Martin Fone's Blog, page 227
May 26, 2019
Beards Of The Week
For pogonophiles the place to be last weekend was the Snorrenclub Antwerpen in the Belgian city of Antwerp. And why was that?
Well, it was hosting this year’s World Beard and Moustache Championsip, a biennial and peripatetic event. It is a serious affair with some seventeen categories for contestants to compete in. There are three main categories – best moustache, best partial beard and best full beard. Then there is the best in show, the prize for which is a magnum of champagne, which, I imagine, has to be sipped carefully but the consolation is that there will be bits to savour later.
There are rules of engagement. For example, moustache hairs can grow on but not below the upper lip and some assistance is allowed for the more elaborate designs of facial hair, like wax, hair spray, balm, and other hair cosmetics, but unnatural hair colouring, false hair, extensions and any form of hair pin or support structure are strictly verboten.
Most of the competitors seem to dress up in style to complement their facial hair designs. A good time was had by all and at least if they get tired of their look, they can shave it all off.
May 25, 2019
Coffee Of The Week
For those of us who like the finer things in life and were not fortunate enough to have an evening out at Manchester’s Hawksmoor where the staff mistakenly served a bottle of Chateau le Pin Pomerol 2001, priced at £4,500, for a standard swilling Bordeaux costing a mere £260, there is always the consolation of a decent cup of coffee.
Mind you I might have second thoughts if I was offered a cup of Elida Geisha Natural 803. I’m sure it tastes wonderful, after all it has just been voted the best coffee at the Best of Panama coffee competition, the Oscars of coffee. The problem is that only 100 pounds of the stuff has been produced and it set the world record for the most expensive coffee at $803 per pound.
Most of the buyers were from the Far East but Klatch Coffee Roasters managed to secure ten pounds and have been retailing it at a mere $75 a cup at tastings in their gaffs in southern California. For your money, you got a cup of coffee, some pastries and a souvenir Elida mug, to go with you, I suppose.
According to the blurb, it is a rare variety of Arabica coffee that came to Panama via Ethipia and a Costa Rican research lab. And what does it taste like? The experts suggest that it has floral, tea-like and stone fruit flavours with jasmine, bergamot, sugar cane, peach and apricot flavour notes. Oh, and its best taken black.
If you were hoping to savour it, you’ve missed the boat as Klatch Coffee have sold out and there are no plans to restock. I wonder if the Hawksmoor serve it?
May 24, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (232)?…
Lark about
I remember during my far and distant schooldays that our poor unfortunate teachers would often be driven to such distraction by their unruly pupils that they would exhort us to stop larking around. By this they meant playing around, acting the fool, doing anything other than what we were supposed to. The warning was usually enough to restore order. But where does lark come from?
As is often the case with etymological searches, there are a couple of contenders. The most obvious is the skylark, once a common sight and sound in the English countryside but now one that is pretty rare. I cannot recall the last time I heard one sing. On the ground they are not much to look at but once they are airborne, they soar and hover and treat us to a long, unbroken song which can last two or three minutes a time, delivered with a clear, distinctive warble.
So enchanting and distinctive was the lark’s song, that it inspired poets and composers to laud their praises, most notably Percy Bysshe Shelley in his To A Skylark and George Meredith’s wonderful The Lark Ascending from 1881, which formed the basis for Ralph Vaughan Williams’ composition of the same name. “He rises and begins to round,/ he drops the silver chain of sound,/ of many links without a break,/ in chirrup, whistle, slur and shake,/ for singing till his heaven fills,/ ‘tis love of earth that he instils.”
An exaltation of larks, the collective noun for larks which dates back to at least the 15th century, must have been a wondrous thing to hear and see.
So common a sight were they and so distinctive and playful was their behaviour that their name was used to describe children who played and scavenged around the banks of rivers, mudlarks, and slightly older youths who played around on the rigging of ships, skylarks. The Student’s Comprehensive Anglo-Bengali Dictionary of 1802 picked up the latter, defining skylarking as “the act of running about the rigging of a vessel in sport; frolicking.”
But there is an alternative derivation, from the northern English dialect word lake or laik, which first appeared in the early 14th century, meaning to play. It almost certainly owed its origin to the Old Norse word leika, which was used to describe play, as opposed to work. It was used in the English translation of 1350 of the French romance poem, Guillaume de Palerme; “he layked him long while to lesten at mere.”
In the 18th and 19th centuries it was used by the sporting fraternity such as jockeys and grooms, making an appearance in Francis Robinson’s A Glossary of Yorkshire Words and Phrases collected in Whitby and the Neighbourhood in 1835 as lairk. The conjecture is that the intrusive r is the work of southern Englishmen trying to make sense of the impenetrable Yorkshire accent.
The Lexicon Balatronicum; a dictionary of buckish slang, university wit and pickpocket eloquence of 1811 – if you are going to be dipped, it is as well that the thief be eloquent, I feel – defined lark as “a piece of merriment. People playing together jocosely.” Alas, it gives no clue as to whether it is derived from the bird or the Yorkshire dialect word.
What is clear, though, is that usage from then onwards associated lark with playfulness and frolicking. To prove that the transition of a noun into a verb is not a modern affectation, Lieutenant Colonel Peter Hawker wrote in his diary in 1813, “having larked all the way down the road” and by 1844 The Living Age, an American magazine, was describing a Mr Larkins as “eternally larking about somut or other.”
Although I am attracted to the skylark theory, I find it hard to ignore the dialect term, laik or lairk.
May 23, 2019
It’s The Way I Tell ‘Em (37)
“The easiest time to add insult to injury is when you’re signing somebody’s cast.” – Demetri Martin
“I went to buy some camouflage trousers the other day, but I couldn’t find any.” – Tommy Cooper
“My wife – it’s difficult to say what she does. She sells seashells on the seashore.” – Milton Jones
“So I’m at the Wailing Wall, standing there, like a moron, with my harpoon.” – Emo Philips
“A spa hotel? It’s like a normal hotel, only in reception there’s a picture of a pebble.” – Rhod Gilbert
“My Dad always knew I was going to be a comedian. When I was a baby he said, ‘Is this a joke?’” – Ken Dodd
“I went down the local supermarket. I said: ‘I want to make a complaint – this vinegar’s got lumps in it.’ He said: ‘Those are pickled onions.’” – Tim Vine
“My grandfather invented the cold air balloon but it never really took off.” – Milton Jones
“I moved to a well-to-do area. I know it’s well-to-do because I said to my husband ‘it’s chilly in here’, and he said ‘shall we turn the floor up’?” – Sarah Millican
“Police arrested two kids yesterday. One was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off.” – Tommy Cooper
“I have kleptomania. But when it gets bad, I take something for it.” – Ken Dodd
“I like to go into The Body Shop and shout out really loud, ‘I’ve already got one!’” – Jimmy Carr
“I got recognised today in Dixons. A member of staff came up to me and said ‘hey you’re that mad bloke off the telly’. I went ‘that’s me’, and he went ‘no, you’re that mad bloke… off the telly!’” – Lee Mack
“You know, somebody actually complimented me on my driving today. They left a little note on the windscreen, it said ‘Parking Fine.’ So that was nice.” – Tim Vine
“Money can’t buy you happiness? Well, check this out, I bought myself a Happy Meal.” – Paul F Taylor
“A man walked into the doctor’s. He said, ‘I’ve hurt my arm in several places.’ The doctor said, ‘Well don’t go there any more.’” – Tommy Cooper
“If you don’t know what introspection is, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself.” – Ian Smith
“I worry about ridiculous things, you know, how does a guy who drives a snowplough get to work in the morning… that can keep me awake for days.” – Billy Connolly
“My great uncle Arthur died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But he wasn’t involved in the fighting. He was camping in a nearby field and popped over to complain about the noise.” – Rob Brydon
“So a lorry-load of tortoises crashed into a trainload of terrapins, I thought, ‘That’s a turtle disaster.’” – Peter Kay
May 22, 2019
Book Corner – May 2019 (4)
The Rector – Margaret Oliphant
Am I on a one-man mission to rehabilitate the reputation of the Scottish writer, Margaret Oliphant, or am I just addicted to series of books? If the latter, I’m going the wrong way about it as having recently read Miss Marjoribanks, which is a later book in what is known as The Carlingford Chronicles, I have now picked up The Rector, which is considered to be the first, or possibly second, of the series.
First, though, a little about the Scottish writer, Margaret Oliphant (1828 – 1897). Unusually for the time, her mother was keen that the young Margaret was as well-read as possible and so received a far better education than many of her sex. She published her first book, Passages in the Life of Margaret Maitland, in 1849, which received some critical success, and went on to become a prolific contributor to magazines, principally Blackwoods.
In 1857 she married her cousin, Frank, but the marriage was short-lived, her husband succumbing to tuberculosis seven years later. Left with three children, debts and later an alcoholic brother, Willie, and three children from her other brother, Frank, she needed to find the means to support them all. Career options were limited for women at the time and so Margaret relied upon the power of her pen. Over the course of her writing career she penned over one hundred novels, many of them whoppers, spreading over three volumes.
It was a prodigious effort but, not unnaturally, less is often more and her the quality of her output was variable. The uneven quality and sheer size of her literary efforts meant that her critical reputation suffered and over the years she has fallen out of favour. Indeed, many of her books are out of print. Thank heavens for digitised books. She also suffered the handicap of being a direct contemporary of Anthony Trollope whose own prolific output was more consistent in quality and of being a woman.
The Rector was published in 1863 and because of its length, at just 35 pages it is a mere pamphlet by mid 19th century Victorian standards, usually goes hand in hand with The Doctor’s Family, which I will turn to another time.
Despite its brevity, the novella deals with some important issues. In short, it can be seen as an essay on the difficulties of an outsider breaking into and settling down in a closed community, the suitability or otherwise of someone from the groves of Academe doing a job in the real world and the role of the necessity of looking after an aged relative in career decisions.
A new Rector has been appointed to Carlingford and the good folk of the town are all a-twitter as to whether he will be Low or Broad Church and whether he is an eligible bachelor. Morley Proctor, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford, has taken up the post, mainly so that he can provide a home for his aged mother. But he soon finds that he has no aptitude for the role of a parochial clergyman, his sermons are stiff and boring and he has no empathy for the sick or dying, his hopelessness confirmed when he watches his rival, Mr Wentworth, the curate of St Roque’s, administer to a dying woman.
His mother urges him to get a wife and his attention is drawn to the eligible daughters of Mr Wodehouse. Although the elder daughter, nearly forty, mild and kind, would be the more suitable match, Morley is drawn to the younger, wilder, more beautiful, Lucy, but soon realises he is out of his depth.
Embarrassed, frustrated, he retreats to All Souls, accommodating his mother nearby in a lodgings in Oxford.
And that’s that – a simple tale, nicely told.
May 21, 2019
Mystery Of The Week
Calling on all those who fancy themselves as code breakers. Here’s a chance to pocket a prize of €2,000.
The council of the French village of Plougastel-Daoulas in Brittany has decided to intensify efforts to crack the mystery of a strange inscription carved on to a rock, discovered a few years back and only visible at low tide. To date, its message has eluded the best endeavours of local experts and the responsibility of cracking the contents of the seemingly random array of letters and words, known locally as the Breton Rosetta Stone, has been passed to a wider audience.
The only discernible clues are two dates, 1786 and 1787, and the fact that the lettering uses Latin script. At the time there would have been an artillery battery at nearby Corbeau Fort and one theory is that the message is written in Basque or Old Breton. Alternatively, it could be a hoax.
All answers on the back of a postcard to the Mayor of Plougastel-Daoulas, please.
May 20, 2019
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Ninety Four
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857 – 1935)
I’m fairly Catholic in my reading but there is one genre that I can’t really get on with, science fiction. Perhaps it is my lack of imagination or just that I would prefer to spend my time understanding the range of emotions that make we humans tick or how we react to situations, comic or tragic.
I’m sure it is my loss.
But there are some whose imagination is stimulated by sci-fi and one such was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.
The fifth child out of eighteen born to an impoverished Polish immigrant family in Russia, (cause and effect, I can’t help thinking), profoundly deaf after a childhood bout of scarlet fever and pretty much self-taught, Konstantin stumbled upon Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, first published in 1865.
Fascinated by the prospect of travel to the Earth’s nearest neighbour but being of a practical bent, he calculated that using a giant cannon to fire a spacecraft to the moon, Verne’s designated method, would generate forces that would kill the unfortunate passengers.
Verne did, though, light the blue touch paper that ignited Konstantin’s life-long interest in all matters aeronautical. He is reported to have remarked, “I do not remember how it got into my head to make the first calculations relating to the rocket. It seems to me the first seeds were planted by the famous fantasoeur, J Verne”.
Initially, he set his sights on flight, designing early airships and Russia’s first wind tunnel. He published his first work on the subject in 1892. In 1894, he wrote an article in which he proposed an aircraft made of metal. Surely the idea would never take off.
But the lure of space travel proved too great.
Konstantin tried his hand at writing science fiction but found that his mind wandered to trying to solve the practicalities of getting a rocket out of the Earth’s atmosphere and on its way to the moon. From 1895, this became his major preoccupation.
By 1903, Konstantin had cracked the problem, writing Explorations of the World Space with Reaction Machines, which was published in Russia’s scientific review, Nauchnoe Obozrenie. More articles were forthcoming from the prolific scientist. His rockets were to be fuelled by a mix of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, precisely the same mix as was to be used by the Space Shuttle.
Astonishingly, hydrogen had only been liquefied for the first time by James Dewar in 1898.
Konstantin developed what later became to be known as the Tsiolkovsky Equation, which demonstrated the mathematical relationship between the change in the mass of a rocket as it burnt fuel, the speed of its exhaust gases, and the final velocity of the rocket. It became the bedrock that enabled the later development of astronautics.
Konstantin wasn’t done.
In 1929, he published an article in which he postulated that in order for a rocket to break out of orbit, it would need a series of rockets to drive it forward, each one breaking off from the main body of the craft as it had used up all of its fuel.
Who needed science fiction when you had Tsiolkovsky?
But hardly anyone outside of Russia had heard of his work. The Bolshevik revolution meant that very little hard information was coming out of the country. In any event, Konstantin was a lowly school teacher, who spent his spare time thinking about rocketry rather than a fully-fledged scientist attached to an acknowledged academic institution of standing. Moreover, the scientific journal he used to publish his articles was closed down.
There was no world-wide web to publicise his findings.
So, independently and in parallel during the 1920s, the German Hermann Oberthand and the American physicist, Robert Goddard, worked on many of the problems that had exercised Konstantin’s mind and often came up with the same conclusions as he had. All three could claim to be the fathers of rocketry, although Konstantin seemed to have got there first.
Full recognition of his genius only came posthumously. His work was drawn on and influenced the rocket designers, Valentin Glushko and Sergey Korolyov, as Russia strove to win the space race in the 1950s and early 1960s. The most prominent crater on the dark side of the moon bears Konstantin’s name as does asteroid 1590.
Tsiolkovsky was a great visionary. He wrote that “mankind will not forever remain on Earth, but in the pursuit of light and space will first timidly emerge from the bounds of the atmosphere, and then advance until he has conquered the whole of circumsolar space”.”
He was not wrong.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone
May 19, 2019
Tuk Tuk Of The Week
It’s always a dangerous thing to do, surf the internet when you have had a few sherbets. You never know what trouble you may get into.
Late at night Mark Everard from Billericay in Essex was searching ebay and his attention was caught by a three-wheeled 1971 Bangkok taxi, put on sale by someone in Bolton. He put in a bid and to his surprise was successful. Now a proud owner of a tuk tuk, the question was; what to do with it?
Mark decided to make the best of what otherwise would have been an expensive mistake by modifying it with a view to attempting to secure the world record for the fastest tuk tuk. After spending some £20,000 on the project he and his cousin, Russell Shearman, reached a speed of 74.06 mph at Elvington Airfield, outside of York. It was fast enough to satisfy the bods from Guinness World Records and so Mark is now the proud holder of the record for the fastest autorickshaw/tuk tuk (prototype).
He’s not done yet. He wants to smash the 100mph barrier. I will follow his progress with interest.
May 18, 2019
Fruits Of The Week (3)
The durian fruit is at it again.
Measuring up to a foot long and shaped like a spiky ball, filled with custard-like pods, its flavour and creamy texture has made it a hit around South East Asia. Unfortunately, it comes with a bit of a pong. So strong is its odour that the authorities in Singapore have banned it from being carried on its subway systems and many hotels in the region refuse to stock it. In November 2018 an Indonesian plane was grounded because passengers complained of the stench. The culprit? You guessed it, a shipment of durian. Imagine rotten food or dirty socks and you get the drift.
That brings me nicely to students whose hygiene standards have never been of the highest so the smell in the library of the University of Canberra must have been particularly bad to trigger a mass evacuation. After a thorough search of the building by the Fire Brigade, the culprit was unmasked. It wasn’t a gas leak, as originally suspected, but a half-eaten durian.
The offending article was removed and put into a bin but the whiff lingered for ages, I’m told.
May 17, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (231)?…
Swan-song
Some artists find it hard to call it a day. Elton John is embarking upon a 300-concert world tour to mark his retirement from touring. It will span three years. Dame Nellie Melba spent eight years, between 1920 and 1928, performing what she called final concerts, prompting the Australians, famed for their inventive use of language, to spawn the phrase “more farewells than Nellie Melba”. Frank Sinatra caught the bug, performing more farewell tours than you could shake a stick at. Perhaps Neil Young, as often is the case, summed it up perfectly in an interview with the Rolling Stone magazine in March 2018; “when I retire, people will know, because I’ll be dead.”
As a child I was fascinated by the fables attributed to Aesop. In the Swan and the Goose, the cook goes to the outhouse in the dark to get the goose to put in the pot. He picks the swan by mistake and it is only saved when it bursts into song, an early reference to the propensity of a swan to sing just before its demise. Given the uncertainty surrounding the dating of these fables, it may not be the earliest.
There are references to the volume of a swan’s call in Hesiod and the clarity, sonority and sweetness of its song in Alcman and Pindar, but it was Aeschylus, in his play Agamemnon, dated to 458 BCE, who gave us the image of a swan bursting into song just before its death. Clytemnestra describes Cassandra’s death throes as “singing her last death-laden lament like a swan.”
By the 3rd century BCE, the notion that a swan sings a mournful song immediately before its death had attained proverbial status. But is there any truth to it?
Pliny the Elder, in his Naturalis Historia from around 77 CE, was emphatic in his refutation; “observation shows that the story that the dying swan sings is false.” It is true that swans are not noted for their vocal abilities, there is the Mute Swan, after all, but they do make noises.
The Whooper Swan, which was to be found in Ancient Greece, makes a honking sound, hence its name, and when it dies, because it has an extra tracheal loop in its sternum, its collapsing lungs make a long, drawn-out series of notes. Beautiful it may not be, the Encyclopaedia Britannica describing it in 1823 as akin to “a clarionet when blown by a novice in music”, a sound it is. It was enough to convince the Prussian naturalist, Peter Pallas, towards the end of the 18th century, that this was the origin of story.
Swans here in Britain are protected so I cannot vouch for the veracity of the story from personal experience. I will have to rely on the testimony of a zoologist, D G Elliot, who winged a tundra swan in flight and noted, in 1898, that as it made its long glide down towards terra firma, it gave out a series of “plaintive and musical” notes which sounded “like the soft running of the notes of an octave.”
However loose the association between a swan’s song and its death is in reality, you can’t keep a beautiful image down. Writers down the ages, perhaps more influenced by Aesop and Aeschylus than the kill-joy Pliny, have been drawn to it. Chaucer, in his Parlement of Foules, wrote of the jealous swan singing before his death and Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice says, “then, if he loses, he makes a swan-like end, fading in music.” Leonardo da Vinci repeated the canard, writing “the swan … sings sweetly as it dies, that song ending its life.”
Turning to swan-song used specifically as a noun, the Scottish evangelical cleric, John Willison referred in his Scripture Songs in the middle of the 18th century to King David’s swan-song and in the second of his Five Sacramental Sermons, he wrote, “you may sing that swan-song.” The phrase was sufficiently well-known for Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his epigram, On a Volunteer Singer, to make a joke I will remember next time I’m made to suffer a karaoke session; “swans sing before they die; ‘twere no bad thing/ did certain persons die before they sing.”
The specific association of a musician with a swan-song can probably be traced back to Franz Schubert. He died tragically young in 1828 at the age of thirty-one, officially from typhoid but more likely syphilis. A year later, Tobias Haslinger published a collection of songs which Schubert had written just before his death, under the title of Schwanengesang. This was the composer’s farewell to the world.
Whether they know it or not, artists who perform their swan-song are stepping into Schubert’s shoes, As he was only 5 feet one inch tall and was nicknamed Schwammerl, little mushroom, they are unlikely to have been that big.
