Today’s Daily Telegraph reports on Clive James interviewing himself at the Edinburgh International Books Festival. The article includes:
Did we know, he asked, that by decree, no rank below Major could wear make-up in the Romanian army during the war – a gem first divulged to him, incidentally, by Anthony Powell.
Full article here.
[With thanks to Julian Allason]
From “Feedback” in New Scientist, 04 August 2007
Calendar chaos
[X] was, sitting at his computer, when the calendar window of his Microsoft Outlook office program started scrolling uncontrollably back through time. He watched, helpless, as it zoomed back through two world wars, past the Great Reform Act of 1832, the French revolution and American independence – stopping only in the 1760s when, he guesses, a frantic IT worker somewhere in the bowels of the famous London building he works in must have fixed the network glitch.
Naturally, [X] was intrigued to see how far back in time he could personally make Outlook’s calendar go. Trying to view even earlier dates, he got stuck at All Fool’s day 1601. Putting this into a famous web search engine revealed no special event in history that day. It did, however, provide a link to a “rather weird” website devoted to the work of a genealogist named John Mayer at www.arapacana.com/glossary/mb_mn.html. This notes that “Outlook provides a series of perpetual calendars covering something less than 2898 years, from 1 April 1603 to 29 August 4500,” but that users can manually scroll back to 1601.
Feedback’s further searches suggest that 1 April 1601 was declared the beginning of time by the authors of the COBOL computer-programming language …
Oh and for the geeks amongst you, Outlook 2003 will also let you schedule meetings during the missing days, 3-13 September 1752, when British Empire changed to the Gregorian Calendar.
One is left with just one question: Why?
Giraffe’s necks and Golden Gate Bridge
[It seems] an appropriate moment to introduce readers to the unusual unit converter discovered … at http://www.weirdconverter.com/. This enables you to convert from one unusual unit to another. Sadly, in the “weight” section “male polar bear” is listed, but there is no baby elephant, only a fully grown one. Even so, you may be interested to know that one African elephant equals 12.24790343434 polar bears. There is also a “length/height” section which reveals, for instance, that one Golden Gate Bridge equals 720 giraffe’s necks.
[New Scientist; 28/07/2007]
Absolutely brilliant — so much so it is stretching my credulity neurons.
As @j-sin syas: I’ve lived in the UK long enough to know that this is the only country where “leaves on the track” stop our trains but this seemed a new level of sillyness. Was the dust “high in fat or low in fat” I wonder?
OK, the current meme wins; I’ll play the game!
I never thought about being in The Simpsons, but here I am …
Another piece from this week’s New Scientist but this time from a mainline article.
The article is titled The Last Place on Earth … and gives 17 examples of the last place you can find various “things”. I print the whole of number 7 below, it is so off the wall.
The last place on earth where you can still hear the strangest languages
ever spoken
The death of any language is a tragedy, but some are a more distressing loss than others. A handful of endangered languages are the last refuges of odd linguistic features that, once their host language disappears, will be gone forever.One is Tofa, spoken by a handful of nomads in the Eastern Sayan mountains of southern Siberia. Starting in the 1950s, the Soviet government forced the Tofa people to learn Russian and abandon their traditional ways of life. Now, there are only 25 Tofa speakers left, all elderly. When they die, one utterly unique feature of Tofa will disappear: a suffix, -sig, that means “to smell like”. In Tofa you can add -sig to the word ivi-, (reindeer) to describe someone who smells like a reindeer. No other language in the world is known to have this kind of suffix.
Linguist K David Harrison of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania has documented similar examples of endangered “information packaging” systems in his book When Languages Die. One of these is the body counting system used in an estimated 40 languages in Papua New Guinea. In languages like Kaluli and Kobon, the words for numbers are the names of body parts. So 1 to 10 in Kobon are “little finger, ring finger, middle finger, forefinger, thumb, wrist, forearm, inside elbow, bicep, shoulder”. To count higher, you count the collarbone and the hollow at the base of the throat – and then right down the other side, all the way to 23. You can count to 46 by counting back the other way and even higher by starting over and doing it all again. So 61 in Kobon is “hand turn around second time go back biceps other side”.
Charlotte Church* savaged to death in the Beckhams’ back garden
(*that’s the lamb Gordon Ramsay named after the Welsh singer and was rearing for his TV show)
The above is a headline from today’s Daily Mail. You can find the full story here.
Someone please tell me it’s actually April 1st! Or are these people total tossers?
From the “Feedback” column in this week’s New Scientist …
Finally, using the public facilities in a shopping centre in Christchurch, New Zealand, Russell Pearse was confronted with a sign above the urinal instructing “Aim Higher”. The effect was not, probably, what Victoria University in Wellington had in mind when it launched its recruitment campaign.
More on English …
Thanks to Riannan (aka “In the Headlights“) we bring you the translations of some common words, phrases and silences used by women, but rarely understood by men:
Fine: A word used by women to end an argument when they are right and you need to shut up.
Five minutes: If she is getting dressed, this means half an hour. Five minutes means five minutes if you have been told you have five more minutes to watch the game before helping her with chores.Nothing: This is the calm before the storm. This actually means something, and should alert you to be on your toes. Arguments beginning with nothing usually end in “fine”. Nothing can refer to silence, or can actually be a comment, as in “What’s wrong?”, “Nothing”.
Go ahead: This is a dare, not permission. Whatever it is, don’t do it.
Audible sigh: This is not a word, but a non-verbal statement, often misunderstood by men. A loud sigh means she thinks you are an idiot and wonders why she is wasting her time standing here arguing with you about nothing (qv).
That’s okay: One of the most dangerous things a woman can say to a man. “That’s okay” means she wants to think long and hard before deciding how and when you will pay for your mistake.
Thanks: A woman is thanking you. Don’t ask why or faint. Just say “you’re welcome.”
Whatever: Her way of saying f*** you.
Don’t worry about it, I’ve got it: Another dangerous statement. This refers to something a woman has asked a man to do several times but is now doing herself. This will lead to a man’s asking “what’s wrong?” which is answered by “nothing.”
