Wordy Wednesday - Losing One's Cool

You Jane, Me Tarzan? Me Not Remember.

It's the old, old story. A man met a woman. I don't know where, though I'm guessing it was in Holland, and I don't know the circumstances. Maybe he went to his local bank or post office. Maybe she was behind the counter. Maybe they were both in the waiting room of their local STD clinic, or perhaps she ran into the back of him at the traffic lights.

In any case, he hadn't met this woman before, but he was somewhat taken by her physical charms. Perhaps it was her well-endowed ears, or the way her thin top clung to the hump on her back, or the smooth curve of her seemingly endless nose. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

They only spoke a few words, before she asked for his address. Which is why I was guessing that they had just been involved in a minor prang. Anyway, what we do know is that he couldn't remember where he lived.

It could be that he was drunk, or concussed, or (like me) permanently in a daze, but he was shocked by this and reasoned that it must have been the attractiveness of the woman that had made him lose his mind. Being a psychologist, he set up an experiment to prove that it was all her fault.

The experiment involved measuring the mental capacity of students before and after chatting with someone. The male students who had just been talking to someone they found attractive achieved significantly lower scores than anyone else. In particular women aren't affected by men in this way. Presumably the men's mental capacity was fine once the blood had found it's way back to their brains.

I'm sure this is hardly earth-shattering news, though I wish they'd done the experiments here. I wouldn't have minded getting plied with gorgeous women in the interest of serious scientific research.

The full story is here.

Please Use the Other Toilet

I'm not a great fan of Stephen King. I've never read his novels, so I suppose I mean that I'm not a great fan of his films. Apart from the Shawshank Redemption. Unlike that one, most of them are concerned with the supernatural.

A colleague lent me a DVD of one of them, whose name escapes me now. Sadly, not because there's a stunning woman in my flat, but just because my brain is like a sieve at the best of times. In this film there is some kind of evil monster which first becomes apparent when some friends go on a hunting trip into the middle of nowhere.

Actually it first becomes apparent when one of the guys decides to use the facilities. The monster is somewhere in the plumbing and understandably doesn't take kindly to someone crapping on it. The result of all this is horrible and bloody. And fatal.

For most of us, this sort of thing only happens in Stephen King films. But in Australia, the contents of your toilet can quickly turn out to be deadly. At least, from what I know about Australian toilets. All of my knowledge about Australian toilets, and indeed Australia comes from lager adverts. I couldn't find any on You Tube about deadly spiders in the "dunny", but I'm sure they made at least one.



According to my extensive research, one might want to be careful about sitting down before making sure that there are no poisonous spiders or scorpions lurking somewhere on the porcelain. But even in Australia you would not expect to find a three metre python grinning up at you.

If it had been me in that situation, whatever bodily functions I went in there to perform would probably have happened spontaneously as I ran out of the room screaming, but our Ozzie guy lives in the bush, so I bet he calmly walked out and shut the door, went to another toilet, and then phoned the local snake expert, and arranged for an appointment.


The expert went round, but was unable to remove the snake, because it was tightly wrapped round the S-bend. He finally got it out on his fourth visit. I wonder how many days later this was. The snake was then released back into the wilds.

I've decided I won't emigrate to Australia.

Wordy Wednesday Goes Back in Time

My continuing effort to learn Greek means that I always have a book on the go. Despite the fact that my reading speed is much lower than in English, I am still reading more than I used to.

At the moment, I'm working my way through Herodotus' "The History of the Persian Wars.", translated from Ancient Greek by Angelos Vlachos. A lot of the book describes the cultures of the various peoples involved. Herodotus seems to have visited them all, and gives interesting details about their beliefs and habits.

For example, Egyptian women urinate standing up, and they are the ones who go off to the market and do business whilst the men stay at home knitting.

The Babylonians had a novel solution to the whole knotty problem of dating and marriage. Every year in each village, they'd have an auction of all the single women of marriagable age. They started with the most beautiful women, who would be sold to the highest bidder, and worked their way down. They shifted the less desirable ones by offering money to the "buyer" - the man who was willing to accept the least money got the girl. This was funded from the sale money, and helped poorer suitors get a decent start in life.

The buyers had to agree to marry the women, but there was a full money back guarantee if they subsequently got divorced.

Before any of my male readers book flights, I should point out that Herodotus was describing things as they were 2500 years ago, and I suspect that the Political Correctness Brigade have probably got these auctions banned by now.

In addition to the travel guide and the actual Persian Wars, Herodotus gives some historical background to the various kings, power struggles, and so on. Some of the stories are horrible - someone being "punished" by being invited to a banquet at which their child was the main course (they told the father after he'd finished eating and complimented the chef on an excellent meal).

Others are a bit more entertaining. I like the one where about a king who used to boast about how attractive his wife was was. He didn't think that his mate was suitably impressed, so he arranged for him to hide in the royal bedroom and get a glimpse of the naked queen. This was arranged as illustrated below.


Unfortunately what sounded over a few beers like a fun laddish prank went rather badly wrong for the king. The queen found out and was incensed. She told the king's friend that now he'd seen her naked, he couldn't be allowed to live, since he wasn't her husband. She said that he'd either have to do the honorable thing and top himself, or he could kill her husband, marry her and become king instead. It's not difficult to guess which option he chose. Herodotus explains that some cultures are a lot more prudish about nudity than the Greeks.

Anyway, I'm only about a fifth of the way through this rather large tome, so I'm off to continue reading about Egyptian sacrificial rites...

Weekend Viewing

Up in Flames

I spent a fair bit of last weekend following the live coverage on Greek TV and radio of the forest fires that were rampaging through North East Attiki (near to Athens). Many people were evacuated, and hundreds of homes were either completely burned down or were damaged. Several countries sent help, including a helicopter and a team of firefighters from Cyprus. Satellite pictures from NASA showed the smoke getting as far as North Africa.

People didn't always heed the authorities' advice to evacuate, and those living in areas where the fire service didn't send planes and helicopters to drop water were understandably frustrated. In the end, though, the fires were contained, though of course at this time of year there are bound to be more around the country.



Yesterday a pilot died when his firefighting plane crashed, probably into electric cables. A similar accident cost two crew their lives in 2007, and was put down to human error. The planes can be in the air constantly during the daylight hours and have to try and dive low in smoky conditions, so it's not surprising that accidents happen.

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Name That Tune

This week's random musical accompaniment to my life this week was Beethoven's Eroica Variations.

Beethoven was an expert at producing variations. Usually there is a theme, which is played first. Then variations of this theme follow. For example, Beethoven wrote some brilliant variations on the British National Anthem, and "Rule Britannia". Earlier composers were generally not as bold or creative, and very few composers have ever matched Beethoven's exuberance, and humour. I don't really know how music can be humorous, but his variations are. Even Albert Brendel says so. Syncopation is another strong feature of his works which is particularly noticeable in his variations.

In the Eroica variations, he starts off by playing not the tune, but the bass line on its own. Then he messes around with that a few times, before finally playing the main theme and its 15 variations.

The reason this is running through my head is that I played through the first few pages of this before giving up and playing Glenn Gould's recording of the work. I have to admit that his playing was just a bit better than mine, though I'm not so sure that his singing was...

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Have a good weekend!

Wordy Wednesday

The Arachnoid Wars

Someone sent me one of those spam chain emails the other day. It told the story of a Mexican cactus that a tourist bought, and some time after he got it home, exploded spewing out hundreds of deadly dinner-plate sized tarantulas all over his back garden. A spider had lain eggs inside the cactus which had then grown into these terrifying monsters. At some point they outgrew their home and made a collective bid for freedom.

It even had a picture of a dinner-plate sized taratula on a dinner plate. As if I hadn't been freaked out enough by the story. A quick check on google suggests that this is a hoax. If anyone knows different please do NOT tell me. People who spread terror in this way through our inboxes should be sentenced to spend a month naked in a sealed cell full of hungry tarantulas.

Recently, I have been trying to coexist with several spiders who have taken up residence in my flat. These have very thin legs, almost transparent, and tiny bodies. There was one in my bedroom for several weeks. Until Monday morning. I woke up really early to see a much blacker larger arachnoid grinning up at me. The last time this happened I resorted to boiling water. This time, I calmly got up, took my bedding and alarm clock into the lounge, got my work clothes out of the wardrobe, and went back to sleep on the sofa until it was time to get up.

I didn't see the spider again until late that evening, when it was on a wall in the hall. At which point it got eaten by the vacuum cleaner. The less scary one hasn't been seen since. So it was either devoured by the beast, or it ate one fly too many and morphed into it.

Thus ends my uneasy truce with eight-legged freaks. War has once more been declared.

Incidentally, for those of you who prefer to skip the words on my blog and just look at the pictures, I apologise for the lack of illustrations. By the time I'd trawled the net for spider images, I was freaked out.

Credit Crunch

You know the economy must be in a bad way when an armed bank robber escapes with only €10. When I first saw the headlines, I was worried that the banks were in more trouble than we thought, but it turns out that the robber was incompetent. Economically speaking, this is even worse. It's a bleak day for capatalism when people lose the will to rob one another.

And then I woke up...

Those of you who are wondering why I haven't posted all week (what do you mean you didn't notice?) will I hope be pleased to learn that I'm still alive. At least as I type this. Or to be more accurate, semi-alive. I've only just got up, and I'm still half asleep. Normally I'd wait a day or so to wake up properly before attempting to post something, but I have to do a brain dump before I forget:

Last night I had an incredibly detailed dream.

I was working in an office - it might have been the real office where I work, or maybe somewhere else. A senior manager had turned up who normally worked in a museum in London (no, I don't understand this either. I've never worked in a museum), and everyone was wondering why he had decided to take a detailed interest in our office, and whether he would mess everything up by deciding to micro-manage us. He was known as the Colonel, and I pictured him as a very upper class retired military gentleman. Not the KFC guy.

I can't describe the Colonel properly, as I only heard the others talking about him. I had already prepared my opening line, something like "Well, I've heard of 'musuem pieces' but it's nice to finally meet one." Maybe I'll get the chance to use it tonight.

According to my colleagues, the Colonel brought a special white suit to dine in and silverware. He went through some complicated business of setting up his dining equipment, pressing his white trousers, presumably before putting them on, probably opening five bottles of wine and port (one for each course), and finally carving the meat. Then he took one taste and spat it out. I'm not sure what he did next. Maybe he got a sandwich from the shop.


There was also a lot of walking around between this office and a warehouse where we were running a display of some sort. I don't know what. A museum display, possibly? You had to enter this warehouse via a large red door that swung up and down, like you get on most garages only a lot bigger, and this involved getting someone inside to open it, I think. I remember at one point that it had started to close and I dashed in, but some other people didn't want to in case they didn't make it in time.


To find out what happened next, please refer to the title of this post. If anyone has any suggestions about what all this means, I'd love to hear them. In the meantime, I'm going to put the kettle on and see whether I can get myself into a slightly less zombified state...

My Revolutionary New Phone

Last week, I became the proud owner of a brand new telephone. I'd been considering replacing my old one for a while, and Helena and I happened to find ourselves at the appropriate shop due to a sequence of events that began with me waking up hungry that morning, suggesting that we get an early lunch at Burger King, and then noticing that there was a shopping centre across the road with signs advertising discount clothes, dragging my reluctant daughter over there in search of cheap trousers and quickly deciding I wasn't in the mood for clothes shopping (I never am).

So I came home with a phone rather than a new pair of trousers. In the end, I decided against an iphone because I found something that has all of the iphone's useful functions, but is much better.

• Cheaper - At £30, I didn't require a mortgage.

• Easier to use - Even I can work out how to make and recieve calls on this phone.

• Has a built in bell. For some reason known only to apple, the iphone lacks one of these.

• It's a design classic.

Talking of design, the phone that this is a replica of first came out in 1937 and was in use well into the 1950s. (The latest iphone will probably be out of date by next year). Helena loves it, as she's never used a rotary dial phone before.

I hardly use my landline, and might be tempted to get rid of it, except that I need it for internet access, and I have a nagging worry about relying on mobile phones in an emergency, since they don't work when there's a power cut. In any case, there's only one thing wrong with my new retro purchase. Sadly I still get 21st century marketing calls.

Wordy Wednesday - Wordy Game

Helena wanted to play scrabble yesterday. This entailed a visit to Toys 'R' Us, since we only had the Junior version, which she's now grown out of.

Despite playing with an "Open Dictionary" and getting some help, she was unable to beat me. I'm not sure why this came as such a surprise to her, considering that she was playing against someone with 28 years more experience of English.

Anyway, one of the benefits of allowing the free use of a dictionary is that you learn about words that you can't believe exist. Such as:

aa n a type of scoriaceous volcanic rock with a rough surface and many jagged fragments. [Hawaiian]

ee n (pl een) Scots form of eye.

oo 1. n Scots form of wool

oo 2. pronoun a Scots form of we

These Scots have got a lot to answer for. All definitions are taken from the Chambers Dictionary, which is published by a Scottish firm (of Scrabble players?).

Anyway, I'll just about buy the above as plausible, but the following definition, used by Helena to get 12 points, is going too far:

moy (Shakesp) n supposed by Pistol (misunderstanding a Frenchman's moi me) to be the name of a coin.

So now they're putting random nonsense made-up words in the dictionary??? I wonder if it's just because it's Shakespeare, or can anyone join it? If I put some stupid combination of letters in my blog, will it get a mention in the next edition of Chambers? Let's try it and see.

I had a dream last night that at a crucial point in a game of Strip Scrabble, I managed to beat my three gorgeous opponents with a real qycxbez.

qycxbez (BOV) n A massively high-scoring word played during a Scrabble game by a player who fools his less experienced opponents into believing that it's in the official dictionary, which he claims to have learned by heart.

I only once played an allegedly experienced scrabble player, and I'm sure that most of the weird 2-letter combinations he used were qycxbezes. (Note that the plural form of this word does not double the "z", since there's only one "z" in a standard Scrabble set. Note also that it's one of those few handy-to-know words that has a "q" in it, but not a "u").

I bet Shakespeare's turning in his grave, wishing that he were alive now to realise his full potential. Given his capacity for inventing words, he'd have been an unbeatable opponent...

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Exercise for the reader:

What's the highest word score you can get for qycxbez? If you place it in on a triple word square with the "x" on a double lettter, you make 141 points, but I don't know if there's a way to score more.