amusements, personal

40 Things About Me

OK, just to waste a few minutes, here’s a meme of 40 things about me. I changed one question from the original I saw as I thought it too American.

  1. Do you like blue cheese? Yes; certainly most of them.
  2. Coke or Pepsi? Coke, but it has to be Diet.
  3. Do you own a gun? No, guns are illegal in the UK without a licence. Anyway why would I want one?
  4. What flavour of fruit juice? Mango.
  5. What do you think of hot dogs? People should be convicted for leaving dogs in cars.
  6. What’s your favourite TV show? The off switch.
  7. What is your favourite movie? I don’t do film.
  8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? Tea; always tea; and lots of it.
  9. Can you do a push-up? Very doubtful, but then why would I want to?
  10. What’s your favourite jewellery? My white gold signet ring (made on our 25th wedding anniversary).
  11. What is your favourite outdoor activity? Drinking beer, sitting in a deckchair, in the sun, watching good club cricket.
  12. Do you have ADD? No.
  13. Do you wear glasses? Yes, since I was 14. I’ve never liked the idea of even trying contact lenses.
  14. What was/is your favourite cartoon? Cartoon strip? Probably The Wizard of Id.
  15. Name three things you did yesterday/today? Paid some bills. Drank a few beers. Slept.
  16. Name 3 drinks you drink regularly? Beer. Wine. Gin.
  17. Current worries? Depression. Brexit.
  18. Current hates? The UK government.
  19. Favourite place to be? Dungeness.
  20. How did you bring in the New Year? Sitting up in bed with a glass of Champagne.
  21. Where would you like to go? Iceland.
  22. Name five people who might do this? I can’t think why anyone would waste their time.
  23. Do you wear slippers? No; always bare feet indoors (socks if very cold).
  24. What is your favourite colour? It varies with mood: sometimes green, sometimes yellow, sometimes …
  25. Do you like sleeping on satin sheets? No idea; never tried them.
  26. Can you whistle? Only very badly.
  27. Where are you? Sitting at my desk in the study.
  28. Would you be a pirate? Never; I’m too prone to motion sickness.
  29. Favourite food? Curry. Or maybe pasta with seafood.
  30. Favourite music genre? Sacred early music.
  31. Do you wear proper pyjamas? No; haven’t worn anything in bed since I was a student.
  32. What’s in your pockets? Nothing; I’m wearing the Emperor’s new clothes.
  33. Last thing that made you laugh? Would I do anything so frivolous as laugh?
  34. What’s your favourite animal? Cats.
  35. What’s your most recent injury? Pulled muscle in my back.
  36. How many TVs in your house? Two.
  37. Worst pain? Total knee replacement, if only because it isn’t something that is over with in 5 minutes.
  38. Do you like to dance? No; I hate dance.
  39. Are your parents still together? As they’re both dead I have no idea.
  40. Do you enjoy camping? In a tent? Yes, I certainly did when I was young; not sure I could do it now.
words

Tock Tick

Here’s another piece on the English language; it seems to be in vogue round her at present.

I came across this some time ago and thought I had written about it, but I cannot find that I did. So here it is: an interesting piece, essentially a BBC report about Mark Forsyth’s book The Elements of Eloquence. It’s another example of why English is such a pig of a language!

Why “tock-tick” does not sound right to your ears

Play it by ear: If a word sequence sounds wrong, it is probably wrong.

Ever wondered why we say tick-lock, not tock-tick; or ding-dong, not dong-ding; King Kong, not Kong King? Turns out it is one of the unwritten rules of English that native speakers know without knowing.

The rule is: “If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, 0. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or 0. Mish-mash, chit-chat, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, tip top, hip-hop, flip-flop, tic tac, sing song, ding dong, King Kong, ping pong.”

There’s another unwritten rule at work in the name Little Red Riding Hood.

“Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac” [or worse, a foreigner!].

That explains why we say “little green men” not “green little men”, but “Big Bad Wolf” sounds like a gross violation of the “opinion (bad)-size (big)-noun (wolf)” order. It won’t, though, if you recall the first rule about the I-A-0 order.

That rule seems inviolable: “All four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound. But we always, always, say clip-clop, never clop-clip.”

This rule even has a technical name, if you care to know it – the rule of ablaut reduplication – but then life is simpler knowing that we know the rule without knowing it.

words

Words: Patrilocal and Matrilocal

Patrilocal
1. Describing a custom of marriage by which the married couple settles in the husband’s home or community.
2. The tendency of females to leave their natal group and reside (or mate) with males of a different group.

Similarly …

Matrilocal
1. Describing a custom of marriage by which the married couple settles in the wife’s home or community.
2. The tendency of males to leave their natal group and reside (or mate) with females of a different group.

First used in 1906, the words are from the fields of anthropology, sociology, ethnography and zoology.

For example, zoologically, chimpanzees are patrilocal, whereas many monkey species are matrilocal. Both modes are still found amongst different hunter-gatherer and similar tribes. Human societies are more predominantly patrilocal (although even in more undeveloped societies this is not universal), and is suggested as one of the foundations of the patriarchy and the ownership of women as chattels.

The western world has largely abandoned both modes, although has yet to shake off patriarchy etc.

quotes

Quotes

Welcome to this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes!

Everyone says he is crazy – which maybe he is – but the scarier thing about him is that he is stupid. You do not know anyone as stupid as Donald Trump. You just don’t.
[Fran Lebowitz]

Faith that cannot survive collision with the truth is not worth many regrets.
[Arthur C Clarke]

Prohibition … goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes … A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded.
[Abraham Lincoln]

There is only one honest impulse at the bottom of Puritanism, and that is the impulse to punish the man with a superior capacity for happiness.
[HL Mencken]

The convention mis-called “modesty” has no standard, and cannot have one, because it is opposed to nature and reason and is therefore an artificiality and subject to anyone’s whim – anyone’s diseased caprice.
[Mark Twain]

Yes, reason has been a part of organized religion, ever since two nudists took dietary advice from a talking snake.
[Jon Stewart]

Capitalism is pretty horrible, but the various attempts at improving on it have either led to totalitarianism or gradually eroded back into capitalism. Or, in the case of modern China, both.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

The way the news reaches us these days, with so much of it either “fake” or “breaking”, is worse than ignorance. It’s a decontextualised screech that monetises its ability to catch our attention, but takes no responsibility for advancing our understanding or avoiding disproportionate damage to our peace of mind.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

[The news is] up-to-the-minute micro-snippets of information about events, the real significance of which will only become evident in many weeks’, months’ or years’ time; it’s like trying to assemble a 5,000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Satan’s face by being given one piece every hour, each one accompanied by a bone-rattling fanfare.
Under capitalism, current affairs are presented like this because it makes economic sense. The media generate money by getting our attention and we grant it most reliably not in response to the accurate, illuminating and proportionate, but to the loud, sensational and frightening. That’s a problem we can only solve by ignoring it.
[David Mitchell; “There are good reasons for ignoring the news“; Guardian; 26/03/2018]

De-criminalization is not the same thing as endorsement. There is no law against sticking wooden spoons up your ass. That doesn’t mean the state sanctions the use of wooden spoons for that purpose.
[@Grimesweeper on Twitter; 11/04/2018]

I stop and do nothing. Nothing happens. I am thinking about nothing. I listen to the passing of time. This is time, familiar and intimate. We are taken by it. The rush of seconds, hours, years that hurls us towards life then drags us towards nothingness … We inhabit time as fish live in water. Our being is being in time . Its solemn music nurtures us, opens the world to us, troubles us, frightens and lulls us. The universe unfolds into the future, dragged by time, and exists according to the order of time.
[Carlo Rovelli; “Time is Elastic“; Guardian; 14/04/2018]

There’s this common misconception that other people have all got their shizz together and we’re failing and flailing. It couldn’t be further from the truth. Life isn’t linear, we’re all kinda making it up as we’re going along because there is no handbook, there is no ‘right’ way and fundamentally, we’re all so different. It’s a shame we feel the pressure to get it ‘right’, when there is no right nor wrong, it’s how we perceive we’ve done based on a prior expectation we held of how we feel we should have done. And that awful comparison game we sometimes play based on what we see on social media, or the bits of people’s lives that they allow us to see. Life is a process of trial and error, there are obstacles aplenty, we cohabit with other people who are trying to find their way too which makes it even more difficult to feel as though we know what we’re doing.
[Blurt Foundation]

We cannot judge … the character of men with perfect accuracy, from their actions or their appearance in public; it is from their careless conversation, their half-finished sentences, that we may hope with the greatest probability of success to discover their real character.
[Maria Edgeworth (Anglo-Irish novelist; 1767-1849)]

beliefs, personal

Simple Formula for Living

I happened on this somewhere on the intertubes the other day. Though undoubtedly not easy – each one of us will find different parts hard – one could do a lot worse than follow these precepts.

Simple Formula for Living

Live beneath your means.
Return everything you borrow.
Stop blaming other people.
Admit it when you make mistake.
Give clothes not worn to charity.
Do something nice and try not to get caught.
Listen more; talk less.
Every day take a 30 minute walk.
Strive for excellence, not perfection.
Be on time. Don’t make excuses.
Don’t argue. Get organized.
Be kind to unkind people.
Let someone cut ahead of you in line.
Take time to be alone.
Cultivate good manners.
Be humble.
Realise and accept that life isn’t fair.
Know when to keep your mouth shut.
Go an entire day without criticising anyone.
Learn from the past. Plan for the future.
Live in the present.
Don’t sweat the small stuff.
It’s all small stuff.

amusements

Ten Things

Something different for this month’s Ten Things …

Ten Fish which are also Surnames:

  1. Roach
  2. Rudd
  3. Pike
  4. Salmon
  5. Herring
  6. Sturgeon (pictured right)
  7. Pollock
  8. Parr
  9. Whiting
  10. Grayling
environment, food+drink

How to Use Less Plastic

We all know that plastic is not very biodegradable, and thus an environmental nightmare, as well as being over-used in many instances. Equally we all know how convenient it can be.

The other day I can across Less Plastic, and their poster of 9 Tips for Living with Less Plastic. Although it’s a couple of years old, I share them here with comments on how well I think we do.

  1. Bring your own shopping bag. Already do this and have done for some years.
  2. Carry a reusable water bottle. As we don’t carry water, we can’t do this. Although we could stop buying mineral water in plastic bottles for use at home.
  3. Bring your own cup. We almost never have take-out coffee etc., so not much point in this.
  4. Pack your lunch in reusable containers. Again we don’t carry packed lunch, so this isn’t appropriate.
  5. Say no to disposable straws and cutlery. Yep, always do if we can.
  6. Skip the plastic produce bags. Difficult if the supermarket offers no alternative to having 29 onions floating loose in your trolley – they can provide paper bags for bread so why not for other produce? Would they like us taking our own paper bags? And then there’s the question of what to use in the freezer.
  7. Slow down and dine in. We seldom eat out; maybe once or twice a month, on average.
  8. Store leftovers in glass jars. Yes, could do this although I’m ot sure about finding a good variety of different sized jars with out buying then specially. And anyway we have lots of plastic boxes and wouldn’t it be greener to use them to destruction first?
  9. Share these tips with your friends. That’s just what I’m doing!

So how well do you do?

environment, history, links, medical, science, sexuality

Monthly Interesting Links

As regular readers will realise, I read a lot of articles in consumer science, consumer history and the more general media over the course of a month – articles which look as if they will interest me. (I don’t generally read politics, business etc.). What I post here are only those items which I think may be of more general interest to you, my readers, being mindful that the humanities people amongst you might want a bit of “soft” science; and the scientists a bit of humanities. So I do try to mostly avoid difficult science and academically dense Eng.Lit. or history – ‘cos you don’t all want to struggle with/be interested in that, though some may. And I obviously don’t expect everyone to read everything, but just to pick the items which interest you most; if you find one or two each month then that’s good.

So, having restated my aims for this series, let’s get down to business – because there is a lot to cover this month.

Science, Technology & Natural World

We start off with something which surprised me: the engineers building Crossrail had to take the curvature of the Earth into account, because of the length of the line and the precision with which some of the tunnels had to be threaded through between existing structures.

Staying on an engineering theme, scientists have developed a method of making wood as strong as steel, and thus potentially useable as a high strength building material.

Changing themes, what really is biodiversity and why is it so important?

The curious history of horses’ hooves, and how five digits became just one.

Following the attack on a pair of Russians in Salisbury, several of the scientific media have been asking what nerve agents are and how they work. This is Scientific American‘s view.

Health & Medicine

A strange, six inch long, “mummy” was found in Chile some years ago, and many people decided it was an alien – hardly surprising given its appearance. However, following DNA testing it has finally been confirmed that it was a very deformed, female, human infant.

Musician Taylor Muhl has a large birthmark on her torso, but it turns out that it isn’t a birthmark but that she’s a chimera, having absorbed a twin sister in utero in the very early days of gestation.

Influenza is relatively common, and benign, in may non-primate species which provide a natural reservoir for the virus. And there are many other such viruses out in the wild which are a concern as (like Ebola, Zika, SARS) they could mutate and jump to humans.

On a similar theme, researchers are coming to realise that there is a genetic component to our susceptibility to many diseases and that disease prevalence partly depends on the genetic mutations we carry.

Sexuality

From consent advice to sex toys and masturbation hacks, YouTube has taken over sex education.

Language

While on sex, the Whores of Yore website has a history of Cunt, the word.

History, Archaeology & Anthropology

Researchers have analysed a huge number of DNA samples to discover that Homo sapiens interbred with Denisovans on multiple occasions, as we did with the Neanderthals.

Why did Oxford and Cambridge have a monopoly on UK university education for several hundred years, when universities proliferated across the rest of Europe?

Long before the height of the slave trade and the British Empire, black Africans lived freely in Tudor England.

In 1600 Giordano Bruno burned at the stake as a heretic and it looks likely that this was for believing in the existence of planets outside our solar system.

The oldest message in a bottle has been found on a beach in Western Australia.

London

Mudlarking: the pursuit of archaeological treasures hiding in the mud of the River Thames foreshore. Warning: you need a licence!

John Joseph Merlin, a wizard in Georgian London.

Lifestyle & Personal Development

Brad Warner, one of our two favourite Zen Masters, on waking up happy.

So just how many beak-ups does one have to have before one finds “the one”? Search me!

The exorcists are coming, and it doesn’t look good.

We’re living through a crisis of touch where lots of basic human contact like hugging is no longer acceptable – and it is having a serious effect on our mental health.

OK guys, this is for you: 100 easy ways to make women’s lives better. Basically: be considerate!

Finally, following on from the above two items, an article I found rather nauseating about the supposed crisis in modern masculinity. Gawdelpus all!

More next month! Meanwhile, be good!

current affairs, ramblings

It’s not Cricket, or is it?

So, a couple of Aussies have been banned for tampering with the match ball.

This should not be a surprise, except that they were using an artificial aid to do so – which, however tempting, is frankly stupid as well as cheating. And they got caught.

Ball doctoring goes on in cricket at all levels, it is very easy and it isn’t new.

Some dust on the hand can easily rough up one side of the ball, as can boot studs or a fingernail, while shining the other side with hair gel to help the ball swing. Shining the ball on the trousers/shirt/handkerchief is legal. Using hair gel, dust, fingernails or studs isn’t.

It is also very easy to lift the seam with just a thumbnail and some sleight of hand while (allegedly) removing dirt from the seam. Removing the dirt is legal but lifting the seam isn’t.

And that is just the tip of the iceberg.

I was never more than a jobbing club third XI cricketer, and yet I was shown some of the techniques on more than one occasion. I never doctored a ball during a match – I wasn’t good enough that it would have made any useful difference anyway – nor did I ever spot it happening when I was umpiring, but I did use it to prolong the useful life of practice balls.