The Horse Race Game

We had a Blue Peter afternoon. 

For those not from the U.K., Blue Peter is a BBC Television children’s magazine programme that has been running at least once a week since the nineteen-fifties. Amongst a wide variety of content, it is known for encouraging children to make things out of cardboard, pipe cleaners, household waste items, and “sticky-backed plastic”. One of its best-remembered creations was a version of the Thunderbirds Tracy Island in the nineteen-nineties. 

That was amusing in itself. Television re-runs of Thunderbirds generated a stream of toys and merchandise, and Matchbox Toys brought out a Tracy Island play set just before Christmas. It sold out within days. Blue Peter responded with a home-made version made from paper mache. Thunderbird 1 was launched from a Yoghurt pot, the hangar for Thunderbird 2 was a tissue box, and Thunderbird 3 launched out of a toilet roll. The BBC was inundated with so many requests for the free instructions, they had to stop sending them out, and instead released a VHS video of presenter Anthea Turner making it (see the BBC archive). 

Our Blue Peter afternoon was spent making a horse racing game for the memory group Mrs. D. runs. The theme that week was Royal Ascot. 

We came up with a track made from long pieces of card marked with lines, with cardboard fences. For the horses, I printed out two-sided chess knights in different colours. They were stapled around movable cardboard stands.  

The rules were kept simple. Each player has a horse to move according to the throw of a dice (I can hear my maths teacher telling me if there is only one it is a die). If you land on a space before a fence, that counts as a refusal and you have to move back three spaces. The first to the finish line is the winner. With around ten participants taking turns, the game lasts more than half an hour.

Horses are go. F.A.B. Anything can happen in the next half hour. 

It was fantastic fun, with laughter and excitement. One lady must have had a “donkey”, because it kept refusing the first fence when most of the others had nearly finished. Some wanted to bet on the outcome, but that was not allowed, although they could try to predict the winner. One could not remember which was her horse, and one kept taking the die out of the cup and turning it in his hand, not knowing what to do. They laugh at each other because they think that they are the only one that is with it, and that all the others (including the volunteers) are completely gaga. 

“Parka”
“Yuss Billaidi”
“Put down one hundred pounds each way on the green-yellow one, at 7:2”
“They won’t allow it, Billaidi” 
“Oh! And Ascot used to be such fun” 
“Yuss Billaidi”

Of course, I wanted to strive for perfection by colouring the track green and drawing white railings along the sides, having water jump, colouring the horses in jockey colours, and making one a zebra, but Mrs. D. said we had spent long enough. Perhaps we should send off for our Blue Peter badges anyway. 

We spent days making things like this as children. One of the best Christmas or Birthday presents you could get was a roll of Sellotape, a bottle of glue, a ball of string, and a few cardboard boxes. My brother made himself an aeronaut’s flying suit out of cardboard, complete with streamlined leggings, gauntlets, helmet and wings. He bounded around the house in it, jumping on and off the furniture making flying noises. 

Would many of today’s youngsters, who seem to spend most of their time playing games and messaging each other on their phones, have the interest, persistence, or even the practical ability to make such things?

Credits: The voices of Lady Penelope and P. were provided by JayCee and Parker, with American and Australian versions by Steve Reed and Andrew High Riser, and German sub-titles by Meike Riley. The horses were fed on silage grown by Dave Northsider, their stables built by Debby Hornburg, and the zebra ridden side saddle by Debra who seeks. The horses are writing a guest post for Tigger’s Mum. Tracy Island and the race game were made by Mrs. D. who let Tasker think he was helping. Thelma played Anthea Turner, and Yorkshire Pudding was Brains. 

The Deaf Duster

My wife was looking for a clean duster. I surprised her by producing a brand new one, forty years old. A BBC archive clip of programs I wrote for deaf children reminded me of it recently (the one-minute clip is here). Someone gave me the duster at that time.  

We decided the duster was much too nice to use as a duster, so it went back in the drawer. 

I never did manage to learn the sign alphabet. I can spell out my name, but little else. 

Memories churned around in my head, as often happens these days, and in the middle of the night, out of nowhere, there emerged a song.

To the tune of the old British music hall song Let's All Go Down The Strand: 

           Let's all go through the codes (Have a banana)
           Let's all go through the codes (Gertie Gitana)
           A B C D    /    E F G
           H I J K    /    L M N O P
           Q R S      /    T
           U V W X Y    /    Zee
           A B C D    /    E F G
           Let's all go through the codes.

What a great way to learn it: 

He's as daft as a brush. 

Right, who wants a part in The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights, or Julius Caesar on an Aldis Lamp? 

Sunday Silliness

Silly Songs With Simple Chords
C and G7 

         Cows in the kitchen, moo moo moo,
         Pigs in the pantry, grunt oink ooh,
         Lambs on the landing, baa baa boo,
         Skip to my Lou my darling.

         There’s a horse in the hallway, neigh neigh neigh,
         A donkey in the doorway, bray bray bray, 
         Ducks and chicks in the chairs all day, 
         Skip to my Lou my darling. 

         Get all these animals out of this place,
         They make a lot of noise, they take a lot of space,
         There’s no room left for me or you,
         Can’t skip to the loo, you can’t get through.  

The Cats With A Bank Account

Anyone seeking evidence that the BBC is not what it once was, look no further than this report from Nationwide in 1973. 

https://youtu.be/zEp-bigGqYI

As someone who was working in accountancy at the time, several things in this report trouble me greatly.  

Aside from tax and inheritance questions such as whether the correct tax was paid on interest received (cats do not have a tax allowance), and what happened to the money after the cats died: how did the beneficiaries or next-of-kin proved their right of inheritance, I have questions about the operation of the bank account. 

Presumably, Quicksilver and Quince had someone write the cheques for them, possibly the lady in the film, but how did they sign them? If it was with a paw print, then how did the bank verify the signatures as genuine, rather than the paw prints of criminal cats who steal cheque books? One paw print looks much like another as far as I can tell. 

And if the account required joint signatures, rather than either one, then how did the bank verify that both have actually signed, rather than just one that has put its paw mark on the cheque twice? That Quince looks a bit shifty to me.  

We need assurances that the bank account was operated legally and not in false names. 

Downstairs

New Month Old Post: first posted 30th October, 2016.

A song for dads to sing to their children. 

What a super singalong on BBC Four on Friday! 

It Started with a Kiss, or rather for us with a bottle of Chilean Shiraz. It was followed by a fabulous edition of Top Of The Pops 1982, from 15th July. After several weeks of watching the constipated faces of Brian Ferry and Martin Fry (get the look!), it was great to have some good tunes for a change. Following Errol and Hot Chocolate came Dexy’s Come On Eileen, the perennial Cliff Richard, David Essex’s Night Clubbing, and Irene Cara’s Fame (although I have never understood the line in that song about qualifying for a pilots licence).

Later, there was a concert with the then (in 2016) 83-year-old Petula Clark who has brought out a new LP. Goodness, she is even more perennial than Cliff Richard. My great-grandfather used to like her and he died in 1960. Her voice is a bit thin now, but the music and band were superb. She kept us waiting for her ultimate singalong song but it duly arrived near the end. I then blotted my copybook by reprising my own lyrics from when the children were little. They went something like this.

When you’re in bed and Mummy’s snoring beside you

You can always go, downstairs

When you are cold and Mummy’s got all the duvet

There’s a place I know, downstairs

You can lie down on the settee, and have it all to yourself, 

Choose some bedtime reading from the books upon the bookshelf

How can you lose?

It’s warmer and quieter there 

You can forget all the snoring, no need to stay there 

Just go downstairs

Sleeping on the settee, downstairs

Sleeping so peacefully, downstairs

Everything’s waiting for you.

When you’re in bed and Mummy’s been eating garlic

There’s a place to go, downstairs

Onions and curry, chilli, tikka masala

Seems to help I know, downstairs

You can open all the windows and the air is clear and nice

Fill your lungs with freshness that’s free of herbs and spice

How can you lose?

The night is much cleaner there

You can forget all your troubles, forget all your cares

And go downstairs

Have a weak cup of tea, downstairs

Crackers or toast for me, downstairs

Everything’s waiting for you.

I was lucky not to have to sleep downstairs.  

Blue Star

Northsider Dave will immediately recognise this from the rear label of a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale. It acts as a temperature indicator, beginning to turn from white to blue below 12°C. I brought this in from the garage at around 6°C.  

“Drink Cold” it tells us. Why cold beer? Some pubs serve it so cold it could give you brain damage. You cannot taste it properly. Is that because their beer is so awful they don’t want you to? 

Not so Newcastle Brown. I don’t see why I should be told how to drink it by some Dutch outfit that bought out the company and don’t even make it in Newcastle any more. They can keep the cold for their disgusting pilsner.

I will concede it is now made in Yorkshire, and that they tried to keep pint bottles rather than the more usual 500ml. You cannot expect the Dutch to understand that an Imperial pint is 568.261 ml, not 550. Or do they diddle us a sip to refresh the profits other beers can’t reach? At least they are not American pints.

While we are on the subject, why is the temperature in °C rather than Fahrenheit? Imperial measures were invented to flummox the French, not the Dutch.

So, I drink it warm. If there is the slightest hint of blue on that label I put the bottle in the washing up water until it turns white. If I want to drink it warm, then I will, and if I want to swig it round my mouth while crunching up a chunk of chocolate then I’ll do that too.

Here is the star after it has turned white, now on the empty bottle. I apologise for it not being as good an image as the first. Dave and I will not be the only ones to appreciate that empty bottles are much more difficult to photograph than full ones.

Factorials (or Bonding with Brague)

Dear Bob,

As I am sure you know, the factorial of any positive whole number is that number multiplied by all the numbers between it and 1.

So the factorial of 3 = 1 x 2 x 3 = 6
And the factorial of 5 = 1 x 2 x 3 x 4 x 5 = 120

I am also sure that, as a computer programmer, you could quickly write a program to calculate the factorial of any number N. One way to do it would be to set up a counter to cycle through all the numbers between 1 and N, multiplying each by a running total that is initially set to 1. In an imaginary programming language it might look like this:

RunningTotal = 1
FOR Counter = 1 to N
Multiply RunningTotal by Counter; (thereby altering the value of RunningTotal)
The factorial of N = RunningTotal

So, in calculating the factorial of 5, each step of the cycle would produce the following values:

Counter	Multiplication of  RunningTotal x Counter	New Value of  RunningTotal
1	1  x  1	1
2	1  x  2	2
3	2  x  3	6
4	6  x  4	24
5	24  x  5	120

But there is a more elegant way. This involves thinking of the factorial of any number N as being that number multiplied by the factorial of N-1.

So the factorial of 3 = 3 x 2 = 6
And the factorial of 5 = 5 x 24 = 120
And the factorial of 6 = 6 x 120 = 720

In our imaginary programming language, the program to calculate factorials using this method might look like this:

The factorial of 1 = 1
The factorial of N = N x the factorial of (N-1)

This is known as a recursive function because it has to re-use itself at each step of the calculation. For example:

The factorial of 5 = 5 x (the factorial of 4)
    The factorial of 4 = 4 x (the factorial of 3)
        The factorial of 3 = 3 x (the factorial of 2)
            The factorial of 2 = 2 x (the factorial of 1)
                The factorial of 1 = 1 (this causes the calculation to “unwind”)
            So, the factorial of 2 = 2 x 1 = 2
        So, the factorial of 3 = 3 x 2 = 6
    So, the factorial of = 4 x 6 = 24
So, the factorial of 5 = 5 x 24 = 120

Isn’t that just exquisite!

Now, for homework, please would you explain the operation of recursive descent parsing giving examples from the Hebrew and Cherokee languages.

Sincerely yours

Jokers Wild

New Month Old Post: Barry Cryer, who died last week, is remembered in this not-so-old post from 18th November, 2018

Leeds 1970. Mondays. Back to work. Accountancy 8.45 to 5.30. I’d better get used to it because it could be for the next forty or fifty years. One of the older guys could find his own handwriting in ledgers from the nineteen-thirties: like in Cat Stevens’ Matthew and Son.

But there was one good thing about Mondays: Jokers Wild. The show had returned for a second series just after we moved into the first of our shared houses in March, 1970. I could be home for 6.15 when it went out on Yorkshire Television.

Jokers Wild (not to be confused with the American series of the same name) was a classic comedy show in which two teams of comedians competed by telling jokes on topics from cards drawn by Barry Cryer. Bonus points could be scored by interrupting a joke part-way through and completing the punchline. It was pretty much the first British example of many similar show formats: the Mock the Week of fifty years ago.

Old copies of that wonderful provincial newspaper The Yorkshire Post, which at parochial odds with almost every other newspaper and magazine in the country listed Yorkshire Television ahead of the B.B.C., name the regular team captains as Ted Ray and Arthur Askey, with team members Les Dawson and Ray Martine. On the 6th April, 1970, the day my wild-joking accountant boss had wished me a happy new fiscal year (I ashamedly still use that joke every year without fail), they were joined by guests Clive Dunn and Stubby Kaye.

Ray Cameron (father of the present day comedian Michael McIntire), who invented the show, appeared in some episodes. Other regulars and guests read like a who’s-who of British comedy from the last days of music hall to the nineteen-seventies. Many of them smoked cigarettes overtly on-screen. Some are now so gone and forgotten they don’t even have Wikipedia pages.

Barry Cryer with the Jokers Wild Trophy (click to play)

A YouTube clip advertising a DVD of some of the shows has guests Joe Baker and Lance Percival, probably from the 13th or 20th April, 1970. In subsequent weeks the Yorkshire Post lists Jack Douglas (in character as the nervous-tic-suffering Alfred Ippititimus), Ray Fell, Ted Rogers, Graham Stark, Kenneth Connor and Arthur Worsley. Other online clips include Michael Aspel, Warren Mitchell, Tim Brooke-Taylor and Sid James. Wikipedia and IMDb also mention that over its five-year, nine-series run, others on the show included Eric Sykes, Jimmy Edwards, Roy Hudd, Alfred Marks, Professor Stanley Unwin, Norman Collier, Bob Monkhouse, Peter Goodwright, Jack Smethurst, Lennie Bennett, David Nixon, Roy Kinnear, John Cleese, Charlie Chester, Freddie Starr, Michael Bentine, Paul Andrews, Lonnie Donegan, Milo O’Shea, Kenneth Earle, Kenny Cantor, Clement Freud, Mike Hope, Albie Keen, Tony Brandon, John Junkin, Mike Burton, Don Maclean, Bobby Pattinson, Tony Stewart, Dick Bentley, Deryck Guyler, Laurence Harvey, Dickie Henderson, Bernard Bresslaw, Rolf Harris, John Pertwee and Fred Emney. As was the spirit of the time, few women appeared on the show, the only ones listed (including hostesses) being Isabella Rye, Diana Dors, Audrey Jeans, ‘the lovely’ Aimi MacDonald and June Whitfield. I can remember most on the list, but by no means all. Some were actually singers, actors or presenters rather than comedians.

They told a lot of sexist, racist, men-in-pub, wife and mother-in-law jokes. I remember Tim-Brooke Taylor being allowed almost to complete a joke about a town in Devon before Barry Cryer interrupted to remind him that the subject was supposed to be painting. “Oh,” he said sounding surprised. “I thought you said Paignton.” The wonderful and much-underrated Ray Martine, a Polari-speaking, camp Jewish comedian with a reputation for witty and effective put-downs, became more and more ill-at-ease and hesitant as the series progressed. He seemed unable to cope with constant teasing and interruptions, especially from Les Dawson. On one programme he looked so fed up he launched into a stream of jokes about Barry Cryer’s wife, which was taking things a bit too far. Barry Cryer took it with good grace and said that after the break they would be back with more jokes and a letter from his solicitor. And it was all done without a single swear word.

One might also reflect on prominent comedians of the time who were not on the show: no Morecambe and Wise; no Ronnies; no Tommy Cooper, Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams, Dick Emery, Harry Worth, Charlie Drake, Benny Hill or Jimmy Tarbuck; only a minority of Carry-Ons, Pythons, Goodies and Goons; and so many, many others. Perhaps they were too busy, or under exclusive contract to the B.B.C., or maybe it was just not their format.

It was at least a last chance to see some of the older generation: the wartime generation and earlier. Arthur Askey and Fred Emney were over 70 when they appeared, with Ted Ray not much younger. From all of these lists it is astonishing to realise just how many brilliant comedians there have been over the years.

It looks terribly dated now and was probably more scripted than improvised, but it still raises a laugh. The DVDs for Series 1 and 2 are tempting [I later bought the series 2 DVD]. A much better review than this of the first DVD appears here.

Dill in Mustard Sauce?

(first posted 12th January 2017)

“But dill is a herb!” Mrs. D. gave me that withering look she normally reserves for her ageing mother. 

 I still thought I was right.

“They’re little fish - dill in mustard sauce.”

“It’s a herb! You wouldn’t get dill in mustard sauce. That would be like having basil in Worcester sauce or parsley in pineapple marinade.”

I sighed. “There was a tin last year in the Christmas hamper your mother gets from the pension company: a tin of dill in mustard sauce. They were little fish. Your mother gave it to us and they were really nice.”

“Sure it wasn’t sild?”

“It was definitely dill. As in a shoal of dill.”

There was nothing in the dictionary about dill as fish, only as Anethum graveolens, a European, pungent, aromatic, umbelliferous, annual, yellow-flowered herb of the celery family Apiaceae, used in flavouring pickles or to relieve excess wind, although in Australia and New Zealand it colloquially means a fool. Mrs. D. said that’s what I was being - or doing. I said we needed a better dictionary.

At Christmas, I can usually guess what’s in presents before I open them, but this one had me puzzled. It was too thin for a dictionary and the wrong shape for DVDs. I unwrapped it still wondering. 

It was a tin of John West herring fillets in mustard and dill sauce.

Eating in the Fifties

Someone sent me this. Apparently it made them think of me. 

I could add:

• Instant coffee was black, liquid, came in a square bottle and was something to do with camping.
  
• The only wine you had is what you did when told if you don't eat it up now you'll get it for breakfast, dinner and tea until you do.
  

Posters on the Wall

Guinness, Smirnoff, Accountancy and Monty Python

(First posted 17th October, 2015. 1,040 words)

There was a time when no self-respecting, young person’s bedsit would be complete without an iconic Athena poster. Along with the thousands of other young persons who had exactly the same one, it was a statement of your individuality. Full-blooded young males could have a sexy French lingerie model or the knickerless tennis girl absent-mindedly rubbing her naked bottom (gratuitously included here). The more emancipated might have the muscular man cradling a baby. For the rebellious it would be Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix surrounded by psychedelic swirls. The arty could choose a fine reproduction print, perhaps a Salvador Dali to indicate their leanings towards the avante garde. For the revolutionary Marxist it had to be Che Guevara. For those of a philosophical bent it might be seagulls in mid-flight, quoting Virgil: “They can because they think they can.”

Athena outlets sprang up in most large towns and cities, and for a couple of decades they made good profits. Not out of cheapskates like me though. My walls were adorned with a scruffy and eclectic mix of images acquired entirely free of charge. Here are some of them in my attic bedroom in our dingy shared house in Leeds in 1972, next to some colourful ink blots on blotting paper, the product of an idle, unsupervised afternoon at work.

One was a Guinness poster to show that independence and resilience were important parts of my individuality. You had to be pretty independent and resilient to drink the stuff. No one else I knew liked its burnt and heavy flavour. I’m not even sure that I did.

I had sent Guinness a sycophantic letter admiring one of their newspaper adverts: ‘How to Make Guinness’. Back came a roughly A2-sized poster in a cardboard tube.* It caricatured the process from harvesting the barley through to delivery by road tanker, and gave sound advice on how to avoid common errors such as brewing it upside down with the head underneath the body.  

Then there was the Smirnoff poster: “Accountancy was my life until I discovered Smirnoff.” Well, it was true, accountancy was my life, and I dearly wished it wasn’t. Oh that something so simple as learning to handle a bottle of vodka could instantaneously transform it from the humdrum into one of glamour and excitement! But, from the other adverts in the series, I would rather have been the camel train trekker who used to take the caravan to Southend but now traversed the desert, or the mainstay of the Public Library who had escaped to carefree rural reverie, rather than the suited, cigar-smoking, nineteen-thirties City of Westminster gangster in the wide-brimmed Panama hat.

Anyone would have thought that accountancy was boring. Well, thanks to John Cleese and Monty Python, that is exactly what most of my contemporaries did think. Most damaging was the ‘Vocational Guidance Counsellor’ sketch about an insignificant little man whose careers advisor declared without doubt that the ideal job for him was chartered accountancy. “But I am a chartered accountant,” he protested. He wanted a new job, “something exciting that will let me live.” He wanted to be a lion tamer. Chartered accountancy was “dull, dull, dull ...”,  a career in which it was a positive advantage to be “unimaginative, timid, lacking in initiative, spineless, easily dominated, no sense of humour, tedious company and irrepressibly drab.” The sketch ends by asking for donations to The League for Fighting Chartered Accountancy: “this terrible debilitating social disease.” I am certain it influenced my subsequent rejection of the career. So much for independence and resilience.

The senior partner where I worked found the sketch so offensive it became practically a dismissable offence to admit you watched the programme. John Cleese, however, discovered that his own accountant was not offended in any way at all. When asked why, he explained it was because the sketch was about chartered accountancy, whereas he himself was a certified accountant.

But a fervent Monty Python fan I was, one of those who could recite ‘The Piranha Brothers’ and ‘Room for an Argument’ off by heart. We even used to audio-tape and transcribe the television shows so we could act them out ourselves in our shared house. My brother used the school’s photographic equipment to make a poster from the Whizzo Quality Assortment page of Monty Python’s Big Red Book. This showed a box of chocolates containing such delights as Crunchy Frog, made using only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq. “Do you take the bones out?” “No, it wouldn’t be crunchy if we did.” That poster went on my wall too.

In 1973, I went with a group of mates to the Leeds Grand Theatre and Opera House in New Briggate to see Monty Python on tour. Many of the sketches, such as ‘The Parrot Sketch’, and the animations projected on to a screen, were straight from the television series, but there was some new material too. In one sketch a group of bowler-hatted city gents were sitting on stools reading newspapers in a cocktail bar. It got its first laugh simply by using language you would not then have expected in a theatre, not even in Monty Python: “I see Nixon’s had an arsehole transplant.” The punchline brought the house down: “It says here the arsehole rejected him.”

The programme for the show was in the form of a huge poster. Many of them ended up gliding gracefully across the vast auditorium in the form of paper aeroplanes, but with my bare walls in mind, I carefully rolled mine up and took it home. Here it is, well just the lower edge of it, at the other end of my attic room above a messy desk of reel-to-reel tapes, guitar music and the camera case. I still have it today in the Guinness cardboard tube, much faded, its corners damaged by drawing-pins and blue-tack.

* With it came a smaller poster, ‘How to economise on Guinness’, which suggests mixing it half and half with champagne to make ‘black velvet’. This can be seen to the right of the ‘How to make Guinness’ poster.

I have now found a coloured copy of the ‘How to make on Guinness’ poster:

The Yorkshire Story of the Creation

Yesterday, blogger Yorkshire Pudding complained about a scurrilous postcard purporting to epitomise the character of Yorkshire people. This moves me to set the record straight with this account disclosed by a work colleague some years ago.

The Yorkshire Story of the Creation

Recently, the Bishop of Oxford denounced attacks by creationists on the teaching in schools of the scientific facts about the evolution of life on Earth. He says that the attackers are bringing religion into disrepute by pretending that the theory of evolution is a ‘faith position’ on an equal footing to the biblical story of the creation.

Traditionally, the Anglican Church has relied on Archbishops and Synods to demarcate the boundaries of science and religion, especially the Archbishop of York. The latter is, however, keeping a dignified silence. You may be puzzled by this, but to those of us who know how the county of York was really created there is no puzzle at all. The Archbishop is simply being diplomatic and discreet. He knows exactly how Yorkshire was created.

It came about during a particularly dull February when God himself was overcome by existential ennui. God went missing for six days, but on the seventh day the Archangel Gabriel found him resting contentedly.

“Where have you been, Lord, and what have you been doing?” asked the worried angel.

“I have created a planet called Earth, a place of wonderful contrast and balance,” declared God with a serene smile.

“Contrast and balance?” queried the bemused Gabriel. So God explained.

“That part there in the North of America is very wealthy, and in the South, there, I established great poverty. Over there, I have put a continent of white earthlings, while down there is a continent of black folks…” God described all the continents and peoples to Gabriel, showing him which parts were hot, which were covered in ice, where it was flat and where it was mountainous. Gabriel was almightily impressed. Pointing to a particularly attractive area of England he asked “And what’s that?”

“Ah,” said God. “That is my own county of Yorkshire, the most glorious place on Earth. There I made beautiful lakes, streams, rivers and hills. Its people make great music, fine architecture, ingenious products. I made them at once modest, intelligent, witty and giants of sport. They are forever kind and hard-working, and wonderfully articulate. They are known throughout the earth as diplomats, peace-makers, and captains of industry, finance and commerce.”

Gabriel, gasping in admiration, was nevertheless puzzled. “But what about the balance, Lord? You said that your Earth is a place of contrast and balance!”

“Indeed,” said God, smiling and nodding sagely. He wiped his brow on his sleeve and pulled Gabriel gently to face the West. “Now let me tell you about Lancashire …”

EQUAL RIGHTS FOR TOES!

About thirty years ago, a John Phillips pointed out in a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine  (1991, vol. 324, no. 7, p.497) that while the fingers all have Latinate names, no such distinction had been given to the toes except for the big toe or hallux. The others were simply numbered.

To remind you, the names of the digits of the hand are:

• Thumb - digitus pollicis
• Index Finger - digitus indicis
• Middle Finger - digitus medius 
• Ring Finger - digitus annularis
• Little Finger - digitus minimus

To rectify this, and to preclude anatomical ambiguity in clinical situations, he proposed the toes be given the following names:

• Big Toe or Hallux - porcellus fori
• Second Toe - porcellus domi
• Third Toe - porcellus carnivorus
• Fourth Toe - porcellus non voratus
• Fifth Toe - porcellus plorans domum
  

 Quod conservis callidus.

Don’t They Know It’s Christmas Time?

If you are not seeing the YouTube video after the 7 photographs of flowers blooming unseasonally in our garden, here is the link: https://youtu.be/xjG_VB-la7o

 

Twelve Bar Blues

In 1965, Paul McCartney awoke with a lovely melody in his head. He hurried to the piano so as not to forget it, and came up with these words:

Scrambled eggs,
Oh my baby how I love your legs,
Not as much as I like scrambled eggs,
We should eat some scrambled eggs.

Like many dabblers with musical instruments, I too occasionally wake up with a tune in my head. Sometimes they might even be original. And sometimes there are words. Out of the fertile depths of my own imagination have emerged such timeless classics as: Sitting In Bed With A Cold, I Can’t Sing Very Well and She Was Only A Chartered Accountant’s Daughter. I contend they are every bit as good as Scrambled Eggs. If only Paul McCartney had left things as they were I might have been up there with the greatest songwriters in the world. Unfortunately he had to spoil it by waking up another morning with a completely new title and set of lyrics for his tune: Yesterday.

I am probably going to get into trouble for this, but I woke up one morning with a fully formed set of twelve-bar blues lyrics in my head. The idea seems so obvious it cannot be original, yet there appears to be nothing like it on the internet. Gender stereotyping it certainly is, possibly sexist as well, but if it is offensive then please re-educate me. Otherwise, could someone tell me where it came from? It is not autobiographical.


[hackneyed riff to begin:]

I’m in a house full of women, a house full of women and me
I’m in a house full of women, a house full of women and me
There’s her mother, my woman, three daughters, the maid and me 
[hackneyed riff]

I’m in a house full of women, where do you think that puts me?
I’m in a house full of women, a house with a hierarchy
There’s her mother, my woman, three daughters, the maid, the dog and me
[spoken: “don’t even beat the dog”]

Went down to the pub
Came home to my bed
The lights were out
The door was locked
Now I’m sleepin’ in the shed

I’m in a house full of women, a house where I always lose
I’m in a house full of women, a house where I don’t get to chose  
Can’t leave the seat up, drink whisky, smoke, fart, swear or play the blues.
[hackneyed end riff]

Coronavirus Pacman

Limerick Leanings

It’s an affliction. Whenever I see a quirky or unusual place name, or sometimes quite a straightforward one, I just have to compose a limerick. 

(Limericks, if you are not familiar with them, are humorous five-line poems, in which lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme and scan with seven to ten syllables, and lines 3 and 4 rhyme and scan with five to seven syllables. The form was popularized by Edward Lear, and well known examples include the nursery rhyme Hickory Dickory Dock, and The Young Lady of Niger, above.)

A popular blogger I started to follow recently (Going Gently) mentioned he had been caught by a speed camera, and, as an alternative to points on his licence and a fine, he had agreed to be indoctrinated on a speed awareness course in Mold. Well, Mold! What a name. Irresistible. A limerick immediately began to form in my head. I posted it as a comment on his blog:

          I went on a short course in Mold,
          To be told what I had to be told,
          The days are now past
          Of me driving too fast,
          My right foot must be more controlled.

We play it as a game in the car on holiday (not to be recommended because it’s so easy to stop concentrating on driving and go too fast through speed traps). As Mold is in Wales, here’s another we came up with in that country (although I’m not sure whether the basic idea is that original):

          A fragile young lady from Wales,
          Tried buttered toast spread with snails,
          She shivered and quivered
          When all the snails slithered
          To the edge of her plate leaving trails.

They don’t emerge only in Wales, or only in the car for that matter. A couple of years ago we went for a walk on Exmoor in Devon, through the village made famous in Lorna Doone, and out came this:

          A naïve young fellow from Oare,
          Was stopped in the street by a whore,
          “Hello love,” she said
          Let’s go to bed,
          Now he’s not so naïve any more.

          (OR - Now he knows what his ***** is for.)

I think that’s quite enough of that for now.

Is anyone else encumbered with this?

Twelve Balls

Things that amused us when we should have been working

I came across a note I made in 1970 (on the right of the notepad, above):

                                        SHINE BALD TOP
                                        BALD SPOT
                                        SLAB DINE
                                        HEAP LIST

It took me a while to remember what it was. Eventually it came back: it was the solution to the twelve balls problem (sometimes known as the twelve coins problem). One of the management staff posed it in November, 1969, when we were auditing Spencer and Halstead, an engineering manufacturer at Ossett. We couldn’t solve it. Insufferably, he wouldn’t tell us the answer until our next visit four months later.

The Problem: You have twelve identical-looking balls (or they could be coins or anything similar). One of them is a forgery and is therefore different in weight to others: it could be heavier or it could be lighter but you do not know which. You have a simple balance to weigh the balls against each other, but you can use it only three times – no more. How do you identify the fake ball and whether it weighs more or less than the others?

Note that you do not know whether the fake is heavier or lighter. If you knew for certain that it was, say, definitely lighter than the others, the problem is slightly different: it becomes a question of how to find a single fake out of nine coins in two weighings, or out of twenty-seven coins in three weighings. This is simpler and is not addressed here.

You may wish to pause to consider it further at this point. Or, if you’ve glazed over already, you may wish to jump to the end to find out about the other notes on the notepad.

                                                                *          *          *

The answer is to label the twelve balls with the letters of the first phrase above, and then weigh them in groups of eight – four against four – as specified in the three pairs of words.

For example, if the three weighings come out as (i) balance (ii) left heavy (iii) right heavy, then you know the faulty ball is not one of those in the first weighing, so it must be H, I, N or E. The second weighing eliminates H which is not there, and because I, N and E are on the light side, one of these must be lighter than all the others. Of these only E is on the light side in the third weighing, so E is the fake, and it is lighter than the others.

I wondered how this could work for all possible answers. Well, first of all, because each weighing can have three possible outcomes – left heavier, right heavier or balance – there are 3 x 3 x 3 i.e. 27 possible outcomes across the three weighings. Secondly, as there are twelve balls, and as we know that only one of them is either heavier or lighter, there are 24 possible answers. So the number of possible outcomes exceeds the number of possible answers, suggesting that each outcome could identify a different answer, with three outcomes unused.

One of the unused outcomes has to be where all three weighings are in balance, because that would mean all balls had identical weight. 

Not being one to let this kind of thing pass by without further thought, I could not resist creating the following table (L means left heavy, R means right heavy and B means balance). Hey, some people enjoy crosswords, I enjoy doing this. Get over it!

S heavy = RLR	S light = LRL
H heavy = BBL	H light = BBR
I heavy = BRR	I light = BLL
N heavy = BRB	N light = BLB
E heavy = BRL	E light = BLR
B heavy = LLB	B light = RRB
A heavy = LLL	A light = RRR
L heavy = LLR	L light = RRL
D heavy = LRB	D light = RLB
T heavy = RBR	T light = LBL
O heavy = RBB	O light = LBB
P heavy = RBL	P light = LBR
Not used: BBB, RLL, LRR

You can see that the outcomes for heavy balls are mirror images of the outcomes for light balls. Also, the ‘unused outcomes’ are ones which do not occur.

In fact, the table also tells you where to place each ball in the three weighings. Looking just at the left hand column: Ball A should be placed on the left of the balance in all three weighings; Ball O should be placed on the right in the first weighing and omitted from the second and third weighings.

With this insight, we could now create our own mnemonic for the solution. How about:

                                        READ THIS BLOG
                                        READ BITS
                                        BEAR GOLD
                                        THOR SLED

I think it works. It’s just a case of finding a phrase consisting of twelve different letters, and then jiggling the letters and weighing patterns around until you get words.

I wondered why a pair of outcomes is left over: RLL / LRR as well as BBB. It is because the solution only needs 24 rather than the full 26 of the 3 x 3 x 3, i.e. 27 possible outcomes. So could it be used for a thirteenth ball? Unfortunately not, because if you placed a thirteenth ball on the balance you would be weighing six balls against seven each time, which would tell you nothing. However, I think you could use this outcome instead of one of the others provided you switched round other balls to preserve the equality of the three four-against-four weighings.

Could you do four balls in two weighings? Theoretically, this has 8 possible answers with 3 x 3 i.e. 9 outcomes from two weighings. But, you get only a partial solution. You have to weigh one against one each time (with two two-against-two weighings, neither would balance, and five of the nine possible outcomes would be non-occurring). For example, labelling the balls A, B, C and D, and weighing A against B and then A against C:

A heavy = LL	A light = RR
B heavy = RB	B light = LB
C heavy = BR	C light = BL
D heavy =BB	D light = BB (also)
Not used: RL, LR

It identifies all outcomes except when ball D is the fake, which is identified correctly but not whether heavy or light. However, it would work if you had only three balls and two weighings. I suspect this was the starting point for the person who originally formulated the problem.

What if you were allowed four weighings? What, then, would be the maximum number of balls from which you could identify a lighter or heavier fake? There would then be 3 x 3 x 3 x 3, i.e. 81 possible outcomes. Forty balls would have eighty possible answers, but I suspect you would have insufficient non-occurring / unused outcomes to be able to do it.

Well, I’ve worked it out (I told you I’m a loony). Four weighings would allow you to find the fake amongst thirty-nine balls. If you want to know how I did it, look here. It actually gives quite an insight into how the whole things works. It appears there is always a variety of ways to formulate the groups used in the weighings.

What if, rather than just one, there were two fake balls? How would you weigh them then? O.K., this is beginning to go beyond even my limits of pointless curiosity. Proper mathematicians have come up with formulae to show how many balls can be done in N weighings (in the main case considered here it’s ½(3ⁿ-1)-1 if you want to know, but it can get a lot more complicated).

It’s clever stuff. Out of the millions of ways in which twelve balls can be weighed against each other, it is genius to realise that you can arrange things so that each combination of outcomes identifies a different solution. And just as brilliant is the realisation that the balls can be labelled with the letters of a phrase so that the three weighings can be selected using pairs of words made from the letters of that phrase. But cleverest of all is whoever it was that came up with the problem in the first place.

                                                     *                 *                *

The other notes on the paper, by the way, are also things which amused us during our working hours.

The first is supposedly a telegram sent by a sailor to his wife on returning from a long voyage. It was intended to read “In today, home tonight, lots of love, Rodney” but got garbled during transmission and came out probably as what he was really thinking.

The second refers to a philanderer who took out policies with different insurers to provide for his loved ones. The policy for his baby was with General Accident, and so on.

So, we did not spend our entire time thinking about combinations and permutations. Welcome to the wonderful misogynistic world of business and commerce, 1970.

This Hi-de-Hi Government

So Theresa May has appointed Dominic Raab as Brexit Secretary following David Davis’s resignation.

Does anyone else think he looks like Simon Cadell?

Simon Cadell (1950-1996) was best known for his portrayal of Jeffrey Fairbrother in the BBC situation comedy Hi-de-Hi, which Wikipedia describes as being set in a fictional holiday camp, revolving around the lives of the camp’s entertainers, most of them struggling actors or has-beens.

More than just a visual resemblance then. Just perfect for this Hi-de-Hi government.

Hi-de-Ho!

A Birthday Surprise

We bought a “Very Hungry Caterpiller” card for a cousin’s two year old granddaughter. Inside was promo suggesting we turn her birthday into a day to remember by buying one of their “perfectly-tailored gift experiences.”

Which of the perfectly-tailored experiences, we wondered, would be the most perfectly-tailored for a two year old? We tried to think back to when we were two. What would we have enjoyed? Gin tasting? Golf tuition? Perhaps Aston Martin and Ferrari thrills?

The organic chocolate making workshop was clearly a strong contender, but in the end we went for either the llama trekking or the flying lesson. We marked them as suggestions and left it for grandma and the parents to make the purchase.

It was hard to imagine being two. In fact, psychologists tell us we remember very little from that age. So how much of a day to remember would it be? It might be better just to give her the promo card to tear the perforations and colour in.