Monday, February 22, 2010
PS
Woke up worrying whether the Muslims do not have a point when they call us infidels. Their point being that they pray facing towards Mecca, their most holy place, while we pray facing the rising sun. Clearly a hang over from our prior affiliation with the sun god. But then I worried some more and thought that while churches in England do tend to have east facing altars, that would amount to about the same thing as facing Jerusalem, our most holy place. Plus, the sun does not always rise in the east: it swinging down from somewhat north of east in the summer to somewhat south of east in the winter. The sun god might not be happy about the lack of attention implicit in our always facing due east. Stonehenge was rather more careful about this sort of thing.
So what about churches in other parts of the world? Which way does the chapel face in the polar station at the South Pole? I assume that they do have facilities. I don't think Google Earth would help on this last point but it does help with Notre Dame in Paris, a sufficiently important place that they might pay attention to direction, and where I find that the altar faces something south of east, which would be right for a place a significant proportion to the east of us, on the way to Jerusalem. So maybe I do not need to worry at all.
Amused to read yesterday about people at No. 10 complaining about bullying. What on earth do they expect? We think it perfectly natural that celebrity chefs should f-word their way through the working day, exterminating legions of apprentices on the way. Why not prime ministers? They have just as demanding a job and don't even get decent pay. At least, not compared with celebrity chefs or, even, bankers before bonus.
And intrigued by an appercu on the arrangements for printing catalogues at Argos, which we happened to pass through in the afternoon. It seems that catalogues are a very important part of life at Argos as they had several open pallets containing catalogues for us to take away and the main counter was lined with a wall of the things. But the appercu was noticing that the closed pallets appeared to be colour coded by their plastic wrapping. On closer inspection the colour coding corresponded to someone called the binder. The main binder appeared to be binder D, the next most important binder A and the least important, numerically at Epsom anyway, was the binder at Nuremburg, Germany. What does a catalogue binder do? Does he just bind the pages which have been printed elsewhere? Does he print, cut and bind the pages which have been composed elsewhere and sent to him over the wire? How many binders do Argos need to have to guarantee supplies? It seems that a very important day in the life of Argos is 12 January when the spring/summer catalogue goes live. How many did they plan on having on store floors on that day? Several million? Epsom must have carried some thousands yesterday. Several million would be a fairly monster print run by book standards, and fairly hefty by newspaper standards - although one does not have to do the thing overnight, each night. Presumably, in the couple of weeks running up to that day, OIC catalogue is the most important person in Argos off the board. Direct line to god sort of person.
# posted by Jim @ 11:28 PM 
