Treasure Trove

I'm not sure what started me thinking about slide rules this afternoon, but once I did, I wondered if they are still available.

Manufacture seems to have stopped in the 1970's, but second hand rules are still available, in fact they are collectors' items, with prices ranging from just over $100 for a simple rule to more than $300 for a rule with lots of scales.

I suspect that my 24 scale Thornton's two sided rule, with vector scales and differential trig scales is quite a treasure.

Very Late Forsythia

By commenting on the late flowering of various plants, I risk being a bore, but in my garden the forsythia seems even more conspicuously late than anything else. It's usually in full bloom before the end of the winter, but this year is still dormant.

Versatile In Spitefulness

Yesterday someone delivered a leaflet attacking gay marriage on the grounds that it would be a great threat to the family. There was a picture of someone using a hammer to smash a family picture.

It surprised me that the publisher was SPUC = Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, and asked people to show their disapproval of gay marriage by sending donations to that organisation.

I suppose it makes sense in a twisted way. People inclined to force women to bear children against their will, may also enjoy being spiteful in other ways, and attacking gay marriage seems to have become a popular way for the spiteful to vent their spleen.

Defining 'Bedroom'

A recent change in housing benefit seems to extend to council house tenants rules that already applied to tenants in other accommodation, so I suspect that protests are coming much too late to make much difference, but that should not deter us from commenting.

I don't at all like the thought of the authorities enquiring what we do in each of the rooms of our houses, and doubt whether they need to know.

Dividing benefits into two parts, one for housing, and one for other needs seems inconveniently complicated. I'd prefer that people in need be given a single benefit to cover everything, and allowed to make their own decisions how to divide their money between their various needs.

The language of the Irresponsible

I forget just where I came across it, but I recently hard someone say:

"If you have an accident, and it's not your fault..."

If an event is an accident, it isn't anyone's fault, but language has been corrupted by the self justification of motorists. Many of them are reluctant to take responsibility for anything, so it has become the custom to refer to any motoring mishap as an 'accident', even though many crashes and collisions are nothing of the kind.

Suffering in Instalments

I always find it rather confusing to lose an hour when we put the clocks on, so this year I I tried two 30 minute shifts.

I moved the clocks on a full hour on Saturday night, but also set my alarm clock to awake me at 8:30  BST, instead of the usual 8 am. The last night I changed the alarm to its usual setting.

It worked well on Sunday, but this morning I woke rather tired and so stayed in bed listening to the news for an extra 15 minutes.

I judge the experiment a moderate success.

A Fragmented Holiday

Banks were closed on Friday, but open on Saturday.

If I worked in a bank I'd prefer to get a longer weekend break by working on Friday and taking Saturday off instead. I suspect that that's what would happen if the holiday times were settled by negotiation between banks and their employees.

As all too often happens, Government has imposed a less convenient arrangement.

Spite in the name of Love

Today two Clerics were televised denouncing gay marriage as a threat to Christianity. One was a superannuated archbishop who reigned in Canterbury long ago, and the other an evangelical Anglican with the hard face of a Calvinist bigot.

Gay marriage is no threat at all to to Christians content to love their fellow men. It is only a threat to those Christians who use their religion to justify feelings of superiority to the rest of us, feelings which encourage them to tell us how to behave. Feeling their status challenged they respond with spiteful invective, creating a religion of spite on the ruins of what was supposed to be a religion of love.

Reassurance of Youth

John Major was the first prime Minister younger than I and since his appointment I've gradually become accustomed to important people being my juniors, until now every member of the cabinet is younger than I.

What a relief it is that at least I'm still younger than the Pope !!

What has become of Coffins ?

Reports of the death of the late President Chavez of Venezuela mentioned a procession accompanying his casket.

For me the word 'casket' conjures up a picture of a small box suitable for holding small precious items such a jewellery, or perhaps the ashes left after someone has been cremated.

A complete human body needs a much bigger box. I'd call that a 'coffin'.

My First Biscuits

Today, for the first time in my life, I made some biscuits. I found a recipe for 'spicy biscuits' in the Penguin cookery book, the first cookery book I owned, bought when still a student.

Before cooking the mixture was surprisingly soft and therefore hard to shape. I feared I'd got the quantities wrong, but the final product was eminently crunchy and biscuity, so I concluded I'd got it right.

Incidentally the spell checker tried to change 'biscuity' to 'promiscuity'. While the perils of promiscuity are many, I shouldn't expect them to include biscuits crumbs in the private parts.

Coy Evasion

As we hear ever more accusations of 'inappropriate' behaviour in the distant past, I wonder precisely what the miscreant is supposed to have done. Was a private part caressed, a bottom patted, a knee squeezed, or just a non-consenting head patted?  We cannot be reasonably expected to conjure up the 'appropriate' degree of moral outrage unless we know what happened.

I think that acts that would at the time have been dismissed as just bad manners are now reinterpreted as serious assaults.

In a biographical essay on Bertrand Russell, Alistair Cooke wrote:

"During his wartime stay in Princeton, when he was in his early seventies, the groves of academe were flustered by rumours of Lord Russell's goatish ways. One lady whose testimony is to be trusted made the shivering confession the the groping of the noble lord in an automobile conveyed the sensation of 'dry leaves rustling up your thighs' "

That was published in the 1970's without provoking any public outrage.

The quotation is from Alistair Cooke, Six Men  p. 204 in the Penguin Edition.