Health, Safety and Steamed-Up Glasses

Giger bugs

Saw these near Men-an-Tol on the Penwith peninsula. Found afterwards that they are the larvae of the Bloody-Nosed Beetle, or Blood-spewing Beetle, which feed exclusively on 'bedstraws' (I always called this goosegrass). The adult spits a red fluid when in trouble. - I wanted to identify the weird, leathery beasts and went to a specialist website; with a heavy heart, knowing how slim my chance of finding them among thousands. But they were the very first in the list of recent queries! Someone else had just seen them, and in Cornwall too.

Physics and the Cinema: notes from an excellent free lecture in the University of York programme

Earlier this month, Professor Jordi Miralda Escudé gave a public lecture at the University of York, which looked at the relationship between science fact and science fiction. In space, we know you can’t hear screams, but should you be able to see lasers and set things on fire? We know it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but how many billion light years away from Earth are alien invaders likely to be?

- You really notice the extraordinary number of casualties in sci fi films.

- Newton first described ‘escape velocity’. Anything over 5G for more than a few minutes has serious effects and can be fatal.Verne’s ‘gun’ method would have resulted in about 40,000G.

- Why did no one notice the ARMAGEDDON asteroid until it was 18 days away? Someone was lying down on the job.

- Number of errors in ARMAGEDDON logged by NASA inductees is 167 and rising. The asteroid was way, way, way bigger than you need to annihilate all life on earth. I think it was ‘size of Texas’. Dinosaur one was 6 miles. To blow it up today we would be able to assemble probably a 100 megaton bang, max, and you’d need two trillion megatons. Then all the bits would keep coming and annihilate all life on earth (in the film they all miraculously miss).

- Effects of weightlessness: you know these. 45% of astronauts vomit. Unit of vomit is a Garn Unit, Garn being the most profuse vomiter ever known in space. So your Garn score is a fraction of 1, as you can’t match one Garn. Also you fart a great deal.

- STEERING – imagine people swooping through meteor showers, dodging baddies etc. Can’t be done. You can issue a little puff of nitrogen to change your attitude or head off in another direction, very carefully, but there is no friction out there. Fictional spaceships behave as if they were fighter planes in air.

- STARSHIP TROOPERS is a favourite of Professor J’s. The enemies live on the other side of the galaxy and hurl asteroids at Earth, effectively ‘throwing rocks’. We saw the hero on their territory and radioing for aid. The aid would arrive after 120,000 years.

- If a real asteroid comes, it’s better to move away from the target area than smash the asteroid up and make lots of different target areas.

- INDEPENDENCE DAY: the baddies come from ’90 billion light years away’. It is only possible to come from 13 billion light years away, and how did Will Smith know anyway?

Useful notes

Citric acid powder aids bread

If a job's worth doing, it's better to do it badly than not at all.

Warm salt water kills infections: gargle, bathe, dab.

You can sprout things in a cafetiere.

Other people don't remember your embarrassing moments - you don't remember theirs

The future can't get at you

The future can't get at you.


MAN - a Passerby



To see:
Cragside House, Armstrongs, early hydroelectrics
Thornbury Abbey, North Lincs
Bowes House

Restaurants:
(v) Orchard, Sicilian Ave, Holborn
Food for Thought, Neal St, Covent Garden

Things I like to see

Goods trains
Goldfinches
Thespian howling children
Very tall trees
Barmaids and waitresses in black, with dyed red hair
Greyhounds
Clear rivers, streams and seas
Five-sailed windmills

Small post mills

Canal locks
Tower cranes
Coal fires

Hens in the distance

"The Sheepdog" - U.A. Fanthorpe

After the very bright light, 

And the talking bird, 
And the singing, 
And the sky filled up wi' wings, 
And then the silence, 

Our lads sez 
We'd better go, then. 
Stay, Shep. Good dog, stay. 
So I stayed wi' t' sheep. 

After they'd cum back 
It sounded grand, what they'd seen. 
Camels and kings, and such, 
Wi' presents - human sort, 
Not the kind you eat - 
And a baby. Presents wes for him 
Our lads took him a lamb. 

I had to stay behind wi' t' sheep. 
Pity they didn't tek me along too. 
I'm good wi' lambs, 
And the baby might have liked a dog 
After all that myrrh and such.

Concrete appeals to cats

Ian has finished laying new concrete in the back yard. Charlie mentioned next door's cat. Ian said cats are attracted to wet concrete. They walk on, stop - you think they'll reverse, but they always carry on. Once it was raining at the end of the day and he covered a conservatory-footing he'd just laid with plastic sheeting. In the morning they took the sheeting off and two cats had been across, under the sheeting, and stopped to have a fight in the middle.

This Russian family was cut off from human contact for forty years

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html

Uncle Podger hangs a picture

You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job. A picture would have come home from the frame-maker's, and be standing in the dining-room, waiting to be put up; and Aunt Podger would ask what was to be done with it, and Uncle Podger would say:

"Oh, you leave that to me. Don't you, any of you, worry yourselves about that. I'll do all that."

And then he would take off his coat, and begin. He would send the girl out for sixpenny worth of nails, and then one of the boys after her to tell her what size to get; and, from that, he would gradually work down, and start the whole house.

"Now you go and get me my hammer, Will," he would shout; "and you bring me the rule, Tom; and I shall want the step-ladder, and I had better have a kitchen-chair, too; and, Jim! You run round to Mr. Goggles, and tell him, 'Pa's kind regards, and hopes his leg's better; and will he lend him his spirit-level?' And don't you go, Maria, because I shall want somebody to hold me the light; and when the girl comes back, she must go out again for a bit of picture-cord; and Tom!—where's Tom?—Tom, you come here; I shall want you to hand me up the picture."

And then he would lift up the picture, and drop it, and it would come out of the frame, and he would try to save the glass, and cut himself; and then he would spring round the room, looking for his handkerchief. He could not find his handkerchief, because it was in the pocket of the coat he had taken off, and he did not know where he had put the coat, and all the house had to leave off looking for his tools, and start looking for his coat; while he would dance round and hinder them.

"Doesn't anybody in the whole house know where my coat is? I never came across such a set in all my life—upon my word I didn't. Six of you!—and you can't find a coat that I put down not five minutes ago! Well, of all the—"

Then he'd get up, and find that he had been sitting on it, and would call out:

"Oh, you can give it up! I've found it myself now. Might just as well ask the cat to find anything as expect you people to find it."

And, when half an hour had been spent in tying up his finger, and a new glass had been got, and the tools, and the ladder, and the chair, and the candle had been brought, he would have another go, the whole family, including the girl and the charwoman, standing round in a semi-circle, ready to help. Two people would have to hold the chair, and a third would help him up on it, and hold him there, and a fourth would hand him a nail, and a fifth would pass him up the hammer, and he would take hold of the nail, and drop it.

"There!" he would say, in an injured tone, "now the nail's gone."

And we would all have to go down on our knees and grovel for it, while he would stand on the chair, and grunt, and want to know if he was to be kept there all the evening.

The nail would be found at last, but by that time he would have lost the hammer.

"Where's the hammer? What did I do with the hammer? Great heavens! Seven of you, gaping round there, and you don't know what I did with the hammer!"

We would find the hammer for him, and then he would have lost sight of the mark he had made on the wall, where the nail was to go in, and each of us had to get up on the chair, beside him, and see if we could find it; and we would each discover it in a different place, and he would call us all fools, one after another, and tell us to get down. And he would take the rule, and re-measure, and find that he wanted half thirty-one and three-eighths inches from the corner, and would try to do it in his head, and go mad.

And we would all try to do it in our heads, and all arrive at different results, and sneer at one another. And in the general row, the original number would be forgotten, and Uncle Podger would have to measure it again.

He would use a bit of string this time, and at the critical moment, when the old fool was leaning over the chair at an angle of forty-five, and trying to reach a point three inches beyond what was possible for him to reach, the string would slip, and down he would slide on to the piano, a really fine musical effect being produced by the suddenness with which his head and body struck all the notes at the same time.

And Aunt Maria would say that she would not allow the children to stand round and hear such language.

At last, Uncle Podger would get the spot fixed again, and put the point of the nail on it with his left hand, and take the hammer in his right hand. And, with the first blow, he would smash his thumb, and drop the hammer, with a yell, on somebody's toes.

Aunt Maria would mildly observe that, next time Uncle Podger was going to hammer a nail into the wall, she hoped he'd let her know in time, so that she could make arrangements to go and spend a week with her mother while it was being done.

"Oh! You women, you make such a fuss over everything," Uncle Podger would reply, picking himself up. "Why, I like doing a little job of this sort."

And then he would have another try, and, at the second blow, the nail would go clean through the plaster, and half the hammer after it, and Uncle Podger be precipitated against the wall with force nearly sufficient to flatten his nose.

Then we had to find the rule and the string again, and a new hole was made; and, about midnight, the picture would be up—very crooked and insecure, the wall for yards round looking as if it had been smoothed down with a rake and everybody dead beat and wretched—except Uncle Podger.

"There you are," he would say, stepping heavily off the chair on to the charwoman's corns, and surveying the mess he had made with evident pride. "Why, some people would have had a man in to do a little thing like that!"

From 'Three Men in a Boat', Jerome K. Jerome

Christmas 2012

What my mother said too

"No one imagines that a symphony is supposed to improve as it goes along, or that the whole object of playing is to reach the finale. The point of music is discovered in every moment of playing and listening to it. It is the same, I feel, with the greater part of our lives, and if we are unduly absorbed in improving them we may forget altogether to live them." Alan Watts