One of my favourite sights is rays of sunshine breaking through clouds. You see it surprisingly rarely, even though we have cloud and sunshine most days in the UK. The effect is copied in iconic buildings like St Peter’s Basilica in Rome and Grand Central Station New York. You can see beams of light work… Continue reading Rays of sunshine
How much does an apple weigh? How wide is a typical family car (not an SUV or a campervan)? How far is 100 metres, and how fast can you run it? These are the kind of things that children should know (or at least have an idea of) by a certain age, preferably around the… Continue reading Weights and Measures
The word exobrain has been playing on my mind for many years now. I wasn’t sure how many years until trying to work out where, exactly, I first came across it. I thought it was in this Oliver Burkeman piece in which he confesses that he is “obsessed with index cards”. He writes about many… Continue reading Word of the week: exobrain
Last week I wrote about home videos and time spent making digital copies of cherished recordings using our last working video player. While the VCR was set up I also took a look at some of the other old tapes that I’ve kept. In recent years I have recycled or thrown away thousands of videos.… Continue reading Robert Bresson, films on video, and pinball in the movies
Can you picture a guillotine? I’m talking here about the device used for executions, especially during the French Revolution: a tall wooden frame, a heavy block with a sharp, angled blade, dropped from a great height to behead the prisoner below, their neck secured in wooden stocks. On Saturday morning I caught about 20 minutes… Continue reading Word of the week: guillotine
We still have a video player that works. It’s an ION VCR2PC “Video Conversion System”. It plays VHS tapes but is not a video recorder. On the box that the machine came in are the words, “Convert your memories to your PC”. I keep it in the box most of the time but last month… Continue reading Copying Home Videos
Warning: the YouTube link in this article contains the rudest words in the English language. If you are in any way sensitive to bad language do not follow the link. If you’re okay with curse words and appreciate punk poetry, you’re in for a treat. At some point I will write a piece dedicated to… Continue reading An earworm for May 2017: a poem with lots of rude words
A recent quiz question on “Fifteen to One” asked which fish has the taxonomic name Thymallus Thymallus and is known as the “Lady of the Stream”. I had never heard of it. The answer is grayling. This form of taxonomic name, where the same word is used twice, prompted thoughts of other such names, and… Continue reading Word of the week: tautonym
In the last two months I have written about serifs, in this piece about “Stig of the Dump” and this piece about readability. Perhaps I should have clarified what a serif is and what it does. Webopedia, here, describes it as a “small decorative line added as embellishment to the basic form of a character”… Continue reading More about serifs
My sleep patterns are flexible, much more so than when I was younger. I wrote about it last year in this piece, “Usually I’m Anthony Trollope, but not this week”. I am capable of staying up till 3am, or going to bed before 9pm and waking up between 3 and 4am. These days I’m usually… Continue reading Cup Final Foolishness
