All posts by Keith

I’m a controversialist and catalyst, quietly enabling others to develop by providing different ideas and views of the world. Born in London in the early 1950s and initially trained as a research chemist I retired as a senior project manager after 35 years in the IT industry. Retirement is about community give-back and finding some equilibrium. Founder and Honorary Secretary of the Anthony Powell Society. Chairman of my GP's patient group.
amusements, links, science

Your Interesting Links

More links to interesting articles you may have missed.
Have you ever wondered how glow sticks work? Well wonder no more because here’s the explanation. I love those aromatic dye molecules; they’re similar to the ones I used when I was a post-grad student.
So chemicals are bad then? Well not so much. Five myths about the chemicals.
Want to avoid getting cancer? The Cancer Code provides a 12 point guide to avoiding unnecessary risk.
OK so let’s have something a bit more light-hearted …


Feral pigeons can be a pain, especially in cities, but wood pigeons (above) make wonderful contribution to our countryside. “That eat excellent”, too!
Rats! Nasty, dirty, disease-ridden creatures aren’t they? Well actually they aren’t dirty at all though rats do carry all sorts of unknown bugs. But then so probably do many creatures. We just don’t know, because we haven’t looked.
What looks like a rabbit, stands on two legs and walks? No, not Bugs Bunny but an extinct giant kangaroo. Yes, this one was basically too big to hop efficiently and was adapted to walk.
And while we’re on strange things in the animal world, here are five surprising facts about squirrels, including that they make jerky!
Most Brits will probably remember the wildlife film from some 15 or more years ago of squirrels beating an obstacle course to get food — if only because a well known brand of beer used it for a commercial! Seems Americans don’t know it, because one journalist conducted a human vs. squirrel battle of wits. And yes, the squirrels won!
Liz Heinecke specialises in hands-on science for kids which can be done at home.

Why is it we all love pizza? What makes it so irresistibly delicious? Turns out it is all down to the chemistry of the ingredients and the cooking.
Anthropologists have been arguing for decades about how the Pacific Islands were colonised. Now it seems that the voyage of the Kon-Tiki was misleading and that the Pacific islands were colonised from the west by skilled navigators, as the genetics suggest.
Back to something more serious for a minute. George Monbiot takes his weekly side-swipe at big business and big politicians.
Meanwhile we’re all getting lonelier as families and communities are becoming more fragmented. And the loneliness isn’t good for us. George Monbiot (again) concludes that our lives are becoming nasty, brutish and long.
Finally I’ll leave you with a couple of less serious items.
First a look at fictional characters who would have been vastly improved by an abortion. At last someone agrees with my jaundiced view of the classics.
And finally Paris’s giant inflatable butt plug Christmas tree was deflated by saboteurs and is now an oversized green condom.
p1s p2s

history, personal, ramblings

Birthtime TV

There’s an interesting new resource from the BBC … the BBC Genome project.
It contains the listings information (TV and radio) which the BBC printed in Radio Times between 1923 and 2009 … and you can search the site for BBC programmes, people, dates and specific Radio Times editions.
That means you can find when a particular programme was broadcast, who appeared in a particular episode of your favourite comedy series and even what was being broadcast the minute you were born.
Now this latter I find sort of scary. Having been born in another century and on a different planet — ie. before we had 24 hour, wall-to-wall TV — I was totally unsure what I’d find being broadcast when I appeared.


I know I was born at lunchtime, about 12.50 according to my mother. And of course I now the date and place (University College Hospital in London’s Gower Street). But back in 1951 this was not just before the days of 24 hour TV but at a time when there were only three radio stations and one TV channel. TV (now BBC1) and the Third Programme (now BBC Radio 3) broadcast almost exclusively in the evenings with just the occasional TV programme during the day (see later).
That left me with entering the world to either Workers’ Playtime on the Home Service (now BBC Radio 4) or Hullo There! on the Light Programme (now BBC Radio 2) which featured comedian Arthur Askey.
OMG! I remember hearing Workers’ Playtime when I was a bit older. It was awful and condescending. But then so was everything in those days. As an example, the afternoon I was born TV screened a programme called Designed for Women which included “John Gloag reviews some recent books” and “Round the Shops, Margot Lovell reports on what she thinks will interest you in the shops this week”. Can’t you just hear those awful Fanny Craddock-style presenters?
Thank heavens we live in another age and in a greater light!
What about you? What was being broadcast when you appeared in the world?

photography

Buggered Britain #24

Another in my occasional series documenting some of the underbelly of Britain. Britain which we wouldn’t like visitors to see and which we wish wasn’t there. The trash, abused, decaying, destitute and otherwise buggered parts of our environment. Those parts which symbolise the current economic malaise; parts which, were the country flourishing, wouldn’t be there, would be better cared for, or made less inconvenient.
This is the junction Elder Street with Commercial Street, E1, just north of Spitalfields Market.

Click the image for larger views on Flickr
Buggered Britain #24

amusements, food+drink, history

Oddity of the Week: Coffee Grinding

The coffee plant is native to Ethiopia, but the first evidence of coffee beans being turned into a beverage comes from fifteenth-century Yemen. The fashion for this black, bitter drink spread across the Middle East and the Mediterranean, reaching Europe in the late sixteenth century. Although hand-operated spice mills had been in use since the 1400s, coffee beans continued to be ground using the more basic technology of mortar and pestle, or by millstones. Even as late as 1620, when the Pilgrim Fathers sailed for America on the Mayflower, all they brought with them for grinding coffee was an adapted mortar-and-pestle device.
In the 1660s a certain Nicholas Book, ‘living at the Sign of the Frying Pan in St Tulies Street’ in London, publicized himself as the only man known to make mills that could grind coffee to powder, but he was not necessarily the inventor of the machine he manufactured. The first US patent for a coffee grinder was issued in 1798 to Thomas Bruff of Maryland, who, when he was not grinding coffee, was Thomas Jefferson’s dentist.
From William Hartston; The Things that Nobody Knows: 501 Mysteries of Life, the Universe and Everything; Atlantic Books; 2011

words

Word: Xanthophobia

Xanthophobia
A fear of the colour yellow or the word yellow.
From the Greek xanthos, ξανθός yellow with the Latin -phobia, Greek. -ϕοβία, fear, dread or horror.

personal, photography

Weekly Photograph

This week’s photograph is special. Because yesterday was my mother’s 99th birthday, which makes her the oldest person I know about in the family for some 300 years.
Of course we went to see her. She lives in a really excellent care home just south of Norwich, in a tiny village in the middle of the country. Amazingly she is all there mentally; just very frail and almost totally deaf. What is even better is that she is still doing things: reading, doing little watercolour paintings of flowers, knitting, making soft toys, and watching the occasional bit of television. She is always up to try new things: someone has given her several pieces of board for watercolour painting; and we bought her a needle-felting kit because it is something I think she’s never done — and there’s a good chance she’ll love it. OK her hand isn’t as steady and accurate as it used to be but she still enjoys painting all her own greetings cards!

Dora at 99
Dora on Her 99th Birthday
East Carleton; October 2014

All the girls in the home love her. They’re always bringing her little things to paint. And yesterday the cook made her a special birthday cake.
I think she’s having a wonderful holiday! And she certainly seems to be enjoying her age; it doesn’t seem to be a burden, although the frailty and deafness are annoying. She still has vivid memories of her childhood and things she’s done through the years.
I just really hope she makes 100 as I think as well as being a huge milestone, she will actually enjoy it, in her own quiet way.

books, personal

Ten Things #10

A month or so ago my friend Gabriella tagged me in the 10 Books Challenge: to list 10 books that stayed with you in some way. I had been thinking about this for a while, so I was enjoined not to think too hard about it, especially as they don’t have to be the “right” books or great works of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way and stayed with you.
Looking back I find I have done something very similar before. But this time my rather eclectic list is somewhat different …
10 Books that Mean Something to Me

  1. Like Gabriella I have to start with Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. All twelve volumes. I’ve written so many times before about Dance I’ll say no more here.
     
  2. Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking Glass. I remember these from an early age and they started me thinking about language and logic. I especially love the Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice, first encountered as a student.
     
  3. TS Elliot, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. As an 8-year-old I knew “Skimbleshanks” by heart.
     
  4. Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief and Waugh in Abyssinia which might as well be the same book.
     
  5. Noreen Marshall, Dictionary of Children’s Clothes, 1700s to Present. How can I not have been influenced by this: I lived with (and still do live with) the author through the umpteen years it was being written.
     
  6. Gabriel Chevallier, Clochemerle. Brilliant farce. Read as a teenager.
     
  7. John Betjeman, High and Low. I bought this in my teens, when it first came out and for many years it was my go-to book if I had a sleepless night.
     
  8. Florence Greenberg, Jewish Cooking. No I’m not Jewish, but I found this when a student and it is such an excellent cookery book. OK there’s no pork or offal but there is just about everything else from the everyday to the special.
     
  9. Douglas Adams, Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy.
     
  10. Mervyn Peake, Gormenghast trilogy, especially the first book Titus Groan. I couldn’t finish volume three, Titus Alone; it was just too depressing.

As this is my “Ten Things” I’m not tagging anyone in particular, but you’re all challenged to do this if you haven’t already.

personal, ramblings

Who would you choose?

1 Comment

I saw this the other day and thought it such a great idea — if only to make one think — it seems worth sharing.

who

My answer?
My immediate answer when I saw the question was: Prof. Alice Roberts.
But there are just so many great people to choose from. Galileo. Leonardo. William Byrd. Anthony Powell. Richard Feynman. Samuel Pepys. Tony Benn. Dalai Lama. And of course one or two of my ancestors who could unlock some riddles in the family tree.
So who would you choose?
Answers in the comments, or on your blog with a link in the comments, please.