Electronics to tranquillise Zach

Now this does work and we the adults are very grateful.

For the third year running the five of us (the BBs, daughter, son-in-law and offsprig Zach) will holiday in the Languedoc. It’s a long two-day journey from Hereford and Zach’s behaviour during this ordeal has depended very much on the screen you see hanging behind the front passenger seat. As I’m sure you’ve guessed the screen is attached to a DVD player and for Zach, the unwinding autoroute is as nothing.

For me, one of two designated drivers, the tinkle of CBeebies discs endlessly recycling themelves was a small price to pay in Year One and Derek Jacobi’s soothing voice narrating In the night garden was a measure of normalcy. In Year Two I was less enamoured by The Wiggles and xenophobic tendencies had to be suppressed. This year Zach will be 3¼ and a cultural step-up is indicated. If not as far as Pulp Fiction surely he’s ripe for Citizen Kane? In the interim we shall test his ability to follow narrative.

The DVD player is plugged into an extension lead from the cigarette lighter. Another of the lead’s sockets accommodates the plug for the satnav. On the dashboard the computer calculates fuel consumption (trip and elapsed), reports the external temperature and tells us how much diesel we have left. An incredible amount of data processing whereas the only message from my Austin Cambridge in the early sixties was that I’d bought a rotten car.

All part of the healing process

General anaesthetic? They stick a plumber’s friend over your mouth and pump in isoflurane. But not quite. Don’t forget the muscle relaxant.

The prep didn’t work and I lay awake and febrile on a trolley close to where they keep the sharp things. Desperate, I read The Daily Telegraph proving that the balance of my mind was disturbed. A scruffy quasi-medical figure declared himself baffled by my alertness.

I awoke from the procedure to hear the surgeon complaining it had all taken far too long. But I was concentrating on breathing. It’s a simple activity, I’d been doing it all my life. Except now it wasn’t so simple. My chest muscles were inoperative and my lungs seemed to be elsewhere, perhaps in a waste bin. I was the star in a film about dying from shortness of breath. And I knew what a 35 lb carp feels after being whipped from the river and held for minutes by a grinning angler posing for the camera.

Later the surgeon visited me in the ward. Was I OK? Yes, but the non-breathing had been scary. Ah but that’s all over. Alas, no. I now chose to pass on the bad news that I’d been commissioned by World Medicine to write an article about my experiences. Hmmm.

Ten minutes later I was visited by the scruffy quasi-medical figure who smelt overpoweringly of cigarettes. The anaesthetist. Just the after-effects of the muscle relaxant, he said. But I wouldn’t be writing about that, would I? I reassured him I wouldn’t. But I lied.

A brief attack of the oldies

This one’s going to be tricky. I distrust Golden Eras (“Those Edwardian summers when the afternoons were long and sunny and the gels so pretty…”) but here I am, harking back.

Several blogs and/or comments I’ve read recently speak fondly about digital cameras. Blogging wouldn’t be the same without them. No delay waiting for prints. Lots of technology easily accessed. Zero overheads. Good quality for low outlay. All good stuff.

My 6 megapixel Traveller DC-6900 cost £69 at Aldi and its only fault (rechargeable batteries last about 20 shots) may not be attributable to the camera. Yet who could love this Christmas cracker toy? This deformed Easter Egg?

While still gainfully employed I used a Fuji battery-powered non-digital camera and clearly advancing the film threatened the battery’s capacity. The unease became reality at a T. J. Maxx warehouse in remotest Canada when I ceased to be a photo-journalist and was reduced to my notebook alone. The Pentax replaced the Fuji and my thumb now advanced the film. Speed had to be balanced with aperture. For two years after I retired I did freelance work which meant using a tripod and long long exposures in stygian industrial buildings. I could never have trusted the Traveller.

The Pentax doesn’t do “instant”. It’s heavy too. But it’s beautifully made, the lens is gin-clear and, I’m afraid, I love it. It deserves an ode, if not an eclogue. On verra.

Meet my better half

My 195th post and I’m experiencing a sense of self-persecution. If I renounceed my blogonym a perfect replacement would be: The Man in the Iron Mask - Outside, Tungsten Carbide; Inside, Liberal Arts Jelly-Baby.

Despite this blog’s aims, I have read fiction, some hardish (eg, The man without qualities), listened to music (including Alban Berg’s violin concerto), watched subtitled films and looked at paintings. All potential epiphanies but rejected as grist for this mill. For one thing culture blogging is competitive, for another most people regard the arts as a likely source of “perceptions of the essential nature or meaning of something” and I doubt I could add anything new.

Hence technology and its siblings. And here’s a techno-epiphany. At age 12, in the Monster Puzzle Book, I came upon this: a will is divided so that Jack gets half as much as Jill while Humpty’s portion is equal to… etc, etc. With an insight that has not visited me since, I recognised it as an expression in prose of a pair of simultaneous equations. Gazoing! Although to appreciate that Damascene moment you need to know what a wretched scholar I was. Two French adjectives say it best: débile (feeble) yet têtu (obstinate).

Anyway I decided on a blog which touches on such moments, on the delights of well-cut gears, the neatness of some software and the excitement which motorbikes generate. With each post an additional part of that iron mask was created and the visor descended some months ago. I am now a figure held together by cables, pistons and printed circuits despite pathetic attempts (like this) to re-establish my membership of the intelligentsia. Ahead, the dump.

Local control improves heating system

Somewhat late in the day we decided to have thermostats fitted to the central heating radiators. As thermally inefficient pensioners we’ve had the heating on all day this winter for the first time and solar gain in the living room had indicated the need for local control.

Once the system was drained the ‘stats were quickly fitted. We were not only quoted a very competitive price but on a tour of the house the plumber recommended we only needed to control nine of the twelve radiators. Avoid adding thermostats in places where the temperature varies widely (the bathroom, the kitchen) to prevent excessive valve action.

But my concern was the usage stratagem. Received wisdom says bedrooms could be cooler but the hell with that. One pleasure here has been to wake up into a warm room and walk, stripped to the waist, fitted carpets all the way, into the en suite bathroom, there to remove unneeded facial hair. Shaving benefits from amelioration. In any case it turns out thermostat practice is based on “suck it and see”.

Given a captive plumber I was able to ask the $64,000-dollar question: why are his peers so addicted to Stilson wrenches, those clumsy self-tightening adjustables that risk graunching the corners off nuts? Of course nuts concentric with piping deny them ring spanners but the main reason, reluctantly admitted, is tradition. I would welcome comment on this from Works Well’s US commentators.

EBOOK FREEBIES. All Mark Twain’s letters in six volumes. The University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page (30,000 titles).

Biting the hand that fed them - grits

When senior executives from Detroit’s Big Three recently took their begging bowls to Washington they were vilified for using company planes. Once, much humbler individuals used this form of transport.

The short-haul airliner (Alas, Relucent Reader, I’ve forgotten the type) was emblazoned with North American Rockwell’s logo and colours. Half the seats had been removed to increase leg room for the press party. In the aisle a polished wood box, somewhat larger than a Hammond organ, proved to be a well stocked bar opened while we were still climbing quite steeply. We were bound for Statesboro, Georgia, where I ate grits with red-eye gravy for the first time.

Ostensibly we were visiting a factory manufacturing control valves. In reality we were observing the latest skirmishes in the American Civil War. The factory managers all appeared to be New Yorkers who bitterly resented Statesboro. On the bus from the airport one of them commented: “You’ll see the town has a railway running through it. This is so lots of people can live on the wrong side of the tracks.”

Later were were told how to obtain a driving licence – necessary if you move to another state. “You pull up at a drive-in window in the town hall. You hand over your application form and five dollars. You’re told to drive round the town hall and pull up again to pick up your licence. Which would have been just fine except that my neighbour was driving the car.” Lots of sipping whisky that evening brought more of these stories which – inevitably – I have forgotten. Together with anything I learned about control valves.

Ebook reader: progress report

It’s beginning to look more like a book. The MS of Gypsy Scholar, which Jinks and I have sweated over for two years, now resides on my swanky new Sony Portable Reader System alongside War and Peace, The Heart of Darkness and 98 other titles which came as freebies.

As explained, the aim is to read the MS as if I were a reader instead of an editor. I did the transfer yesterday and was ready to go but swimming pool water got into my goggles and left my eyes streaming. Some time this weekend, then.

How good is the machine? For me, optically as good as paper but it supplements rather than replaces books. Electronic things break and if you were in Timbuktu (excellent BBC4 programme last night about the ancient documents found there) you’d need print back-up. But ponder this. Suppose you were going foreign and needed your big 2½ kg dictionary. If it came as an ebook you could load it into the 255 gm Sony and still have room for Hamlet, The Rights of Man, Middlemarch, On the Origin of Species, Jungle Book, the complete Jane Austen, most of Dickens and le tout Ruth Rendell. In all 160 titles.

At the moment I’m spouting the press release; I need to use the thing. I checked title availability by Googling “ebooks” and turned up half a dozen, mainly university, sources. Project Gutenberg offers 27,000 free out-of-copyright titles. Copyrighted titles you pay for. If you want French books try Athena. On verra.

Latest: Just copied and transferred Rousseau's La nouvelle Héloise (via the Athena site) with no problems. Wonder what it's about.

A reward in this life and thereafter

It’s been done before but what the heck. What have these in common: Grazia Deledda, Werner von Heidenstam, Jacinto Benavente? Let’s make it easier. How about: Elfriede Jelinek, Wole Soyinka, Winston Churchill? That’s right. All six won the Nobel Prize for literature and the latter trio won it post-war.

I used to take flak from a physicist who cited the Nob/lits when jeering at the evanescence of literary taste. Whereas, he said, the Nob/physics not only include the names that should be there but also the deserving lesser lights. I sympathise with hard science practitioners who look on bemused as yet another fictional “genius” is popularly lauded then forgotten in months. Where are you now Wislawa Symborska, who took the cheque in 1996?

But let’s not cry too hard for the unsung quantum mechanics. Their tight world hands out prizes which come close to conferring immortality. Do these words mean anything: henry, becquerel, pascal? They are the internationally approved units for measuring inductance, the activity of a radionuclide and pressure/stress. They are also the surnames of three scientific giants.

Oh, it would be nice to get the cheque but just imagine if the scientific community decided that the quality (Chutzpah? Mendacity? Subversiveness?) of blogs would, from now on, be measured in bondens. Ahhh.

PERFECT NAME FOR A TWO-WHEELER (See below). It isn't a bike and it's not British. But nobody has bettered Vespa (means wasp in Italian).