Category Archives: amusements

amusements, books

Oddity of the Week: Oddest Book Title

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Oddest Title of the Year Award
Every year the Diagram Group offers a prize, via the column of the estimable Horace Bent in the Bookseller magazine, to the person in the trade who comes up with the oddest book title published that year. Many — but not all — of the winning titles are from professional, technical, academic and scientific publishers.
Since the prize was established in 1978, winners have included:

  • Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Nude Mice (1978)
  • The Madam as Entrepreneur: Career Management in House Prostitution (1979)
  • Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual (1990)
  • The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling (1993)
  • Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (1996)
  • High-Performance Stiffened Structures (2000)
  • Butterworths Corporate Manslaughter Service (2001)
  • Living with Cray Buttocks (2002)
  • The Big Book of Lesbian Horse Stones (2003)

Other submissions over the years have included:

  • Access to the Top of Petroleum Tankers
  • An Illustrated History of Dustcarts
  • Bombproof Tour Horse
  • Classic American Funeral Vehicles
  • Cooking with Mud: The Idea of Mess in 19th-century Art and Fiction
  • Did Lewis Carroll Visit Llandudno?
  • Diversity of Sulfate-reducing Bacteria Along a Vertical Oxygen Gradient in a Sediment of Schiermonnikoog
  • Fancy Coffins To Make Yourself
  • Lightweight Sandwich Construction
  • New Caribbean Office Procedures
  • Pet Packaging Technology
  • Principles and Practices of Bioslurping
  • Psoriasis at Tour Fingertips
  • Short Walks at Land’s End
  • Tea Bag Folding
  • The Aesthetics of the Japanese Lunchbox
  • The Anger of Aubergines
  • The Fiat-Footed Flies of Europe
  • The Voodoo Revenge Book: An Anger Management Program You Can Really Stick With
  • Throwing Pots
  • Twenty Beautiful Tears of Bottom Physics
  • What is a Cow?: And Other Questions That Might Occur to Ton When Walking the Thames Path
  • Whose Bottom? A Lift-the-Flap Book
  • Woodcarving with a Chainsaw

From: Ian Crofton, Brewer’s Cabinet of Curiosities

amusements, people, photography

Weekly Photograph

So there I was in Uxbridge a few weeks ago, sitting waiting people watching while for Noreen to emerge from M&S, when these three beauties happened along. They seemed to be about to enact Act 1, Scene 1 of Macbeth.

Macbeth Act 1, Scene 1 in Modern Dress
Macbeth Act 1, Scene 1 in Modern Dress
Uxbridge, March 2015
Click on the image for larger views on Flickr

amusements

April Auction Oddments

Yet another round of the curious and the mad from our local auction house’s latest catalogue. Strange things and eccentric juxtapositions.
Interesting items including two pewter miniature boxes, an ambrotype, a Stratton floral compact, a Trinity College membership card, two walking stick handles, one with a silver mount, a miniature mirror, a miniature Bible, old bone-handled miniature brushes, one stamped Savory & Moore, a dried seahorse, a watch movement, a seal, pencil sharpener, etc.
Presumably the seal was after the seahorse as a light snack?
An interesting lot including a pair of spurs, an old burr wood snuff box, a pocket watch, cigarette case, AA badge, a crop, cigarette holder in carrying case, whisky flask, watches, costume jewellery, etc., and a leather notepad with silver corners
18 lead soldier musicians and 10 First World War lead soldiers, tanks, etc., and two small iron shoe lasts
A box of decorative crucifixes
A portrait miniature of a lady in a white cap and high-waisted blue dress, English School, c.1815, a miniature watercolour portrait sketch of a lady, English School, c.1825, a small bronzed silhouette of a young man, English School, early 19th century, all in black papier-mache frames, and an old photograph of a gentleman in a folding leather travelling case
Very small man, or good escapologist, if he fits in a folding travelling case!
A good quantity of interesting items including a large fish jaw with sharp teeth, a swagger stick with silver plated knop, a decorative brass clock, an oak desk inkstand with brass inkwells, 3 vintage fountain pens including Parker, a heavy figurine of the obelisk, 19th Century wooden gavel, a small quantity of Mappin & Webb silver plated cutlery, goblet on stand and a Balinese wooden Fo dog
A quantity of vintage wooden shoe horns and cobblers lasts
A pair of spelter gilt decorated table lamps in an organic style plus a pair of similar column candlesticks in the form of classical maidens on three decorative feet
I wonder when classical maidens evolved out their third foot?
A quantity of interesting items including a vintage top hat by GA Dunn & Co London, a boater by the York Hat Co, a quantity of kids toys to include a large doll, clown puppet, guitars, model soldiers, a drum by Peak Frean and a quantity of ornaments to include Bisson, tigers and a toy bird in cage, pearly king jacket, quantity of linen, etc.
A green leather vanity case by Mappin & Webb … two 19th Century heavy adjustable lamp bases on hairy feet, a cased Imperial typewriter …
A quantity of old medical syringes, a vintage Halford car horn, brass ceiling mounts, a cased set of butter knives, wooden frame, humorous oriental recumbent man, a leather and glass hip flask with silver plated lid etc.
A decorative sword, a Sony carl Zeiss handycam, an old violin, a brass and glass ceiling light and a decorative moon wall plaque
Two incomplete sectional walking sticks, one in specimen woods, the other in horn, antique or vintage, and a plain incomplete stick, possibly a penis bone
An interesting collection of African objects, comprising three carved wood figures, two carved and painted masks, ceremonial knife, fly whisk, wooden jar, goat toe armbands, also a globular box and a pair of ram horns
A vintage rhinoceros foot worked as a plant pot, circa 1900, an old whale tooth and a section of mammoth tusk
Clearly essential for every home!
A good pair of Italian reliquary panels, each with glazed recesses of rolled paper work enclosing named relics within an elaborate cushion frame in carved giltwood and cut paper, together with a small needlework reliquary panel, all probably early 18th century, together with a later reliquary and a carved wood portrait panel of a pope
An old Australian Aborigine boomerang, one surface carved overall with a wave pattern and with possible seaweed motifs at the ends, 66.5cms, and a club, possibly for throwing, with reeded finish and roughened end, 70cms
A miscellaneous collections of exotic items, Middle and Far Eastern, Indian, Maori, etc., comprising seven carved wood masks, a wooden figure, perched stone bird, Indonesian puppet, and six other items
An old waist and wrist manacle in leather and steel
Exactly what you need for your dungeon.
6 old irons, one possibly Tudor period, others 19th century ready for the coal to be added
I’m not very convinced the Tudors had smoothing irons!
A quantity of new sinks including a large kitchen sink, shower tray and bathroom sink
I think my brain hurts!

amusements, science

Oddity of the Week: Erectile Ears

So what can marine animals actually hear? Seals are among the first to have their ears tested. They have developed different hearing mechanisms for land and sea and hear well in both environments. For example, seals have erectile tissue in their inner ear, which swells up with blood when they are underwater. “It’s like the penis of a man,” says Ron Kastelein at the Sea Mammal Research Company in Harderwijk, the Netherlands, who did the hearing tests. The blood in the engorged tissue helps conduct sound waves to the inner ear, allowing seals to hear a slightly greater range of frequencies in water than on land.
From New Scientist, 11 April 2015

amusements

Five Questions, Series 7 #3

And so, it has come to pass that the time is upon us when we need to answer the next of my Five Questions.

★★★☆☆

Question 3: How can you drop a raw egg on a concrete floor without cracking it?
You will need:
1 raw egg (species of dinosaur donor of egg immaterial)
an uncracked concrete floor
a hand (or similar holding device)
Method:
1. Grasp egg in hand.
2. Hold the egg above the concrete floor.
3. Release the egg.
4. Observe the effects of gravity.
5. Observe also that the egg hits the floor.
6. Clean any mess of egg from the floor.
7. Observe the floor.
Result:
1. One cracked egg.
2. As requested, one undamaged concrete floor.
Other methods may be possible but have not been verified experimentally.

amusements, personal

Five Questions, Series 7 #2

Let’s try and catch up a bit and answer the second of our five questions.

★★☆☆☆

Question 2: What is your spirit animal?
Now everyone is going to expect me to say TIGER, especially as I was born in the Chinese Year of the Tiger. And according to the Chinese I’m actually a Metal Tiger — or as I prefer to think of it: Tin Tiger.
But is my spirit animal a tiger?
Well no, I’m not sure it is. But then I can’t say definitely what it is. And of course one isn’t able to choose one’s own spirit animal — it has to choose you. At least that’s what American Indian culture says. And your spirit animal may change throughout your life, depending on what lesson you’re supposed to be learning.
Tigers are creatures of scrubland as well as forest. Whereas in many ways I actually feel more drawn to the Jaguar, cryptic and silent, slinking through the forests of Central and South America.

How can you not like a lazy cat like that!

Jaguar are still large cats, actually the third largest after tigers and lions respectively. They weigh in at around 1.7m from nose to tail compared with a tiger’s roughly 2.5m. So you still wouldn’t want to pick a fight with one!
Perhaps I’ve gone off tigers because they’ve been over-exposed due to their endangered status, but I have certainly recently come to appreciate more the beauty of the jaguar compared with the raw power of the tiger.
In trying to answer this I have done a number of (apparently more serious) quizzes online. Most of them reckon my spirit animal is either an owl or a wolf. Neither of those feels intuitively right. But then the questions are stupid. And, as mentioned above, spirit animals have to choose you; they can’t be chosen or assigned.
Mind you, there is Tigger in Winnie the Pooh. Maybe Tigger is my spirit animal as I would like to be perpetually bouncy!
Or maybe just any cat will do; small domestic cats are just fine. Oh and I also like crows (all the crow family), parrots and fish.
So no, I really don’t know. Maybe I need some guided mediation the find the answer.

amusements

Five Questions, Series 7 #1

Oh dear, so much for the best laid plans etc. There I was, 10 days ago, about to write an answer the question 1 of my latest Five Questions when the dreaded gastric flu lurgy struck. Still hopefully I’m OK now, back in the land of the (semi-)sane, and we can resume what passes for normal service.
So to our question …

★☆☆☆☆

Question 1: Does killing time damage eternity?
Crumbs, you do ask some difficult ones don’t you!
First of all we need to understand what time is and what eternity is. And we don’t. No-one has yet agreed. Even our top physicists really don’t have much of a clue what time is. See for instance physicist Sean Carroll and Wikipedia.
And if we don’t understand time, we cannot understand eternity. For eternity is just the infinite extension of time. And how to understand the infinity of something we don’t understand.
But there, we now have a connection between time and eternity. So anything which affects one of them can logically have an effect on the other. But what effect? We don’t know, because we understand neither time nor eternity.
But then again we have the wisdom of Terry Pratchett in Thief of Time …

Wen considered the nature of time and understood that the universe is, instant by instant, re-created anew. Therefore, he understood, there is, in truth, no Past, only a memory of the Past. Blink your eyes, and the world you see next did not exist when you closed them. Therefore, he said, the only appropriate state of the mind is surprise. The only appropriate state of the heart is joy. The sky you see now, you have never seen before. The perfect moment is now. Be glad of it.

And …

Time was something that largely happened to other people; he viewed it in the same way that people on the shore viewed the sea. It was big and it was out there, and sometimes it was an invigorating thing to dip a toe into, but you couldn’t live in it all the time. Besides, it always made his skin wrinkle.