People who can‘t say ‘ull

The BBC Radio Four announcer said this afternoon that in half an hour there would be a programme about the 2017 City of Culture.

“I know where he means” I thought, but then he mystified me by saying it was about the Ezzall area of the city. It took me a moment to realise he meant ‘essle. There is a difference. In trying to mimic the local accent, he had over-emphasised the initial E.

Like the friend I had when I worked in Scotland. No matter how hard she tried, no matter how many times I demonstrated, she could never say ‘ull without it sounding wrong. The initial U was too strong, almost beginning with a glottal stop. The voice-onset came too soon. It’s a soft gentle U after the dropped H, not a hard one.

It seems to my ears that people not from the region cannot say ‘ull or ‘essle properly, or for that matter ‘owden, ‘edon, ‘altemprice or ‘umber. Please, unless you grew up in East Yorkshire or thereabouts, don’t try. Just put the H in.

The programme, incidentally, was Hull 2017: The Spirit of Hessle Road.

Trump and Tusk

When Donald Trump met Donald Tusk, what did they talk about - the elephant in the room?

 
see also trump.html

Le Tour de Yorkshire

In the early nineteen-sixties, I remember going along to Boothferry Bridge to watch The Milk Race pass by – a national cycling event also known as the Tour of Britain, sponsored by the now defunct Milk Marketing Board. Some blokes on racing bikes flashed past amidst the everyday traffic and it was all over in less than a minute. It wasn’t worth the bother. Cycling must be the sport with the biggest disconnect between doing (riding a bike is fun) and watching (tedious). I’ve never been to a cycling event since.

So it’s irritating to find the Tour de Yorkshire imposed on us this weekend, with roads closed most of the day bringing maximum disruption to our activities, just to see people on bicyles for a couple of minutes. I’m keeping well away.

And they call it the / le “Tour de Yorkshire”. What pretentious twaddle! Et le moins dit à propos de la côte de Silsden et de la côte de Wigtwizzle, mieux c'est.*

Surely, if it’s in Yorkshire, shouldn’t it be called t’baiyk race roun’ t ‘roo-ads?

* The less said about “côte de Silsden” and “côte de Wigtwizzle” the better.

Baby Jane

Initially posted after 'Brexit' notice served. Postscript added after result of the UK 2017 general election. 

When I give my heart again I know it’s gonna last forever
I won’t be that dumb again I know it’s gotta last forever

Theresa May, Donald Tusk, Rod Stewart.

Did Rod Stewart anticipate the Brexit mess as long ago as 1983, both lyrically and visually?

Postscript (9th June 2017)

Theresa and Philip May

No Philip. That’s not quite right. You need to look as if you are enjoying it - a bit more passionate. Like that it doesn’t look as if it’s gonna last forever in any way at all.

Alt-0247 and Rule: the Ed Sheeran Prize for Computer Science Education

Perhaps there should be a new category at the next Brits, the award for the year’s most outstanding contribution to computer science education, the first winner to be Ed Sheeran for his new album ÷ (pronounced Divide). This follows up his previous albums (or LPs as I still call them) + (Plus) and × (Multiply).

In trying to search for the new album, my daughter was frustrated by the lack of a ÷ key on her computer. She was about to go through the tedious procedure of using the ‘Insert Symbol’ menu in Microsoft Word to create one, which she could then copy and paste into the search box, when I said “Just type Alt-0247”, and the stargate opened into a whole new world of understanding. Ed Sheeran’s title had brilliantly illustrated the concept that everything you do on a computer has an underlying numerical representation.

The concept is ASCII – the American Standard Code for Information Exchange. I found it extremely useful in the early nineteen-eighties in working with Tandy TRS-80 and BBC computers, when I had the dubious honour of being the author of an educational computer program called Munchymaths.

ASCII had been developed twenty years earlier by IBM’s Bob Bemer and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) as a standard way to represent characters in computers. It allows computers to communicate with each other.

In ASCII, the divide (or obelus) symbol is represented by the number 247, and can be produced by typing Alt-0247 on the number keypad.

To do it, hold down the Alt key while typing 0247 on the number pad, (number lock must be switched on), and the ÷ symbol appears when you release the Alt key. Some of us know this, and some of us don’t. It’s the Great Alt-0247.

Here are some other well known phrases or sayings in ASCII format:

• To be, or not to be; that is the Alt-63
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created Alt-61
• Alt-62 love hath no man than this
• To see the World in a Grain of Sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Alt-8734 in the palm of your hand, And Eternity in an hour

Apologies if some or all of these symbols do not work or render as intended on your device. They appear correctly in the most used fonts in Windows 10 on Microsoft computers, but different devices, software and font selections use different codes. There are now several versions of the extended ASCII table to provide for the enormous number of characters computers are called upon to represent, such as  ê   €  Œ   ¶  and so on. The infinity symbol ∞ is particularly troublesome. Unfortunately, ASCII is not as standard as it could or should be.

Furthermore, ASCII is only an intermediate representation to make things easier for us stupid humans to understand. Underneath ASCII there are lower-level concepts such as octal, hexadecimal and binary, but let’s not go there now.

Ed Sheeran, however, is always going to be spoilt for choice for new album titles.

Supermarket Launches New Loyalty Badge Scheme

An off-topic post, exclusive to Tesco Dunham’s Yorkshire Memories

A leading supermarket is to launch a new loyalty badge scheme inspired by the post Be Prepared in Tasker Dunham’s Yorkshire Memories, which describes how Wolf Cub proficiency badges promote strong feelings of achievement and loyalty. With this in mind, Tosco are to launch a similar scheme for customers.

Customers will be able to earn discounts by collecting shopping bag badges and car window stickers. Products bought over the Christmas period and throughout the duration of the scheme will be grouped into categories, such as fruit and vegetables, pet food and alcoholic drinks. Once a qualifying amount has been spent in a particular category, customers will be awarded a proficiency badge to show they have earned a 1% discount on all future purchases within that category. Spending twice the qualifying amount earns a 2% discount, and so on, up to 10% until the scheme ends. Customers who purchase a full range of products will therefore be able to earn a whopping 10% discount on the whole of their weekly shop.

One unique aspect of this innovative scheme is the collection of proficiency badges to display on shopping bags and in cars. As in the Wolf Cubs scheme, badges will be colour-coded according to whether they reflect character, skills, service to others or health. Here are some of the badges that will be available:

Blue Badges for Character

Customers will be able to show they possess depth of character through blue badges earned when they buy meat and poultry, tobacco products, and beers, wines and spirits.

Yellow Badges for Skills

Customers who buy tools and maintenance products, cookware, kitchen equipment and materials for household cleaning and laundry will be able to display their accomplishments on yellow badges.

Red Badges for Service to Others

Caring red badges will be awarded to customers who buy babycare products such as formula milk and disposable nappies, and also to those who buy pet care and first aid items.

Green Badges for Healthy Lifestyle

Healthy green badges will be awarded to buyers of fresh fruit and vegetables, wholesome food supplements, vitamin pills, over-the-counter medicines, denture fixative and incontinence pads.

Just as in the Wolf Cubs scheme, the Tosco scheme will also allow customers to qualify for glitzy silver stars to fix to the front of their cars and shopping trolleys. For the first star, customers will have to show they can successfully carry out a set of difficult tasks, including steering a loaded shopping trolley safely through a crowded supermarket while collecting a list of fifteen specified items in less than fifteen minutes, using an automated self-service checkout, packing items efficiently into bags, learning Tosco slogans by heart (e.g. Every Little Helps) and executing the Tosco two-fingered salute.

Keith Richards' Lost Weekend

What a treat on BBC Four television this weekend when Keith Richards’ “pirate broadcast” took over the channel from dusk to dawn for three nights, replacing the usual schedule with his own selection from the past, such as Tony Hancock’s Twelve Angry Men, Captain Pugwash, and Hitchcock’s 1935 version of The Thirty Nine Steps, all billed as Keith Richards’ Lost Weekend. I didn’t stay up all night with Keef but the bits I did see were great. 

One particular clip had me in hysterics: Spike Milligan’s Raspberry Song from 1977. I’d never seen it before.* I squirmed in agony until my family decided it had to be switched off – “before he wets himself” was the phrase used.

They turned over to the other channel for Would I Lie To You in which two teams of metropolitan smart alecs compete to make viewers feel witty and sophisticated. Next to Milligan they are no different from any of those pompous, pedestrian panellists of the past, like Frank Muir, Robert Robertson and Robin Ray. Raspberries to them all.

* For the lyrics see http://lyricsplayground.com/alpha/songs/e/everythingisfreshtoday.shtml

Help ... my courgette looks like a duck!

It’s like something out of That’s Life – a 1973-1994 BBC Television magazine-style consumer affairs and entertainment programme presented by Esther Rantzen and a panel of male co-presenters. During its Sunday evening run in the mid nineteen-seventies it made for a relaxing and usually mindless end to the weekend. Among the serious and often worthwhile consumer rights campaigns, the show contained numerous items that were just plain silly: there were “Odd Odes”; stooges would burst into song in supermarkets; there was a dog that could growl the word “sausages”; and viewers would send in unusually shaped vegetables such as intertwined carrots, teddy-bear shaped potatoes and parsnips that looked like legs with male genitalia.

Well here Esther, around forty years too late, is my contribution – a courgette that looks like a duck. Pareidolia.

It was hiding in the vegetable patch. It must have twisted round to grow against its stalk. Concealed beneath the leaves at the back of the plant, it surreptitiously became this three and three-quarter pound (1700g) monster.

The Riddle of the £30 Restaurant Bill

[You read the answer here first]

It seems that an age-old mathematical brain teaser (sometimes known as The Missing Dollar) is doing the rounds again on the internet. It goes like this.

Three friends go out for a meal. The bill comes to £30 so they give the waiter £10 each. The waiter then realises he has made a mistake and that the bill should only have been £25. Not knowing how to divide the extra £5 between three people he decides to give them back just £1 each and keeps the other £2 himself. So the three friends have paid £9 each making £27, and the waiter has kept £2, so what happened to the other £1?

I don't know what the difficulty is. The answer is obvious. PayPal kept it.