personal

Ten Things #16

Like many of my days I spent yesterday glued to my desk. Such are the joys of retirement and being involved in running community groups. So while Noreen went to the supermarket, cooked tea and did various other domestic things, here are ten things that I did …
Ten Things I did Yesterday

  1. Worked on the draft “Terms of Reference” for the new PPG network group — which of course I have been fingered to chair!
  2. Read countless emails — and binned most of them
  3. Processed a bundle of Anthony Powell Society membership renewals — and despaired of people (mostly Americans) who can’t read the form
  4. Ate three meals and drank several buckets of tea
  5. Ordered Noreen a pair of earrings
  6. Prepared for this morning’s Healthwatch strategy group meeting
  7. Had a shower and my weekly-ish shave
  8. Chatted to the postman and the gardener
  9. Worked on Anthony Powell Society website — which needs far too many updates done
  10. Sent my doctor a request for a repeat prescription — done online, of course.

So a pretty typical day at the coalface really!

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.

science

Oddity of the Week: Moon

Did you know that the moon has a tail? Turns out, it has two.
Data from NASA’s Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE), which spent seven months orbiting the moon in 2013 and 2014, has revealed a tail of nanoscale dust particles.
The finding follows the discovery of the first lunar tail in 1999, when ground-based telescopes spotted a faint stream of sodium gas stretching out behind the moon.
Anthony Colaprete, who leads LADEE’s spectrometer instrument, thinks the second tail is the result of dust particles thrown up when asteroids crash into the surface and are pushed away by the sun’s radiation pressure.
From New Scientist, 31 March 2015

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.

personal

We're on Hiatus

Apologies everyone, there’s going to be a (hopefully short) hiatus while I recover from this nasty gastric flu bug — complete with debilitating dizzy fits.
Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

words

Word: Lambrequin

Lambrequin

  1. An ornamental hanging covering the edge of a shelf or the upper part of a window or door.
  2. A border pattern giving a draped effect, used on ceramics etc.
    [Think of the filigree ornamental wooden edging on Victorian railway station canopies or on the Colonial Governor’s house.]
  3. A heavy protective cloth or scarf worn over a helmet in medieval times.
  4. In heraldry another name for mantling.


The word is a surprisingly late import from French with, according to the OED, the first use being in 1725 in Coats Dictionary of Heraldry.

amusements, topographical

Oddity of the Week: Kew Gardens

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (aka. Kew Gardens) has been in existence since 1759 so it isn’t surprising it has a few little eccentricities.
The Gardens has its own police force, which with 17 staff and one vehicle is one of the smallest police forces in the world.
Turner’s Oak was planted in 1798 but was feared destroyed in the great storm of October 1987. However it was discovered that the tree had been lifted by the storm and dropped back down in place; this loosened the soil round the roots and gave the tree a new lease of life. As a result a new technique for treating old trees has been developed.


The Palm House is home to the world’s largest pot plant, an enormous Jurassic cycad, Encephalartos altensteinii, collected from the wild in the 1770s. It has a four metre wide trunk and is repotted roughly every 20 years.

Kew is also home to the smallest royal palace in the country, Kew Palace, which is more the size of a manor house than a palace. The palace (also known as the Dutch House) was reopened to the public in 2006 following a 10 year restoration.
From 7 things you never knew about Kew Gardens.

quotes

Quotes

Another selection of recently encountered quotes.
Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents, and everyone is writing a book.
[Cicero]
[John Aubrey’s] thoughts and reactions are often so like ours that it comes as a shock to find that most people he knew could and did speak Latin, read by candlelight and had to dash outside to check the time on a sundial. He recognised the spread of London’s first coffee shops as a key democratic advance, an early equivalent of the internet, giving previously unimaginable access to everyone who wanted to make contact and keep in touch with a strange, fast-changing, often unsettling new era. ‘Before they opened, men only knew how to be acquainted with their own relations or societies. They were afraid, and stared at all who were not of their own communities.’
[Hilary Spurling, Spectator, 14/03/2015; reviewing Ruth Scurr, John Aubrey: My Own Life]
We never know the quality of someone else’s life though we seldom resist the temptation to assume and pass judgement.
[Tami Hoag, Dark Horse]
I do not want to deconstruct the pleasure of wine by trying to work out whether the aromas smell of bananas or apricots. If you analyse too much, you end up destroying the pleasure.
[Lionel Poilane, famous French baker]
They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.
[F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise]
In general, we look for a new law by the following process: First we guess it; then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right; then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.
[Richard Feynman]
Most people that I talk to [in Japan] don’t identify as Buddhist, even if they’ve grown up in a house with a butsudan altar, and go to Buddhist funerals with their family. Religious activity is something you can participate in without even believing in it, without having to change some core part of yourself. Religious activity is in many ways “just” a social role.
[Gesshin Greenwood @ That’s So Zen]
People say nothing is impossible, but I do nothing every day.
[AA Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh]
If all Printers were determin’d not to print any thing till they were sure it would offend no body, there would be very little printed.
[Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)]
Those of us who know not the secret of properly regulating our own existence on this tumultuous sea of foolish troubles which we call life are constantly in a state of misery while vainly trying to appear happy and contented. We stagger in the attempt to keep our moral equilibrium, and see forerunners of the tempest in every cloud that floats on the horizon. Yet there is joy and beauty in the rolls of the billows as they sweep outward toward eternity. Why not enter into their spirit or, like Liehtse, ride upon the hurricane itself?
[Kakuzo Okakura, The Book of Tea]
“Why do you look so sad?”
“Because you speak to me in words and I look at you with feelings.”
[Leo Tolstoy]
Walk Nude, and people won’t need to undress you with their eyes.
You are never as broken as you think you are. Sure, you may have a couple of scars and a couple of bad memories, but then again all great heroes do.
But I must leave you with a couple of my favourite quotes from Terry Pratchett …
And what is this?
“It is a cat. It arrived. It does not appear to wish to depart.”
The cat, a feral ginger tom, flicked a serrated ear and curled up in a tighter ball. Anything that could survive in Ankh-Morpork’s alleys, with their abandoned swamp dragons, dog packs and furriers’ agents, was not about to open even one eye for a bunch of floating nightdresses.
[Terry Pratchett, Thief of Time]
In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
[Terry Pratchett]
More anon.