Month: December 2016

A limerick a week #15

So, the hedonistic rock star lifestyle has claimed another victim, or at least it looks that way, even if Rick Parfitt’s demise at the age of 68 is hardly that of a spring chicken. As Francis Rossi, his band mate and long-time friend, said of his ill-health in a portending interview the day before Parfitt died, “It’s payback for being a wild-man and he admits that himself”.

springchicken
Rick Parfitt

Still, it’s yet another icon of one’s youth to disappear. Top of the Pops in the seventies wasn’t Top of the Pops without Status Quo power-strumming their way through another incarnation of extremely loud, three-chord boogie-woogie (head-banging optional).

Spring Chicken

Whenever their musicianship was criticised their answer was simple: “We’re not musicians – we’re players”. And very loud players too, so much so that I guess if a journalist had told them in those days that the future would see them explore the acoustic route they’d have thought the hack’s snout had been buried rather too deeply in their coke trough. But they did, even if they called it ‘unplugged’ rather than acoustic.

Here’s a valedictory limerick for Parfitt:

I once wrote a limerick obit
For a rock star who called himself Parfitt …

… not really, that was a non-starter – here’s the real one:

You rocked the world over with ‘Caroline’
And your twelve bar blues that came to define
The essence of Status Quo
(A boogie-rock, three-chord show)
But, sadly, you’ve now reached the end-of-line.

Postscript: You may know that in 1975 Steeleye Span had a chart hit with ‘All Around My Hat‘, an up-tempo version of a traditional folk song that rose to number 5 in the UK top ten. In the same year Status Quo released ‘Roll Over Lay Down‘ which charted at number 9. Maybe it was being out-charted by a folk group that led to the subsequent fusion of Steeleye’s Maddy Prior with Quo in the latter’s 1996 studio album of cover versions.

‘All Around My Hat‘ (with Prior dad-dancing on the video oblivious to the watching world) was one of the singles taken from the album, peaking at number 47 during its mega two-week run in the charts!

Happy birthday to a hypocrite …

Having ‘dissed’ marketing departments in my earlier post I am now about to contradict myself by thanking the good people of the Laphroaig distillery for my ‘Friend of Laphroaig’ birthday card and 20% discount on my next bottle. Very timely. Ironic, really, as I became a ‘friend’ solely as a result of being ‘marketed’ …

Happy birthday to me!
Happy birthday to me!

 

A limerick a week #14

Faith, hope and gluttony.
That’ll be Christmas!

Big business dictates the modern spirit of Christmas (its marketing departments ensure that) and throughout its annual, tawdry attempts to wrest even more money from the season of goodwill we, as consumers, unfailingly comply.

capitalistchristmas

Nothing new of course. On his album ‘An evening wasted with Tom Lehrer‘, the songwriter/mathematician introduces his attempt at a tongue-in-cheek consumerist’s Christmas Carol with:

“It has always seemed to me after all, that Christmas with its spirit of giving, offers us all a wonderful opportunity each year to reflect on what we all most sincerely and deeply believe in. I refer of course, to money“.

Many a true word spoken in jest. Or, as Kevin McKenna writing in the Observer argues:

“At Christmas time though, the UK turns into a vast themed funfair reserved exclusively for the enjoyment for people with money … . At no other time of year does a person who  is experiencing real deprivation feel more alienated or deprived“.

pleb-rudolf

Therefore, as response to marketing departments the world over and in honour of Scrooges and Grinches everywhere, I give you:

It’s clearly within my ability
To indulge in a certain proclivity.
So, because our modern-day
Christmas has lost its way,
I’ll  eschew all the seasonal festivity!

Postscript: The perceptive amongst you will recognise the subtitle of this post to come from Thea Gilmore’s not-quite-a-hit Yuletide song, “That’ll be Christmas” in which her attempt to head for high ground to “forget it all” comes to nought. I suspect that will be my lot too.

I could lusten all day!

They say that languages are alive and constantly evolve, so here is my addition to the UK lexicon preceded by its root in standard UK English:

listen
 /ˈlɪs(ə)n/
verb
give one’s attention to a sound.
“evidently he was not listening“
lusten
/ˈlʌst(ə)n/
verb
Give too much of one’s attention to a mellifluous radio presenter.
“Evidently he lustened excessively to Kirsty Young”

Well, I did lusten excessively to Kirsty Young this morning, but that was solely to hear Bruce Springsteen on Desert Island Discs. And talking of ‘The Boss’, ’tis a little known fact that I once re-worked some of his lyrics in the days when I organised a series of get-togethers over coffee between colleagues at work – the SciOps Coffee Club – and advertised them with a series of posters.

One such poster was my take on the artwork for Springsteen’s pivotal ‘Born in the USA’ album that was transmogrified into ‘Baked in the MLA’. Literary licence allowed me to pretend that his song ‘Born to Run’ had actually debuted in that album as ‘Born to Bake’.

Here’s the original (modelled by Springsteen):

Apparently this photo was used on the album cover because, according to the man himself, his "ass looked better than his face".
Apparently this photo was used on the album cover because, according to the man himself, his “ass looked better than his face”.

… and this was my take on it (modelled by ‘Britney’ Springsteen , aka Firstborn):

Firstborn putting the 'bum' into 'Album'
Firstborn putting the ‘bum’ into ‘Album’

Postscript: this post was prepared on a smartphone. Bad choice. Its keyboard is not conducive to writing a lot of text and its capacity to include even mis-typed text into its dictionary of personalised ‘predictive’ text means that I shall now and forever think of Bruce Springsteen as Beery Sorungsteeb! Very Hitchkiker’s Guide …

Other than giving birth …

… I share a lot in common with Victoria Coren Mitchell’s view of the Mother-of-all-awful-years.

But awful year or not, at least we can be amused by her source of inspiration (or, wearing my current Grinch persona, we can once Christmas is over!) …

quote-my-inspiration-has-always-been-jeanne-calment-a-frenchwoman-who-smoked-and-drank-every-victoria-coren-mitchell-58-70-51

Postscript#1: Unsurprisingly, I don’t really have much in common with Coren Mitchell. After all, she’s an elite poker player, successful writer, highly amusing TV personality and, ahem, muse to men-of-a-certain-age, and all that I can do well is to count fish (commercial fishermen would disagree) and I haven’t actually done that since about 2005!

Postscript#2: In the Observer article on which she tweets, she cites Victoria Wood’s death as the saddest of the year: “… take your pick whose fall upset you most … for me the deepest cut was Victoria Wood, that sparkling creature of joy and laughter“. I agree, recalling from posts passim: “There has been a heavy toll taken of performers recently, but, for me, hers is the most egregious loss. Too soon and too young. A genuine laugh-out-loud writer and a comedian …“. (Of course thousands will have read Coren Mitchell’s comment on Wood; 11 people read mine – and that includes the author – so not much in common there either).

A word of comfort …

… to a mathematically ‘challenged’ social science class. 

I’ve previously mentioned the hilarity evoked by Firstborn’s decision to take a course in statistics during her Masters year. Well, that is over now and she didnae enjoy it, concluding that statistics is “evil”.

Tutors take note! That’s what happens when a subject is badly taught. From a pedagogical perspective the teachers could learn much from the following extract from Jordon Ellenberg’s book ‘How not to be wrong; the hidden maths of everyday life“:

“Working an integral or performing linear regression is something a computer can do quite effectively. Understanding whether the result makes sense … requires a guiding human hand. When we teach mathematics we are supposed to be explaining how to be that guide. A math course that fails to do so is essentially training the student to be a very slow, buggy version of Microsoft Excel. And let’s be frank: that really is what many of our math courses are doing.”

 

 

A limerick a week #13

There once was a lassie called H …

Short and sweet this week. Firstborn (aka ‘H’) told a friend that “my dad writes a limerick a week”. Her friend apparently thought that was the opening line of a limerick itself, so, at Firstborn’s request, here is one that does start that way:

My dad writes a limerick a week
They’re poems of a sort, so to speak.
It keeps him amused
Whilst the best are infused
With a bawdy, irreverent streak.

(Except they’re not really bawdy or irreverent more’s the pity).

What Michael said #3

The first spreadsheet program that I learned was SuperCalc for DOS in the pre-Windows days. Then came SuperCalc for Windows with a whole new interface to learn. The same path was followed for word processing: WordPerfect for DOS and then WordPerfect for Windows. All were purchases for the personal computers that my group possessed. The rest of my workplace was on a mainframe computer (actually a ‘mini-computer’, the DEC PDP 11) so my lot was really ahead of the game and we could go our own way. Unfortunately the rest of the place eventually caught up with us and then it all became ‘corporate’.

One of the first corporate decisions was to adopt WordPerfect Office as the ‘productivity’ software of choice. From my perspective that was fine for the word processing part of the package, but not so good for the spreadsheet as I now had to learn Borland’s offering for Windows: Quattro Pro. It also introduced Paradox as its database offering and Presentations as its slideshow application. Not to worry, though, we picked up on these until not that many years later it all changed again. Microsoft ruled the corporate world, so it was “Goodbye” to WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, Paradox and Presentations and “Hello” to Word, Excel, Access and Powerpoint.

Learning the new programs was tedious when you could do things so much quicker with the software that you had left behind and, often, the WordPerfect offerings were better than Microsoft’s. Add to that the translation of numerous macros from one language to another and things really got tedious – so much for increasing productivity.

Nevertheless, for the next decade or so things were reasonably stable and we had the internet to ourselves; no mass access to the World Wide Web in those days. And then the Web came to everyone, or so it seemed, with the burgeoning of social media. Friends Reunited looked interesting, but then it was MySpace and finally Facebook. (I got on to Facebook in 2015 and left it in 2016 thinking: “What’s wrong with the pub?“). But now we have, among others: Messenger, WhatsApp, Tumblr, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Google+, YouTube, Viber, WordPress, Yammer and Snapchat. All of which can be used fairly superficially (easy!) or can be delved into to exploit their real power (a bit harder).

What impresses me is how younger folk take to the ‘harder’ inner workings of these newer applications so readily, and how it seems to get a bit more difficult as you get older even if you have lived with Microsoft since DOS version 3, can program Windows applications using an object-oriented programming paradigm and even wrote reasonably complex code on the old Hewlett Packard programmable calculators in reverse Polish notation. Personally, I take comfort from Michael Graham’s war-time confession

What Michael said:

“Many of us strive to keep our bodies supple, but we do not have much success with our minds. I remember that I only just managed to learn the elements of wireless telegraphy during the last of my ‘teens; but the boys who followed me knew it all.”

Plus ça change! Time to take up brain-training methinks (or maybe just Sudoku).

Postscript#1: Graham was writing during the 1940s when it generally was ‘the boys who followed’ and not the girls. Sad to say that in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) it is still mainly ‘the boys’ that follow even 80 years after Graham’s quote.

(My workplace is trying to work towards greater inclusion and gender equality in STEM subjects. One of our tools is Yammer where my skills encompass the easy-to-access shallow end of its capability; I won’t be stressing my grey matter to delve into its depths).

Postscript#2: As a Brit of a certain age, my preference would be to refer to the object-oriented programming paradigm as the object-orientated paradigm. I once googled why the former prevails. Mostly, it seems, it is because ‘to orient’ is the common American usage of the same verb that UK English would reference as ‘to orientate’.

Interestingly, North Americans that comment on the issue find the verb ‘to orientate’ to be irritating (or should that be irriting?) whereas ‘to orient’ seems irritating to the Brits (apparently orient is more common than orientate in British use today, but I suspect that may be due to its use in computer programming paradigms – you don’t see it used much elsewhere).

My understanding is that evidence indicates that orientate evolved in UK English from orient, so it seems be an example of an English word that evolved further in the UK after North America was colonised whereas its original form was maintained across the pond. I recall the author Bill Bryson making the same point about other words that we Brits now refer to dismissively as ‘Americanisms‘ when, in fact, they are the original British forms of the words that we now use.

Personally, I think object-based would do!