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 A tentative blog to test the temperature. |
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Ten years ago I was writing several blogs on various subjects - F1 motor racing, Music, Classic Cars, Great Romances and, most crushingly, a personal journal that included my thoughts on America, memories of England and Africa, opinion, humour, writing and anything else that occurred. It all became too much (I was attempting to update the journal every day) and I collapsed, exhausted and thoroughly disillusioned in the end. So this blog is indeed a Toe in the Water, a place to document my thoughts in and on WdC but with a determination not to get sucked into the blog whirlpool ever again. Here's hoping.     |
| Belief The hardest thing in the world is to believe in a thought process. It's experience that makes us truly believe. |
| Sometimes We Win The British are the most virtuous nation on earth. What is our national sport (the one we always win at)? Queueing. What is the first requirement to be able to queue? Patience. Patience is a virtue. The British are the most virtuous nation on earth. |
| The Road to Enlightenment There is little point in being of the same opinion as everyone else. Wherever there is consensus, raise your voice in favour of the unpopular view, always support the underdog, look for the clay feet of the winners. That way, you will never be far from the truth. |
| Thought for the Century If I'm incorrigible, where is everyone else? |
| Conversation First philosopher: "I think, therefore I am." Second philosopher: "You only think you think." |
| Being History I'm a child of the 20th Century - most of my life was lived in it. It seems quite reasonable to call it that too since that was how we thought of it. But today I heard a young person referring to it as "the nineteen hundreds." Talk about being suddenly relegated to history, consigned to a long ago and almost mythical time. I am devastated. |
| On Veggies The enigma of the swede has vexed me for many a long year. Eventually resorting to Google, I discovered that they are a type of turnip, just as I had suspected. But, much more interestingly, they are the result of the crossing of a turnip with a cabbage. I kid you not. It turns out that most of our vegetables are related and the result of cross breeding between each other. This particular family includes turnips, swedes, cabbages, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, kohlrabi, rutabaga (rocket to us Brits) and many others, some of which I've never heard of. And they have been happily interbreeding with each other from Roman times at least, producing the amazing variety of veggies we know so well. The swede is apparently a misnomer for it does not originate in Sweden. Nor does the sprout come from Belgium. They are just examples of the wonderful way we Brits manage to get the wrong end of the stick whenever forced to confront something foreign. Oddly, the parsnip has nothing to do with the turnip, in spite of the similarity of their names (-nip derives from the Old English "neep", a word meaning root and still used in Scotland). Parsnips and carrots are the snobs of the vegetable world having remained aloof from the rest and creating their own more limited collection of variants. Word count: 225 |
| Acronyms I have always thought that the reason for creating acronyms was to shorten long names and so speed up the process of talking about them. Obviously, this only made sense for those things that were spoken about often. Less chatworthy subjects hardly needed an acronym, being so rarely mentioned. Lately, however, my faith in the theory has been shaken. Every day I seem to be confronted with an acronym I’ve never heard before and have no idea of its meaning. America seems obsessed with the assigning of acronyms to new diseases, committees, departments, etc. faster than I can learn them. It’s no longer a way to make life easier; it’s become yet another tool for muddying the waters of understanding. It used to be the convention that, when introducing an acronym into a treatise, speech or discussion, one would first express the full name of the thing, then put the acronym in brackets (parentheses) immediately after it. Once that had been done, the acronym could be used in the rest of the document without explanation. The game is very different now. The kudos goes to those who can squeeze the most acronyms into a single paragraph, especially if they are so rarely used that it is almost guaranteed that no one will understand what they mean. Since there are too many to be remembered and enquired about, they are meekly accepted and the speaker or writer can be assured that whatever is being pushed will succeed. The whole thing becomes ridiculous and we, the acronym-challenged, should fight back by inventing our own stupidly long and pointless acronyms. Join the revolution now and become unintelligible tomorrow! CLOTHEARS (Council for Long Overstatements of Tedious Homilies on Exhausting and Awkward Revolutionary Schemes) Word count: 288 |
| Shrinkage If we're supposed to start shrinking when we get old, how come it gets harder and harder to reach the ground? |
| To Infinity and Beyond! The television told me to go to the Infiniti site, so I did. Boy, that site is endless. I began to think I was trapped in there forever. In the end, I had to steal my own identity to get out. |
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