You Might Have Shaved First!

Product awaiting development: a "spray on" designer stubble. At present you have to rub your chin and upper lip with pritstick and then dust your face with clippings from an electric shaver. To blow away excess hair dust, stand in a draught or use an electric hair-dryer. If you win the Dyson advertised on the packaging of the kitchen roll advertised you could put it on blow.

Further exercise: Close your eyes and see whether you can think even bigger!

                                                                                                                  Advert from Radio Times

On second thoughts, he's probably  wondering why they make such wide toilet paper... 

Raging Against The Light

How my face lights up when I think of those old incandescent bulbs- I had a dream last night in which instead of the usual treasure, or lost items from my childhood I found a crate of bulbs. What guilty pleasures. Speak to me of those bulbs, O visitor from the past. How one could read a book by them and not get a headache. Dost remember- O Mistress Wysywyg- how 100 watts was 100 watts? And how bulbs fitted lamps, whereas now you might not be able to fit the base of the bulb into the opening in your old lamps.

Oh yes, as a good citizen I switched a long time ago to low energy bulbs. For 23 Watts of consumed power the new ones give out 103 of those old and less depressing Watts (1450 lumens, if you recall what those are), though in a friendlier part of the spectrum to which my rods and cones have not yet adjusted. (Well, there is probably something more natural and restful about Planckian radiation.) At this wattage I can see, though it is not particularly pleasant reading and I tend to get headaches. The electricity bills are not significantly lower, and quality of life is not enhanced.

It used to be a fiat lux moment when you turned on a light switch: illumination was up and running in a fraction of second. The bulb whose packaging is shown here has a start-up time of less than 30 seconds (well, to help you get over that shock, they call it 'Quick-start').

It is non-dimmable (thank goodness I don't have dimmers; but my adoptive father does in London). It also contains 4.5 mg of mercury. In theory such bulbs should be recycled, but we all know that not everyone is socially responsible, so that over a sufficiently long time there will be mercury leaching out at rubbish sites. I was astonished to see some immigrant workers throwing broken bulbs into normal household waste, being largely unaware and even indifferent to our island ways and the council's recycling procedures.

Of course, the bulb runs by stimulating mercury vapour to emit UV, which in turn zaps a phosphor which emits light in the visual part of the spectrum. Some of this UV escapes and some researches are asking whether the levels are dangerous or not. There is also the issue of electromagnetic radiation. If you want to make up your mind about how safe these are, just google CFL and UV and health.

Meanwhile, in a padded treasure box, I keep an old incandescent bulb from the golden age of illumination. On special days when the PC Snooper and his thought police (what dimwits) are down at the pub, we shall ceremonially remove this bulb and invite George Orwell over for a read-in with tea and biscuits. How guilty we shall feel for escaping the gloom.

Passing through

It is the 150th anniversary of the London tube, a section of which constitutes the first subterranean railway in the world. I am a fan of tubes, including the Métro de Paris, the Петербу́ргский метро and, more recently, the Budapesti Földalatti Vasút. The idea of a nether world beneath the bustling of the streets above reminds me of Greek myth; the way you enter by one hole and pop up somewhere else reminds me of the topological shortcuts implicit in the Einstein-Rosen bridge. No wonder the fares are astronomical.

I am also a connoisseur of mugs; so I was happy to combine enthusiasms in one little object of desire: this commemorative mug from Oxford's Paperchase (an Aladdin's cave replete with things necessary and, more importantly, unnecessary for anyone who has ever drawn a pen across a page). I drink a lot of coffee (What did mathy Eurofolk before, say, 1690 when attention flagged? Mathematicians, after all, run on coffee.); so mugs matter to me. This one is for those who like their coffee under-ground.

A Fishy Tale

I remember once being criticised for using the word pelagic. "Why can't you be less pretentious and say deep sea instead," said my detractor, "words which ordinary people use." Well, I've never considered that I need to dumb down what I say; I mean it would be patronising. And if someone asks me what I mean it is usually because I have not phrased things as well as I might. I have always objected to radio producers and station managers telling me not to use difficult words as the listeners won't be able to follow. It is certainly not my experience of listeners. Nevertheless the argument stuck in my mind.

So I was amused years later to see the word turning up in the supermarket on the label of some Scottish Smoked Mackerel Fillets. Do fish eaters have a broader vocabulary? Or do the products of the Scots educational system have a better fin-ish? I'll stop there, I don't want to get into deep water.

More recaptioning

See my earlier post on Latin here:  Studying Latin at School

The slave boy interrupted their game
 of rock-paper-scissors

"Are you sure you turned the stove off?"

Ah!—the caducity of time...

Of course most things fall apart eventually, but in my experience they crumble in clusters. When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions—as the bard has it. The Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride around in fours, and the plagues of Egypt visit in sevens, so breakages—a phenomenon admittedly on a far smaller scale—might well be susceptible to clustering.

The butter knives are on their last legs and the last of them has at long last disintegrated and now gone the way of the fish-knives (Norman). Oddly enough we now eat more fish than meat but have no fish-knives; so why were they necessary when we ate fish only once a week? Tempora mutantur.

Ah but back at the clustering of the domestic disasters in miniature. My first digital TV- the Hitachi I placed near my work desk so I can watch TV if I have mindless work to do (e.g. scanning)—bit the dust and the hand that fed it slap bang in the middle of a Western.  Well I never liked it. It is odd how some objects are a source of joy while others yet, remain merely functional and are angular and awkward and fail to inspire confidence. I have now replaced it with the cheapest Logik set of the same size from Curry's for under £100 and am delighted with it.

The TV aerial has been playing up for a long time now; whenever it started to rain  channels dropped out one by one and would not return until it dried again. And it's been a particularly rainy year. Particularly vulnerable to damp was ITV3 which is often the only channel with something watchable on it. The more channels there are the harder it is to find anything to watch. (Quaere: If the number of channels became infinite would I have to stop watching TV altogether? Or would I be spoilt for choice?)

The sheathing on the coaxial cables on both aerials (the one for the TV in the bedroom and one for the TV at my work station) was badly worn and it let the water in. Oxford aerials sent an excellent chap who not only replaced the two degraded aerials but consolidated both cable runs through one aerial. I can now watch TV even if it rains.  What a relief when things work as they should.

Tidying up afterwards I found ants had invaded the kitchen. Tiny ones who had found a way through the wall. They don't make brickwork like they used. (Ant activity always peaks after long periods of rain followed by a couple of sunny days, so in a way such an event was likely to be synchronous with summoning the TV engineer, so that might explain that bit of clustering.) Wilcher Close used to be apple orchards so ants abound, but you have to stop them coming indoors. In Budapest I had tiny ants threading their way up to the third floor and eating crumbs off the table. Back at home in Wilcher Close we plugged the hole and hoovered up all the spoil, at which point the hoover hose snapped. We can't afford a new vacuum as well, so it's been taped up with brown tape.

More seriously, my belt snapped and so did its replacement, which I took as a sign that I should go on a diet sometime soon (in a day or so)—and get more exercise. A quick but stretching game of shuttlecock on the back lawn. This is not at all strenuous apart from the bit where you throw a broom up into the tree to dislodge the shuttlecock when it gets stuck.  But what was that 'ping'? 

Oh my racquet has finally given way as well.

Studying Latin at school was stimulating. Structure evokes creativity, exploration and play, just as the rules of tennis or chess make you itch to see what is possible.

Those of us who cared about these things did not entirely approve of the Cambridge Latin Course as you had to pick the lingo up naturally as you went along, piqued, presumably, by the stories, which did not turn us on at that age. That the teacher refused to tell us how the grammar worked we regarded as a waste of our young time: we wanted to get into the language. We thought it was tossy.

After all, a baby starts to pick up its first languages from within its mother's womb. The brain is developmentally attuned to this task at that time of life. But now you are 10 you have your first language and your brain moves on to more appropriate programmes for that age; the super-fast route of absorption has shut down and active efforts are more efficient. What you have lost internally has to be made up for externally. But try telling that to a teacher at that age.

We also decided that the illustrations of the Cambridge Latin Course were not good, but could be much improved if they were fitted with better captions, and we were best placed to provide them. In this unintended way our thwarted creativity found natural if disrespectful expression.

  At last a use for Messalina's

    marshmallows  suggested itself..