If through some chance you’ve missed that pathetic Tim Horton “Roll Up the Rim to Win” story coming out of St Jerome, Quebec (still developing at this writing), here are the bullets so far:
- Ten-year old girl finds discarded Tim Horton contest coffee cup in school garbage can; can’t roll up the rim herself so gets help from a 12-year old friend;
- Cup is not only a winner, it’s a winner of one of the 30 grand prizes, a Toyota Rav-4 SUV that tilts the valuemeter at some $29,000;
- 10-year old’s Dad was first to the school when it was discovered the girls had found a winning cup. At last report, he was the person in possession of the cup;
- Parents of both kids have gone to war for a share of the prize; teacher at the school comes forward, claims to be the one who purchased – and tossed out – the cup, but demands a share of the prize;
- Tim Hortons corporate keeps their position real simple: they’ll give the prize (or the optional $25,000 cash) to whoever brings the cup through their door.
The story blew nationwide before you could look up “morons” in your Petit Robert. The extent of the coverage caused the father of the ten-year old – who at first said he’d share (but didn’t say 50-50) some of the prize with the 12-year old’s family – to rescind the offer and essentially told the 12-year old’s parents to go to hell. They had taken the story to a Montreal radio station “to determine their legal position” and so triggered the media torrent.
(I know that when I’m looking for information about how to write a radio news story, I go first to my lawyer, so seeking legal information from an on-air radio personality seems a perfectly logical quid pro quo, pro bono, habeus corpus, caveat emptor, habemus papum… but ego digresse, maximus.)
I’ve been musing (unamusedly, I hasten to add) about this whole thing, and first had to get past the thought that this is an absolutely perfect benchmark to forever-after define the relatively new word, “clusterf*ck” **.
** Good old Google has its etymology: “Marine slang -- A clusterf*ck was any group of Marines big enough to draw enemy fire, or several Marines close enough together to be wounded by the same incoming round. More generically, a clusterf*ck was something that was all screwed up, ie "That operation was a giant clusterf*ck!" Whenever three or more Marines gathered in the open, talking or working on something, somebody was sure to call out "clusterf*ck!" and one or more of the guys would walk away.”
But to me, this whole mess all seems to come back to, “What the devil does it teach our kids?”
Yes, $25,000 is a lot of money. But is it fair compensation for the loss of goodwill and crushing the sense of school community spirit in this little corner of St Jerome?
I will not be at all surprised to read, for example, that the ten and 12-year olds have already each been instructed by their parents to avoid contact with one other, in much the same way as a cabinet minister will plead, “I’m not going to comment on a matter that is before the courts”, (usually uttered by a cabinet minister who has him or herself come under investigation for some kind of impropriety).
I would also not be surprised to read that the school has whipped that teacher away from the school and strongly advised him not to put his face in front of the media. (What’s the French for “Cause you’ll look like a complete jerk!”?)
So, here’s my take:
To the teacher: You didn’t “lose” the cup; you threw it away. You’re not even in the picture. You are the weakest link. Go home.
To the parents of the 10-year old: Good going Dad, you beat Other Dad to the school and managed to become the holder of the cup. But it’s completely found money and had your daughter not been helped by her 12-year old friend, that cup right now’d be quietly rotting in whatever landfill receives St Jerome’s garbage. And Tim’s will give you cash in lieu of a prize. If I had the power, I would make you split it right down the middle.
To the parents of the 12-year old: Play nice. Under Québec law, possession trumps almost anything unless what you possess is stolen. You lost the race, so anything you gain is going to have to come from the goodwill of 10-year-old’s parents. And you’re fast peeing that away.
To both sets of parents: Once you’ve banked your cash – each couple of you – pick your kid’s favourite subject / classroom in their school. If it’s the band, buy $2,500 worth of instruments; if it’s the library, buy them a quartet of internet-enabled workstations or however many $2,500 will buy; if it’s drama, buy them a $2,500 video recording and playback system so they can record and critique each other; if it’s phys-ed, pick your sport and buy a poopload of new equipment for the department. (“Poopload”, by the way, is metric for $2,500 worth.) Use your imaginations, fergawdssake! End result: you each have $10,000 banked, and the school is $5,000 worth of your generosity richer, none of which would have been possible had your children not gone dumpster diving in the school just a couple short days ago.
And as a purely practical aside, has anyone, I wonder, considered how swiftly $25,000 is going to vanish (because, to date, three separate lawyers have descended on the fracas). Is that worth driving one or two permanent rifts through the heart of this community? (Here’s a free tip: The correct answer is “No”.)
PS… Since I’ve just saved you all a whack of legal fees, each of you reduce your deposits by $500 and mail me a cheque for $1,000. I’ll send you the particulars.
- -
Trekkies have taken over the Government of Canada!
At work recently, I received a directive related to a new priority in the Department. Brief background: US President George W Bush recently approved a contract placing responsibility for management (and security) at six seaports of entry into the US into the hands of a Dubai-headquartered company. Not to be outdone, our department has determined there is a Canadian angle to this story:
“We have received a new request to keep an eye out for anything related to the Port of Vancouver Terminal and the United Arab Emirates. A state-owned Dubai company is contemplating purchasing six major ports around the United States including the Port of Vancouver Terminal. The federal link is the grain that comes and goes and passes through the Terminal is a federal responsibility. Federal jurisdiction encompasses industries of national importance including port operations and longshoring plus industries declared by Parliament to be for the general advantage of Canada such as grain handling.”
Now, hilarity aside over the mysteries of a transportation flow reminiscent of The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “comes and goes and passes through the Terminal” (talking of Michelangelo?), the larger issue to my warped mind is the possibility that grain could be a security threat!
Which, as any Trekkie knows, is the very linchpin to the premise of one of the few episodes of Star Trek - the Original Series that is played for laughs: The Trouble with Tribbles, wherein a disguised Klingon, in an effort to sabotage the planned colonization of Sherman’s Planet, poisons an entire shipment of quadrotriticale seed grain. (The episode is also one of the only mentions of Canada in the series, because it was in Canada where the world’s first serious research into triticale, an enormously high-yield wheat hybrid, was undertaken at the University of Manitoba.)
“Quadrotriticale is a four grain hybrid of wheat and rye. Its root grain, triticale, can trace its origin all the way back to 20th century Canada...” (Mr Spock, in the episode)
And for real trivia nuts, the first part of Kirk’s line in the same episode, “Who put the Tribbles in the quadrotriticale, and what was in the grain that killed them?” is precisely the same meter as “Who put the overalls in Mrs Murphy’s Chowder?” (“triticale” is pronounced TRIT-uh-KAY-lee).
But don’t just take my word for it:
WHO PUT THE TRIBBLES IN THE QUADROTRITICALE?"
(to the tune of "Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy's Chowder?")
by Jean Lamb
Chorus:
"Who put the tribbles in the quadrotriticale?"
Nobody spoke, so we interrogated daily.
It's a Klingon trick, it's true,
And we'll lick the clique that threw
The tribbles in the quadrotriticale.
Verse the firste:
We were down on Sherman's Planet just about a week ago,
And our gallant crew decided to put on a show.
The Science Staff brought down a bin with seeds of a new strain—
Its fruitfulness would bring the rival Klingons lots of pain.
Mr. Spock, he opened it, and blushed a pure clear green,
For where the precious grain was, only tribbles could be seen.
The captain, he got screaming mad, his eyes were bulging out!
He got on Communications, and loudly he did shout:
(Chorus)
Verse the seconde:
Mr. Spock, he nodded grim, and said he had to then.
Then he started looking for a man called Cyrano.
Uhura picked up one of them, and it started purring fine;
Then she walked by a bureaucrat and it began to whine.
The Klingon spy confessed at length, then pleaded for the fuzz.
Even Federation jail was better than a tribble's buzz!
Mr. Spock let Cyrano Jones out of his makeshift jail,
Picked up his synthesizer, and it began to wail:
(Chorus)
Verse the thirde and the laste:
Now the tribbles have a home across the leap of time,
While littering the corridors of Station Deep Space Nine.
Worf is angry and frustrated, till he's almost sick,
And Quark is offering customers Roast Tribble On A Stick.
The Chronocops are wondering if all is truly well,
So Sisko takes his refuge in the phrase, "Don't ask, don't tell!"
When Klingon ships arrive to conquer where the beasties dwell,
They flee in panic to avoid this awful Tribble Hell!
(Chorus)
(Flourish and exeunt)
Sleep tight tonight, the Government of Canada is awake.
Keeping our grain safe from Klingons.
- -
It was fun while it lasted. (Another Bryson footnote)
If you, like me, were among those who enjoyed a meal or two of New Zealand orange roughy sometime about the mid-1980s, count yourself lucky, because it’s likely not an experience we’ll be repeating any time soon.
In my reading of Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, I just finished a section of his “life on earth” chapters that makes a pretty compelling – and for me shocking – case for how badly we are managing our ocean-borne natural resources, especially its life forms. Not surprisingly, he touches on Newfoundland cod as a measure of how spectacularly we can deplete a resource once thought to be impossible to diminish. (As visitors to Algonquin Park’s Pioneer Logging Exhibit Museum can affirm, he could have written the same about Algonquin Park white pine, but I digress.)
New Zealand orange roughy is (hopefully “is” – although that verb tense could also possibly be “was”) a fish found only in the waters off the Kiwi and Australian coasts. As Bryson notes, in the 1970s, it was discovered to be delicious, and it was discovered to exist “in large numbers”. Great. So far, so good. But as Bryson notes, “In no time at all, fishing fleets were hauling in 40,000 metric tons of roughy a year”.
Then the marine biologists entered the picture and made “alarming” discoveries. A roughy, it turns out, is an unbelievably long-lived fish, with a truly astonishing life span of 150 years or thereabouts. This evolutionary adaptation is due to the fact they live in extremely resource-poor waters. But the real kicker (at least for the unfortunate roughy) is that in a self-managing evolutionary consequence they also typically spawn only once in a lifetime. By the time the biologists’ message got out to the commercial fishing fleets, it was already too late. As Bryson notes, sadly, even with immediate and exceedingly careful management it will be decades before the roughy population recovers, “if they ever do”.
And continuing with the Trekkie theme, as I read the foregoing in Bryson, I couldn’t help but think of the Star Trek Original Series episode whose plot was built around the threatened extinction of this species:
http://www.70disco.com/startrek/horta.htm
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We need a new term in the lexicon. And given the explosion in popularity of home renovation and decorating programs on TV, this is one that could catch on. Just remember where you first heard it:
DIY-do (pronounced DOO-ey DOO):
Definition: the sh*t in which a do-it-yourselfer finds yourself after realizing you’ve embarked on a home project that should have been contracted out to a professional.
Not surprisingly, I have an example. (Although in hindsight, “DIY-do” is probably being overly critical. But it did take the intercession of a professional – in this case a plumber – to discover the problem I was experiencing.)
We are in the process of finishing up a relatively minor redecoration of our half bathroom. “We” needs to be qualified. I am doing the guy things – tearing out the old light fixtures, towel rack and toilet paper dispenser and either installing new ones or re-installing old ones after the repainting is done. My wife is the family design specialist so she has selected the paint colours and done all the wall patching, sanding, surface preparation and priming required before applying the new colour to the walls.
Oh, and I get to clean up the paint tools.
As part of the preparation process, I removed the water tank from the back of the toilet in order to provide access to the bare wall behind it.
Whenever I do something like this, I never cease to be amazed at really how basic a fixture or appliance can be, even though it might seem at first to be a hideously complex system. Not to put too fine a point on it, but a household toilet is simply a device to channel water through a hole in the floor, in the process carrying off… well, you know perfectly well what it carries off. When it’s not being used for… well, you know perfectly well what it’s used for, it’s designed to perform two related functions: 1. hold a reservoir of water that can be discharged on demand (the “flush”); 2. keep a water dam trapped between the bowl and the hole in the floor to prevent the related aromas from the hole in the floor from coming back into one’s home. Everything else is just whistles and bells – a mechanism to shut off the water flow when your tank is full, a hydro-dynamic shape to channel the water in all sorts of artistic patterns around the inside of the bowl at various velocities, and the ability to do all this in attractively designed compatibility with the other appliances with which it shares floor space in the bathroom.
The water reservoir (that’d be the “tank”) has an opening on the bottom to which is connected a hose or pipe through which water enters, and a bigger opening, also on the bottom, through which water flows into the bowl. Obviously, your mission as a homeowner is to ensure that this one-way flow is hooked up correctly, and maintained without having the water take any unscheduled side trips – whether up (explosively into the air) or down (slowly or, God forbid, swiftly onto the floor or, even worse, under the floor).
To make a long story short, after I re-installed the tank, I discovered we were experiencing a maddeningly unstoppable leak of water. After four repetitions of the installation process, during which I replaced – after each new installation – some part that I suspected might be the culprit, the leak continued to manifest itself as a slow creeping wetness along the underside of the tank that gradually found the lowest point, built up to a shiny drip and fell with a “plonk” to the floor. In this case at the rate of about one drip every 30 seconds. Not enough to require a mop in the short term, but more than enough to wet the floor to an alarming degree when left undetected overnight, at which point it did indeed require a mop to clean up.
Finally, my patience and the threads on the plastic couplings both wearing a little thin, I called a plumber. After marveling at the array of new parts I had for him to choose from, he took about 15 minutes to discover, and inform me of same, a short hairline crack that began on the underside of the tank, turned the corner of its lower front edge and crept about an inch and a half up its face. “Hairline” here is being generous. This crack was considerably less than the width of a human hair. In fact, it was utterly invisible to the naked eye until the plumber shone some sort of blue or ultraviolet penlight beam on it that caused it to light up like a map of the Nile River. (Google is really sparse but not completely silent on “ultraviolet water leak detection”. How it works, I have no idea. That it works, I have no doubt. Certainly this particular leak source is something I never would have found myself.)
Oddly enough, he also found discolouration along the crack inside the tank, which apparently was indicative that it had been there for some time, probably as long as the tank has been in use (about two years). Why it only started its slow but relentless leak on my re-installing it, he could only speculate was due to the tightening down of the tank onto the bowl for a second time. He suggested it created just enough of a channel for the water to travel from inside the tank to out, something that obviously had not happened in the initial installation a couple years back.
So now we have a brand new tank, which actually comes with every last one of the same parts I had replaced and installed over the previous few days in the process of trying to get my slowly leaking tank to stop leaking. So now I’ve got a whole bunch of parts and gaskets, all of them brand new, left over. Replacing a toilet, anyone?
Kids! Don’t try this at home.
- -
My next entry should have a few anecdotes of what a week in Grenada feels like. And we’ll be doing the research first-hand.
(But if you’re expecting a review of what possum – apparently one of the island’s delicacies – tastes like, I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.)
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
It’s a funny world. At the same time as we focus more and more of our communications energy into railing about the loss of privacy and the muddying of the water that once much more clearly differentiated between “personal” information and “public” information, it seems to me that we are actually doing more and more to undermine that very same once-held-to-be-sacred distinction.
After all (he whined – it is the sub-title of this blog, after all), it wasn’t that long ago that a phone booth was where we went in public when we wanted to use the phone. It was a small room, because when people used the phone, usually they didn’t want their phone business aired to the world or (and this is already a vanished courtesy) they didn’t feel it was appropriate to inflict their personal matters into public airspace. Over the years, we’ve seen such spaces devolve from Dr Who’s fortress-like call space [http://tardis.org/] and Superman’s well-protected changeroom [http://saltandpeppers.net/supermantbsp.jpg], through more modern and less private phone “booths” [http://www.johnsangiovanni.com/Images/2001-07%20Europe/Cinque%20Terre/29-Cool-looking%20phone%20booth.JPG] to… well, to this: http://www.noelheikkinen.com/images/cellphone.jpg
In my recent commuter travels to and from work, I have overheard (and not by fine-tuning any eavesdropping radar – but simply because the conversation emanated from, at its farthest, a seat or two away) half a conversation ripping some hapless guy named Kevin because he asked “her” out on Friday night and not, as Kevin was apparently expected to do, the holder of the cellphone; a grisly description of “Mom’s” hernia operation the previous day; and the “bullet-points” of the communications strategy that would accompany “his” announcement two days hence. (Which may or may not have worked. Two days hence, I heard nothing anywhere in the media that bore even a remote resemblance to any of the points I overheard being described. In government circles, the absence of media attention is just as often, if not more so, considered a “success”. But I digress.)
It must be the curmudgeon in me. Because despite the fact that I do indeed own a cellphone, I almost invariably wait until I am back in the privacy of my car before using it to make a call. And Lord knows I more and more frequently wish these days that other people would too.
(Although I will confess to having made an occasional call while standing at the Loblaws meat counter with a shopping list that says “4 lb beef roast” to solicit further specifics. But even that I do in a very low voice… “Whaddya mean ‘pot roast’ and ‘oven roast’ are different… if you cook it in an oven, isn’t it automatically an oven roast???”)
- -
My wife and I were watching a TV news clip a few days back and the story was about the local morning rush-hour traffic impact of a huge rolling convoy of farm tractors in the city to help make the case that farmers – grain and oilseed farmers in particular – need more money. At one point, one of their spokesmen was explaining to a reporter that they (the farmers) felt they needed to bring their message directly to the Parliamentarians in Ottawa because most reporters they dealt with “don’t know the difference between a bale of hay and a bale of straw”.
My wife and I looked at each other.
I think we each expected the other to say, “Oh c’mon, everyone knows that! It’s…” and then provide the answer, quickly snicker and nod, each thus grateful for not having had to reveal an appalling ignorance of farming and bale assembly to the other.
Unfortunately, after a brief silence, we discovered that if this indeed is the baseline measure by which one acquires either an “informed” or “ignorant” label when it comes to farming, then I’m sad to say we’re both ignorant about the profession.
(GoogleGoogleGoogle)
This gets quickly fascinating. It’s a distinction that has actually been used in no less a medium than the New York Times to characterize Democrats with an awareness of rural issues:
“So Democrats need to give a more prominent voice to Middle American, wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, beer-guzzling, Bible-toting centrists. (They can tote The Times, too, in a plain brown wrapper.) For a nominee who could lead the Democrats to victory, think of John Edwards, Bill Richardson or Evan Bayh, or anyone who knows the difference between straw and hay.” (NYT November 6, 2004, “Time to Get Religion”, By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF)
But much to my relief, it’s not a blazingly obvious difference. And just to prove that (and also to prove that the Internet has at least one of absolutely everything), here’s a pretty authoritative sounding explanation from a blog on which there was actually a commentary and discussion under the title, “Straw vs Hay”:
“I’m sure I’ve had this conversation at least twice: what is the difference between straw and hay? I finally looked it up, and I think I’ve been calling a lot of stuff hay that is in fact straw. Huh.
Straw: The stems or stalks (esp. dry and separated by threshing) of certain cereals, chiefly wheat, barley, oats, and rye. Used for many purposes, e.g. as litter and as fodder for cattle, as filling for bedding, as thatch, also plaited or woven as material for hats, beehives, etc.
Hay: Grass cut or mown, and dried for use as fodder; formerly (as still sometimes) including grass fit for mowing, or preserved for mowing.
And now I know.”
(The only difference between me and this writer is his firm assertion at the end, “And now I know”. Me? I’m still not so sure.)
But unlike the London Daily Telegraph, at least I know the difference between a hay bale and a corn-rick (from the same blog):
“Don’t worry, you’re in good company. The great Daily Telegraph (London) got it wrong 3 or 4 years ago with a front page picture of a cornfield with bales of ‘hay’.”
Baby Duck: More than just rantin’ and whinin’. Ensuring a continuing awareness of the differences between the rural agrarian economy and the urban industrial complex.
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Even if you don’t immediately recognize the name Dan Brown, no doubt you have encountered one or more of his books many times in the past five years when you passed the front door of just about any bookstore in the land: The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, Digital Fortress.
So, Memo to Mr Brown:
Dan, you may want to consider that, in light of the evidence cited in this brief portion of a story that appeared on the CBC website late in February, your defence might arguably be characterized as… well, not to put too fine a point it, “weak”:
“The author of The Da Vinci Code is in British High Court on Monday, accused of intellectual property theft.
The lawsuit by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, accuses Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown of stealing their themes and ideas for his blockbuster novel…
...
The name of a major character in Brown's book, Sir Leigh Teabing, could be an anagram of Leigh and Baigent.”
Baigent, Leigh… Leigh Teabing
“Could be” an anagram???
Geez, Dan, you’re the author of the flaming Da Vinci Code! Could you not have been a bit more imaginative? Claim it was a tribute, for heaven’s sake, not theft of intellectual property. (In my courtroom, having read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, I would begin and end the trial with the opinion that even to call it “intellectual property” is oxymoronic to the extreme. And that’s also why I could never be a judge. But I digress.) But Dan, really. Having wallowed in the “Where’s Waldo?” writing romp that “The Da Vinci Code” must have been, had you just sort of assumed that no one would pick up on your cleverness, in the mistaken belief that anagramming is a lost art, on a de-coding par with hieroglyphics?
Maybe you’re thinking that when it comes to concealing real names and identities, the absolute apex of subtlety is a technique exemplified by this Monty Python sketch:
The North Minehead Bye-election
[Knock] Door opens.
Landlady (Terry Jones): Hello, Mr and Mrs Johnson?
Mr Johnson (Eric Idle): Yes, that's right. Yes.
Landlady: Oh, come on in. Excuse me not shaking hands. I've just been putting a bit of lard on the cat's boils.
(Door closes)
Johnson: Thank you.…
Landlady: Well you must be dying for a cup of tea.
Johnson:Well, wouldn't say no, long as it's warm and wet.
Landlady: Well come on in the lounge, I'm just going to serve afternoon tea.
Johnson: Very nice.
Landlady: Come on in, Mr and Mrs Johnson and meet Mr and Mrs Phillips.
Mr Phillips (Graham Chapman): Good afternoon.
Johnson: Good afternoon.
Landlady: It's their third time here; we can't keep you away, can we? And over there is Mr Hilter.
(In the corner are three German generals in full Nazi uniform,poring over a map.)
Hilter (Cleese with heavy German accent): Ach. Ha! Gut time, er, gut afternoon.
Landlady: Oho, planning a little excursion, eh, Mr Hilter?
Hilter: Ja, ja, ve haff a little... (to Palin) was ist Abweise bewegen?
Bimmler (Michael Palin, also with German accent): Hiking.
Hilter: Ah yes, ve make a little *hike* for Bideford.
Johnson: Ah yes. Well, you'll want the A39. Oh, no, you've got the wrong map there. This is Stalingrad. You want the Ilfracombe and Barnstaple section.
Hilter: Ah! Stalingrad! Ha ha ha, Heinri...Reginald, you haff ze wrong map here, you silly old leg-before-vicket English person.
Bimmler: I'm sorry mein Fuhrer, mein (cough) mein Dickie old chum.
Landlady: Oh, lucky Mr Johnson pointed that out. You wouldn't have had much fun in Stalingrad, would you? Ha ha.
[Stony silence]
I said, you wouldn't have had much fun in Stalingrad, would you?
Hilter: Not. Much. Fun… in Stalingrad. No.
Landlady: Oh I'm sorry. I didn't introduce you. This is Ron. Ron Vibbentrop.
Johnson: Oh, not Von Ribbentrop, eh?
Vibbentrop (Graham Chapman, with German Accent): Nein! Nein! Oh. Ha ha. Different other chap. I in Somerset am being born. Von Ribbentrop is born Gotterdammerstrasse 46, Dusseldorf Vest 8..... So they say!
Landlady: And this is the quiet one, Heinrich Bimmler.
Bimmler: Pleased to meet you, squire. I also am not of Minehead being born, but I in your Peterborough Lincolnshire vas given birth to. But am staying in Peterborough Lincolnshire house all time during vor, due to jolly old running sores, und vas unable to go in ze streets or to go visit football matches or go to Nuremberg. Ha ha. Am retired vindow cleaner and pacifist, without doing war crimes. Oh...and am glad England vin Vorld Cup. Bobby Charlton. Martin Peters. And eating I am lots of chips und fish und hole in ze toads and Dundee cakes on Piccadilly Line, don't you know old chap, vot! And I vas head of Gestapo for ten years.
[Hilter elbows him in the ribs.] Ah! Five years!
[Hilter elbows him again, harder.] Nein! No! Oh. NOT head of Gestapo AT ALL! I vas not, I make joke! (laughs)
Landlady: Oh, Mr Bimmler. You do have us on! (Telephone rings) Oh excuse me. I'd better get that.
Johnson: How long are you down here for, Mr Hilter, just the fortnight?
Hilter: Vot you ask zat for, are you a spy? Get on against ze wall, Britischer Pig. You are going to die!
Bimmler: Take it easy, Dickie old chum!
Vibbentrop: He's a bit on edge, Mr Johnson, he hasn't slept since 1945.
Hilter: Shut your cake-hole, you Nazi!
Vibbentrop: Cool it, Fuhrer cat!
Bimmler: Ha ha, ze fun we haff!
Johnson: Haven't I seen you on the television?
Hilter, Vibbentrop, Bimmler (hastily): Nicht. Nein. No.
Johnson: Simon Dee show, or was it Frosty?
Hilter, Vibbentrop, Bimmler: Nein. No.
Landlady: Telephone, Mr Hilter. It's Mr McGoering from the Bell and Compasses. He says he's found a place where you can hire bombers by the hour...?
Hilter: If he opens his big mouth again, it's Lapschig time!
Bimmler: Shut up! Ha ha, hire bombers! He's a joker, zat Scottish person.
Vibbentrop: Good old Norman!
Landlady (to Johnson): He's on the phone the whole time now.
Johnson: In business, is he?
Bimmler: Soon, baby!
Landlady: Of course it's his big day Thursday. They've been planning it for months.
Johnson: What's happening Thursday then?
Landlady: Well it's the North Minehead bye-election. Mr Hilter's standing as the National Bocialist. He's got wonderful plans for Minehead!
Johnson: Like what?
Landlady: Well, for a start he wants to annex Poland.
Johnson: North Minehead's Conservative, isn't it?
Landlady: Well, yes, he gets a lot of people at his rallies.
(Short scene cut: huge crowds outside going "Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil.")
Hilter: I am not a racialist, but...und zis is a big but...the National Bocialist party says zat das (stream of German).
Bimmler: Mr Hitler (Hilter slaps him) ...Hilter says historically Taunton is a part of Minehead already!
Hilter: Und der Minehead ist nicht die letze (stream of German)...in die Welt!
Crowd: Sieg Heil.
(Cut to interviews in the street)
Yokel (Jones): Oi don't loike the sound of these 'ere Boncentration Bamps.
Woman (Idle): Well, I gave him my baby to kiss, and he bit it in the head!
Upper class (Cleese): Well, I think he'd do a lot of good to the Stock Exchange.
Gumby (Palin): I FINK ‘E'S GOT BEAUT’FUL LEGS!
Conservative (Chapman): (droning) Well... well... as the Conservative candidate I just drone on and on and on and on without letting anyone else get a word in edgeways, until I start to froth at the mouth and fall over backwards. Ooo-aaahhh. (THUD)
Hilter – Hitler; Baigent – Teabing; Sweet potato – yam.
- -
An Olympic footnote 1: Canada’s February 22 Olympic men’s hockey loss to Russia, by yet another 2-0 score – which dispatched Canada’s NHLers to the bus terminal sign labeled “Home” – was the overwhelming headline-dominator on the day after Canadian women also won two gold and two silver medals. The media handwringing began with only minutes left in the third period. A number of stories picked the “turning point of the game” as Russia’s first goal (rather disappointingly discounting my view that it was, in fact, the opening face-off). It was scored while a Canadian player was in the penalty box.
Now if you were in charge of the “Divine Retribution” file for a day, who would you have put in the penalty box to bitingly underline the game’s “turning point”?
You win! (Yep… Todd Bertuzzi.)
An Olympic footnote 2-A. When the Canadian men’s curling team, a Newfoundland team, played for the gold medal on February 24, the provincial government declared a half day holiday so the entire province could watch the draw. Perhaps sensing the tidal wave of support radiating from home, the Newfoundlanders swept (hee hee) their opponents 10-4 (due in large part to one six-point end). And I didn’t hear anyone complain at all about the lack of “swingy” ice.
An Olympic footnote 2-B. And did you catch the highlight reel for the gold medal women’s curling match between Sweden and Switzerland? If not, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: It came down to the last rock of the final end and required the Swedish skip to finesse a perfect and very difficult double-takeout to win (not only to remove the two Swiss rocks, but also to leave her own in the rings).
Now, here we are many days later and, oddly enough, I have yet to read a word that she was able to do it because of the European familiarity with “straight ice”. She just made one hell of a shot – brought out her very best at the exact moment she needed it to take home a gold medal. And when her rock stayed in the rings after hammering out the two Swiss stones, she burst into tears of joy. And that’s what the Olympics is all about, Charlie Brown.
- -
And finally, a brief book review – something you don’t often read here, but once in a while I will encounter something that is just too good to keep to myself.
Somewhere in the course of my secondary school education, I took a wrong turn and wound up in four successive years of Latin while my scholastic peers were being immersed in the earth sciences and environmental science, leaving me to regret much later in life that I never, in all my high schooling, took a course in geology or biology, and only managed one introductory course each of chemistry, physics and a course in which I was among a population of test-year students, space science. (The absence of a more in-depth exposure to high school science had to do with my having been an air force brat. As Dad was transferred to different RCAF bases, I was parachuted into schools run under different provincial curricula. In consequence, when I left the Quebec system after Grade 10 to come to the Ontario system for Grade 11, I was absent the prerequisites to move into the science stream in my new school.)
(The most consistent benefit of my four years of Latin is that I tend to recreate quite happily among the grids of cryptic crossword puzzles. That, and the seemingly endless amusement of my now teenaged offspring at hearing that “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi” translates literally as “Always Where Under Where” – you gotta take your praise where you can get it when you’re the parent of a teenager.)
All of which is to say that I really love it when a book comes along that explains science to me in a way that is both understandable and enjoyable to read. Such a book is Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. I am only halfway through it and cannot recall ever having had so much fun reading about the sciences ranging from the very big (the suspected distance between Earth and the limits of the known universe) to the very small (the variety of particles that actually make up an atom), with stops along the way to consider the very incomprehensible (quantum physics).
What Bryson has done is build a remarkable account, by way of a series of biographies of some amazing and heroic people, of how we came to where we are in our understanding of, for example, a basic scientific building block like the Periodic Table of the Elements. Occasionally, a “biography” in fact might be no more than a single paragraph, but its subject is always a key player – and often as not an unacknowledged key player – in the evolution of our present body of scientific knowledge.
But what makes “A Short History…” especially engaging is Bryon’s wonderful sense of humour, and his ready admission that you can’t possibly be expected to understand some of the often wildly baffling theories that define modern science. His second-last sentence in the chapter on quarks, for example, is this: “The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws we don’t truly understand.”
And take these Bryson citations on describing someone’s first likely reaction to that particularly complex wing of physics that requires you to accept that an electron is “at once everywhere and nowhere”:
“Bohr once commented that a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said. Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: ‘Don’t try.’”
Bryson also provides some terrific examples to help one grasp just how incomprehensible something incomprehensible is. For example, he says that to get a picture of just how many particles are in “Avogadro’s number”, a chemistry constant (6.02 X 10 to the 23rd power) that allows scientists to measure the size and weight of atoms, consider this: it’s the number of popcorn kernels that would be required to cover the entire United States to a depth of nine miles. Now you still might not understand _how_ big that number is, even with that picture in mind, but at least now you most assuredly understand that it is, indeed, a very big number. And that’s all Bryson sets out to do.
Even at only halfway through, I have already encountered a few surprises. For example, the science of plate tectonics and continental drift, which I just assumed to be probably a couple hundred years along, has only been accepted as geological fact within my lifetime, dating in fact to a meeting of the Royal Society in London, England in 1964 (when the Beatles were rocking the walls of Liverpool’s Cavern Club) when, reports Bryson, “suddenly… everyone was a convert”.
Read this book. In fact, buy this book because I suspect you’ll want to go back to it more than once.
À la prochaine.
After all (he whined – it is the sub-title of this blog, after all), it wasn’t that long ago that a phone booth was where we went in public when we wanted to use the phone. It was a small room, because when people used the phone, usually they didn’t want their phone business aired to the world or (and this is already a vanished courtesy) they didn’t feel it was appropriate to inflict their personal matters into public airspace. Over the years, we’ve seen such spaces devolve from Dr Who’s fortress-like call space [http://tardis.org/] and Superman’s well-protected changeroom [http://saltandpeppers.net/supermantbsp.jpg], through more modern and less private phone “booths” [http://www.johnsangiovanni.com/Images/2001-07%20Europe/Cinque%20Terre/29-Cool-looking%20phone%20booth.JPG] to… well, to this: http://www.noelheikkinen.com/images/cellphone.jpg
In my recent commuter travels to and from work, I have overheard (and not by fine-tuning any eavesdropping radar – but simply because the conversation emanated from, at its farthest, a seat or two away) half a conversation ripping some hapless guy named Kevin because he asked “her” out on Friday night and not, as Kevin was apparently expected to do, the holder of the cellphone; a grisly description of “Mom’s” hernia operation the previous day; and the “bullet-points” of the communications strategy that would accompany “his” announcement two days hence. (Which may or may not have worked. Two days hence, I heard nothing anywhere in the media that bore even a remote resemblance to any of the points I overheard being described. In government circles, the absence of media attention is just as often, if not more so, considered a “success”. But I digress.)
It must be the curmudgeon in me. Because despite the fact that I do indeed own a cellphone, I almost invariably wait until I am back in the privacy of my car before using it to make a call. And Lord knows I more and more frequently wish these days that other people would too.
(Although I will confess to having made an occasional call while standing at the Loblaws meat counter with a shopping list that says “4 lb beef roast” to solicit further specifics. But even that I do in a very low voice… “Whaddya mean ‘pot roast’ and ‘oven roast’ are different… if you cook it in an oven, isn’t it automatically an oven roast???”)
- -
My wife and I were watching a TV news clip a few days back and the story was about the local morning rush-hour traffic impact of a huge rolling convoy of farm tractors in the city to help make the case that farmers – grain and oilseed farmers in particular – need more money. At one point, one of their spokesmen was explaining to a reporter that they (the farmers) felt they needed to bring their message directly to the Parliamentarians in Ottawa because most reporters they dealt with “don’t know the difference between a bale of hay and a bale of straw”.
My wife and I looked at each other.
I think we each expected the other to say, “Oh c’mon, everyone knows that! It’s…” and then provide the answer, quickly snicker and nod, each thus grateful for not having had to reveal an appalling ignorance of farming and bale assembly to the other.
Unfortunately, after a brief silence, we discovered that if this indeed is the baseline measure by which one acquires either an “informed” or “ignorant” label when it comes to farming, then I’m sad to say we’re both ignorant about the profession.
(GoogleGoogleGoogle)
This gets quickly fascinating. It’s a distinction that has actually been used in no less a medium than the New York Times to characterize Democrats with an awareness of rural issues:
“So Democrats need to give a more prominent voice to Middle American, wheat-hugging, gun-shooting, Spanish-speaking, beer-guzzling, Bible-toting centrists. (They can tote The Times, too, in a plain brown wrapper.) For a nominee who could lead the Democrats to victory, think of John Edwards, Bill Richardson or Evan Bayh, or anyone who knows the difference between straw and hay.” (NYT November 6, 2004, “Time to Get Religion”, By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF)
But much to my relief, it’s not a blazingly obvious difference. And just to prove that (and also to prove that the Internet has at least one of absolutely everything), here’s a pretty authoritative sounding explanation from a blog on which there was actually a commentary and discussion under the title, “Straw vs Hay”:
“I’m sure I’ve had this conversation at least twice: what is the difference between straw and hay? I finally looked it up, and I think I’ve been calling a lot of stuff hay that is in fact straw. Huh.
Straw: The stems or stalks (esp. dry and separated by threshing) of certain cereals, chiefly wheat, barley, oats, and rye. Used for many purposes, e.g. as litter and as fodder for cattle, as filling for bedding, as thatch, also plaited or woven as material for hats, beehives, etc.
Hay: Grass cut or mown, and dried for use as fodder; formerly (as still sometimes) including grass fit for mowing, or preserved for mowing.
And now I know.”
(The only difference between me and this writer is his firm assertion at the end, “And now I know”. Me? I’m still not so sure.)
But unlike the London Daily Telegraph, at least I know the difference between a hay bale and a corn-rick (from the same blog):
“Don’t worry, you’re in good company. The great Daily Telegraph (London) got it wrong 3 or 4 years ago with a front page picture of a cornfield with bales of ‘hay’.”
Baby Duck: More than just rantin’ and whinin’. Ensuring a continuing awareness of the differences between the rural agrarian economy and the urban industrial complex.
- -
Even if you don’t immediately recognize the name Dan Brown, no doubt you have encountered one or more of his books many times in the past five years when you passed the front door of just about any bookstore in the land: The Da Vinci Code, Angels and Demons, Deception Point, Digital Fortress.
So, Memo to Mr Brown:
Dan, you may want to consider that, in light of the evidence cited in this brief portion of a story that appeared on the CBC website late in February, your defence might arguably be characterized as… well, not to put too fine a point it, “weak”:
“The author of The Da Vinci Code is in British High Court on Monday, accused of intellectual property theft.
The lawsuit by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, accuses Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown of stealing their themes and ideas for his blockbuster novel…
...
The name of a major character in Brown's book, Sir Leigh Teabing, could be an anagram of Leigh and Baigent.”
Baigent, Leigh… Leigh Teabing
“Could be” an anagram???
Geez, Dan, you’re the author of the flaming Da Vinci Code! Could you not have been a bit more imaginative? Claim it was a tribute, for heaven’s sake, not theft of intellectual property. (In my courtroom, having read “Holy Blood, Holy Grail”, I would begin and end the trial with the opinion that even to call it “intellectual property” is oxymoronic to the extreme. And that’s also why I could never be a judge. But I digress.) But Dan, really. Having wallowed in the “Where’s Waldo?” writing romp that “The Da Vinci Code” must have been, had you just sort of assumed that no one would pick up on your cleverness, in the mistaken belief that anagramming is a lost art, on a de-coding par with hieroglyphics?
Maybe you’re thinking that when it comes to concealing real names and identities, the absolute apex of subtlety is a technique exemplified by this Monty Python sketch:
The North Minehead Bye-election
[Knock] Door opens.
Landlady (Terry Jones): Hello, Mr and Mrs Johnson?
Mr Johnson (Eric Idle): Yes, that's right. Yes.
Landlady: Oh, come on in. Excuse me not shaking hands. I've just been putting a bit of lard on the cat's boils.
(Door closes)
Johnson: Thank you.…
Landlady: Well you must be dying for a cup of tea.
Johnson:Well, wouldn't say no, long as it's warm and wet.
Landlady: Well come on in the lounge, I'm just going to serve afternoon tea.
Johnson: Very nice.
Landlady: Come on in, Mr and Mrs Johnson and meet Mr and Mrs Phillips.
Mr Phillips (Graham Chapman): Good afternoon.
Johnson: Good afternoon.
Landlady: It's their third time here; we can't keep you away, can we? And over there is Mr Hilter.
(In the corner are three German generals in full Nazi uniform,poring over a map.)
Hilter (Cleese with heavy German accent): Ach. Ha! Gut time, er, gut afternoon.
Landlady: Oho, planning a little excursion, eh, Mr Hilter?
Hilter: Ja, ja, ve haff a little... (to Palin) was ist Abweise bewegen?
Bimmler (Michael Palin, also with German accent): Hiking.
Hilter: Ah yes, ve make a little *hike* for Bideford.
Johnson: Ah yes. Well, you'll want the A39. Oh, no, you've got the wrong map there. This is Stalingrad. You want the Ilfracombe and Barnstaple section.
Hilter: Ah! Stalingrad! Ha ha ha, Heinri...Reginald, you haff ze wrong map here, you silly old leg-before-vicket English person.
Bimmler: I'm sorry mein Fuhrer, mein (cough) mein Dickie old chum.
Landlady: Oh, lucky Mr Johnson pointed that out. You wouldn't have had much fun in Stalingrad, would you? Ha ha.
[Stony silence]
I said, you wouldn't have had much fun in Stalingrad, would you?
Hilter: Not. Much. Fun… in Stalingrad. No.
Landlady: Oh I'm sorry. I didn't introduce you. This is Ron. Ron Vibbentrop.
Johnson: Oh, not Von Ribbentrop, eh?
Vibbentrop (Graham Chapman, with German Accent): Nein! Nein! Oh. Ha ha. Different other chap. I in Somerset am being born. Von Ribbentrop is born Gotterdammerstrasse 46, Dusseldorf Vest 8..... So they say!
Landlady: And this is the quiet one, Heinrich Bimmler.
Bimmler: Pleased to meet you, squire. I also am not of Minehead being born, but I in your Peterborough Lincolnshire vas given birth to. But am staying in Peterborough Lincolnshire house all time during vor, due to jolly old running sores, und vas unable to go in ze streets or to go visit football matches or go to Nuremberg. Ha ha. Am retired vindow cleaner and pacifist, without doing war crimes. Oh...and am glad England vin Vorld Cup. Bobby Charlton. Martin Peters. And eating I am lots of chips und fish und hole in ze toads and Dundee cakes on Piccadilly Line, don't you know old chap, vot! And I vas head of Gestapo for ten years.
[Hilter elbows him in the ribs.] Ah! Five years!
[Hilter elbows him again, harder.] Nein! No! Oh. NOT head of Gestapo AT ALL! I vas not, I make joke! (laughs)
Landlady: Oh, Mr Bimmler. You do have us on! (Telephone rings) Oh excuse me. I'd better get that.
Johnson: How long are you down here for, Mr Hilter, just the fortnight?
Hilter: Vot you ask zat for, are you a spy? Get on against ze wall, Britischer Pig. You are going to die!
Bimmler: Take it easy, Dickie old chum!
Vibbentrop: He's a bit on edge, Mr Johnson, he hasn't slept since 1945.
Hilter: Shut your cake-hole, you Nazi!
Vibbentrop: Cool it, Fuhrer cat!
Bimmler: Ha ha, ze fun we haff!
Johnson: Haven't I seen you on the television?
Hilter, Vibbentrop, Bimmler (hastily): Nicht. Nein. No.
Johnson: Simon Dee show, or was it Frosty?
Hilter, Vibbentrop, Bimmler: Nein. No.
Landlady: Telephone, Mr Hilter. It's Mr McGoering from the Bell and Compasses. He says he's found a place where you can hire bombers by the hour...?
Hilter: If he opens his big mouth again, it's Lapschig time!
Bimmler: Shut up! Ha ha, hire bombers! He's a joker, zat Scottish person.
Vibbentrop: Good old Norman!
Landlady (to Johnson): He's on the phone the whole time now.
Johnson: In business, is he?
Bimmler: Soon, baby!
Landlady: Of course it's his big day Thursday. They've been planning it for months.
Johnson: What's happening Thursday then?
Landlady: Well it's the North Minehead bye-election. Mr Hilter's standing as the National Bocialist. He's got wonderful plans for Minehead!
Johnson: Like what?
Landlady: Well, for a start he wants to annex Poland.
Johnson: North Minehead's Conservative, isn't it?
Landlady: Well, yes, he gets a lot of people at his rallies.
(Short scene cut: huge crowds outside going "Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil. Sieg Heil.")
Hilter: I am not a racialist, but...und zis is a big but...the National Bocialist party says zat das (stream of German).
Bimmler: Mr Hitler (Hilter slaps him) ...Hilter says historically Taunton is a part of Minehead already!
Hilter: Und der Minehead ist nicht die letze (stream of German)...in die Welt!
Crowd: Sieg Heil.
(Cut to interviews in the street)
Yokel (Jones): Oi don't loike the sound of these 'ere Boncentration Bamps.
Woman (Idle): Well, I gave him my baby to kiss, and he bit it in the head!
Upper class (Cleese): Well, I think he'd do a lot of good to the Stock Exchange.
Gumby (Palin): I FINK ‘E'S GOT BEAUT’FUL LEGS!
Conservative (Chapman): (droning) Well... well... as the Conservative candidate I just drone on and on and on and on without letting anyone else get a word in edgeways, until I start to froth at the mouth and fall over backwards. Ooo-aaahhh. (THUD)
Hilter – Hitler; Baigent – Teabing; Sweet potato – yam.
- -
An Olympic footnote 1: Canada’s February 22 Olympic men’s hockey loss to Russia, by yet another 2-0 score – which dispatched Canada’s NHLers to the bus terminal sign labeled “Home” – was the overwhelming headline-dominator on the day after Canadian women also won two gold and two silver medals. The media handwringing began with only minutes left in the third period. A number of stories picked the “turning point of the game” as Russia’s first goal (rather disappointingly discounting my view that it was, in fact, the opening face-off). It was scored while a Canadian player was in the penalty box.
Now if you were in charge of the “Divine Retribution” file for a day, who would you have put in the penalty box to bitingly underline the game’s “turning point”?
You win! (Yep… Todd Bertuzzi.)
An Olympic footnote 2-A. When the Canadian men’s curling team, a Newfoundland team, played for the gold medal on February 24, the provincial government declared a half day holiday so the entire province could watch the draw. Perhaps sensing the tidal wave of support radiating from home, the Newfoundlanders swept (hee hee) their opponents 10-4 (due in large part to one six-point end). And I didn’t hear anyone complain at all about the lack of “swingy” ice.
An Olympic footnote 2-B. And did you catch the highlight reel for the gold medal women’s curling match between Sweden and Switzerland? If not, here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: It came down to the last rock of the final end and required the Swedish skip to finesse a perfect and very difficult double-takeout to win (not only to remove the two Swiss rocks, but also to leave her own in the rings).
Now, here we are many days later and, oddly enough, I have yet to read a word that she was able to do it because of the European familiarity with “straight ice”. She just made one hell of a shot – brought out her very best at the exact moment she needed it to take home a gold medal. And when her rock stayed in the rings after hammering out the two Swiss stones, she burst into tears of joy. And that’s what the Olympics is all about, Charlie Brown.
- -
And finally, a brief book review – something you don’t often read here, but once in a while I will encounter something that is just too good to keep to myself.
Somewhere in the course of my secondary school education, I took a wrong turn and wound up in four successive years of Latin while my scholastic peers were being immersed in the earth sciences and environmental science, leaving me to regret much later in life that I never, in all my high schooling, took a course in geology or biology, and only managed one introductory course each of chemistry, physics and a course in which I was among a population of test-year students, space science. (The absence of a more in-depth exposure to high school science had to do with my having been an air force brat. As Dad was transferred to different RCAF bases, I was parachuted into schools run under different provincial curricula. In consequence, when I left the Quebec system after Grade 10 to come to the Ontario system for Grade 11, I was absent the prerequisites to move into the science stream in my new school.)
(The most consistent benefit of my four years of Latin is that I tend to recreate quite happily among the grids of cryptic crossword puzzles. That, and the seemingly endless amusement of my now teenaged offspring at hearing that “Semper Ubi Sub Ubi” translates literally as “Always Where Under Where” – you gotta take your praise where you can get it when you’re the parent of a teenager.)
All of which is to say that I really love it when a book comes along that explains science to me in a way that is both understandable and enjoyable to read. Such a book is Bill Bryson’s “A Short History of Nearly Everything”. I am only halfway through it and cannot recall ever having had so much fun reading about the sciences ranging from the very big (the suspected distance between Earth and the limits of the known universe) to the very small (the variety of particles that actually make up an atom), with stops along the way to consider the very incomprehensible (quantum physics).
What Bryson has done is build a remarkable account, by way of a series of biographies of some amazing and heroic people, of how we came to where we are in our understanding of, for example, a basic scientific building block like the Periodic Table of the Elements. Occasionally, a “biography” in fact might be no more than a single paragraph, but its subject is always a key player – and often as not an unacknowledged key player – in the evolution of our present body of scientific knowledge.
But what makes “A Short History…” especially engaging is Bryon’s wonderful sense of humour, and his ready admission that you can’t possibly be expected to understand some of the often wildly baffling theories that define modern science. His second-last sentence in the chapter on quarks, for example, is this: “The upshot of all this is that we live in a universe whose age we can’t quite compute, surrounded by stars whose distances we don’t altogether know, filled with matter we can’t identify, operating in conformance with physical laws we don’t truly understand.”
And take these Bryson citations on describing someone’s first likely reaction to that particularly complex wing of physics that requires you to accept that an electron is “at once everywhere and nowhere”:
“Bohr once commented that a person who wasn’t outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn’t understand what had been said. Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: ‘Don’t try.’”
Bryson also provides some terrific examples to help one grasp just how incomprehensible something incomprehensible is. For example, he says that to get a picture of just how many particles are in “Avogadro’s number”, a chemistry constant (6.02 X 10 to the 23rd power) that allows scientists to measure the size and weight of atoms, consider this: it’s the number of popcorn kernels that would be required to cover the entire United States to a depth of nine miles. Now you still might not understand _how_ big that number is, even with that picture in mind, but at least now you most assuredly understand that it is, indeed, a very big number. And that’s all Bryson sets out to do.
Even at only halfway through, I have already encountered a few surprises. For example, the science of plate tectonics and continental drift, which I just assumed to be probably a couple hundred years along, has only been accepted as geological fact within my lifetime, dating in fact to a meeting of the Royal Society in London, England in 1964 (when the Beatles were rocking the walls of Liverpool’s Cavern Club) when, reports Bryson, “suddenly… everyone was a convert”.
Read this book. In fact, buy this book because I suspect you’ll want to go back to it more than once.
À la prochaine.
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