Pigeon English

Stense might think she's the Queen of Ditzy, but Carolyn can knock her into a cocked hat.

Yesterday, as Carolyn and I were walking through the main shopping street in Liverpool, there was a hawker selling Mr Punch-type throat whistles: Wa-wa-waaaah!! he cried in throat-whistly type of voice… That's the way to do it!!

"How did it do that?" gasped Carolyn, completely freaked out.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"How did it do it?"

"It's a special type of whistle."

"No, seriously, how did it do it?"

"I am being serious. It's how they do the Mr Punch voice in Punch and Judy."

At which point, Carolyn burst into uncontrollable laughter and started choking something incomprehensible at me. It took me 30 seconds or so to work out what she was trying to say:

She'd thought the noise had been made by a pigeon.

Postscript: Chat message between me an Carolyn half an hour after I posted the above:

Carolyn: … and I don't remember the pigeon saying 'that's the way to do it' - you made that up!!!
Richard: NO I DIDN'T! He definitely said 'That's the way to do it'! Have you been checking my website?
Richard: … What am I talking about? Of course the pigeon didn't say 'that's the way to do it' - the MAN said it! Are you trying to trick me?
Carolyn: NOBODY said it - it was just a loud pigeon noise. I would've known a pigeon can't talk - it was just a loud cooey caw.
Richard: A 'cooey caw'?? A 'cooey caw' doesn't sound anything like 'that's the way to do it'. Are you crazy?

Houston, we have an unscheduled eventuality

Compare and contrast:

BBC (30-Jan-2002): 'Minimal' risk from deorbiting spacecraft

The American space agency's Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer (EUVE) spacecraft is due to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and break-up sometime during the next 24 hours.

BBC: (20-Mar-2001): Mir re-entry is unprecedented

… The de-orbiting of Mir would be a routine procedure if it were not for platform's size. At 135 tonnes, Mir is far larger than any other manmade object brought to Earth before.

BBC (03-Sep-2006): Probe crashes into Moon's surface

Europe's lunar satellite, the Smart 1 probe, has ended its mission by crashing onto the Moon's surface in a controlled collision.

American and Russian spacecraft de-orbit; European ones crash.

57 Channels…

Jen and I finally succumbed (or should that be succame?) to Sky+™ telly last week, having become totally fed up with the incessant ads on the BBC telling us what we were missing. We had already tried a Freeview™ digital box, but there is no coverage at our house, the tallest transmitter (and, indeed, tallest free-standing structure) in the UK being, rather infuriatingly, just out of view behind the hill. 100 yards up the hill, fine; 100 yards down the hill, fine; but where we live, not fine. Not fine at all. Cable TV is but a distant dream this far out in the sticks. So Murdoch finally parted us from our hard-earned.

Isn't there an awful lot of shite on telly these days?

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Mouse 49½

For some years now, I have been displaying the latest score in the Rodent Wars in the sidebar on the Gruts home page [removed since this post was written]. I use the plural because the wars are seasonal, with Open Season beginning, as these things tend to, on the Glorious Twelfth. The new season has already seen a lot of action, with good old homo sapiens continuing to hold the upper hand.

The wars began on Sunday, 13th October, 2002 (rather appropriately, Margaret Thatcher's 77th birthday). I recorded the great event for posterity a couple of days later in a letter to Stense:

This Sunday, Jen was rooting round in a food cupboard and uncovered clear evidence that we had a mouse. Half a (very large) bar of Milky Bar chocolate had been demolished. Ordinarily, I'd have let bygones be bygones, but I'm particularly partial to Milky Bar, so this meant war…

I then remembered that I'd seen a Little Nipper mousetrap behind the kickboards in the kitchen, so I dug it out and loaded it up with Milky Bar. The following morning, the chocolate had gone, but the trap remained unsprung. Clearly, I was dealing with a wily rodent here. So last night we tried a new strategy, viz. Toblerone. Ten minutes after we'd retired to bed last night, I heard the trap snap shut…

Since then, it has been all-out (albeit seasonal) warfare. As the above quote demonstrates, in the early days, the campaign was fairly evenly matched: sometimes the mice escaped (one point to the furry fiends), sometimes the mouse was caught (one point to the human beings). But, as we have became more battle-hardened, Jen and I have become much better at setting our trap: it has been over two years since the mice scored a single point against us. But still they come.

Yesterday morning, the Rodent Wars reached a major milestone: mouse 49½.

The ½ is a particular sore point with Jen, who believes she earned the full point. I explained how the half point arose in another letter to Stense written a month later:

I told you about the mice, didn't I? We trapped two a couple of weeks back, then didn't catch any more, so we thought we'd got rid of them. Then we noticed fresh droppings (or spoor as we big game hunters tend to think of the stuff). So we set the trap again and caught another mouse last Saturday night. We set the trap again on Sunday night and, on Monday morning, we came down to the kitchen to find the empty mouse trap sitting in the middle of the kitchen floor, six feet from where we'd left it. No sign of any mouse. No sign, that is, until Jen picks up her work bag in the hall and sees something moving inside… She puts the bag on the kitchen work top and steps back, and this mouse climbs out of the bag and sits on top of it looking at us kind of sleepily. So Jen grabs an empty pint glass and a magazine and catches the cheeky little bugger! She then releases it into the adjacent field, singing the theme song from Born Free. I think we'll call that one a draw.

What do you think? Should catching a mouse with a glass and magazine, as if it were nothing more than a wasp, have earned Jen the full point? Or, should the mouse have got the point for avoiding the trap and coming out of the ordeal alive? Or was I right to call it a draw?

(I made up the Born Free bit, by the way.)

See also: Dispatches from the Rodent Wars

Here's looking at Euclid

Ever since I first encountered it at school, I've always admired the elegant simplicity of the reductio ad absurdum proof of the irrationality of the square-root of two. I know, I know: I really should get out more.

This week's New Scientist includes a description of Euclid's equally elegant and simple, 2,300-year-old, reductio ad absurdum proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers. I hadn't seen it before. It's really neat. The description goes as follows:

Suppose a mathematician comes with a finite list of primes and claims there are no more. Euclid showed that there must be a prime missing from the list. Multiply all the primes on the list together and then add one to this number. This new number is not divisible by any of the primes on the list because you always get remainder one. So Euclid's new number is either another prime itself or divisible by a prime that is missing from the list. If you add this new prime to the list, repeating Euclid's trick will always show that any finite list is missing a prime.

Sorry to bore you with maths. The real reason I'm doing it is because I just thought of the here's looking at Euclid pun, and I really didn't want to let it to go to waste.

Papal bull

If this turns out to be true (and, from the vibes I've been picking up lately, it almost certainly will), then I take back everything nice I've ever said about the Pope:

Guardian: Pope prepares to embrace theory of intelligent design

Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals close to Pope Benedict will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican's view of evolution.

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of "intelligent design" taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.

Oh, that's right, I have never said anything nice about the Pope.

Right, wasn't I?

Of course, you realise this means war.

Rubbish

BBC: 'Pay as you throw' call for waste

Councils should be given powers to charge households for getting rid of non-recyclable rubbish, a think tank has urged the government.

The Institute for Public Policy Research said a "pay as you throw" system was the only way to improve the UK's poor recycling record.

Erm… aren't we being charged already? It's called the Council Tax, chaps.

Who are these tossers in so-called think tanks do you reckon? I'll bet they're self-appointed (as well as self-important). Their answer to every problem seems to be to fine people. I think we should fine think tanks every time they come up with a solution that involves taking more money off us.

It is simply not true that the only way to improve the UK's poor recycling record is to charge for non-recyclable rubbish. For a start, why not give people better recycling facilities? I wrote to my own council recently to complain about ours: we receive a single, tiny recycling box which is collected once per fortnight, we are not allowed to over-fill the box, we are expected to wash anything that is dirty, and we are expected to bag-up the different types of rubbish before we put it in the box. It's ridiculous. I don't mind separating stuff (which is where I can add real value to the recycling process), but why all this other palaver? What we need is different bins for different types of rubbish—like they do in other places. But Calderdale Council (to name and shame it), despite our frankly massive council tax, apparently hasn't got the money to do recycling properly because it has spent it all on unnecessary and highly criticised road improvements in Hebden Bridge.

I mean, Hebden Bridge is Hippy Central, for Pete's sake: this should be like pushing at an open door. If we can't get recycling right here, we really are knackered.