pumpkinstrokemarrow

It seems that the text in the image in the previous posting can be read without much trouble by about half the population. Some bright spark has discovered that about half of human brains are a bit lazy: they do not care about the order of the letters in a word between but not including the first and the last, provided that they are all there and that there are no extras. Put another way, that the middle part of the word you are looking at is a permutation of the middle part of the word intended. Presumably this says something about how a word is processed but I am not sure what. I shall ponder further.

Something of a stink on the way to the baker today, in the form of a dead, somewhat mashed badger on the edge of the road. Pretty good stink considering that it was fairly cool and early and the thing was in the shade. Maybe it was done on Sunday on Monday, neither of which, as it happened, were baker days. Would not have expected a badger so far into town; presumably it had wandered off some wild part of Nonsuch Park we do not know about - where, as it happened, we took a stroll a few days ago. Excellent place with lots of mature trees and lots of open grass, where they do the trick of not mowing all the grass, just the paths, so one gets the benefit of the long grass and the various flowers in it. A bit more interesting than mown grass if not so hot for picnics. Formal garden part looking a bit run down - which is a shame as it will take a lot of work to bring it back up to standard. Presumably a bit on hold while the various local authorities involved make up their minds what to do with the building. If it was up to me and I had a few million to spare, I would knock the existing house down. It is old enough to be very expensive to run, small enough not to be much use as a conference centre or a hotel and not very pretty. So knock it down and build a small pavilion with a cafe, toilets and maybe the odd function room. Outdoor seating in shade and in sun. Could all be very nice. But I expect, apart from the authorities enjoying squabbling with each other about who is in charge, the thing is a listed building. How does one appeal against such a status?

Interested to read that Harrods finds it worth its while to pay their local council £750,000 for permission to keep their out-door cafe open for an hour longer each evening in the summer. Presumably the owners' compatriots do not appreciate the funny English rules about smoking and need somewhere where they can smoke at the same time as whacking down the finest Harrodian buns and pastries. I wonder what their Chelsea buns are like? Do they get the balance between liquid sugar and cinnamon right? And what did the original buns use, before liquid sugar was invented? Did the bakers bother to make their own or did they do something else? Clues to be found at http://www.sugar.org/ - which appears to be a site run by a sugar manufacturers trade organisation - although one has to look closer than I did to be sure about this. All a bit dishonest really. Sites should say loud and clear where they are coming from.

Interested to hear last week that the director of a theatrical play brings the thing to the boil, as it were, and then bows out. Day to day operations are left to the stage manager - whom I have always (possibly quite wrongly) regarded as a lower form of luvvy life. I suppose this fits with the practise in other industries where the more expensive construction crew hands the construction over to the less expensive maintenance crew. Certainly fits in with what a composer does: once he has published his master work - and taken his fees - he no longer has any say about what people do with it. If the conductor does a bit of judicious cutting, tweaks the directions to the players or corrects a few wonky passages, that is up to the conductor. Unless the composer is such a power in the industry he can publish with strings attached? What about a dead one? Or an out of copyright one? Can a musical estate get difficult about bad performances? A painter certainly can't prescribe how people look at his work. Or what they say about it, however naff said people might be. But going back to the play, one might think that a performance could drift quite a bit over time - not necessarily for better or worse, but to become differant in a way that might bother either or both of director and author. Does the company of players have regular service review sessions in the way that the service company for a computer system might? Does the company take itself off for a luvv-in (far worse, one imagines, than the hug-ins favoured by management consultants and personnel types) in some grand sea-side hotel so that they can do a drains-up on how the show and the showers are getting on? Would either the director or author be allowed to come? I guess we will have to wait until one of the television companies does a theatrical soap to give us a break from hospital and police soaps (aka simple object access protocol. I had thought that the TV sort of soap was another acronym but according to wiki, the soap here just refers to the former sponsorhip of popular episodic radio programmes by soap companies) to find out.