Salt and corrosion

March books read

* The Horologicon - Mark Forsyth (2012)
( Read more... )

* Malice - Keigo Higashino (1996) (Trans. Alexander O. Smith, 2014)
( Read more... )

* KNITSONIK: Stranded Colourwork Sourcebook - Felicity Ford (2014)
( Read more... )

* 1974: Le livre illustré de ceux qui sont nés cette année-là! - Adrien Servent (2015)
( Read more... )

I also started a new Cartland during the month and didn't get back to it. I know you'll find this hard to believe, f-list, but it was boring. I mean, the hero was called John. John. Remember that time there was a hero called Norvin? Those were the days. John was described as looking like a leopard, which would make him... spotty? That can't be what she meant.



( Answers to 1974 quiz )

I read something the other day about language death, and how it's not just languages and words that are dying: it's also number systems. Not everyone uses base-10 like we do. For example, a tribe in Papua New Guinean has a septivigesimal (base-27) number system. I'd be 1B years old if I lived with them. So young!

And so to this week's thing of the 100 random things:

2. Tea bags
At some point in the mid-1980s, a tea company had a competition. Like a golden ticket in a Wonka bar, they hid a symbol in the label of a tea bag. My grandfather and I whiled away a rainy weekend afternoon pulling tags off every tea bag in my grandmother's new box. We didn't win, and my grandmother was very cross when she found that each of her tea bags had string that wasn't attached to anything. I don't remember what the prize we didn't win was, but it surely wasn't as good as this:


(From http://www.luxuo.com/most-expensive/tea-bag.html)

That would be a tea bag studded with 280 diamonds, valued at $12,000, awarded as a prize in a different competition. Runners-up won a teapot and a year's supply of tea, which, frankly, seems much more useful than a diamond-studded tea-bag. Perhaps they should have put the diamonds on the teapot instead. Or could you take the diamonds off and have them set in something, then make a nice cup of tea with the plain bag? Or, or, could you make a cup of tea with the diamond bag, then take the diamonds off, just so you could say you've drunk diamond tea? Hmmm. What would *you* do with a diamond tea bag?

The filter paper on tea bags is made from abacá, the 'leafstalk of Philippine bananas also known as Manila hemp'. Thanks, Wikipedia.

Next week: Pears.

There's a meme going round at the moment in which you enter your LiveJournal user name into a box and it generates an analysis of your journal content: whether the writing has a masculine or feminine basis, whether it deals with the past, present or future, and other stuff like that. So I did the meme - don't worry, I'll spare you the whole result - and discovered that my 'general message is distinguished by verbosity', which is a fair cop. I was more surprised to find that it analysed my writing style as predominantly male. I'd always thought the way I write was quite obviously female, but perhaps that's because I know I'm female. Although, reading a bit more about it, the gender basis is determined by counting the occurrences of certain words - 'and' is counted as female and (ha!) 'the' as male - so I'm not sure that I'd take that to be wholly reliable.

June 30 was the end of the financial year here (happy new year!), so I've been busy all day doing payroll stuff. How much do I hate my payroll software, the stupidly named Payroll Pro Professional? This time last year, I spent half a day on the phone, pretty much equally divided between being on hold and fruitlessly trying to explain that the payment summaries for a handful of my employees weren't printing correctly (in fact, weren't printing at all). In the end I gave up and ordered some stationery from the Tax Office and wrote them by hand. This year, I realised the (updated) software was doing the same thing, so I saved myself a lot of heartache and wrote the problem half-dozen out straight away using the left-over stationery from last year. So take that, Payroll Pro Professional!

Why does my Italian-English dictionary think that I may need to translate "heroin" but not "seahorse"? That's making certain assumptions about my lifestyle that I don't feel a dictionary is qualified to make. Hmph.

Right now, I'm reading a book called The Third Heaven Conspiracy by Giulio Leoni. It's a cosy little mystery novel about murder and intrigue in the Church in fourteenth century Florence, and hot on the killer's trail is the sleuth... Dante. That's right: the poet Dante. Fantastic.

What random historical person do you think could have solved mysteries in their spare time? Personally, I'm waiting for Genghis Khan, PI.

Imagine this scene: two people are running for a bus or driving up to a green light, only to miss it. If those people are any two members of my family, they will invariably have the following conversation:

Person 1: Too late ...
Person 2: ... she cried as she waved her wooden leg in the air.

After thirty odd years of hearing this, it occurred to me recently that it's really quite an odd thing to say.

( Of wooden legs )

Thinking about that reminded me of something my grandmother used to say, which I loved but haven't heard for ages:

Person 1: What are you doing?
Person 2: Making a wingwong for a goose's bridle.

( Of wingwongs )

What family sayings do you have?

The Gloom has been upon me these last few weeks, rendering me incapable of writing anything but lists of Things That Annoy Me (No. 1: “Impact” as a verb). My wellbeing has been further upset by a sudden welter of small but annoying ailments: my winter cough, a sore wrist, a gammy knee, my usual sense of general inadequacy and an eye infection that has kept me exiled from the computer to avoid any strain. Poor, miserable, Eeyore-me. However the gloomy weather has started in earnest and I can now wallow in my disgruntledness to my heart’s content.

I recently heard an interview with Mark Latham (a politician and possible – likely? – next Prime Minister, for the benefit of non-Australian readers), in which he channelled the spirit of my late grandmother and told her favourite joke. Asked what he thought of someone calling him some unpleasant name, he answered, “I don’t care, as long as they don’t call me late for dinner.” How often did I hear that as a child?

“I’ll call you when I want to be picked up.”
“As long as you don’t call me late for dinner!”

Other favourite sayings of my grandmother that I haven’t heard in a long time:

• On being ignored by a friend in public: “Look at her with her head in the air like a snake.” This was usually said with some venom (ahem), but I’ve just realised my mother says it too, with amusement.


• On being asked what she was doing or what something was: “(I’m making) a wingwong for a goose’s bridle.”


• On seeing someone (usually my grandfather) get up early and come into her kitchen still bleary-eyed and half-asleep: “Look out, here comes creeping Jesus.” That would be a great name for an alt-country band.