No, not that sort of balcony! Monday’s Wizard of Id cartoon just tickled my sense of the ridiculous …
Category Archives: amusements
Bales of Straw – Only in England!
Between about 18th and 30th April, if you are in central London, it may be worth visiting Tower Bridge for an unusual sight.
The details are in the Port of London Authority Notice (PDF file). Basically work is to be done on a couple of arches of Tower Bridge by men on ropes dangling from the the arches which will on some days be closed to navigation. At other times the arches may still be open to navigation but with reduced headroom when the byelaw requires that the Bridge Master hang a bale of straw “large enough to be conspicuous” from the centre of the arch by day (and a white light by night).
And of course one must not forget that Tower Bridge is officially registered as a ship.
Surely only in this country do we have such arcane, and legally enacted, requirements!
Hat-tip: Ian Visits
Rye April Fool
This is one of the best April Fool articles I’ve seen in a long time.
As always given away by the details, but otherwise all too plausible especially for the Rye coastal area!
Quotes of the Week
A better selection of quotes this week, which reflects a more varied weeks reading.
Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of great spiritual power. We know this because they are capable of being invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can’t see them.
[Steve Eley]
When you run into something interesting, drop everything else and study it.
[Psychologist BF Skinner]
We all are born mad. Some remain so.
[Samuel Beckett]
Physicists. Just because you’re not smart enough to know what the fuck they’re talking about doesn’t mean God exists.
[]
I contend that we are both atheists. I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.
[Stephen Roberts]
Children are naïve – they trust everyone. School is bad enough, but, if you put a child anywhere in the vicinity of a church, you’re asking for trouble.
[Frank Zappa]
Bad facts make bad law, and people who write bad laws are in my opinion more dangerous than songwriters who celebrate sexuality.
[Frank Zappa; Statement to the Senate Hearing on “Porn Rock”; 1985]
I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than the ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
[Isaac Newton]
You can’t always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
[Frank Zappa]
Just as long as that giraffe is made of choux pastry and dipped in chocolate! Might be best if it doesn’t mate with a pink unicorn too. 🙂
Prime or Not?
I came across this on the intertubes earlier. It may amuse those of a more scientific bent …
Several people are asked to prove that all odd integers greater than 2 are prime.
- Post-graduate mathematician: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is not prime. Ha! A counterexample.
- Undergraduate mathematician: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime… so by induction, all subsequent odd integers are prime.
- Statistician: Let’s verify this on several randomly selected odd numbers, say, 23, 47, and 83.
- Computer scientist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, segmentation fault?
- Computer programmer: 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime, 3 is prime…
- Physicist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is an experimental error, 11 is prime…
- Mechanical engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is approximately prime, 11 is prime…
- Civil engineer: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime…
- Biologist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is… still awaiting results…
- Psychologist: 3 is prime, 5 is prime, 7 is prime, 9 is prime but suppresses it, 11 is prime…
- Economist: 2 is prime, 4 is prime, 6 is prime…
- Politician: Shouldn’t the goal really be to create a greater society where all numbers are prime?
- Sarah Palin: What’s a prime?
I especially like the Physicist and Mechanical Engineer ones.
Auction Eccentrica
Another in our irregular series of eccentric lots from our local auction house.
I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes some of these things so amusing and concluded that it is a mixture of
(a) the strange objects which are put up for sale,
(b) the almost inexplicably incongruous combinations which get put together to make up a lot, and
(c) those which appear totally unintelligible.
Anyway here’s this month’s selection:
A Royal Navy cocked hat by Rowe & Co, and another.
An extensive collection of matchboxes including a complete box of Sotheby’s Special Reserve Matches and two boxes containing ‘The Nostalgia Postcard’.
A mahogany canteen of Pedigree Plate cutlery for eight, including carving set, fish eaters, etc., with detachable legs.
[What do the detachable legs refer to? The ‘canteen’? The ‘fish eaters’? Or the ‘etc.’?]
An automated singing bird in gilt cage.
An interesting mixed lot […] including Gladstone bag, barleytwist candlesticks, British Cafe dominoes, a quantity of Torquay ware, Doulton footwarmer, old jeweller’s drill, old tins, oriental ware, wooden trough, corner brackets, etc.
A tribal drum, carved mask, oriental wooden plaque, ceramic sculpture, boomerang, linen including batik? panel, etc.
A large framed religious tapestry marked Ellen Simpson, aged 15 years, 1858; and a stone elephant.
[A excellent example of the strange combination of incongruous stuff]
A wonderful lot containing an adjustable hearth pot stand, brass motor for spit, old tins, early copper moulds, can opener in the form of a bull’s head, folding spectacles in case, carpet bowls, leather and metal hip flask, cast iron meat mincer, old leather and wooden children’s clogs.
[You just know anything beginning “A wonderful” or “An interesting mixed lot” is going to throw up something which boggles the mind.]
An old ship’s rudder, mahogany pipe stand, three brass candlesticks, small Doulton Lambeth vase, fawn pottery with blue and white raised decoration, novelty pop-up cigarette box, three crucifixes, pewter plate, oriental ware, children’s mugs, cat figurine, etc.
A good late 19th century German cuckoo clock, in carved walnut case, wreathed in vines and with bird surmount, the movement by gong striking and with two pipes, by GHS.
An old cavalryman’s lance in bamboo with steel point and end, branded mark ‘XIIIIX’, with red and white wool pennant attached
Five and a half Victorian architectural cast iron panels.
An antique Indian window frame with shutter door, now fitted with a mirror, and a decorative metal framed box.
A collection of CDs, boxed Lego Technic unopened, a cycle hat, a carton including new gadgets including Braun shavers, cycle light, earphones, flints, new plumbing parts, electric fret saw, a shredder, telephone hand sets, tool boxes, a solar wireless alarm system, a case of screws, Draper appliances (unused), a workbench, a duvet, sleeping bag, teddy bears, an electrical extension reel (boxed), etc.
Six old red painted fire buckets.
Facts of the Week
This is the first in what will probably be an occasional series highlighting unexpected, unusual or just amazing facts I come across. It is really for curiosity value rather than a resource of those who take part in pub quizzes. Wherever possible I will, as always, provide a source for the information. So here is the first selection of factlets …
Each year, an estimated 10,000 shipping containers fall off container ships at sea.
Between five and six million containers are in transit at any given moment.
[]
The Sendai earthquake shifted the earth’s figure axis by about 17 cm and moved the main island of Japan [Honshu] around 2.4 metres.
[US Geological Survey]
The Sendai earthquake also shortened our day by about 1.8 milliseconds (thousands of a second).
[NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory]
The original Polynesian and South Pacific origin of the word ‘tabu’ actually refers to that which is sacred: the application of a taboo actually designating that which is holy.
[OED]
You Just Can't Get the Staff
Yesterday we received a communication from the Civil Service Club in London. In this they advertise their Annual Dinner as follows …
Three course dinner with Champagne reception & Canopies, with the Committees guest speaker.
How many committees? And whose marquees?
Lacy Shirts
I found this somewhere on the intertubes the other day. I thought it passingly amusing, and incredibly inventive. Mothers of boys might like to note.
Committee Decisions
Excellent letter in yesterday’s Times:
Sir, Professor John Murrell has been given the wrong definition of a committee. I always understood that a committee was a group of people who individually could do nothing, but collectively decided that nothing could be done.
Campbell Sylvester