quotes

Quotes : Explanations

Well yes, these quotes do explain a few things …

Here’s all you need to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.
[George Carlin]

You never know what is enough, until you know what is more than enough.
[William Blake, Proverbs of Hell]

Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled.
[Michael Crichton, Caltech Michelin Lecture, 17 January 2003]

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.
[HL Mencken]

Warm-heartedness reinforces our self-confidence – giving us not a blind confidence, but a sense of confidence based on reason. When you have that you can act transparently, with nothing to hide! Likewise, if you are honest, the community will trust you. Trust brings friendship, as a result of which you can always feel happy. Whether you look to the right or the left, you will always be able to smile.
[Dalai Lama]

If you can’t get rid of the skeleton in your closet you’d best take it out and teach it to dance.
[George Bernard Shaw]

food+drink, personal

Reasons to be Grateful: 24

Experiment, week 24. Continuing the experiment here are this week’s five things which have made me happy or for which I’m grateful.

  1. Sunshine. Yeah, I said it last week and I’ll say it again! This has been such a dismal week, weatherwise, that I’ve really appreciated the few odd spells of sunshine we’ve had.
  2. Lunch with Friends. On Thursday we had a flying visit to Portsmouth to have lunch with some friends and ex-colleagues. (We were going to make a good day out of it and look round Portsmouth Dockyard. But who wants to do that in the pouring rain?) So we settled for just having a most enjoyable lunch at The Chimes. This is the restaurant run by the Hospitality and Catering Department of Portsmouth Highbury College. As Pam, who booked it, said: the food is always excellent but the service can be interesting. And to be fair the service was somewhat hesitant and lacking confidence — but then the students were obviously learning and we all have to start somewhere! As to the food …
  3. Rack of Lamb. … Yep I had a rack of lamb at the The Chimes. And yes, it was excellent. Beautifully cooked; really tender; and full of flavour. All in all the food really couldn’t be faulted; everyone enjoyed it. And it was ridiculously cheap.

  4. Lamb Curry. Lamb again, only this time my own lamb curry early in the week.
  5. Raspberries & Clotted Cream. More food; and eaten at home. We should have been going to dinner with friends last night but Sue was ill. And as we’d promised to take pudding we had a quantity of raspberries and clotted cream to devour for tea! Followed by strawberries for breakfast today. Yum!
ramblings

Uninspiring Weather

Yes, I know! There’s been a bit of a hiatus here.

It’s because I am not feeling inspired to write. And there doesn’t seem to be much around at the moment I feel compelled to write about.

Oh, sure, there’s plenty going on in the world. The news seems mostly about direly boring politicians as usual. That and the calamitous nature of “things”.

And there’s not a whole lot happening in my world despite seeming to be busy. Most of the efforts recently seem to have gone into making some progress on my family history. Which is good, and which is slowly paying dividends. But it isn’t something to generally enthuse other people.

But hey, we’re British! So what better to do on a wet April day that indulge in that world-famous British pastime of talking about the weather!

It’s supposedly the wettest April on record in the UK. Well, yes, the weather has been dire for the last month. Today it’s blowing half a gale and peeing down with rain. AGAIN! SE England has reportedly had over 40mm of rain in the last week and over 140mm this month — that’s well over twice the April average. And the forecast is that there’ll be no let-up in May.

Which sort of disinclines one to venture out unnecessarily.

And there won’t be anything by way of a fruit crop this year. Our apple and cherry trees have been in bloom for the last week, and are almost over. It’s not been a week for bees to be out and about pollinating the flowers. Except perhaps for a couple of sunny mornings.

And what of the drought? Well yes, we still have a drought. A month’s heavy rain won’t refill the aquifers or the reservoirs overnight, although it will help. That takes time.

And once there is drought the soil dries out and the subsequent rain just runs off rather than soaking through properly. Hence we get flash floods and swollen rivers. Travelling to the south coast a few days ago it was noticeable that every river was in spate.

Drought we certainly do have. There is an area of our garden which usually has standing water after any significant rainfall, and it is noticeable that the standing water hasn’t been there until this morning. Our houses were built in 1930 on what was previously farm/park land. We suspect that where we get standing water is where the builders likely backfilled a field ditch with rubble but the ditch still runs with water from a small nearby spring. Dowsing certainly tells us there is running water there.

But how do we have a drought? I ask because my fish pond is overflowing and has been most of the winter. The water level is usually down by 2 or 3 inches by the Spring. But not this year; if anything it has been consistently 2 to 3 inches higher than normal, and overflowing, with no effort on my part.

On the other hand the garden is looking wonderfully green with all the water. And the grass is growing like Topsy — well it was top-dressed with “home-grown” compost a few weeks ago!

But it is essentially uninspiring and demotivating all round. Where’s my summer?!

medical, quotes, science, thoughts

Gardening the Mind

I came across the following quote from Jill Bolte Taylor’s Stroke of Insight on the interwebs the other day. It seems a good take on personal development and personal responsibility.

I view the garden in my mind as a sacred patch of cosmic real estate that the universe has entrusted me to tend over the years of my lifetime. As an independent agent, I and I alone, in conjunction with the molecular genius of my DNA and the environmental factors I am exposed to, will decorate this space within my cranium. In the early years, I may have minimal input into what circuits grow inside my brain because I am the product of the dirt and seeds I have inherited. But to our good fortune, the genius of our DNA is not a dictator, and thanks to our neurons’ plasticity, the power of thought, and the wonders of modern medicine, very few outcomes are absolute.

Regardless of the garden I have inherited, once I consciously take over the responsibility of tending my mind, I choose to nurture those circuits that I want to grow, and consciously prune back those circuits I prefer to live without.

Although it is easier for me to nip a weed when it is just a sprouting bud, with determination and perseverance even the gnarliest of vines, when deprived of fuel, will eventually lose its strength and fall to the side.

amusements, quotes

Quotes : Stop and Think

Some mornings it just doesn’t seem worth it to gnaw through the leather straps.
[Emo Phillips]

So much of what we call management consists in making it difficult for people to work.
[Peter Drucker]

The saying “Getting there is half the fun” became obsolete with the advent of commercial airlines.
[Henry J Tillman]

Censorship is telling a man he can’t have steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
[Mark Twain]

I see no way out of the problems that organised religion and tribalism create other than humans just becoming more honest and fully aware of themselves … we’re living in what Carl Sagan correctly termed a demon-haunted world. We have created a Star Wars civilisation but we have Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. That’s dangerous.
[EO Wilson; New Scientist, 21/04/2012]

history, people, personal

Forgive Me for I have Sinned

I have sinned. I need shriving.

We should have spent the weekend doing boring domestic things like cleaning out cupboards and throwing away toot, or doing literary society work.

But we haven’t.

The only domestic stuff I managed to do was (a) the regular paperwork and make sure the bills are paid and (b) to put together the Saturday and Sunday evening meals. That really isn’t good enough considering the jumble-sale state of the house.

But did we care? Did we hell!

Instead we worked at cracking a couple of blockages in tracing my family history. We haven’t cracked them but we have made progress and narrowed some of the options. In both cases this is down to two heads being better than one, and Noreen having a couple of brainwaves.

The two cases are totally unrelated; one in my father’s family the other in my mother’s. The former in Kent; the latter in London. But both at at the end of the 18th century and beginning of the 19th, so way before there are birth, marriage and death registrations or censuses to help much.

In my father’s family I have a gg-grandfather the date of whose marriage I can’t prove and whose parentage I can’t prove. There is later census data which shows a string of children and there are death registrations for both gg-grandparents. I can’t prove which of two candidates is my gg-grandfather: there are two guys with the same names, born to different parents, within 2 years (1805-1807) in the same village. Which of them was it who married my gg-grandmother? I cannot tell. At very best I have some extremely vague circumstantial evidence. (Note that at this date most parish records do not give the names of the bride’s and groom’s fathers.)

But Noreen did solve part of the puzzle over gg-grandfather’s marriage. The marriage dates for my gg-grandparents don’t fit with the string of children — several are born before the apparent marriage. Noreen said “I don’t suppose he had two marriages?”. And yes, from the baptism records, it looks as if he did and that my gg-grandmother was his second wife. The first half of the children are by his first wife; and my line descends from the youngest child of the second wife. And that puts the marriage in the right place on the timeline. I still can’t prove it conclusively, but it looks likely.

This is going to be a case of go and hunt in the actual parish registers for the relevant villages and see if there are clues which aren’t in the transcriptions.


Late-1930/early-1931. My father (centre) aged about 10, with his parents, younger brother and baby sister.
It’s my grandfather’s line I’m trying to fix.
[Apologies for the scan of a poor copy of a poor original!]

In the other case, on my mother’s side, I have as good as fixed the problem gg-grandparents already, although corroboration would be nice. But I cannot fix my gg-grandmother’s parents or their parents.

We have likely baptisms for the ggg-grandparents, and also ggg-grandfather’s death. There appears to be a marriage, but the date is in doubt (by all of 10 years — choose 1822 or 1832!). 1822 is the more likely as the first child appears to be born in 1823. But by dint of diligent searching and some good guesswork we’ve managed to fix ggg-grandparents’ family on the 1841 census which we couldn’t previously and found a couple of their children who we didn’t previously know about and who probably died prior to 1841.

That doesn’t help unravel the problem of the gggg-grandparents although there are now a few clues to work on. And fortunately in this case we are looking at people with relatively uncommon surnames, but in London where many of the parish records aren’t available online (yet).

But we have made progress. Again it is going to be a case of looking at the original parish registers of a couple of well known London churches to see what clues they can offer which the available transcriptions can’t.

How do we do it? Basically I work as far as I can and draw out the options. In each case I then take Noreen through the case, outlining what I know and can prove, what we need to prove, and where there are conflicts or gaps. We then check the data together. And hunt together (or separately) other avenues which present themselves. We have ideas and hunches and try to prove (or disprove) them. And I do the same for Noreen’s researches. One of us presents our case and the other acts as judge. When we agree a position we then both act as investigating magistrates.

Yes, it is hard work and it does need two brains on the problem. It has to be approached forensically. One needs to know the result is correct; I liken it to having to convince a court. Many people are far too slapdash and make assumed connections where there are none; too much of what I see others doing I can easily prove to be wrong. I have to be convinced beyond reasonable doubt.

And it’s as annoying as hell not to be ale to crack the problems.

But it sure beats doing housework!