Mr Majeika - Everyone's favourite wizard

I found this Mr Majeika book the other day

and I was surprised by the tagline "Everyone's favourite wizard". This edition was published in 2004. By then, five of the Harry Potter books had been published and two of the films had been released. Lord of the Rings had been published for 50 years, and the latest trilogy of films had been released. I'm sure that Mr Majeika has his fans, but to claim that he's everyone's favourite seems a little ambitious to me.

Oddly specific

The University of York are arranging two York Researchers' Nights, one in September 2014 and one in September 2015. The idea is that on a Friday night, researchers will organise events in the centre of York.

I'm not sure that this is a terrific plan, as whenever I've been in York on a Friday night, discussions about philosophy or physics seem to be the last things on the minds of those who are out and about. There may be philosophical implications of their conversations, in the way that alcohol does tend to induce puzzlement at the meaning and purpose of one's existence. There may be issues of physics to be considered, in the trajectory of objects thrown through the air. But I'm not sure this is the time and place to discuss them.

That is not the concern of this post, however. No, this is about something more trivial. They are advertising for a York Researchers' Night Co-ordinator to help with organising the events. What interested me was this additional duty that will form part of the job.

0.2% of the role is supporting the York Festival of Ideas. Over a 13-month, full-time contract, I reckon that's about 4 hours, or one afternoon. Either that afternoon is so important that it needs a specific mention in the advert, or somebody should suggest organising a short seminar from the maths department. (Although perhaps not on a Friday night.)

V4 POO - Sh*t numberplate

For a while, I have been wanting to do an occasional series on personalised number plates. I wouldn't go so far as to say that you should never trust someone with a personalised number plate, but it's close. It's also long been a source of bafflement to me as to what some personalised number plates are supposed to mean.

What finally prompted me into action was a big black Maserati that pulled out in front of me the other day. A shiny, expensive sportscar, its engine roared throatily (I think that's how you are supposed to describe it). Yet on the car was the numberplate V4 POO. That just struck me as, well, silly. Maybe the driver's name is Vapoo. There was a Maserati V4, but in the 1930s, and if you do a search for POO, well, you get information on whether or not bird poo spoils the car's paint. Perhaps the driver has some sort of scatological interest. I don't want to speculate too much about his private life. But, really, why would you buy an expensive car and then put POO on it?

Acid

I do like a good self-help quote. OK, I'm lying, I can't stand self-help quotes, but I was enjoying reading an article on rebuilding your life, and generally being awesome, when I came across this sentence:

Look how beautiful Mark Twain talks about this: “Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

Firstly it alerted my "dubious quote" senses. I'm always doubtful that these internet quotes have the correct attribution. So I scuttled off to worry about that. I can't find a reliable source pinning it down to Mark Twain, and elsewhere it is credited to Seneca.

But perhaps more importantly, it's rubbish. If you're storing acid in a glass bottle then the bottle is fine. It's pretty much unconcerned about being full of acid, and can stay that way for years. If you take that bottle of acid and pour it over, let's say, your hand*, then it will do considerable harm.** So the inspiring quote makes no sense at all. If I'm going to rebuild my life then I would like to base it on somewhat firmer foundations than quotes like these.

*WARNING: Do not do this.

**The extent of the harm will depend on the strength of the acid. You're probably OK with citric acid, but stay away from hydrochloric.

The golden brick

York is definitely a golden brick hospitality destination these days

says the estate agent who sold a York hotel. I had not heard of the phrase "golden brick hospitality destination" but assumed it was a piece of colourful property jargon, like greenfield or brownfield. Having done a Google search, I'm now convinced he either

1. made it up (in which case let's see how far it spreads); or
2. the journalist misheard him, and it was a different phrase, but I can't work out what.

Swearing defined

Interesting to read this definition of swearing in a recent academic paper.

Swearing referred to verbal statements or gestures pertaining to body parts designed for sexual activity or waste elimination, or uncomplimentary references to others' parentage.

Curious.

#weirddreams Farage

Surprised to see Nigel Farage appointed as the new head of our department. He's thinner than I expected, almost gaunt-looking. He told us that we had been awarded a 6% increase in funding, but that we now needed to "hustle". I asked him what that meant, was it going out and trying to attract more business, or dancing in a suggestive way? I illustrated this by twerking in front of him. Perhaps not the best career move.

The dream was also notable for the way that locations can change during a dream. Our office was (originally) in a long, winding corridor. You had to walk past a Portuguese cleaner before going through the only door off the corridor, which in turn led to some stairs and our office. When I returned after meeting Nigel (I feel we're on first name terms now), the corridor and the cleaner were still there, but now there were many doors, most of which seemed to lead into medical facilities of one kind or another. It had basically turned into a hospital.

Similarities

Watching Britain's Got Talent this evening, I was struck by the resemblance between one of the lads from Collaboro (great name by the way) and England footballer Michael Carrick. I wonder if by any chance they could be related.

Collaboro

Carrick

One day a week embracing poetry
Meant nothing to me
Misery again and a life of pain
Beauty unopposed
Oh, the shame that arose
My long lost hope of happiness
I never, never want to change
I will never, never love change
Put your roots down
Stay in the ground

Glamorous girl cuts a swathe through the fears of the world
I was right there in your whirl
Glamorous girl

Blade Runner

The only Blade Runner in the news at the moment is Oscar Pistorius, currently on trial for something or other in South Africa. (I always want to call him Oscar Pretorius because he is South African.) It was not always that way, though.

Next week the University of York is holding a workshop into the film Blade Runner. It looks like the kind of workshop I would not feel happy at, for several reasons:

• There is a lot of philosophy involved, and I have never really got the hang of philosophy, even though I consider myself a philospher of sorts.
• I have never seen all of the film Blade Runner. Like many other films, there was a time and a place to watch it (which I think was probably the 1980s) but now the moment has passed. Everything it did mean will no longer mean anything. See, I told you I was a philosopher.
• You have to make your own arrangements for lunch. Come on, at least make the day feel special.

But then, in an uncanny coincidence (or was it?), I found this book in a charity shop yesterday. It was a free copy given away with the May 1997 issue of Computer Gaming World, when the 21st Century was just a glint in the eye of time. I particularly like the way that they emphasised the film title, rather than the actual title of the book

and how the back cover includes the credits for the film, rather than book-related information.

Computer Gaming World ceased publication in 2006, which gives this book the odd feeling of being a historical document about a future world, which should have existed by now, but doesn't.

The All Nite Soul Review

At the All Nite Soul Review
Judith, 52,
Dances along to songs
She always knew

The acts upon the stage
Some are showing their age
The Classic, the Original and the New

Before them glittering ranks
Applaud their sweaty thanks
Their tits swinging lower than they ever used to do

Fulled by cheap warm wine
They're having a fine old time
Forgetting the miserable lives for an hour or two

With the girls they can forget
Every mistake they've met since 1962
Their eyes sparkle at the drummer in
The Classic, the Original and the New

Vicious spiteful words
I feel ashamed and absurd
They're only saving themselves like we all do

The Classic, the Original and the New
May not sparkle like they used to do
May not even be able to stand
May not be the ones they used to be

But Ladies and Gentleman, just for you
And Judith, 52,
Tonight I give to you Direct from 1972
The All Nite Soul Review

Different scales

James Ward has posted some pictures of Airfix kits of bombed, shelled or otherwise damaged buildings. The Italian farmhouse looks like the kind of project you would see on Grand Designs, or similar, although they would inevitably ruin it, and by the end of the programme you would be keen to throw a few shells at it yourself.

But the thing that really intrigued me was the difference in scale. Some of the buildings are 1:72, but most are 1:76. I remember all Airfix kits being 1:72 – at least those of roughly that size. There were larger and smaller scales, which from memory were 1:144, 1:32 and 1:24, but 1:72 was the most frequent one. So why would they introduce 1:76? Surely there is not that much difference between the two. Surely it does not matter.

It turns out it matters a lot.

Lost in translation

Wikipedia's "Did you know?" for today features this slightly puzzling entry.

In China, Lou is both the 229th, and 269th, most common surname. Of course the answer is that two different Chinese surnames have been translated into the same English word.

Ullage

In the Daily Telegraph, Helen Yemm has her jobs of the week. She includes this task

Clear emerging perennial shoots of old wet leaves and winter ullage – to make it easier to see what is going on and get the upper hand in the slug war.

My question is, "what is ullage?" The OED defines it as

The amount of wine or other liquor by which a cask or bottle falls short of being quite full (originally the quantity required to make good the loss by leakage or absorption).

There are some vaguely colloquial usages, but nothing that really matches "the soggy stuff that collects around plants over winter". My guess is that it is a typo for "foliage", although I'm not entirely convinced that's right. Either way, it's a great word, and the next time I have a bottle of wine I will point at the air at the top of the bottle and say, "Wow! Look at the ullage on that!"

Creading

There are many words in use in academia that I don't understand - palimpsest, for one. When I came across the description of this symposium, therefore, the word "creadings" jumped out at me:

Chanting Students

Dr. Matthew Cheeseman

I began researching and collecting examples of student chanting in 2005 and have found them a stimulating way of thinking about students and their experience of higher education. Far from simple, chants are both verbal forms and performances, full of contradictory meanings and creadings. In this paper I look at how they are received by others and how they operate as expressions of student identity and enactments of 'lad culture'. Using data collected following an ethnographic methodology, I attempt to situate chanting within larger and no less contradictory performances (such as being a student) and explain its relationship to a language that has become a totemic within the United Kingdom: banter.

Rather than assume that "creadings" was a typo for "readings", I supposed that it must be a new word coined in academia. (I have no idea what "a totemic" is either, but that's beside the point). I assumed that a "creading" would be something like a cross between a reading and a creed. It would be a way of analysing that involved reading whatever you were reading while looking for evidence that it might be connected to some kind of belief system. It sounds logical to me.

I looked it up in the OED and, naturally, it wasn't there. It isn't a word that crops up in a Google search either. It is, after all, a typo.

Black book

I increasingly find that I have strong opinions about people, but I have very little idea why. When I look at the people who are in the various categories, they don't seem to have anything in common. When I try to look at it objectively, there is no particular reason why I should find one likeable and another hideous. I don't understand it.

Can't stand

Clare Balding
James Corden
Dermot O'Leary
Gareth Malone
Kirstie Allsopp

Can put up with

Tony Blackburn
Evan Davis
Chris Evans
Brian Matthews
Susannah Reid

Like

Mishal Husain
Alex Jones
Carol Kirkwood
Graham Norton
Jamie Oliver
Bill Turnbull

Similarities

Watching the news this morning, I was struck by the resemblance between Tom Cruise and Thomas Hitzlsperger. I wonder if they could be related?

Cruise

Hitzlsperger

Data is, um, are, datum is, oh boy!

I think that the battle over keeping datum singular and data plural has been lost. However, many would disagree. This recent press release from the University of British Columbia wants data to be plural, but in this section... well, I'm not quite sure what is going on.

“Publicly funded science generates an extraordinary amount of data each year,” says Tim Vines, a visiting scholar at the University of British Columbia. “Much of these data are unique to a time and place, and is thus irreplaceable, and many other datasets are expensive to regenerate.
“The current system of leaving data with authors means that almost all of it is lost over time, unavailable for validation of the original results or to use for entirely new purposes.”

I suspect that the quote from Vines started with data being singular - "Much of this data" etc - but that someone changed bits of it into the plural. How "Much of this data are" can be correct with "is irreplacable" escapes me. The second paragraph has a similar confusion.

Peak time

Still on the subject of time, in a recent edition of the Infinite Monkey Cage, I was surprised to hear Professor Brian Cox say "counter-clockwise", since I had taken it to be a term from US English. I assumed that it was because he must have spent no little time in the US, and presumably reads a lot of US literature. When I looked at the relative frequencies of "counter-clockwise" and "anti-clockwise" in the Google ngram viewer, I noticed something surprising:

Here's the chart for UK English - a closer battle than I would have expected, but with anti-clockwise just keeping a lead. However, there is a distinct peak in the 1940s, since when the use of both terms has been on the decline.

The peak is even more pronounced in American English. Counter-clockwise wins comfortably, but since 1940 has been in decline.

Why should this be? Perhaps as more stuff has been displayed digitally, and we are less in touch with making and repairing things by hand, the words for rotating something one way or the other are falling out of fashion.

This seems to be supported by a search for "clockwise", which is suffering a similar, if less marked, decline:

American English

British English

Finally, although I won't include the graphs, mentions of the pre-clock words "sunwise" (ie, clockwise) and particularly "widdershins" (ie, anti-clockwise) have tended to grow over the same period. I have no idea why.

The time seller

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography does a regular podcast, which every fortnight, as well as the famous, covers more obscure British lives.

The latest edition featured Ruth Belville, also know as the Greenwich Time Lady, who sold time. Although chronometers were becoming increasingly accurate, their makers were desperate to know the correct time, but had no way of finding it out. They used to go up to Greenwich Observatory to find out what it was, but the Astronomer Royal, Sir George Biddell Airy, got fed up of them interrupting work, and asked his deputy, John Henry Belville, to set up the time selling service. The business became a family affair, run by John Henry, then his widow, then his daughter Ruth.

Incredibly, it continued for more than 100 years, only ending in 1940 when Ruth was 86 and her age, and the effects of World War II, finally forced her to retire. I love finding these hidden corners of life.