A limerick a week #4

It’s not often that I’m approached in the street by a bonnie lass asking to take my picture. Never actually – until yesterday that is (and I have witnesses!). I just happened to be kicking my heels down south when an attractive and youthful damsel ran – literally ran – across the road and asked if she could photograph me.

It turns out that she was an art student and she wanted to capture my visage for a project that she was working on. Well, who am I to frustrate the creativity of today’s youth, especially as she wanted a picture of JUST ME and not the others? Clearly Firstborn’s vanity is beginning to rub off on me.

I saw the result (quite characterful and flattering) and only later began to wonder about Photoshop, the internet and the heinous uses to which an innocently-gifted picture could be put.

Anyway, my late-middle-aged self-esteem had been suitably boosted so I’m happy enough😀

I was accosted just now in the street
By a lassie, both bonnie and sweet.
My cute new amigo
Then massaged my ego
By seeking a photo to tweet!

(Let me predict Firstborn’s reaction to this: “Oh no, not another Afroditi story. You are so ridiculous dad. You really are!“)

A limerick a week #3

‘Team Demelza’ strikes back …

He may have a six-pack, he may be Pol, dark and handsome, and he may have a voice that buckles the knees of womenfolk at 100 yards, but it’s not all about Ross …

While the girls have gone wild about scything
And fantasize all about writhing
With muscular Ross,
I don’t give a toss
‘Cos it’s Demelza with whom I’ll be ‘jiving’!

... but I already do!
… I already do (with Management that is, not Demelza) so glass duly raised!

 

Cor baby, that’s really … painful

A not-so-guilty secret of mine is the enduring appeal of the bawdy ‘laugh-out-loud’ passages in Tom Sharpe’s novels, and since his demise I have to say that I’ve missed them. So how did a family discussion on the geographical origins of the surname ‘Otway’ (family friends) bring Sharpe’s prose back to mind?

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Well, it seems that Management couldn’t remember John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett’s rendition of ‘Really Free’ (not that it had anything to do with our conversation). Nor did she know that the song had come to the public’s attention via an appearance on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Writing in the Independent a few years ago, Robert Chalmers reflected on the event in pure Tom Sharpe fashion:

“… Otway vaulted on to a PA tower and overbalanced. He brought down the speaker stack but fractured no bones when he landed on the sharp corner of a bass cabinet as the impact was cushioned by his testicles“.

Pure Sharpe!

You can watch it here.

Quotes that made me laugh #15


In the immortal words of the Scottish bard:

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

How true, and the quote that made me laugh today comes from Kentish Man (or is it Man of Kent?) and Graun columnist Stuart Heritage. This is how he sees those of us living north of the border and in the far southwest of Englandshire:

Scotland, full of beautiful countryside and majestic red deer. Cornwall, full of rich a**eholes from Islington called Sebastian who’ve got crap ginger dreadlocks and septic wounds where their nasal piercings used to be“.

and just so the Cornish don’t feel too ‘got at’, this is what he thinks of his home county of Kent:

Wander far enough north and you’ll soon find yourself lost in the unwanted hinterland of Bromley. … Go west and you’ll enter Sussex, which is to all intents and purposes Kent with a violent Laura Ashley infatuation. Go south and you’ll drown in the sea, which doesn’t sound great but is at least preferable to spending any meaningful amount of time in Folkestone”.

I don’t know how true this is as I have only ever ventured to Canterbury (which seemed fine) and Bromley (that had a cocktail bar sans cocktails) and I vaguely remember passing through Folkstone very early one morning after disembarking the ferry from Calais and, true, it did look a bit grim. But even though I think it may be a bit harsh, I do recall a fellow student from my Masters course – Simon, a nice chap – lamenting in laconic style that he came from Kent, except in his words it appeared to be even worse: “I come from Gravesend; name says it all really“.

Postscript: I learned today the difference between a Kentish Man and a Man of Kent (ditto a Kentish Maid versus a Maid of Kent). I’d heard of the former as it was the title of Frank Muir’s autobiography and I thought the term applied to anyone from Kent, but no. Men and Maids of Kent may originally have been Jutes whereas Kentish Men or Maids may originally have been Saxons, the former traditionally hailing from that part of Kent east of the River Medway and the latter from west of the river, although some doubt the historical accuracy of the river as the boundary. And it might all be mythical anyway …

A limerick a week #1

A Limerick a Week #1

During 2010-11, Jon Boden (ex-Bellowhead frontman) produced a daily podcast for 365 consecutive days under the banner of ‘A Folk Song A Day‘. The intent was to promote the practice of social singing, but as 99.9999% of the British public are probably entirely unaware of the project and wouldn’t give a damn about it even if they were, I suspect that his was a forlorn hope.

Now, it just so happens that one of the songs that he chose to perform for December was ‘The Mistletoe Bough‘ a delightfully depressing antidote to the over-commercialised festival that comprises our modern-day lost-its-way Christmas. This is a song that Firstborn forbids me to sing in her presence as it brings her to tears (which is the public’s usual reaction to my singing anyway, so what’s new?). Nevertheless, when telling her that it was part of the ‘A Folk Song a Day‘ project she suggested that I should copy the idea and produce a limerick a day on my Facebook (apparently my limericks amuse her). That was too ambitious for me and as I later left Facebook, it would certainly have failed. But a limerick a week? On this blog? Might work …

So here it is. The first one. Inspired by the depressing news of the UK vote to leave the European Union, and to ensure untrammelled, professional mobility throughout the European Economic Area for our kids, Management has taken advantage of her ancestry to claim Irish citizenship, thus enabling Firstborn and the Tall Child to be declared ‘out of country’ births and, as such, to adopt Irish citizenship themselves (if they so desire):

I don’t want to complain, but I do wish
That the Brits would not be quite so boorish
‘Cos leaving the Union
Just bolsters disunion
And my wife’s turned from English to Oirish!

Ready for Brexit ...
Ready for Brexit …

Postscript: The legend behind the Mistletoe Bough can be found here, and Jon Boden’s solo rendition of it is at the bottom of this page (requires Adobe Flash to play).

‘Tis IgNobler in the mind …

I doff my cap to the latest set of Ig Nobel Laureates. These two awards in particular will, I’m sure, prove beneficial to my colleagues and me:

Ig Nobel Peace Prize: Gordon Pennycook and colleagues, for their study “On the Reception and Detection of Pseudo-Profound Bullshit”

Ig Nobel Perception Prize: Atsuki Higashiyama and Kohei Adachi, for investigating whether things look different when you bend over and view them between your legs.

Quotes that made me laugh #14

Okay, so I have to admit to watching Poldark last night even though I had some concerns during the last series after Management seemed a tad over-interested in Ross and his six-pack, only to be:

(i) reassured by her exclamation during his topless scything scene that: “I don’t like men with squares on their chest“;

and

(ii) rather concerned by her somewhat loose grasp of anatomy

Anyway, none of that is of current interest as the highlight of the present series, for me at least, was last night’s exchange between Demelza and Sir Hugh Bodrugan;

Sir Hugh: “Have you come to steal my heart?

Demelza: “No, sir, I’ve come to visit your cow.”

They don’t write ’em like that no more! A true classic.

Poldark once he's got the girl (image posted by Bulloverman's Tomb of the Bizarre)
Poldark once he’s got the girl (image posted by Bulloverman’s Tomb of the Bizarre)

What Michael said #1

The news that Firstborn has elected to take a module on statistics during her Masters’ year brought a smile to my face. Actually, I laughed hysterically until she pointed out that Management or I may have to help her out – it’s a long time since I studied statistics!

In fact, she may do well to ignore to anything that I say – after all, why change the habit of a lifetime! More seriously, that’s because my perspective on statistics and particularly on significance testing in classical statistics is that a lot of it seems rather arbitrary. Why should a particular outcome be considered statistically significant just because the odds of it happening by chance and chance alone are 1 in 20? Why not 1 in 19 or 1 in 21 or 1 in 50,000,000? And I’m not alone in thinking this.

As a post-graduate student at York University in the 1980s (maths, stats and computing for masochists and the innumerate), one of the highlights of the week was a pub quiz in the adjacent village of Heslington. The question master, Peter Lee, was a lecturer in the Maths and Statistics Department who later wrote a book on Bayesian statistics and commented in his Forward that he delved into the Bayesian world because he was dissatisfied with the arbitrary nature of significance testing in classical statistics. Now, I’m nowhere near numerate enough to discuss the finer points of frequentist versus Bayesian statistics, but the same underlying concern of arbitrariness struck me too.

Even within the more classical school, you can still see concerns. Modern papers with titles such as “The insignificance of significance testing“, or variants thereof, abound and exist alongside the older and more literary disclaimer of John Nelder, one of the founders of generalised linear modelling, who, in his overview of a 1971 British Ecological Society Symposium on Mathematical Models in Biology proclaimed:

Fisher’s famous paper of 1922, which quantified information almost half a century ago, may be taken as the fountainhead from which developed a flow of statistical papers, soon to become a flood. This flood, as most floods, contains flotsam much of which, unfortunately, has come to rest in many text books. Everyone will have his own pet assortment of flotsam; mine include most of the theory of significance testing, including multiple comparison tests, and non parametric statistics“.

Interestingly, Nelder was a later successor to Fisher as Director of the Statistics Department at the Rothamsted Research Station. I don’t know whether his quote deprecates Fisher’s work or the fact that followers often follow blindly without the insight into the subject that the originator had – I suspect the latter in Fisher’s case – and you certainly see that in fisheries research, my profession.

I did wonder whether the apparent post-1960s disenchantment with classical significance testing was due in part to the advent of electronic computers as a result of which more numerically intensive approaches to statistical modelling could be developed. Then I remembered a quote I once read in book first published in 1943, The Fish Gate, by Michael Graham (one of the most insightful leaders of fisheries research in the 20th century and the chap after whom the title of this post is framed). There will be more about him in future posts, but for now his concerns with statistical testing and statistical power had nothing to do with developments in computing power:

What Michael said:

In this century we have admitted this ‘Normal’ curve into all our counsels. It is of so wide an application that its professors have come to smell of priestcraft, setting up arbitrary standards by which to judge the significance of everything that we have claimed to achieve. They have real power; but it is of necromancy, as when they solve a problem by a short excursion into n-dimensional space. They ride brooms if ever man did“.

Postscript: I intentionally used the phrase ‘electronic computers’ in the penultimate paragraph above, even though it has a sort of antiquated feel to it; isn’t ‘computer’ enough? Well, no actually! At least not in the context of commenting on work from an era predating the modern age of computing. Delving into the fisheries research literature it is possible to find reference to ‘an experienced computer’ in the bible of fisheries research, Beverton and Holt’s 1957 magnum opus: ‘On the dynamics of exploited fish populations’. In this instance, the ‘computer’ is actually a living, breathing person, not a machine. So there!