So that's the answer!

My thanks to Wikipedia for answering a question I asked some four years ago - when did pikelets become crumpets?  Because in my youth we called them pikelets - and I still do.  Well it seems that the word is an Anglicisation of the Welsh piglydd which is what they called their version of the ubiquitous griddle cake.  And because we here in the West Midlands are fairly close to Wales we adopted their name for it - or at least our local pronunciation of it.  Thank you, Wikipedia.

We should hang our heads.

The shameful delay in raising a memorial to the lads of Bomber Command which I posted about last June, is as nothing compared with the fact that it is only now, nearly 70 years after the event, that those sailors who undertook what Churchill called "the worst journey in the world", ferrying supplies to the Soviet Arctic ports during WWII, are to receive recognition of their efforts with the minting of an Arctic Star medal.  There aren't many of them left of course, which makes the delay all the more reprehensible. In the immediate post-war period it was apparently felt that it would be inappropriate to honour those who had helped a country which was now our cold war enemy, and by the time the Wall came down it was considered too late to do anything about it.  So, better late than never, but we should be ashamed of ourselves.

Twelve good men...

Trial by jury has come under scrutiny following the Vicky Pryce trial where it appears that at least some of the jurors didn't really understand what they were there for. Of course, it may not be that simple - because our laws forbid jurors from talking about what went on in the jury room, or anybody questioning them about it, all we can do is draw inferences from what we do know, which may in fact be wide of the mark. And before we start talking about doing away with trial by jury, it's worth remembering those cases where juries have disregarded clear law to come up with a commonsense verdict.  Let's face it, if it wasn't for juries, Lady Chatterley's Lover would probably still be banned!

Nah - leave it!

We are a nation of procrastinators it seems.  Well, all I can say is that if there's one thing a life working in, and for much of the time managing, offices has taught me it is - never do today what you can put off until tomorrow, because tomorrow you may not need to do it.  I was always surprised at the number of potential problems which, if left alone, sorted themselves out and never came to fruition.  So I pass that thought on for what it's worth.

Do you have the "yuk" factor?

Has this horsemeat business affected your shopping habits?  It seems for some it has.  Local butchers are reporting an increase in trade and Asda has said it has noticed more people seem to be buying vegetarian ready meals.  Each to his own, but I'm still buying the same stuff I always have.  For starters, most ready meals that I buy are chicken based, which as far as I am aware is not iffy, but also I was brought up in the war, when you didn't enquire too closely into what you were eating - if it tasted all right, that was all that mattered.  There's an old song which starts "Ah, sweet mystery of life at last I've found thee...", and back then this was commonly referred to as The Sausage Song, because nobody wanted to think too deeply about what wartime sausages contained!

Now what did I come in here for??

Interesting article in my pensioner's magazine - indeed, if true very interesting -
    "What a relief to learn this - we need more studies like this for old age enlightenment!  Ever walked into a room with some purpose in mind only to completely forget what the purpose was?  Turns out, doors themselves are to blame for these strange memory lapses.  Psychologists at the University of Notre Dame have discovered that passing through a doorway triggers what is known as an event boundary in the mind, separating one set of thoughts and memories from the next. Your brain files away the thoughts you had in the previous room and prepares a blank slate for the next locale.  It's not ageing, it's the damn door!  Thank goodness for studies like this."

Counting - continued.

We saw last time that the idea of putting sets into one-to-one correspondence leads to counter-intuitive ideas like that there are as many even numbers as numbers - and of course there's nothing special about even numbers, you could just as easily show that there are as many century numbers (100, 200, 300...) as numbers. Indeed providing you have a set of things where you can organise them in some systematic way so that you can point to each element in turn then they can be put into one-to-one correspondence with the set of numbers.  Of course you could say we are cheating here, because we are dealing with infinity.  And indeed for some time mathematicians treated the concept of infinity as an embarrassing irrelevance. But then a bloke called Cantor back in the 1870s showed that infinity was an important mathematical tool, and in fact that there was more than one sort of infinity - that there were sets which were too big to be put into one-to-one correspondence with the set of numbers - were in fact uncountable.  But just what do we mean by counting?  We'll look at that next time.

Is this the future?

The other day I watched about six hours of TV - nothing special in that, that's about my normal daily ration, but what made this different is that I never turned the TV on. No, everything I watched I watched on my computer using the various streaming sites, like iPlayer and Sky Go.  And it was all catch-up stuff - programmes from the past - in some cases the long-distant past.  And I wondered if TV as we know it and have always known it is on its way out.  In years to come, will we turn on the TV to be simply presented with a menu from which we will chose what we want to watch? I suppose there will always be a place for news and current affairs programmes but other than that I can't see why I should be stuck with a schedule thought up by somebody else.  Indeed, what brought me doing what I described above was that on that day there was simply nothing on "live" TV worth watching (at least in my opinion).  I remember when video recorders first made their appearance, one of their selling points was that you would be able to create your own schedule of what to watch and when, and streaming is just the latest step down the same road.

It's just human nature

Another of these strange and rather pointless surveys has concluded that people who buy organic food are less likely to be kind and helpful to others.  Actually I'm not sure that the methodology used really supports that conclusion, but I'm equally sure that it's probably right.  It's got nothing to do with organic food as such - it's simply that the sort of people who buy organic food are more likely to be the sort of people who feel self-important and morally superior to everybody else.  I wouldn't mind betting that - if you could be bothered to do the work - you would probably find that people who shopped in Waitrose were less likely to be kind and helpful to others than those who shopped in Aldi, say.  Same reason.

I say, I say, I say.

The expression ex cathedra cropped up in a post the other day - so what exactly does it mean?  Well it translates as "from the chair" - the word cathedra being Latin for chair - strictly a chair with arms, but it has come to mean the ornate type of chair - more like a throne really - used by a bishop.  And - you may have already made the connection - a cathedral is simply a church which houses such a chair. And one of those things which "everybody knows" but which is actually false, is that a city is a place which has a cathedral.  Not so.  A city is a city by virtue of royal proclamation, and the presence or absence of a cathedral is immaterial,  There are cathedrals in places which are not cities (Blackburn and Guildford for example) and cities with no cathedral (Leeds and Wolverhampton for instance).  So a pronouncement made ex cathedra is one made with the authority of a bishop speaking from his chair of office - and the top dog of course is the Bishop of Rome - the Pope.