no longer see a damned thing inside the shop window.
Staff members rush out with tape measures and cudgels. They demand your inside leg measurement and every intimate detail about your life, your partner's life, your children's and grandchildren's lives. Otherwise you can't look into their shop window ever again!
You break free from the menacing staff members and run! As you leave the scene a vast fleet of black cars follows you down the road to the car park. They then scatter to monitor your entire family, friends, contacts and colleagues, right around the globe. For as long as they all shall live and even beyond the grave. A vast, global team of spies and snoopers follow every intimate detail of your entire life for the next 100 years.
AND, YOU STILL HAVEN'T EVEN BOUGHT ANYTHING! Yet the avalanche of parallel cookies crushed the life out of you as a human being. Each cookie woven into an evil version of the "1984 Tapestry." Which would have sneered at. As completely impossible when the book was first published. Hitler and Stalin would have given an arm and a leg for the information the present, online dictators wield as tax-free, global despots.
All this vital information is constantly fed into government computers, via "back doors," right around the planet. You showed interest in a hoodie as a present for a grandchild. Are you a terrorist or a spy? You watched a YT video of the demolition of a local chimney or tower block: Are you a terrorist planning on making a bomb? You read an article on the BBC about Russia. Are you a terrorist or a spy looking for potential targets?
Can you even imagine a REAL SHOP behaving this way? Even in a vile communist dictatorship like "Plague" Jinping's terrifying dystopia? Thought not. Ask yourself why the billionaire despots don't ask if you would like to add their cookies. Instead of having to opt out on every damned website you ever visit. Over and over and over again. Try a cookie killer program. See the hundreds of thousands of cookies which magically appear on your computer every day you are just wandering about online.
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