Monday, June 09, 2008
Senior moment Monday
It being my turn to produce the morning cup that cheers, descend to the kitchen at dawn (or at least what passes for dawn in this very relaxed household). Put small tea cup (for green tea), large tea cup (for BH tea) and tea pot on tray while the kettle boils. Successfully extract tea bag from its container. Then go to drop the tea bag in the small tea cup, then the teapot and last of all, the correct place, the large tea cup. I suppose the good news is that I did not have to fish it out of the wrong place. Or that I had to fish the green tea pellets out of the wrong place, which might have been fiddly.
The mishap may have been a result of the prior psychology experiment, which went as follows. Load a word document. Locate an adjacent 'i' and 'n', with the former to the left and the latter to the right. Move the document so as to bring the two letters to the middle of the screen and place the cursor between them. Focus on the blinking cursor. Effect one is that the middle of the image starts to slide around in a modest way. Effect two is that the shapes of the two letters start to seem strange and ridiculous. Why on earth should these stupid shapes have anything to do with reading and writing? I remember that when I was younger one could achieve a similar effect by focussing on a spoken, rather than a written word. Focus enough and it starts to sound very strange and ridiculous. Must see if I can reproduce.
Having reported on the moss garden in my last post, I now find we have a mould garden, lurking, in of all places, our not so new and shiny Brita water filter. Suddenly noticed an interesting rash of a black mould around the rim of the filter cell (the thing you have to replace every month). At least it is on the right side of the filter so the pure water we are tapping off is still, presumably, pure. Obvious when you come to think of it that something which is more or less permanently full of water and is never washed is going to develop problems of this sort. But I did not come to think of it.
And we have a very obscure factlet. Has it ever been used in a pub quiz anywhere? Having got to the letter L in my classical dictionary, I come across the third entry for Leonidas, the first being the heroic Spartan chap. The third was an astrologer turned poet, who specialised in poems called isopsepha, so composed that if you convert each letter to a number according to its position in the alphabet (so that, for example, in our alphabet, a 'c' would become 3), the sum of those numbers for each couplet is a constant. Perhaps, as he was an astrologer, he also thought that the charectar of the poem would be detirmined by the nature of the sum. Odd, even, prime, that sort of thing. Juvenal, it seems, dismissed the genre as a toy, fit only for Greeklings. But to my mind a precursor of the labyrinthine Joyce.
Scanning up to the hero, I learn that he started out at Thermopylae with a confederate Greek army of around 4,000 and that there is more than one pass. It all went pear shaped when the Persians decided to cheat and turn his flank using one of the minor passes, after which most of his army did a bunk. He was left to face the music (the book says that the point was to cover the retreat of the fleet not the army) with his 300 Spartans.
No entry for the chocolates. Perhaps the ancient Greeks did not make it to Mexico and so did not have chocolate.
The mishap may have been a result of the prior psychology experiment, which went as follows. Load a word document. Locate an adjacent 'i' and 'n', with the former to the left and the latter to the right. Move the document so as to bring the two letters to the middle of the screen and place the cursor between them. Focus on the blinking cursor. Effect one is that the middle of the image starts to slide around in a modest way. Effect two is that the shapes of the two letters start to seem strange and ridiculous. Why on earth should these stupid shapes have anything to do with reading and writing? I remember that when I was younger one could achieve a similar effect by focussing on a spoken, rather than a written word. Focus enough and it starts to sound very strange and ridiculous. Must see if I can reproduce.
Having reported on the moss garden in my last post, I now find we have a mould garden, lurking, in of all places, our not so new and shiny Brita water filter. Suddenly noticed an interesting rash of a black mould around the rim of the filter cell (the thing you have to replace every month). At least it is on the right side of the filter so the pure water we are tapping off is still, presumably, pure. Obvious when you come to think of it that something which is more or less permanently full of water and is never washed is going to develop problems of this sort. But I did not come to think of it.
And we have a very obscure factlet. Has it ever been used in a pub quiz anywhere? Having got to the letter L in my classical dictionary, I come across the third entry for Leonidas, the first being the heroic Spartan chap. The third was an astrologer turned poet, who specialised in poems called isopsepha, so composed that if you convert each letter to a number according to its position in the alphabet (so that, for example, in our alphabet, a 'c' would become 3), the sum of those numbers for each couplet is a constant. Perhaps, as he was an astrologer, he also thought that the charectar of the poem would be detirmined by the nature of the sum. Odd, even, prime, that sort of thing. Juvenal, it seems, dismissed the genre as a toy, fit only for Greeklings. But to my mind a precursor of the labyrinthine Joyce.
Scanning up to the hero, I learn that he started out at Thermopylae with a confederate Greek army of around 4,000 and that there is more than one pass. It all went pear shaped when the Persians decided to cheat and turn his flank using one of the minor passes, after which most of his army did a bunk. He was left to face the music (the book says that the point was to cover the retreat of the fleet not the army) with his 300 Spartans.
No entry for the chocolates. Perhaps the ancient Greeks did not make it to Mexico and so did not have chocolate.
# posted by Jim @ 1:48 AM 
