Month: March 2012

After several years experience in the world of clerical office work, and decades of existence as a human being, I’ve built up a lot of knowledge and tips about both photocopying and human existence. Here, for the first time in one place £ everything I know about these vital life skills.I

• f you point a gun at somebody to threaten them, be sure to imply that you intend to hit them over the head with it. This draws a shorter sentence than a threatened shooting.
• If you put a dog’s collar and lead on a cat, the dog is likely to escape.
• If you have five hundred blank sheets of paper, and you make two copies of each, you’ll have two thousand altogether if you count them incorrectly.
• Ladies: Saved-up fingernail clippings make excellent glue-on fingernails for that special occasion.
• If you built four tennis courts on top of each other, you’d only be able to use the top one unless you leave gaps between them.
• f you photocopy a blank sheet of paper, then fax the copy to somebody, it’s exactly the same as sending the original.I
• The letter Z is pronounced “Zed”. However, the “Z” in “Zed” is pronounced “Zee”. That ‘s what the diplomats would have you believe, anyway.
• If you photocopy a sheet of black paper with the brightness turned up really high, you’ll get a blank white sheet that you can use again.
• Contrary to popular misunderstanding, dental records rarely survive catastrophic events such as plane crashes and explosions. Always make a backup.
• If you make eight hundred and seventy-two copies of a blank sheet of paper, you’d better have a damn good business case for wasting all that stationery.
• The grass is always greener on the other side. For that reason, using a grass roller in the correct direction can make your lawn appear greener.

Gathered together in one place for the first time, here is everything I know about how to design and build things.

• If you build a floor with a ceiling immediately below it, people will think they’re upstairs, and eventually jump out a window to try to escape.
  
• If you build two floors, one right on top of the other, people will assume you’ve accidentally omitted a ceiling and thirteen feet of headspace.
  
• Make your own window: Put two mirrors back to back and place a series of peripheral mirrors in position to reflect one mirror onto the other. Alternatively, just place two two-way mirrors back to back.
  
• Cleaning the outside of a pane of glass is pointless unless you also clean the inside. This is why mirrors don’t work.
  
• Contrary to popular misconception among furniture manufacturers, a Table Tennis table only needs to have two sides, not four.
  
• If you build two walls right up against each other, the pro-agoraphobic brigade will jump down your throat like you’re some sort of evil Nazi.
  
• Because of the ease with which a passing burglar can see potential rich pickings, people who live in glasshouses shouldn’t store thrones.
  
• However, contrary to popular misunderstanding, it is not particularly risky for people who live in glass houses to throw stones, as long as it’s done outside in a large open space, away from the glass house.
  
• Building a partition wall between two rooms is always a pointless exercise, since there is already a wall there.
  
• Cleaning the outside of a pane of glass is pointless unless you also clean the inside This is why mirrors are a waste of money
  
• If you build a room that’s so big it takes up a whole continent, don’t expect any gratitude for all your hard work. That’s all I’ll say. 
  
• If you install a staircase upside down, it’s not really a problem
  
• If you build a wall that goes all the way up to the clouds, people will whinge about dampness and make assumptions about your religious persuasion.
  
• If you build an exact, life size replica of the universe, critics will pan your work as being “derivative”.

An Into Your Head podcast blog from 2012

I assume that parrots are unable to hear their own squawking. I base this on the fact that I (thankfully) have never come across a parrot stuck in an infinite feedback loop.

As a Podcaster, I find that I cannot perform unless I can hear my own voice in the headphones. I can therefore only assume that before these gadgets were invented, humans were just spouting random noises, except for an occasional, and obviously very rare, “thousand monkeys on thousand typewriters” creation, which would have to have been unsophisticated enough not to necessitate infinite time.

Therefore we cannot, when assessing history, rely on any audio recordings made before the invention of the personal earphone.

As I type this I’m listening to Bowsy II purring in my left ear and Leo Laporte on “This Week in Tech” in my right. Yet how can I trust my own brain to accurately “listen” to these sounds if I don’t even have to hand a veterinary stethoscope?

(Apparently that’s it. That’s the whole article.)

Together for the first time (as of 2012), here are some facts that I have gathered over the past couple of years about Ostriches, Eskimos and Camels.

• The Eskimos have eight hundred and seventy-six words for “snow”, but no word for “phlegm retardant cat”.
  
• An ostrich will often bury it’s head in the sand so that it looks like a fifth foot, thereby confusing predators.
  
• A camel will often sink it’s hooves into the sand so that it looks like four ostriches, thereby confusing predators.
  
• An ostrich will sometimes bury it’s entire body in the sand to look like the head of a much larger ostrich,
  
• An ostrich will sometimes bury it’s bodily waste in the sand, in the manner of a cat, thereby confusing predators.
  
• The Eskimos used to be referred to as “The Eskimo”, back when there was only one of them.
  
• The Eskimos have eight thousand words for “snow”, but absolutely no word for “I am not an Eskimo”.
  
• Eskimos have 564 words for snow, but no word for “word for snow”.
  
• At an ostrich funeral, the mourners bury their heads in the sand and wait until the deceased ostrich has been removed by vultures.
  
• People who have an obsession with ostriches and don’t know what’s wrong with them, often ignore the problem and bury their heads in the sand
  
• Interestingly, there is no information whatsoever in my local library, or those in surrounding counties, about people who are obsessed with Eskimos.
  

Assembled in 2012 from a series of insomniacal tweets, if I remember rightly.

Must be sea salt. Probably smells of fish.

You know, it’s weird that pigs are so salty, when they are mostly not raised in sea water. They must be adding something artificial to them. And of course, they’re training our kids to be ignorant with these so-called “crème eggs”. Chocolate comes from cows and cocoa plants, not hens. I mean, if you try to remove the shell from one of those things, your hands get all covered in brown crap.

Whither Louis Pasteur?

And when you think about it, chocolateers are really pushing it with “min eggs”. A real chicken foetus could not have developed a yolk at that early stage in it’s development, never mind a chocolate outer lining. Ridiculous. And don’t get me started on white chocolate eggs. Artificial colouring gone mad.

That said, if the statistics for people’s preferences in chocolate colours had been used as a basis for the original South Africa, the darker chocolate would always have had it’s place as the majority. I’m probably over simplifying the issues here, but now that you mention it, I’ve been to South Africa, brought back three ostrich eggs from different regions, and they’re all white. Meanwhile the New Zealanders call their rugby team the “All Blacks”, and you never hear anything about their eggs.

It’s a mad world.

First published as a series of overcaffeinated tweets @intoyourheadpod

From the old IYH podcast blog, March 2012

I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of the ancient Roman vomitorium.

Constantly we are told that the Mediterranean diet is among the best in the world, yet for millennia upon millennia, these people have been regurgitating their supposedly delicious food almost as soon as they’ve eaten it. And we’re not talking about teenagers with eating disorders here. These are men and women of all ages and sexes.

Nowadays of course, it is de rigueur for the young generation to stick their fingers down their throats and try to dislodge the chicken bone that’s been stuck there since dinner time. In my day it was considered sufficient to clear a path only through the zone that can be reached by a standard toothpick. Nowadays they not only have to poke the food out of their trachea, they even get their stomachs pumped by a medical professional because they have become heavy with liquids.

Clearing a path through one’s trachea, it must be remembered, is not remotely similar to clearing a path through a snowdrift on your front path. For one thing, if you don’t clear your path you can be held legally responsible for the injuries of anyone who comes to harm because of the frozen precipitation on the ground in front of your house.

Leaving your throat blocked has no consequences for anyone other than yourself. And most people are unlikely to attempt to pursue a writ against themselves in the civil courts, as it is very difficult to get one’s legal costs back, even if they are awarded in full to the plaintiff.

Furthermore, courts nowadays tend to dissuade members of the public from attempting to represent themselves, unless they are well adept in the intricacies of the legal system, and have shown that they understand fully the financial risks involved. Anyway, two cats walk into a bar.

One of the cats is a trained lawyer, and is able to get through his evening without doing anything that results in litigation against him. The other cat, sadly, knows nothing about the law, and recklessly goes about flirting with girl cats in the bar, spilling beer on the floor and offering drinks to other patrons. He thereby puts himself at risk of being sued for sexual harassment, negligence and manslaughter, should the drink prove to be poisonous.

Fortunately none of these worst case scenarios happen, and a good night is had by all.

Published March 2012 as an Into Your Head Blog post.

As I write this (many eons ago, when you could still get Red Bar Cola without travelling to Mars), I’m just back from buying a device to retrieve a tank full of fuel from our old car, to use in the new one. A deluxe aquarium gravel-cleaner is to be my petrol-siphoning accessory of choice. I have only have to salvage €6.49 of fuel from the old car to break even. Allowing for spills of course. Although I suppose I could just prohibit those. Lateral thinking is still legal here, last I checked.

Of course, “normal” folk would probably have gone into the Halford’s next door to the pet shop and bought a petrol siphon. That’s why Hitler won. I know what you’re thinking. But since my country was never officially at war, we can hardly declare victory over the Nazis, can we? Especially when I’ve just spent a Sunday morning drinking German-made Red Bull Cola.

That’s not to say that I’d have anything against being invaded by a modern day German dictator, now that they have a fully democratic and benign government. And I know what you’re thinking there, too. But I have a vote whether you like it or not. That’s what these wars were fought for.

Freedom.