Rosetta Stone

This weekend I had dinner with my Emmy-Award-Winning schoolfriend and his American wife. As usually happens we got caught up talking about accents and translations between British English and American English .

If you say "beer can" in your normal English accent you sound like a Jamaican saying "bacon". Similarly, if you can get an American to say "The Space Ghettos" in their natural accent it sounds like a scotsman saying "The Spice Girls". Try it – it's not perfect but it's surprisingly good.

I've got a brother in Texas, various American friends and I used to go out with (date) a girl in Seattle. I thought I had got (gotten) pretty good at translating between the two languages but it's not true. A couple of months ago I tried to help a couple of people in Gatwick who had flown in from America. They were lost and bewildered in the train (rail) station clutching the instructions for their central (downtown) London Air B&B. While I could explain the instructions and tell them that "The Tube" was the name of the London subway system I couldn't pronounce it in a way that they could associate with the letters T. U. B. E.

My Emmy-Award-Winning schoolfriend however is absolutely virtuoso at translating. One of the stories told over dinner involved custard cream biscuits. He conveyed the meaning to his wife perfectly in three words (and didn't get bogged down in the whole biscuit/salty-scone/cookie problem) He said "Square vanilla Oreo".

Richard "TOOOB" B

Dressed to Impress

Have you every walked into a different room to do something and then either forgotten what you were supposed to do, or walked back without having done it? So have I.

On Saturday I had a grave but tolerable hangover. I knew it was coming so I organised my calendar so that I had literally no commitments. I got up late and had a light meal somewhere between breakfast and lunch - if only someone could invent a name for such a meal!

I spent the afternoon working very gently on my car and by about 5.00pm I was tired and hungry and the sun was down. For laziness and luxury I decided to treat myself to a one-man Chinese takeaway. Even by the low standard that I try to maintain the dirty clothes that I had on were too nasty to walk to the shops in. I stood in my lounge and decided to put on clean clothes and then buy my food. I walked upstairs to my bedroom and somewhere along the way put my brain into autopilot. I found myself back in the lounge wearing my pyjamas and slippers wondering what I had been just about to do. It took me two attempts to put on a set of clean clothes.

Richard "sweet and sour chicken" B

The Last Bus Home of Doom

There's an iconic moment from cinema when Indiana Jones just slides underneath a descending door and then, while the door is still coming down, he reaches back and grabs the hat that he had dropped.

On Friday night I didn't cut such a dashing figure.

I was waiting in the wind and the rain for the last bus home. The driver didn't see me and didn't stop because he was following so closely behind one of the very many buses to the picturesque village of "Sorry Not In Service". I sprinted after the bus waving crazily and caught up with it when it got to a queue of traffic at the roundabout – I was now soaked, red in the face and completely out of breath. There was, of course, a waist high fence to stop pedestrians from straying onto the road so even though the bus opened its doors I couldn't step on board. As a younger man I think I could have vaulted the barrier like a pommel horse, if I was even drunker than I was I might have tried. Instead I made an ungainly clamber, one leg at a time, over the barrier and dropped my hat in the gutter. I picked the sodden hat up and got on the bus which was crowded with people who had watched my hopeless escapade.

Richard "inaction hero" B

Christmas Starts Here

If you've got anything irreplaceable that evokes fond childhood memories, you should throw it on a fire right now, otherwise you'll end up spending your time like I did this weekend.

My family does have some idiosyncrasies, and you're best introduced to them with these two phrases:
"If it ain't broke it needs improving." and,
"How many Bolingbrokes does it take to change a lightbulb? All of them, one to change it, the rest to try to fix the old one."

This weekend it was time for the traditional annual mending of the fairy lights. The fairy lights came from Woolworths, they cost 7 and 6 and were given to us by a dear family friend in 1967 or 1968. Each of the 20 lights had a vivid coloured plastic shade and a screw-in bulb. They don't have a 3 pin plug, instead they go into a bayonet light fitting (For my American readers, this is the UK equivalent of an Edison Screw).

By the 80s the lights were too dangerous and unreliable to carry on with. Each of the iconic plastic shades and the obscure mains connection was grafted on to a new string of fairy lights. The new set had state of the art capless bulbs which were (then) easy to replace.

This year too many of the (now) irreplaceable bulbs have failed, but neither my mum nor I can bear to throw the lights away. The problem with grafting the shades onto a new string of lights is that modern ones have much larger numbers of individual LEDs much more closely spaced. I found a set of 100 bright white LEDs with a construction that I could modify. I first shortened it to 58 lights and then removed every 2nd and 3rd light. I spliced and re-insulated these 80 connections, and fixed the 20 original shades to the remaining lights with tiny cable ties.

I was at the pillar drill for at least half an hour and I listened to 3 albums just while I was insulating solder joints. But I have made a working replica (mockery?) of my favourite Christmas lights.

Richard "R.E.M.E" B

Swearing

I'm not sure that I'd recognise a pair, but there's definitely such a thing as "fuck-me shoes". Analogously I've heard a young woman who was familiar with the term describe one of my colleagues as having a "punch-me face".

I don't know how common the term is, but in engineering a big nut with a huge torque setting is sometimes called the "Jesus nut". I understood that it was because you say "Jesus!" when it finally comes undone.

At the weekend the two terms became muddled. I was working on the same car that tried to bite my finger off at the beginning of the year. I was standing on the brake pedal while the owner was straining against the front hub nut with a long breaker bar. He went red in the face and started shaking before it was eventually freed. Despite my instruction on the traditional exclamation he said the wrong thing when it gave way. He said "Fuck me! That was tight" and the idea of a "fuck-me" nut was born.

The most frightening fuck-me of the day was on the ball joint at the top of the upright. It was on the bench and we had a scissors-type splitter on it. We braced the upright with a scaffold pole and tightened the splitter until we were sure we would strip the threads rather than break that taper. We then started investigating ways that we might be able to strike the taper with a hammer. While we were turning it over on the bench the taper gave way with a loud bang and a violent jolt. My friend was holding it at the time, but he was completely uninjured! Guess what he said?

Richard "Fuck Me!" B

Renault Clio 197 Suspension Strut Removal

Can I take the front suspension strut out of my Clio 197 at home? The answer is "Yes, I just did it, but you need some weird and wonderful tools".

Give up and pay a garage to do it if, in addition to a normal toolkit you can't lay your hands on all of these:

• Wiper arm puller
• 32 mm socket and a good sized breaker bar.
• Large torque wrench (280Nm)
• Large ball joint splitter
• 16mm spanner (an adjustable will do)
• 3/8 Whitworth ring spanner or 18mm if you have some kind of metric fetish.
• Torx star drive bits
• 12mm hex bit
• 4 Axle stands

The first job is to pull off the wiper arms. No honestly! You're dropping a major suspension component out of the bottom of the car. Start with the windscreen wipers.

Then you can pop off the scuttle cover. There are two plastic plugs with a screwdriver slot, the rest of it just prises off.

Then you can take off the top-mount cover.

I would advise you to soak the 3 top-mount bolts in penetrating fluid at this stage and then make sure you can turn them. They will be heavily corroded if your scuttle drains have blocked (which is a traditional fault on the Clio Mk. 3)

With the road wheel off the car it is quite easy to push the centre cap out. It comes outward away from the car.

The 32 mm socket will fit down the centre bore of the road wheel so you can undo the hub nut with the car on the ground and somebody pressing the brake pedal firmly. It will be done up tight, this is the archetypal "Jesus nut" and you should exclaim "Jesus!" when you crack it. Just undo it half a turn at this stage,

It is now time to jack the car. Don't work under a car on a jack - put it on stands. You need the front of the car a reasonable distance off the ground so I strongly recommend that you put it on 4 stands to keep it level. 2 under the front subframe, 2 on the rear jacking points.

The brake caliper is held on with two bolts with 12mm hex key heads. Don't leave the caliper dangling on the brake hose. Support it on a precarious pile of tool boxes and bits of wood.

You can now take the brake disc off. Once the wheel is off it is only attached by two tiny star drive screws and years of corrosion. Take out the screws and encourage it away from the car with a heavy hammer.

The front suspension is perfectly mundane in that it has a bottom wishbone and a Macphearson strut. It is unusual in that the strut is linked to the wishbone and the entire hub-carrier assembly is attached to the strut on a pair of pivots. It is only the hub-carrier assembly that steers.

There are 4 ball joints to split:

1. The track rod end (screwed into the knuckle on the hub carrier assembly)
2. The drop link (Anti roll bar link) (screwed into a bracket on the strut just below the spring)
3. The anti rotation link (it looks just like the drop link but goes horizontally and screws into the strut near the bottom)
4. The bottom ball joint (links the wishbone to the strut)

Some of these have 17mm nuts, some are 3/8 Whitworth, and some are 19mm. The anti rotation link has a star drive in the shaft so you can stop it from turning, you have to reach through the middle of the 3/8 Whitworth ring spanner with the star drive key.

Apparently owning a ball joint splitter this small means that I'm a homosexual, but I used a Fischer Price My First Splitter Laser 3525 with great success for the track rod ends.

I also own the more manly Laser 2708 which I had intended to use for the bottom ball joint. The jaws are 19mm apart. As best as I could measure the diameter of the taper amongst all the grime and the rubber boot you need a 22.5mm gap between the jaws. Some splitters have a 22mm gap, so perhaps one of these would just fit.  I opened mine out to 23mm with a file and did manage to split the bottom ball joint with it - and one stout blow from a sledgehammer.

The strut is still attached to the car by:

• The anti-lock brake cable
• The driveshaft
• The top mount

You have to take the entire wheel arch liner out. There are three flimsy self tapping screws and several "fir tree" plastic plugs that you prise out. I bet you destroy at least one of each. The connector for the cable is clipped to the inner wing.

Undo the hub nut and push the drive shaft splines out of the hub. I had a "universal" hub puller and it was nowhere near big enough. Thankfully a friend had lent me a large three jaw puller. I didn't measure the diameter of the hub but it's not small!

You now support the weight of the strut and wrestle it out of the car while your apprentice undoes the three top mount bolts.

Done!

The torque wrench is to do the hub nut up again afterwards.

In our case we were changing the pivot at the bottom of the hub carrier assembly. There's a pinch bolt that attaches the bottom half of the strut to the stanchion. The bottom half of the strut is in two parts and held together by three bolts. The teeny tiny pinch bolt that holds the strut to the bottom of the hub carrier assembly (the bit that steers) has a 4.5mm hex key (WTF?) and was impossible to remove intact. The top pivot is a large ball joint and was challenging and frightening to split. We couldn't change the pivot ourselves. It ended up in an 18 tonne hydraulic press and was reluctant to leave.

Push!

I'm never particularly impressed with them, but last week I was deeply disappointed with the general public. On my way to work there was a large traffic jam caused by a broken down vehicle. The queue had tailed back to the roundabout and caused gridlock, I think there must have been about a hundred cars involved. When I eventually got to the head of the queue I dismounted, offered assistance (without jump leads or a booster I couldn't have re-started the car) and pushed the stricken car out of the way.

How many other people stopped and helped? Not fucking one!

Richard "you haven't just let me down, you've let yourselves down" B

Torque-seal

My motorbike is trying to kill me. The last set of rear brake pads lasted less than a year and the anti-rattle clips are now misshapen. I changed the pads, put the new ones in crooked and destroyed them when I put the brake on. I cut those ones out and put another set in more carefully. The brakes were wonderfully effective and the bike passed its MOT. Within a few days the brake felt awful again and I was horrified to discover that one of the (two) bolts that hold the calliper on was missing. I thought it was so dangerous that I actually came to work in a car one day last week.

Maybe I didn't torque it up correctly, but I don't think that's the explanation. I think something is out of shape and I was tightening it up pad to rotor, not calliper to swing arm. I've got a new bolt and while I'm frightened that the same thing is going to happen I can't be bothered to take a torque wrench to the back of my bike every time I leave the house. That's fine I thought. I've got a little tube of anti-sabotage lacquer, that'll make it obvious if the bolt is working loose. Of course it's so old that it's gone off. So old in fact that the company that makes it hasn't even existed for nearly three years, and all google tells you about it is what products it has been replaced by.

In other news: I was very disappointed that it wasn't international double-entendre day last week. A young buxom woman was getting out of my car while trying to carry two bags of hot food and four large soft drinks all jammed into one of those compressed-cardboard carries that fast-food places give you. "Do you want a hand?" "I might" she said "These are large and a bit wobbly."

Richard "I'll say" B

Say My Name

You can express a certain amount of sentiment with how you store somebody's name in your phone. Years ago I was hurt to discover that my girlfriend had me in her phone as "Bolingbroke, R" – as though she wasn't even on first name terms with me. There was so much mickey taking that all my friends changed my contact details to the same thing, and I think that some of them are like that to this day.

On another occasion we were out drinking and talking about middle names. One of our friends said that she only had one middle name which was "Just Jane" but that's two names, "no, JUST Jane" Oh is it hyphenated like Mary-Sue? Anyway we've called her "JJ" since then. One of my friends was so drunk that he forgot the conversation and forgot changing her contact details and woke the next morning to discover that she was "deleted" from his phone. He assumed that they'd had such a bad argument that he never wanted to talk to her again. He was rung later that day by someone he had no recollection of but that his phone knew as "JJ".

One of my old school friends (another computer nerd) recently won an Emmy award. While he hasn't become intolerable with his own sense of smug self-satisfaction we do rather fear that he isn't going to let us forget it. We've beaten him to the punch by changing his name in all our phones to "Emmy Award Winning A**m S******d" and we call him that in the third person.

Richard "Outstanding achievement in the field of excellence" B

Wimp!

To keep my crippling sciatica at bay I walk frequently and have regular massages. I think it might be different for women, but for me it was very difficult to find a good massage. You either end up ringing up a knocking shop, or talking to someone who thinks that you want a knocking shop, or you end up at a new-age hippy healery decorated with dolphins and crystals. In the end I did very well by ringing sports injury practitioners and then explaining that neither was I a sportsman nor was I injured.

The last time I had a massage I was talking (quite proudly) about the 16 mile sponsored walk that I had done. It turned out that my masseuse had also just done a sponsored walk. Over the course of two days she had covered 46 miles over rough terrain and up and down tors. Again this year my achievement seems quite trivial.

Richard "emasculated" B

Film Review "First Man"

(Contains minor spoilers)

At the weekend I saw the film "First Man" in the cinema and I didn't really like it. It's about Neil Armstrong and the first moon landing. I wasn't transported into the story, in fact I found it so uninvolving that I was able to be annoyed by things like the set dressing and the camera work. A huge amount of the film is shot on shaky "Blair Witch" handheld cameras and most of the frame is often obscured. We get, for example, a tiny view out of a window in a dark cockpit. Fine, perhaps that's to convey the feeling of claustrophobia, but they do the same trick to watch children playing in a swimming pool, most of the lens is obscured by the water and we can only see a ribbon at the top of the screen.

I think the domestic sets were brilliant, but to be fair I've never been in a 60s American living room. I'm a spaceflight enthusiast and this film definitely wasn't made for me. The space capsules and rockets were accurate, but for some strange reason they'd made them all look old, dirty and rusty. The 50 year old ones that I've seen in a museum were cleaner and nicer than the ones in the film that were supposed to have just been built. The flames coming out the back of the first stage of a Saturn V rocket were the wrong colour and the wrong shape at high altitude.

Lots of technical bits of the story that I'd have liked to see were omitted in favour of mawkish emo indulgence. It was made as an emotional story about the man and his family. I'm bad at picking up these things so it seemed boring and straightforward: He was upset when his daughter died, he was nervous and stoic about going to the moon, he was glad to see his wife again afterwards. The climactic scene was about him having to admit to his children that he might not come home from the moon mission. To me this didn't ring true. He was working as a test pilot and his colleagues were dying by the week. I think everyone involved must have come to terms long ago with the fact that me might well come home from work dead.

Richard "Barry Norman" B

Misery Line

I have a deeply disagreeable personality and an amazing habit of rubbing people up the wrong way. It's a massive social disadvantage but very occasionally it will work in my favour. A few weeks ago I was on a train in a bad mood. I had already driven five hours in a loud and uncomfortable car, there were no seats available, the ticket was expensive and only available at the end of a long queue and (because of industrial action) I had to go from Gatwick to Guildford via Clapham Fucking Junction.

If you've ever met me then this will sound like an unfair complaint, but there was a man on the train with a loud and annoying voice. He spoke as though he was addressing the entire carriage and he was telling a long and self-serving story about a job in a theatre that he didn't take. I very much wanted him to be quiet but I didn't have the nerve to ask him. Instead I did some surprisingly successful passive-aggressive social-engineering. I turned round to face him and started paying close attention to his story. I looked him in the eye, nodded along with his story and said a few mmm's and oh's at appropriate points.

It worked better than I could have hoped. I didn't get shouted at or punched. The annoying man got quieter and quieter and more and more embarrassed until he was whispering his story to his girlfriend and then it eventually petered out leaving me free to seethe in luxurious silence for the rest of my journey.

Richard "Pot, meet Kettle" B

How To Run a Country

Nothing funny happened to me over the weekend, so I'm going to have a little look at the politics on the left side of the Atlantic. Some of my readers are ex-pat Brits in the states and a couple of them are actual Americans - Hi guys.

They have a wildly divisive and (in places) un-popular president. I have heard the view that as a reality TV star, self publicist and questionable businessman he's not qualified to be president. This is clearly nonsense. The only qualification needed apart from date and place of birth is to win a no-holds-barred popularity contest in which everyone can vote (your vote only counts if the majority of people in your region agree with you, and the amount that your vote counts depends on the historical population of your region).

President Trump has now nominated a man called Brett Kavanaugh to be a supreme court judge at which point Kavanaugh has been accused of all kinds of unseemly behaviour from his student days. It's clear to me that Kavanaugh isn't qualified to be a supreme court judge because the qualifications include a kangaroo-court of public opinion in which there are no rules of admissibility of evidence and no statute of limitations.

From the right side of the Atlantic, the qualifications that you demand of your leaders look a bit odd.

Richard "just saying" B

Say What?

English is the hardest language to learn. We have homophones (flaw and floor) and homographs (wind-up wind chimes). We have impossible spellings and silent letters (Siobhan Marjoribanks, Knight Pneumatics Ltd, Azalea Rd, Loughborough). We have so many irregular verbs that it's difficult to spot the regular ones (find/found; bind/bound; blind/blinded). We have secret inflections that we only use on special occasions (to whom it may concern, as it were) and then after all that you have to learn the idioms.

An idiom is a colloquial metaphor. We all agree on them and we've all learned them but they are figurative and obscure rather than literal or transparent. Here are a few imaginary places that things can go to. I have no doubt that there are many more and I have deliberately omitted the dirty ones.
Go south / go tits up / go pear shaped / go off the rails - deteriorate
Go round the houses - take a circuitous route
Go off the deep end / go off on one - have an emotional outburst
Go over the top - do something to outrageous extreme
Go underground / go off-grid - hide
Go on a mission - do something urgently
Go mental at - to remonstrate with
Go for a burton - go unexpectedly missing

Richard "Never go Full Retard" B

Left Hand Down a Bit

My mum isn't very good at parking her car. There's a workbench and a vice at the back of the garage, and the boot-lid of the car has a line of dents across it from where the car has been reversed into the vice handle. Years ago she had a Ford Fiesta (with a line of vice-handle dents across the back) and every month or two she would knock one or other of the wing mirrors off against one of the gateposts. The wing mirrors were fixed on with a system rather like an enormously strong bayonet fitting from a giant lightbulb. My father and I built a fitment tool so that you could stretch the spring with a stirrup while you worked, and every month or two for many years I would refit whichever mirror had been smashed off the car.

About five years ago my mum changed her car to a Fiat Panda. Sure enough, after  a month or two, one of the wing mirrors had been smashed off on the gatepost. I couldn't work out how to fix it and she took it to a local garage. Blind Len at the garage fixed it for free as a favour but it cost £50 in parts. And that's the last time she ever hit the wing mirror on the gatepost!

Richard "they’re not fucking whiskers" B

Did it!

At the weekend I walked from Exeter to Teignmouth to raise money for the charity Bloodwise. Exeter to Starcross (8.5 miles) was a nice walk, it's all flat and the views of the estuary are great. Starcross to Dawlish (4 miles) was a bit boring and I was tired and footsore when I got there. The elective final 3.5 miles to Teignmouth was horrible. It was really hilly and steep and a lot of the coast path and seawall is in poor repair and strewn with rocks. It was slow, tiring, sweaty and painful underfoot.

I did 16 miles, so if anybody was thinking of 50p/mile please donate £8 to Bloodwise.
https://bloodwise.org.uk/donate
For those of you that want me to work for your money, I'm sure you'll be glad to know that my legs are stiff, my feet are blistered and that there's blood under one of my toenails.

Bloodwise really is a great charity. They hardly spend anything on publicity, it all goes on research and patient support and they get nothing from the government. You've probably never heard of them, but they're one of the biggest medical research charities in the country. Since the 60s they have brought the survival rate for childhood leukemia from about 10% to about 90%. One day you might need them. Age or genetic and lifestyle factors seem to have no effect on rates of blood cancers. Essentially this week you have already bought one ticket in a lottery to win Leukemia or Lymphoma you will do the same every week of your life.

Richard "unpleasant stroll" B

Put Your Hand in Your Pocket

One of my good friends has chronic myeloid leukemia. He was helped by the charity Bloodwise and he now supports them. Next weekend I am going on a fund-raising walk with Bloodwise. We start in the middle of Exeter and walk down the river and along the coast. The shortest version of the walk goes about 6.5 miles to Starcross. That's where you get a train home if you're a softie, or you've got your whole family with you, or (as is often the case) you're suffering with a bloodbourne cancer. Officially the route carries on to Dawlish at about 12.5 miles. I fully intend to go that far, however the last time I took part I got a fair amount of criticism for going on what was really nothing more than a pleasant walk and then demanding money for my trouble. If my feet and stamina hold up I'm going to walk to Teignmouth at 16 miles.

There is no official sponsorship form, but if you think it's a good cause, or you think what I am doing is worthwhile, then I ask you to make an informal pledge to donate to the charity. You can do that at https://bloodwise.org.uk/donate and I'm accepting cash donations.
Next week I'll let you know how I got on. At 50p/mile you'd be giving either £6.25 or £8 depending how far I get, some of my friends are giving double that amount!

Richard "pleasant stroll" B

Frightened!

I went away this weekend, and while I maintained full control of my bowels for the whole time, there were two occasions when it wasn't guaranteed.

We went to Tenby on Saturday night and stayed in a guest house. Tenby is a picturesque seaside town and seemingly the hen night capital of South Wales. I ate a fish pie the size of a briefcase that must have contained half a pint of cream and drank several pints of local real ale. The combination caused my digestion some problems in the middle of the night.

We had been driving at Pembrey circuit. One of the reasons I like it so much is that it feels very safe. There are big grass runoffs, not much Armco, and the two most difficult corners have a straight on lane so that you can chicken-out and give up on turning. I took a lesson in the morning and have started learning the difficult business of using the brake and the steering wheel at the same time. When I get the technique right (which is seldom) I am much faster. On one occasion I made such a good job of Honda Curve that I hit the rev limiter in 4th on the start-finish straight and found myself in 5th approaching the hairpin. Changing 5th to 4th to 3rd to 2nd under heavy braking was too much for me. I don't know what gear I put the car in at about 90mph but I'm confident that it was the wrong one. I spun violently and frighteningly and ended up pointing backwards inches from the crash barrier with the engine stalled. While I was travelling backwards I was looking into the face of the driver who was following very closely behind me. I don't know if he was as scared as me, but he made an excellent job of slowing his car and not hitting me.

The marshals had the yellow flags up before my car had even come to a halt, nobody hit me, and I eventually got the car running and drove back to the paddock.

Richard "trail braking" B

The Identitarians are Winning

A couple of weeks ago the singer Aretha Franklin died. It’s sad news and at my band rehearsal we talked about her songs and her legacy. We listened to a couple of her recordings, and played one of her songs (an easy one).

I was very disappointed by the coverage on the BBC and in the newspaper. Nobody seemed to care about what a great singer she had been, it was all fashionable politics. People talked about her family's place in the civil rights movement, her being a woman, her being black, and even about her weight (which was apparently up and down like a bride's nightie).

If you hear the news that she's dead, and you think "A prominent black has passed away" or "A prominent woman has passed away" or "A prominent body positivity icon has passed away" then you’re the racist/sexist/fattist. I bet you only know her name because of what a fantastically spectacular and hardworking musician she was.

Richard "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." B

What's In a Name

My friend's dad has an amazing knack of getting celebrities names wrong, and in so doing making them both funnier and more mundane. For example talk show host and actress Winifred Opry and model/actress Baywatch star Pam Lampton.

My mother's hearing is deteriorating and she has started playing the same trick. At the weekend she told me a story about ex racing driver and motoring personality Tiffin O’Dell.

Richard "Oprah Winfrey, Pamela Anderson, Tiff Needell" B

Hurry Up

Yesterday I was at a car show in the rain and one of the things we saw was a demonstration by the fire brigade and ambulance service of rescuing a stricken victim from a crashed car.

I enjoyed watching the hydraulic cutters and spreaders, but overall, considering I watched a car have all its glass removed and its roof cut off, it was surprisingly boring. It was done at a slow pace with what seemed an undue emphasis on containing broken glass. Nothing was loud, dangerous or impressive.

Worse, we happened to see what was done to the car before the demonstration. What we learned is that if you're thinking of needing to be cut out of your vehicle you should make sure that all the doors are unlocked and open freely, that all the trim and rubbers are removed from the roof pillars, and that the seatbelts have been cut. You should then allow at least 20 minutes between crashing the car and needing to be in an ambulance because of blood loss.

I work with a chap who had to be cut out of his car when it was crushed by a bus, his legs were mashed into the wreckage and he was lucky to survive. I always thought he was joking but he told me that he asked the fireman to hand him the angle grinder because, even though he was bleeding to death, he could make a quicker and better job with it.

Richard "smoke alarms save lives" B

Really Useful Boxes

My sports car has a very small luggage space so I built a luggage rack. On my way to a track day it will normally contain 4 plastic boxes:

1. Service tools and fluids.
2. Drinks and snacks.
3. Clothes and toiletries.
4. Guest luggage allowance – which is worse than Easyjet.

The rack and the boxes look both comical and functional. Once on a heavily congested motorway a Welshman matched my speed, wound down his window and shouted (in his charming accent) "I love your boot!". Some people however have no respect for other people's property and no sympathy for their misfortune.

On Friday, when I was negotiating a high speed roundabout all 4 boxes came off the rack and spread their contents over the carriageway. "Tools and fluids" actually stayed upright with the lid on and people tended to drive around it. The empty box was destroyed by impatient drivers. My clothes mainly got run over, but miraculously the toothpaste tube was unscathed. The snacks and drinks varied between untouched (8 Belgian waffles) and mashed (crisps).

Apparently there's something funny about the sight of a fully grown man in a state of panic charging around a busy roundabout (2 lanes, 4 exits, 40mph limit) gesticulating wildly, trying not to get run down, attempting to stop people from driving over his stuff and picking up scattered items.

Bastards!

Richard "improperly secured load" B

Email

My friends berate me for only just having changed from using a purpose built sat-nav to a smartphone app.

My mother is much further behind the times but has methods of coping surprisingly well. About fifteen years ago she refused declined to have a computer and an email address, yet last month she sent a framed picture as a wedding gift to Seattle without shipping it across the Atlantic. The picture is of the local church in the middle of the area where my friends and I grew up. She saw it hanging in the local branch of her bank. She's never heard the phrase ".pdf file" but she accosted the bank manager and demanded that he send a "digital version" to my brother in Texas. He wasn't even very surprised to receive the email from the manager of a bank that he doesn't use in  a country where he doesn't live. He dutifully sent the .pdf file to Walgreens to be printed and framed and set the delivery address to the happy couple's house.

It all worked and they're very happy with it.

Richard "This is the modern world" B

During the Civil War

At the weekend I bought a new crash helmet. I would tell you all about how and why I bought it but I am extremely self-conscious that I might witter on too long.

When I still lived with my parents one of my friends came over for coffee and politely said to my mum "I see you've got a new crash helmet". "Yes." she said "During the civil war the Radfords were a very powerful family in Plymouth... banking systems... wealth as gold and jewellery... armies need to be paid... wars are expensive... royalist army… parliamentarians... fighting moved to the Southwest... buried the treasure... family were killed... lost for generations... founding of America... Industrial revolution... First world war... Second world war... baby boom... need for new houses... improvement in archeological techniques... metal detectors... discovered the Radford treasure... acquired by the British museum... London... people of Plymouth... loaned to Plymouth museum...”

After an hour we'd got about 350 years through a story of world history and a museum exhibit that my mum had gone to see. This could have been the starting point for her story about her helmet being stolen. We hadn't got a word in edgeways, our coffee cups were long since empty and cold, and we were sitting in polite shellshocked disbelief.

My friend will still sometimes say "During the civil war" as a code for "This story bores me".

Richard "Skip to the end." B

Bladder

A few weeks ago I was sailing in a Salcombe yawl with my brothers. We were on the water pretty much all day, we only came ashore to drink a few pints and buy pasties in the middle of the day. By the middle of the afternoon a practical matter of seamanship had become pressingly urgent. How do you pee off a Salcombe yawl? The curvature of the hull means that you can't stand anything like close enough to the side to aim over the gunwhales. The stern decks is too wide and there's a mizzen sail in the way. The boat isn't big enough or stable enough to stand on the side deck. My brother managed to half-stand-half-kneel with one foot inside the boat and one knee on the side deck, it just about worked but it was awkward and ungainly. I was told to go into the bailer and then tip it over the side. Initially this seemed luxurious – I could turn by back on the rest of my family and lean against the mast for support. I discovered soon afterwards that the bailer was about 10% smaller than the capacity of the human bladder. "Two bailer" is now a colloquial term for the highest level of urinary urgency.

Richard "stem the flow" B

Bleeding Brakes!

It was my birthday last week. With characteristic eccentricity my mother didn't just give me a keepsake to mark the occasion. She wanted me to have something that I would genuinely like and realised that she wouldn't know what to buy. Instead she gave me a cheque and the task of both cashing the cheque and buying my own present.

I work nearly full time and the nearest bank that is open on a Saturday is a 15 mile round trip from my house with difficult parking, I wasn't delighted about the "chore" component of my present.

This is what she eventually gave me.

It's, not a hookah pipe, it's not a bong, and it's not some sort of marital aid. It's a manual pressure bleeder for the brake system in a car. Ordinarily you need either a friend, an airline, or a spare tyre. With this system you half fill the vessel with brake fluid and pump it up to 10psi or so. It screws onto the master cylinder reservoir and then you have the whole system under pressure and the fluid being constantly topped up. You can bleed the brakes perfectly without assistance and changing all the fluid in the system becomes the work of minutes. It's just what I've always wanted – for the last few weeks since my friend lent me one.

Richard "billy-no-mates" B

Brakes!

A few weeks ago I was on a track day at Donnington Park on the GP circuit. Even in my little underpowered car we were approaching the Melbourne Hairpin at around 115mph and needed to scrub off about 90mph before the corner. You find yourself rather busy for two or three seconds: Press the brake firmly with the toes of the right foot; clutch down; gear lever into third; left hand back to the steering wheel; press and release the accelerator with the heel of the right foot; clutch up smoothly; clutch down; gear lever into second; left hand back to the steering wheel; press and release the accelerator; clutch up smoothly. And that's all before you've started thinking about turning the wheel.

During my frantic flailing at the controls I would often make a mistake with the gear lever and either grind the gears or end up in the wrong one. My passenger is a good friend who has devoted nearly 40 years to good natured piss taking. The car is a loud environment and the motion is quite violent, but he was still able to shout things like "Try Second" or "It's a standard H pattern" as I approached the hairpin.

On the same weekend I was lent a fantastic book called "How to Drive a Car" which was rescued during the clearance of my sister's late godmother's house. It was published in 1950 and it's so dated that it has become funny to read, it talks about cripples in invalid tricycles and nursemaids pushing perambulators with their human cargo.

Here are a couple of paragraphs:

"Who has not in the past seen many a suffering motorist going through barrel organ motions at the front of his car in often unsuccessful effort to wake it into life, and possibly in the process receiving a sprained thumb or wrist? Luckily those days are almost gone, for modern self-starting mechanism, electrically operated, is now incorporated that makes it possible for even the frailest feminine hand to start the most powerful engine by merely pressing this knob."

"Many years ago the authors used to advise would-be motorists to thoroughly master double de-clutching with no more complicated equipment than a piano, a flower pot and a walking stick!"

Richard "Learn to Drive" B

Holiday

I've just come home from a family holiday in South Devon. We stayed in an Airbnb and hired a little sailing boat. The boat was a joy and the house was like a brilliant scavenger hunt. If you looked hard enough you could find almost anything you wanted. Crabbing equipment, camping stove, parasol, tablecloth, spare light bulbs, weighing scales, board games... There were 2 exceptions. We never found the salt and pepper (although we all think that it was in there somewhere and we just hadn't located it) and there were no towels.

The main theme of the holiday was not being dry, despite staying over mid-summer's day during a heatwave. The house is built into the shady side of a hill beside a creek, it doesn't have good ventilation and everything associated with it is slightly damp. We all thought we might catch mildew or mould when we went to sleep. After going and buying a towel my sister-in-law had a bath and the bathroom ended up so steamy and covered in condensation that she was actually unable to get herself dry afterwards.

Some of the roving on our little boat had gone loose and water was constantly weeping inwards – to the extent that the owner had fitted an automatic electric bilge pump and a big battery to keep the thing afloat when it was on the mooring. It worked perfectly and fitted in nicely with the theme of our holiday.

Richard "Poacher's Pocket" B

Book Review

Ignition!

I have just read "Ignition!" by John D. Clark. It's an informal history of liquid rocket propellants and while it's a great read I'd have probably enjoyed it more if I had a degree in chemistry. Some great authors send multiple characters (or generations of characters) through similar trials, or have recurring themes that affect all the characters. (I'm looking at you Hugo, Dumas, Tolstoy, etc.) In Clarke's book  you get something similar, but the characters are hard to relate to and have difficult names like C-stoff, S-stoff, N2O4, Mixed Oxides of Nitrogen, Inhibited Red Fuming Nitric Acid and Unsymmetrical Dimethyl Hydrazine. The recurring themes are eutectics, equilibrium mixtures, toxicity, corrosion, unacceptable freezing points and the tendency to explode unexpectedly.

Asimov writes a gushingly complimentary foreword and compliments Clarke's short stories handsomely. Ignition is also really fun to read, it contains some great stories, and wicked phrases.

I learned most from the chapter on rocket performance and I now have a much better understanding of Specific Impulse. It's normally defined as the thrust of the rocket (in pounds) divided by the rate that the rocket consumes fuel (in pounds per second). It comes out in seconds. I've never been particularly happy that the quality of a rocket motor is measured in time, but I have manage to justify it to myself by thinking that it's sort-of how long a rocket could hover before it runs out of fuel. Clarke shows us that it's a ridiculous measure brought about by the horrific ambiguity of force and mass in American scientific units. If you just apply Newton's Laws, common sense, and basic algebra you can see that all the fuel being consumed is coming out the back of the rocket (or there's something badly wrong with your design) and that the force applied to your rocket is the same force that's accelerating you exhaust stream.

Specific impulse becomes the velocity of the exhaust of a rocket divided by the standard acceleration due to gravity. Clarke correctly points out building a rocket whose sole purpose is to get away from earth and then expressing its exhaust velocity in terms of the gravity of earth is "parochial and extremely silly". He prefers to think of Specific Impulse as a velocity expressed in units of 32 feet (or 9.8m) and while that works well it offends my dimensional analysis sensibilities. I now think of Specific Impulse as the length of time that a stone dropped in a vacuum takes to gain the same velocity as the exhaust stream.

The book is rather dated. It doesn't cover any developments past the late 60s and it amused me when he talked about Boron Nitrate and discussed the theoretical possibility and the early research that suggests it might have a hard cubic form analogous to diamond.

Richard "8 out of 10 would read again" B

Synchronicity

A couple of weekends ago I took my sports car to a track day at Donington Park (GP layout). It's a great track and we had a wonderful day. There was also a couple of very unlikely coincidences (or we're living in the matrix, there was a segmentation violation and my private memory area spilled out into the general simulation).

We were there on a Friday, but the paddock was already filling up with cars that would be racing at the weekend. One of the races was "Mighty Minis" and we had great fun peering at the race-prepared classic minis. One of my more disparaging comments was "I don't think much of their fusebox". A circuit board full of fuse holders was screwed straight onto the shelf above the passenger's knees (if there were a passenger seat) with no cover or protection of any kind. About a minute later when we had walked back to my car, the glue on the back of the velco that holds my luxuriously appointed fusebox cover in place failed. The fusebox cover fell clanging into the passenger footwell. "I don't think much of your fusebox" said my friend.

During that same short walk across the paddock I overheard one of the mini racers say "He'll be here tonight, he's getting a lift up with Paul Inch". I said to my friend that that was someone else coming up from Plymouth. "How do you know he's from Plymouth?" "Paul Inch is an engine builder in Plymouth" "That's just a man's name, I bet there's more than one. He could be from anywhere". The next mini we passed had the bonnet open and a "Paul Inch" sticker was clearly visible on the rocker cover with an 01752 (Plymouth) telephone number.

At the same time, 150 miles away, the postman was delivering a Hillman Imp fanzine to my friend and both the racing cars on the front cover had "Paul Inch" header strips on their windscreens.

Richard "coincidence or something more?" B

Happy Birthday

This year I have had a couple of delightful things drop through my letterbox. In the middle of April I got a birthday card from one of my friends. It was unexpected because my birthday is in July (his other friend called Richard, who's birthday is in April didn't get a card this year) and it really made me happy.

I've always been interested in rocketry. As a child I tried and failed to make my own rockets, but kept all my fingers. As soon as model rocket motors were available in the U.K. I was using them, and I managed to do the final year project of my computer-science/electronic-engineering degree in association with the space science laboratory.

Since about 1991 I have been trying to read a particular book about the development of rocket fuels. It's no longer in print and I have never seen a second hand copy for sale in real life. Since the rise of internet shopping I sometimes look for it, but it's too expensive. A tattered paperback is nearly £100 and a nice one or a hardback can be several hundred pounds.

Last week there was a pristine copy of this book on my doormat in an Amazon package. No receipt, no explanation, no clue who paid for it. As best as I can tell I haven't made an expensive mistake with "one-click-ordering" and I haven't got drunk and bought my sober-self a generous gift.

To my mysterious benefactor: Thank you very much, I'm delighted with the book, I have no idea how you can have known how much I wanted it.

If the valuable-and-hard-to-come-by-book-fairy reads my blog, let me say this: Milliken and Milliken "Race Car Vehicle Dynamics" ISBN 1560915269

Richard "Thank you" B

Trigger Warning

I always worry about murders and violent crimes that have more than one perpetrator. How does anybody invite somebody to join them without fearing that they’ll just ring the police instead? "What do you fancy doing tonight?" "Oh I was going to beat a prostitute to death, want to come with?" It's hard enough to find out whether your closest friends would condone very minor law breaking, yet I find myself in a tiny underground that does something that is completely unacceptable to the public at large. You'd probably call it "Un-PC Chicken".

I grew up in a golden age of language when "spastic" "homo" and "joey" were workable and useful insults. Since then the education establishment, the media and all public discourse has been filled with talk of inclusivity, tolerance, egalitarianism, individuality, antiracism, antisexism, and the horrors of offence-taking. To put it another way, I have barely read, heard, or seen anything that doesn't strongly imply that I'm just a stone's throw away from being a violent, sexist, racist monster.

The game, which contains no malice and is played in private, just involves using proscribed words and idioms, generally as a source of comedy. Most of it would probably be illegal if I wrote it down here. As a mild example I was recently on a flight to Spain with one of my co-conspirators. We were flown by a lady captain and that was the first thing we told the chap who picked us up. "Was she able to park it up at the stand?" he asked. Not because he thinks women are any worse at parking cars and aeroplanes than men, but because we've all been told so many times that they aren't.

A few weeks ago I though Un-PC Chicken was going a bit far, but I had misunderstood what was being said. I was in the kitchen, my friend was watching TV in the lounge. "My god look at his hair, he looks like a monkey". "That actually is a bit racist". "No. A Monkee" "eh?" "Davey Jones, Mickey Dolenz, The Monkees".

Richard "PC" B

Bandwidth

Apparently I am sometimes an entertaining storyteller, but usually I'm precise and concise in my speech. A couple of weeks ago I was at a wedding in Spain, but the bride and groom and most of the guests were from Seattle. I knew some of them from the many times that I've visited Seattle (there was a girl involved). One of the guests had been primed to ask me about all my previous visits and had been told to expect "a wonderful romantic story full of tension and texture and local colour". He was disappointed when he got talking to me, asked me about it, and I told him "Yeah, so I used to date a shop assistant from Fremont".

When I got home my mum asked me all about the wedding and apparently "a white dress" wasn't a detailed enough answer to the question "what did the bride wear?"

Richard "quite the raconteur" B

Wedding

At the weekend I have to give a short speech at a wedding so I have been talking about speeches at weddings. One of my friends was embarrassed by her cousin's lesbian wedding because there were readings with childish and poorly disguised sexual overtones. One of my friends got married on Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you) to make it easier to remember his wedding anniversary. His best man's speech was brilliant - funny, personal, mildly insulting, and all tied together with a really positive message. I'm still not sure if it contained the best camouflaged dirty joke I've ever heard or if I've just got a dirty mind. The best man talked about how much time the groom spent playing "Football Manager" on his computer, he'd played so many seasons that his computer was simulating the premier league in the year 2083. The best man said, therefor, he was very pleased when the groom met his bride because he could spend less time alone, locked in his bedroom with his laptop.

My "invitation" to speak included the exact length of the speech, a whole range of topics that I'm not allowed to cover, what the general message should be, and how the speech should end. I believe I can give a speech that they'll like, but I was sorely tempted to write a more traditional speech and then bleep out (or mumble) the vast majority of it.

Richard "This time I won't wrestle the bride to the floor" B

Man from Delmonte

I'm going to a wedding in Spain in a couple of weeks, so one of the little jobs I did this weekend was to try on my summer suit. Men of my age who don't wear suits in their job generally have a handful of them in their wardrobe ready for occasions like this. We often don't wear them for years at a time. I've been caught out by a suit that no longer fits me – I'm sure the suit got thinner rather than I got fatter. My friend was completely let down by his beautiful, all wool, designer suit in the infamous "Moth Balls" incident. When it came out of storage the suit had been severely eaten by moths, but only in the trousers, and only around the plums – we don't know what attracted them to that area.

A few people actually tried to work out all my eponymous nouns from a few weeks ago. Here are the answers:

Abigail's Party - An old Mike Leigh play on the BBC that everybody in the country saw but me.
Archimedes' Principle - Physical law about buoyancy
Avogadro's Number – The number of atoms in 12g of Carbon12.
Buffon's Needle - A difficult bit of maths about the probability of a dropped needle across a gap in a planked floor.
Chesterton's Fence - A principle in policy-making about not tearing things down until you understand why they were put up.
Sword of Damocles - Imminent and ever-present peril
Dekker's Algorithm - First proven solution to the mutual exclusion problem.
Drake's Equation - Seems to show that the galaxy should be overrun with intelligent life
Duff's Device - A truly devious hack in C used in loop-unrolling. From back when we didn't have optimising compilers.
Sieve of Eratosthenes - Ancient way of finding prime numbers
Euler's Line - Complicated bit of geometry to do with the centres(!) of a triangle.
Faraday's Constant - Something to do with how much charge an electron has.
Fermi's Paradox - Just about the same thing as Drake's Equation.
Frankenstein's Monster - Famous fictional monster.
Grey Friar's Bobby - Famously faithful dog.
Halley's Comet - Comet identified by Edmund Halley.
Pillars of Hercules - Mountains either side of the entrance to the Mediterranean.
Hobson’s Choice - No choice at all.
Hubbert's Peak - Something about the productivity of oil fields and us all being doomed. Doomed I tell you!
John Brown’s Body - Song. https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/fzhbe/could_someone_please_explain_the_funny_in_this/
Kundt's Dust Tube - Funny sounding physics experiment about standing waves in air.
Lord Clyde's Shovel - The freedom to keep some of your money away from the taxman.
Lord Kelvin's Thunderstorm - Baffling demonstration of static electricity.
Lou Gehrig's Disease - motor neurone disease.
Marley's Ghost - The first visitation in A Christmas Carol
Maxwell's Demon - Thought experiment to make the second law of thermodynamics even more confusing.
Michelangelo's David - An old sculpture.
Murphy's Law - Adage that anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Newton's Cradle - 80s executive desk toy that demonstrates conservation of momentum.
Occam's Razor - Lazy philosophical heuristic.
Orion's Belt - Three stars
Pascal's Wager - "Proof" that it's worth believing in God.
Pavlov's Dog - The original discoverer of classical conditioning.
Pythagoras' Theorem - To do with the length of sides of right angle triangles.
Russell's Teapot - Thought experiment to make arguing about god even more tiresome. https://xkcd.com/1866/
Schrodinger's Cat - Thought experiment to make quantum theory even more baffling.
Shanks' Pony - Walking
Simpson's Rule - Approximation of the area under a curve.
Epitaph of Stevinus - To do with forces on inclined planes.
Ship of Theseus - Trigger's Broom for the upper classes.
Trigger's Broom - A 20 year-old broom that's had 17 new heads and 14 new handles.

Richard "I forgot Death's Door" B

Padded and Underwired

Back in the old days of mobile phones with T9 predictive text dictionaries I had a Sony-Ericsson that would let you read the list of word that had been automatically added to the dictionary (from your text messages). It was a terrifying and illuminating insight into my character. Other than place names every single entry was a swear word or the model number of a microphone.

Since then I have developed a disproportionate interest in driving, and bought both a fast car and a smartphone. It might be rather passé to laugh at autocorrect these days, but the predictive text on my phone has a bewildering and inappropriate quirk. The keyboard seems to know all about my interest in cars. It knows words like Snetterton and Caterham. When I say "Castle" it says "Combe", when I say "Mallory" it says "Park", when I say "brake" it says "calliper" when I say "gear" it says "box" (and when the crowd say Bo Selecta!) yet it resolutely refuses to believe that the word "car" might follow "sports". Worse it always guesses "bra" so I have offered to pick my sister up in my sports bra and asked my neighbour to wait a few minutes while I get my sports bra out of my garage.

Richard "D112" B

Gordon is a Moron

This weekend I have been driving to and From Newton Abbot on an unnecessary mission of mercy. On Saturday (not for the first time) I found a distressed hedgehog in my garden. It was out in daylight, unresponsive, and not curled into a ball. After talking to the hedgehog hospital in Newton Abbot I agreed to drive it up there and I decided that its name was Gordon.

My innuendo-meter went off the scale when I arrived at the hedgehog hospital. The receptionist said "Let's have a look at it then… My God it's enormous!" Gordon is a 1.2kg monster and there was some concern that I had actually disturbed a pregnant female.

On Sunday I got the news that I was waiting for (but sadly not delivered in a Brian Blessed voice). GORDON'S ALIVE! He is male, and is uninjured. He'd been fighting and his genitals were swollen so he'd also been fucking - excessively. When I discovered him he was simply exhausted. He'd shagged himself half to death, he treated the hospital as a trip to a rejuvenating day-spa and was furious about being put back into a box and driven back to Plymouth. I re-released him in my garden around dusk and didn't get a single word of thanks.

Richard "Even the vermin had a better Friday night than I did" B

Old Friend

For a brief period as a schoolchild I had a desirable and high-status friend from another school. He had a Nintendo Entertainment System and an attractive older sister but crucially he also had a full size high quality pool table in his bedroom. His parents were strict and taciturn. We barely saw them and never spoke to them although we often heard his mother shouting – generally the same four words.

If we were too noisy, or if his younger brother went downstairs complaining of ill-treatment then his mother would shout "CHRIS. FRIENDS GO HOME." We would immediately be ushered silently from the house - not allowed to return until the next day. If our infraction was particularly grave – maybe his brother was in tears or we had ignored our expulsion – then his mother would shout "CHRIS. FRIENDS GO HOME FOR A WEEK."

The last time I met him we had been particularly noisy and troublesome and his mother shouted "CHRIS. FRIENDS GO HOME FOR GOOD"

Richard "A=Jump, B=Rush" B

Quiz

A surprising number of nouns have had their ownership taken by a proper name. For example there are apples, and then there is Adam's Apple. These are the ones that I could think of. Can you match them up?

Names	Nouns
Abigail	Algorithm
Archimedes	Belt
Avogadro	Bobby
Buffon/Cleopatra	Body
Chesterton	Broom
Damocles	Cat
Dekker	Choice
Drake	Comet
Duff	Constant
Eratosthenes	Cradle
Euler	David
Faraday	Demon
Fermi	Device
Frankenstein	Disease
Grey Friar	Dog
Halley	Epitaph (of)
Hercules	Equation
Hobson	Fence
Hubbert	Ghost
John Brown	Law
Kundt	Line
Lord Clyde	Monster
Lord Kelvin	Needle
Lou Gehrig	Number
Marley	Paradox
Maxwell	Party
Michelangelo	Peak
Murphy	Pillars (of)
Newton	Pony
Occam	Principle
Orion	Razor
Pascal	Rule
Pavlov	Ship (of)
Pythagoras	Shovel
Russell	Sieve (of)
Schrodinger	Sword (of)
Shanks	Teapot
Simpson	Theorem
Stevinus	Thunderstorm
Theseus	(Dust) Tube
Trigger	Wager

Interestingly the broom and the ship refer to exactly the same idea.

Richard "I was never invited to Maxwell's Party" B

Roadie

Last weekend I drove one of my friends to and from a gig and I carried and set up all his gear. He can barely walk and can't drive or carry anything since he had an operation to cure a nasty case of housemaid's knee (presumably caused by the sheer amount of time he's spent kneeling down sucking cocks and nothing to do with the time that I ran the corner of a heavy flightcase into his knee).

I was returning the favour that I was done in the 90s when I was discharged from hospital following an even more painful and personal operation. However on that occasion my friends chose to drive me home over nearly every speedbump in Plymouth and they negotiated them violently to make me squirm. Yes I still hold a grudge these more than 20 years later.

Richard "a gentleman puts down a pillow" B

Dangerous Dog

My window cleaner likes my beard. He called round at the weekend to get paid and it's the first time I've seen him since I haven't been able to shave. The conversation quickly moved from my beard to my finger injury and it turns out that he is also nursing a nasty injury to his middle finger. His was even more cruel and unlikely than mine. He was bitten by a dog which was locked inside one of his customer's houses while he himself was outside the house. The window cleaner pushed a bill through the letterbox and was bitten (on the tiny portion of finger that protruded inside the letterbox) by a bad tempered terrier that was lying in wait.

Richard "jaws and letterboxes of outragous fortune" B

Colloquial Metaphor

You learn words and phrases, forget where you learned them from, and then sometimes when you use them they turn out to be wrong. My mum deliberately taught me a nursery rhyme wrongly because her version is funnier: "See a penny, pick it up, then all day you'll have a penny". I used to know a woman whos (hippyish) parents had used an inappropriately adult word for her private parts and she got into trouble at school for swearing when she was trying to discuss something intimate.

The English language contains loads of idioms that we all blindly use as though they still make sense: "Flash in the pan", "Keep your powder dry", "Go off half-cocked", "Hoist by your own petard"... I discovered last week, to my surprise, that the phrase "Beaten like a red-headed stepchild" is neither in common use nor suitable for work.

Richard "it's OK they’ve got no soul" B

Your Mother Cooks Socks in Hell

My friend's hoover has been possessed by the spirit of an angry goose.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9f7wodJj04

Richard "Sauce for the goose is sauce for the hoover" B

Garage Door Opener

The garage door at my mum's house is a couple of years older than I am and I don't know which of us is in better shape. It's huge and enormously sturdy, it was made by Westland Engineers Ltd (that's right, military helicopters and garage doors) and it seems to be designed to withstand an armed siege. I don't know what it weighs but it's all two men can do to lift it and move it a few paces. I drilled a pair of 8mm holes through one of the stringers and it took 10 minutes and left me with a large bruise on my shoulder from where I was pushing the drill. The swarf comes off in tiny hard sharp hot flakes and the drill bit is now blunt.

In the late 70s and early 80s the door was much taller than me so the procedure to open it was to unlock it and pull the handle and the bottom edge while a friend stood on the bathroom stool and thumped the top left hand corner – where it would usually bind.

The first golden age of garage door opening was from about '85 to '95 when I was tall and strong enough to operate it by myself and the mechanism was in a reasonable state of repair.

In the late 90s my father and I hired a yacht-rigging supplier who manufactured replacements for the wire ropes, thimbles and pulleys that joined the heavy door to the 8 springs that support its weight. It was an excellent refurbishment, but the original springs were irreplaceable and starting to weaken.

By 2012 more than one of the original springs was rusted through and the door was inoperable. With the help of a carpenter I re-hung the door on more traditional support gear with horizontal rails, lever arms and a pair of enormously stiff springs.

My mother is now in her 80s and the door has got too heavy for her so this weekend I fitted a large electrical opener to it. The procedure for opening the door is now to find the car-keys and push the button on the fob. So begins the second golden age of garage door opening.

Richard "433MHz" B

See It. Say It. Sort It.

There's a ginger and grey creature living on my face. Since I injured my finger I haven't been able to shave so I have grown an unimpressive and patchy beard. Until this weekend I haven't been too self-conscious about it. On Saturday I spent nearly four hours on public transport travelling from Farnham to The ExCeL and back. Every ten minutes there was an announcement saying "If something doesn't look right tell a member of staff or text the British Transport Police and we will sort it – See it. Say it. Sort it." Every ten minutes the guy I was travelling with would make a joke about my beard not looking right, threaten to tell the driver about my beard, make a joke about the elite B.T.P razor squad, or at least look quizzically at my face.

Richard "whiskers" B

Gypsy jazz guitar bridge repair

This weekend I did some moderately accurate woodwork while wearing a thick glove (to protect my finger injury)

This is what I was brought. One bridge is worn and damaged and made of inferior timber. The other is of good quality, the right length, width and radius, but far too low.

Cutting a plank of stock from the damaged bridge:

Stock: I love this picture, the newspaper, the marking gauge, the plane and the curly wood shavings make it look like my bench is clean, I know what I'm doing, and that I can sharpen and set up a plane really accurately. None of those is quite true.

Gluing:

This is what I made: Notice also the salt and pepper mills and the wine glass and bottle - it was extremely sociable woodwork.

This is where you can stick it:

Richard "Luthier" B