Eggs-actly (sorry about that).

So what is it with Easter and eggs?  The Church sees the connection as symbolic - an egg is a symbol of new life, and the shape represents the stone which sealed the tomb of Jesus.  But there is a more prosaic connection, which also explains why eggs used in Easter festivities tend to be hard-boiled.  If you refer back to my post of 20/2/07 you will see that eggs were one of the foods prohibited during Lent.  But of course you couldn't stop the hens laying, so you preserved the eggs laid during Lent by hard-boiling them and then come Easter you would have a load of them the older of which you could use for all sorts of activities like decorating them, having egg hunts, or egg-rolling races or threading string though them and essentially playing conkers with them.  And doubtless you would be using the more recent ones for egg-based dishes for days after, so not surprisingly you would associate Easter with eggs! 

Music Man

This is the centenary year of the birth of Benjamin Britten.  Have to say he's not one of my favourite composers - a bit too acerbic for my taste - but he was enormously prolific, writing pieces for solo instruments, chamber music, orchestral and choral pieces, and songs for solo voice.  Best known perhaps for "A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra", the Sea Interludes from "Peter Grimes" and his "Simple Symphony" -  particularly  the "Playful Pizzicato" movement.  At the other end of the spectrum is his "War Requiem", very much an acquired taste, but indubitably a work of tremendous power and conviction - he was a pacifist and a conscientious objector - and for me the work is one of anger, even repressed rage. It is perhaps one of the most strident pieces of anti-war music ever written.  And his legacy - apart from his music - is the annual Aldeburgh Festival which he started back in 1948.

It's a mystery.

Just when did this vogue for applauding yourself start and why?  It seems to be the done thing more and more these days - you see it particularly on game shows, when a contestant gets a correct answer, and the audience claps them and then you see them clapping as well!  The first time I remember consciously seeing it was on TV way back when Nikita Khrushchev was the Soviet premier and was introduced at some shindig or other and responded to the applause of the crowd by applauding himself, and I remember thinking - what the...?  What I can't understand is who are they applauding?  Themselves (what a big head), those who are applauding them (what's the point)  or what?  Anybody got any thoughts? 

Missing the point?

Somebody with clearly nothing better to do has done a survey of the sort of litter most frequently dropped on the ground.  It seems that Coca-Cola cans, Cadbury's chocolate wrappers, Walkers Crisps packets and McDonald's takeaway bags are the worst offenders.  But surely this tells us little - it's not the products that are responsible for the litter, it's those that use them.  If it tells us anything at all, it is that the sort of people who eat and drink this sort of stuff are also the sort of people most likely to drop their rubbish in the street rather than keep it until they find a litter bin.

Here we go again?

So the Knox/Kercher story isn't over yet then (see posts of 5/10/11 and 22/2/12). The Italian Court of Cassation (highest court of appeal) has overturned the acquittal of Knox and Sollecito (who were originally convicted) and ordered a new trial. Knox of course is back home in the USA and it's most unlikely that the American authorities will agree to her going back to Italy for any new hearings, so just how authoritative any new verdict will be is open to question.  I have to say that my sympathies are with the Kercher family who desperately want the truth and are no nearer finding it now than they were five or so years ago at the time of the killing, and now face - in all probability - years more legal wrangling leading nowhere. I'm not sure to what extent this is an indictment of the Italian judicial system, but they have certainly been badly let down somehow.

A right flap!

A school in Essex has banned triangular flapjacks after one was thrown at a pupil with the point hitting them in the face.  In future the school has decreed that the flapjacks must be cut into squares.  But hang on a minute - a square has four corners against a triangle's three, so it's potentially 33% more dangerous, surely?

Twisted thinking?

The government want to encourage mothers with small children to go back to work. To this end they intend to give such mothers help with paying for child care.  So what if you are a stay at home mum - well you don't get it obviously, because you don't have to pay for child care.  But somehow this is being seen as discrimination against non-working mothers.  This is Alice in Wonderland logic - my neighbour goes out to work and has to pay to have her child looked after while she is at work. I stay at home and look after my child.  My neighbour gets money from the government to help towards the money she has to pay for child care.  I don't have to pay for child care, but it's not fair that she gets money and I don't???  Work that one out if you can.

Oh, pooh!

Snow up North, flooding down South, schools closed, flights cancelled, motorists stranded in snowdrifts, houses destroyed in landslides - the weather seems to have it in for everybody lately.  But the greatest tragedy of all is that heavy rain and dangerously high river levels on the Thames has forced the cancellation of the World Pooh Sticks Championships!

What size, madam?

Well I know the one about the economy and skirt length - you know, in good times, skirts get shorter. and in bad times, longer, but it seems there is a similar co-relation between the state of the economy and the height of the heels on women's shoes. Researchers have tracked the performance of the UK's GDP over the last five years and the sale of high- and low-heeled shoes over the same period, and this seems to indicate that women buy more high heels when the going is good, and more low heels when things are tough.  As one daily paper said, gives a whole new meaning to the phrase - footsie index.

Foyle's War

Anybody else a fan of the programme?  I am, so I wonder if anybody else feels somewhat letdown by the latest series - seven, I think it is.  Now that the war is over (should they really change the title?) and Foyle, Sam and Milner have gone their separate ways, the dynamics have changed and for me the programme has lost its structure. Michael Kitchen continues to hold the whole thing together and Honeysuckle Weeks is as delightful as ever, but somehow it's not the same.  I live in hope that it will get its act back together.

Do gays get a pink wheelie bin?

Birmingham council do have somewhat of a reputation for bureaucratic stupidity. They recently sent out a questionnaire designed to find out people's attitudes to refuse collection and recycling.  Nothing wrong in that, you would say.  Until you get to the last question - Which of the following most accurately describes your sexual orientation?  You are given the option of choosing bisexual, gay man, gay woman/lesbian, heterosexual/straight, other and prefer not to say.  Can you see the connection here because blowed if I can?

Can't see in the dark

When I was a kid, Saturday morning was for going to the cinema, where they would put on programmes specifically for children - "Children's Matinees" they were called, which by the way is the correct use of the word - if you think about it, you can't really have a matinee in the afternoon.  But I digress - there would be cartoons, and almost certainly a cowboy film - probably an episode of a serial.  And you could always tell who were the good guys, and who were the bad guys - the good guys wore white hats, and the bad guys, black hats.  So just how far back does this idea that white equals good, and black equals bad go?  This came to mind the other day, with the choosing of a new Pope - black smoke bad, white smoke good.  I would certainly suggest that it well predates any suggestion of racism, and I suppose the best guess is that it goes back to primitive times when the blackness of night spelled danger (or perhaps one should say - extra danger), so black was bad, and white, being the opposite of black was therefore good.

Ha ha

Two men walk into a bar....
... the third man ducks.

Well I never!

Law Of Blindingly Obvious Consequences again.  It appears that those who have served in the military are more likely to commit violent crimes.  Who'd have thought it?  You teach them to fight, and blow me down, they have a tendency to fight!  Of course, it can't be allowed to be that simple these days - it has to be psycho-analysed - it's all down to PTSD, or a greater tendency to abuse alcohol, or lack of proper counselling, or some such.  But to me, it's simple - create a fighting man and that's what you'll get.  You can't turn him on and off like a light switch.  Remember that old saying - be careful what you wish for - you might just get it! 

R.I.P.

Norman Collier - famously labelled by Jimmy Tarbuck "the comedian's comedian".  I suppose you have to be getting on for 50 years old now to remember "The Wheeltappers' and Shunters' Club"  which made him a household name, but he had already made his mark with a very individual, and very funny, act involving a microphone which appeared to be intermittently cutting out - you can catch it on YouTube.  From a very different era, but a funny, funny man.

Quick - where's the calculator?

A recent poll has found that a fifth of adults struggle with basic maths calculations - I don't find that so surprising, but what did amaze me was that when it came to times tables, the one that caught most people out was the 11-times table.  Surely this must be the second easiest to deal with - the 10-times being the easiest - because, at least up to 9 it simply involves repeating the basic number twice.  So 7 elevens are 77, 4 elevens are 44 and so on.  Bit trickier with 10, 11 an 12, but surely one of the simplest?

Green Cross Code?

Best part of three years ago I did a short series of posts on the subject of free will versus predestination, so I really liked this quote from Stephen Hawking - " I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road"

What's the point?

Author Sebastian Faulks is to write a new Jeeves and Wooster story.  Why??  It's not as though we're not already spoiled for choice - P G Wodehouse wrote no less than 46 stories about the duo - some of them full length books.  I maybe can see some merit in writing a sequel to some popular one-off book - like "Gone With The Wind" for instance - although such ventures do not have a very good track record - but the many attempts for example to write a "new" James Bond book (and Faulks himself is one of those who have had a go at this) to my mind just serve to devalue the originals, and I fear this new endeavour may go the same way.

Do not pass Go...

I'm not going to rehash what I've said many times before, but I cannot see any point in sending Chris Huhne and Vicky Pryce to gaol.  A substantial fine and community service would have fit the bill far better, it seems to me.

Well, blow me!

Sometimes it's only when something is removed that you realise it was ever there in the first place.  Many councils looking to make savings are it seems contemplating scrapping the provision of free transport for pupils attending faith schools which are not considered to be within walking distance.  And you think - or certainly I do - what??!  I've absolutely no problem with parents choosing to send their children to a Catholic, Anglican, Jewish, Muslim or whatever school, but why should I, as a council taxpayer, pay their bus fare?  Councils are not obliged to provide free transport for such pupils, but the provision for them to do so has been there ever since the 1944 Education Act it seems, and the Equality Act of 2006 specifically stated that provision of such free transport - or rather, not providing it for others - did not amount to unlawful discrimination under the Act.  So if you choose to send your child to a far-away school because it specialises in sport, or music, or computer science or some such then the cost of getting them there and back is down to you, but if you choose to send them the same distance to a faith school you can - or at least have been able to up until now - look to the council to provide free transport.  Don't seem right, do it?

Forty years ago...

An official survey has been published comparing life in 1971 with life in 2011.  It concentrates on "lifestyle" issues and highlights things like the decrease in the number of marriages, the decrease in smoking, the increase in drinking and the increase in people living on their own.  But it got me thinking - what is the most significant change between living then and now?  There's central heating and double glazing for instance - commonplace now but very rare in ordinary houses back then. Then there's television - just three channels then, and hundreds now. Supermarket shopping was still a relatively new experience back then, and mobile 'phones unheard of.  But the most fundamental change in my opinion is the advent of the home computer and everything that has developed from it - the internet, online shopping, video streaming and the like.  What do you think?

Counting - the end.

In my fruit dish there are four apples.  What does that mean?  How do I know?  When we're little we count on our fingers - it's no coincidence that we count in tens, because that's as far as you can go before you run out of fingers and have to start again.  So we learn that if we stick our thumb up, that's called "one" and if we have a set of things which we can put in exact one-to-one correspondence (i.e. none left over) with our thumb, then that set is also called one.  Add our first finger and we now have a set called "two" and any set which can be put in exact one-to-one correspondence with that is also called two.  And so on...  So I know I've got four apples because I can put them in exact one-to-one correspondence with my thumb, first finger, middle finger and ring finger and I know that set is called four.  Of course as we grow up we stop depending on our fingers - we can visualise the numbers - at least the relatively small ones, but the principle remains.  So this series of posts has sort of come full circle - we started out by seeing that "set theory" as it's called can enable you to count without really counting, and we end up by realising that counting is in fact a structured form of set theory.  And that, I think, is enough!

For or against?

A very weird situation has arisen in Grantham, the birthplace of Lady Thatcher.  It has always been a bone of contention that the town has no proper memorial to her. So now there is a proposal being put before the council to have a statue of her erected in the town centre.  So why weird?  Because it is the Labour members of the council who are supporting the idea of the statue and the Conservatives who are opposing it.  Everybody seems to be accusing everybody else of party political posturing and electioneering, but like I say - weird.

R.I.P.

This for my late wife - Kenny Ball.  She in her youth was very much into British Trad Jazz and I know she would wish me to mark the passing of one of her heroes.

Having a laff?

Heard of the Laffer Curve - no, neither had I until the other day.  I was reading an article which suggested that cutting taxes could in fact raise revenue.The premise is that, if you set income tax rates at 0% you will clearly raise no revenue, but equally if you set the rate at 100% you will raise no revenue, because nobody will bother to work.  So the idea is that as you move from 0% to 100% revenue will grow until you reach the point where people consider it's not worth doing any extra work, or maybe even getting a job at all, at which point revenue will start to fall and go on falling.  And that's the Laffer Curve.  Of course, what nobody really knows is where that tipping point is, and indeed it may not be a precise point - it may vary as circumstances vary.  This is what was behind the Government's decision to cut the top income tax rate from 50% to 45% - they reckon it will in fact increase the amount of tax they get, and it will be interesting to see if they are right.

Book post

(see post of 18/11/06)

Ken McClure - The Lazarus Strain - 7.5
Alfie Robins - Reprisal - 6
Andrea Frazer - Death of an Old Git - 7.5
Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner - 8
D W Buffa - Star Witness - 6
Edie Claire - Never Buried - 7
Robert Goddard - Fault Line - 8.5
Michael Connelly - The Fifth Witness - 7
J. Robert Kennedy - The Protocol - 8
Chris Pavone - The Expats - 7.5

And the winner is...?

So what are we to make of last week's by-election?  Good for the LibDems, brilliant for UKIP, disastrous for the Tories and average for Labour seems to be the perceived wisdom.  But is it that simple?  Firstly, this was a by-election, and by-elections are traditionally used by the electorate primarily to punish the government of the day, and for all this is a coalition, it is widely seen as a Tory government.  Secondly, this is a LibDem stronghold - they run the local council and are generally well thought of. Whatever their situation nationally, it was always unlikely that their vote here would collapse. Thirdly, Nigel Farage, the UKIP leader has said, quite correctly, that their success was in great part down to the fact that they were prepared to talk about issues that the other parties wanted to avoid.  But it is of course easy to talk about things when you know there is no reasonable prospect of you having to do anything about them in the foreseeable future.  And finally Labour knew from day one that they had no chance, and so really didn't put much effort onto it.  So in a way, this was just one of a relatively small number of foreseeable outcomes, and I don't think anyone should draw any major conclusions from it.

Say cheese...

Employment tribunals are a rich source of "you couldn't make it up" stories.  Here's one - a (male) teacher at a girls' school was dismissed for taking photographs of the girls while on a school trip abroad.  There is no suggestion that the photos were indecent, or in any way inappropriate.  His offence appears to be that he took them using his own camera rather than the school camera.  The school, it seems, wish to retain control of photographs taken of its pupils, this in the name of 'privacy of personal data'.  I suppose you could make a case for that when the pupils are on school premises, but when they're out in the open as it were, they are fair game for anyone with a camera, so to try and forbid anyone - teacher or bystander - from photographing them seems pretty pointless, and to use it as grounds for dismissal somewhat unbelievable.

So that's why the bags take such a long time to come through?

Ignorance is bliss, goes the saying, and indeed there are times when you find something out which perhaps you would rather not have known about.  So, a somewhat worrying story that incoming luggage at Birmingham airport is routinely being searched by Customs before being put on the carousel - that is, without the knowledge or presence of the owner.  What is perhaps most worrying is that this is it seems perfectly legal - HMRC appear to have wider and more draconian powers than even the police.  And although this came to light at Birmingham, I'm sure it's happening at other airports as well.  So if you're carrying anything you would not wish to lose, it's best kept in your hand luggage!

A pint and some pork scratchings please

Couple of recent stories about pubs, which are and have been having a tough time of it for some years now with an awful lot of them disappearing.  So firstly, apparently a lifeline for some pubs is proving to be the pub quiz - it seems that not only are these popular, but they result in increased sales of food and drink.  The second story makes the point that many of today's successful pop groups and bands started out playing in small pubs - apparently known as the "toilet circuit" because in many cases their dressing room was in fact the toilet - and suggesting that the fact there are now fewer of them will make it harder for aspiring pop musicians to get a foot in the door. As a one-time pub pianist, I can empathise with that.

Read on, read on...

Headlines and opening sentences (often printed in bold and sometimes called the "lead") of newspaper articles are frequently as far as many readers bother to go, and this can cause problems when the paper uses them to simplify complex issues - people can get the wrong end of the stick.  This arose the other day when in a conversation among friends and family someone criticised the Government for the so-called "bedroom tax".  It wasn't fair, they said, that just because you had spare bedrooms, you would have to pay for them.  And of course nothing could be further from the truth.  What is proposed is that if you are in receipt of housing benefit - in other words part of your rent is being paid by me and the other taxpayers - and you have a spare bedroom or spare bedrooms, your benefit will be cut.  So you won't actually have to pay anything, it's just that the amount you receive from us taxpayers will be less.