Holly

Y'know, I remember when I used to use this space as somewhere to be annoyed or to link to interesting things, but no longer, apparently. Now it's all very-intermittent updates focusing on things I've done that you're not interested in. On which note, I'm currently involved with this, which is associated with Hide and Seek, a festival of social games and playful experiences running at the Southbank Centre from June 26 to 29. The Sandpit involves monthly playing and playtesting meetings wherein we make up games, play games, and (hopefully) polish games to reappear at the festival itself.

I'm curating the games for the next one, which is taking place at Shunt, in the tunnels under London Bridge, on Wednesday 16 April. It's themed around "Spying and Lying", so come along if you feel like passing secret messages, smuggling objects, being assigned numbers and possibly having an excuse to wear a fedora. And if there's a game that you'd like to run (or just a ruleset you'd like to send in in case someone else wants to run it), let me know. They don't need to be big running-around games with actors and fireworks; low-key sit-in-a-corner games, and hidden play-secretly-through-the-night games, are just as good.

Related: Iglab, the Bristol equivalent of the Sandpit events; Come Out and Play, the New York equivalent of the festival; some photos from the last (listening-themed) event, though unfortunately Shunt's whole "being a maze of dimly-lit underground tunnels" thing doesn't really lend itself to action photography so there's very little documentation of the games themselves.

Coming next week, I tell you about how I seem to have more bags of rice in the kitchen cupboard than I remember buying or can ever possibly eat, and point you to a new blog wherein I will document the life of each individual grain of rice as I attempt to find a new home for it.

Edit: bateleur reminds me to mention thesandpit, the livejournal feed of the Sandpit blog, essays and ruleset. The blog part is kinda London-centric; if anyone would like to keep up with the essays and rulesets but doesn't want to sit through all the overexcited London events stuff, kick me and maybe I'll finally get around to sorting out separate feeds for different categories.

I'm not a student, for the first time since 1986! Now I just have to wait around for several months while the examiners decide if I get to have a PhD or not.

In the mean time, let's see the result of all that study in the form of some statistics!

Times I changed thesis topic dramatically: 1.
Line which I thought was uncontentious but which turned out not to be: "Reading a novel that's had an enduring effect on the course of English literature doesn't make you a better person".
Line that still makes me snigger every time I read it: "Landow further argues that hypertext fiction instantiates the characteristics of Barthes' ideal "writerly" text".
Number of works in the works cited list: 112.
Number of people in the Works Cited list whom I've lived with: 1, down from a first-draft 3.
Silliest name in the Works Cited list: Cheeseburger Brown.
Appearances of the word "zombie" or "zombies" in the text of the thesis: 4.
Number of years since 1986: 22, apparently!
Line that I was told to edit for its non-inclusive language: "The cost of production acts like a peacock's feathers, flaunting his health with their extravagance".
Three sentence fragments: "Peter Pan/Anaconda crossover story", "a habit abandoned nowadays save in outmoded institutions like universities and marriage", "I must stop at the mall of Rundle to buyez des fleurs".

So, um, how does "not being a student" work? I'm doing bits of freelance game design and writing, but should I get a proper job? How would I do that? Do any of you need some games designed or stuff written or, er, relatively static websites or cakes made?

I was intending to wait and point at this when I'd written an actual, you know, post with content, but then I remembered how often that happens, so: as well as persistently not getting around to writing livejournal entries, I am now intending to actually get around to writing entries at my new food blog, Raspberry Debacle. Coming in the next week:

• Salads - gosh they're rubbish, aren't they?
• A ten-thousand-foot-tall mountain of rice pudding.

There's a feed at raspbry_debacle, thanks to thewronghands, because "raspberrydebacle" is one letter too long for Livejournal.

So, London is great, and full of exhibitions and squirrels and tubewalks and people pointing at things and playing board games with me. Unfortunately somebody suggested to our delightful but impetuous housemate verlaine that he move to Canada, and the next thing we knew he was dancing on the kitchen table wrapped in a Canadian flag and singing their national anthem (technically it was "America the Beautiful" with the word "Canada" replacing "America" throughout, but nobody knows the Canadian national anthem, and it's the same accent, so never mind). We managed to coax him down with biscuits, but the next day even that wouldn't work - he refused to eat anything unless we drizzled it with maple syrup first. The upshot of this is that he's moving and we have a spare room as of late February. Do you want to live in it?

We're in Battersea, on a friendly Zone 2 council estate so central that we can all but fly our kite over Battersea Park from the verandah. Ten-minute bus ride to Vauxhall or Clapham Junction, neighbouring train station seven minutes walk away, forty minutes walk or ten minutes by bus to Victoria. The room's smallish, but for £300-ish a month including bills (probably increasing to £325ish in an April rent hike), what can you expect? People in the midlands can shut up about their £250pcm six-bedroom detached houses with study, garage and butler, thank you very much. You shouldn't live in the midlands anyway, you should live with me (I'm lovely), kevandotorg (he's also lovely), and the_alchemist (again, lovely, and also she has a Wii). Frequent views of squirrels from the largeish living room, charming housemates with nice hair, fire escape, verandah, etc. Available pretty much any time from late February onwards, though to some extent the sooner the better.


If you don't actually want to live here, d'you want to visit and play board games with me instead? I can't stand parties, but I keep envying other people's excuses to wear costumes. The solution to this may be a monthly board-game group where each month we play board games based on a different theme (Ancient Rome, food, bean-farming, etc), and possibly wear costumes related to the theme. And eat cake related to the theme (this would be particularly easy for the "food" month). Does this sound like a good idea? What if you didn't have to wear a costume? Would you come to Battersea for it, and if so, what sort of time would be best - a weekend afternoon, an evening?

Tea is brilliant. I realise this might sound like the English immigration department's been round and given me a stern lecture on fitting in, but I promise I still miss dark chocolate tim-tams, and I don't believe in badgers. Tea, though! For a start, you can make it out of anything. Strawberry and mango! Loganberries, which I didn't know existed! Dried apricots, weeds, flowers, probably wicker baskets and old hard drives if you break them up small and boil the water for long enough.

And then there's all the exotic history: smugglers who paid local shepherds to drive sheep across the sand and eradicate tell-tale trails! Profiteers who sold tea adulterated with sheep dung, copper, and previously used leaves! Apparently used tea leaves can also clean mirrors if you "use a soft cloth to buff away the tea after cleaning", which I suspect would also be true of, eg, coffee grounds, cake batter, or mud, but on the other hand I haven't tried it so what do I know? Maybe tea can do that as well.

It even has a brilliant origin. Roses from Mohammed's blood, rightio; daffodils from Narcissus's body, yes, okay; but tea from Bodhidharma's eyelids which he cut off in fury at his failure to stay awake, and cast on the ground. And there's the decades of disapproval, as this Samuel Johnson review of a book by the charmingly-named Mr. H***** demonstrates:

He then proceeds, in the pathetick strain, to tell the ladies how, by drinking tea, they injure their health, and, what is yet more dear, their beauty.

Admittedly the disapproval only applied to "real" tea, "that detestable and poisonous plant"; at around the same time, teas made from less conventional brewees were being used to promote health, and John Byng was writing

I look'd frequently out of my windows at early morn; and finding the rain to continue, did not rise till 8 o'clock. I drank snail tea for breakfast, for my chest is very sore, as every cold, or damp flies to that quarter.

A couple of hundred years later, even real tea has been rehabilitated. In the UK, a recent advertising campaign showed that tea is really really healthy. It mostly accomplished this by not quite lying and interpolating "Tea!" in the middle of sentences about healthy things: "Fruit and vegetables are a good source of antioxidants and the Government recommends that we should eat 5 portions or more a day. But did you know that tea is too? We recommend 4 cups a day". (Lifting weights can be a great form of exercise. But did you know that tea has a weight too? We recommend lifting it to your mouth every two to three hours.)

The "we" doing the recommending is the United Kingdom Tea Council, and their website is so scientifically rigorous that they won't let you see it unless you click to agree that yes, it's intended for health professionals and you aren't going to sue them when you die from a tea-only diet. Once you get in, though, there's a lot of fun to be had - the personality analysis of How do you drink your tea, the games where you try to pour tea into moving cups (and are told to drink more tea to perk you up when you fail). The best part is Astro Tea, allowing you to read your future in your tea-leaves or, if you don't have any tea-leaves, in a flash fake-tea-leaves interface.

Bee (one): A single bee warns of gossip.
Bee (more than one): A swarm of bees indicates that you are busy or foretells a social gathering.

The list is quite exhaustive, including camels (good fortune), a fern (sincerity) and a flamingo (a shy but good looking stranger will soon make an entrance into your life). A snail in your tea doesn't in fact cure your cold but instead "bids you to continue on your path slowly but surely and can also indicate a very sexually uninhibited person". A unicorn "suggests that you may have psychic powers". No wonder they make you click a disclaimer to get in! Imagine the trouble that could stem from an overconfident tea-drinker misinterpreting a postage stamp ("A postage stamp suggests you'll be sending or receiving an important letter") as a mere square ("A square means you need to think creatively. You need to think about the things around you").

A little while ago, offensive_mango pointed to some delightful Humanist Christmas Carols. Silent Night is replaced with Be a Bright, The First Noel with There Is No Hell, the faithful are urged to come from Bethlehem and "ignore him", while, perhaps most charmingly, God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen becomes

The World of Richard Dawkins
Is a place where you will find
A scientific plethora
To stimulate your mind.
Expand your intellectual side;
Leave ignorance behind.
O, tidings of knowledge and truth,
Knowledge and truth.
O, tidings of knowledge and truth.

We atheists will have no truck with comfort and joy, though apparently we will have truck with personifying pine trees and then settling our consciences by instead buying fakes made from non-renewable fossil fuels which used to be, er, dead trees:

O Christmas Tree, O Christmas Tree,
How murderous and wasteful
To end your life so carelessly,
So thoughtless and distasteful.
[...]
I'll work for change, I promise thee,
For only Man can save a tree.
Long life to thee, O Christmas Tree,
I'm buying "artificial."

Revising lyrics to make them more scientific isn't a new idea. Babbage famously wrote to Tennyson complaining about the line "Every minute dies a man, every minute one is born":

If this were true the population of the world would be at a standstill. In truth, the rate of birth is slightly in excess of that of death. I would suggest "Every moment dies a man, every moment 1 1/16 is born." Strictly speaking the actual figure is so long I cannot get it into a line, but I believe the figure 1 1/16 will be sufficiently accurate for poetry.

Furthermore, Christmas songs have notoriously fickle lyrics. Hark! the herald angels sing began as Hark! how all the welkin rings. Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas originally opened "Have yourself a merry little Christmas; it may be your last" before being revised to its familiar form, and eventually to "Have Yourself A Blessed Little Christmas".

Since people are so keen to rewrite Christmas songs, then, I present my Christmas Song Generator, whose usefulness is rivalled only by the shoddiness of its decorative holly. At the press of a button, you can make carols appropriate for atheists:

Bring me flesh, and bring me Richard Dawkins,
Bring me pine logs hither.

You can make secular songs appropriate for Christians:

Rudolph the red-nosed angel
Had a very shiny nose.

And you can make everything appropriate for me:

And so this is Xmas,
I hope you have bees.

There's been some controversy on livejournal recently about whether Glasgow or Edinburgh is better. People who got rained on in Glasgow in 1997 say it's Edinburgh; people who read a review of Trainspotting say it's Glasgow. As someone who just spent a week in Glasgow, but who also went to Edinburgh for a day on Friday, I feel I'm in a unique position to decide the matter properly.

Weather: In Edinburgh the weather is cold but fine. In Glasgow there is, all right, a lot of rain and wind. This is only a problem if you plan something outside that you wouldn't want to do wet and in a tree.

Museums: In Edinburgh the museums close as you reach them. In Glasgow, on the other hand, they've just undergone huge refurbishments culminating in themed rooms like "masks and disembodied heads" and "every painting we own with a kilt in it". In the room filled with stuffed animals and a Spitfire, there was a Scottish man explaining a moose to his bewildered child ("no, not a moose, a moose"), which made me very happy, but he might have gone by the time you get there.

Advertising: In Edinburgh most of the advertising is for tartan and bagpipes and shortbread kilts; there is a shop named "Thistle Do Nicely". In Glasgow, bus shelter advertisements warn that cocaine causes heart attacks, and pensioner radio station Saga regularly interrupts The Seekers and Bing Crosby with a public service announcement about how you shouldn't carry knives.

Carousels: Edinburgh's carousel has those seats on chains that swing out, while Glasgow's has horses with feather-dusters in their heads. Not plumes that look like feather-dusters: actual literal feather-dusters.

German Christmas markets: Both cities have one of these, where you can go to small wooden huts and buy food that combines German and Scottish sensibilities, like sauerchips or chipwurst.

Edinburgh's special feature: A road that led in the wrong direction, though to be fair it did end up in a strange alternate universe of ominous science-fiction houses and a huge spiky museum building (the sign said it was "Our Dynamic Earth", but it was a bit smaller than that). Edit: hoshuteki reveals that the science-fiction dystopia houses are actually Scottish Parliament, brilliantly.

Glasgow's special feature: A visit to a glasshouse at the Botanic Gardens, which (the front page of the local paper later revealed) was at that very moment being reopened after a seven-million pound refurbishment. I was there two years ago, and the main difference seems to be that it has a string quartet and some reporters in it now.

To summarise in photographic form:

( Lights, graffiti, carousels. )

In conclusion, they're both great, but Glasgow's better. It's still not as good as London, because London has (1) gingerbread; and (2) a talk on art crime at the V&A at seven o'clock tonight - we've got a spare ticket, so comment if you want to come. It lasts an hour and the museum is open afterwards. Details here.

Adelaide is enormous; not in a boring literal sense, but in the sense of containing most of the important things in the world.

A lot of Australian cities are like this. They're a long way from anywhere else — Adelaide is the only population centre of more than 25,000 people in its entire time-zone, ten hours by car or a couple of hundred dollars by air from "nearby" Melbourne — so it's relatively difficult to move cities for university or a job or a whim, and ninety percent of the things that have happened to me happened within half an hour's bus ride of the city centre.

When I was thirteen and read a novel set in Rome, I got out a map of Adelaide and oriented it so the Tiber overlapped with the Torrens: aha, there's a mausoleum where the wine centre should be; brilliant, there's theatres in the Festival Centre; the Colosseum's in Victoria Square, surely that's going to be inconvenient. Later, university lectures were filled with people I'd debated against at school, every bus route went past a relative's house, and until yesterday I could walk to any place I'd ever lived in an afternoon (we'll ignore three-month-long overseas visits, because it doesn't make much of a sentence to say "within, ooh, I dunno, a year? If there wasn't any water in the way, and there were people every ten miles with food?").

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I'm now in London, which is also enormous but in a different sense, one involving rather more "being really big" and "having a lot of people in it". If you're one of those people, perhaps you would like to visit a park or museum or something else with me, or come round for boardgames and biscuits one afternoon! You'll find me, probably in the company of the delightful if livejournal-shunning Kevan, in charming Battersea, which — judging by the afternoon I've spent in it so far — seems to be devoted primarily to cheerful streetsweepers waving hello to friendly passers-by, gentle breezes rustling through green leaves, red-brick railway bridges overflowing with lilacs, ducks chasing squirrels merrily through the absurdly huge park, and dappled sunlight that doesn't actually cause sunburn or make objects warm. This can't last, so hurry, before London shows its true colours and I get mugged by a flock of pigeons desperate for a couple of pounds to buy a cup of tea.

So, I'm moving country, which means getting rid of most of the things I own. Fortunately I left a thousand books behind a couple of moves ago, so it's not as difficult as it could be, there's only about 500 left. And some furniture. And everything else in the house.

Except not everything, just the things I don't care about quite enough to ship to the UK. There are some clothes that won't fit in my suitcase, because apparently I have four coats now; some art supplies I know I'll have to rebuy the moment I want to draw something, if I don't bring them; some board games I'll definitely play again (Ebbe and Flut squeezed inside the Citadels box, which is squeezed inside Carcassonne). And some vegemite and biscuits and Haighs chocolate, because I know you claim there's food in the northern hemisphere but I don't really believe it, and you certainly don't have chocolate-coated Scotch Fingers.

So I've got a few cubic feet of the things I really want, and another cubic foot or two of stuff that's no good to me or anyone else but which I can't bear to throw out because it has sentimental value, which is shorthand for "is so precious to me that I'll put it in a damp box to rot in my mother's shed for twenty years and then throw it out". And then a huge pile of everything else in the house. How do pyramids work? I have this conviction that there's an inner sanctum with the pharoah's important stuff, his organs and masks and servants, and then more rooms outside with the things that he'd like to have in the next world but, you know, baggage allowances these days, and shipping costs are frightful, and he doesn't really need that two-hundredth tunic, and surely there'll be somewhere he can get kohl in the afterlife, so never mind about those, but maybe squeeze in another packet of Delta Creams.

A list of the stuff that doesn't quite make it to the inner sanctum is here. Do you want some of it? Free if you only want a couple of things, AU$2 per thing if you want more, and if you're in Adelaide you'll have to collect it yourself. If you're not in Adelaide, I can send it to you, but you'll have to pay for the postage from Australia, which is terrifyingly expensive. It might still be worth looking at the books in case there's something you desperately want, but it's unlikely to be cheaper than getting it from the local second-hand bookshop. Books seem to weigh about 200-500 grams each; postage costs by boat, which would probably take a couple of months to get to you:
$8 for up to 250 grams
$12 for up to 500 grams
$20 for up to a kilo
$30 for up to 1.5 kilos
$35 for up to 2 kilos
An extra $5 for each additional 500 grams or part thereof.
That's Australian dollars; divide by 2.4 to get pounds, 1.3 to get US dollars, or multiply by 6 to get Ancient Egyptian grain withdrawal chits. Add about fifty percent again if you want it by air, which takes a week to ten days. Bargain prices if you buy bulk: $800 plus shipping for everything in the house.

This week's Lessons from the Stacks come from Gerard Nierenberg's How To Read A Person Like A Book, a 1971 study of body language. The library's copy has been heavily annotated by a later scholar, who has drawn explanatory details (which is to say, blood) on the illustrations, thus:

( Picture. )

The annotater has also written "Warning! Sexist material inside!" on the title page, perhaps in reference to lines like "the conscious throat-clearing sound made by an adult male can be a nonverbal signal for a child or female to behave", or to this handy anecdote:

A friend of ours used to get good-looking girls to sit next to him on cross-country bus trips by taking an aisle seat — since he had observed that women like to sit by the window — placing a pillow on the window seat, then gesturing his willingness to remove the pillow every time a good-looking girl walked down the aisle looking for a seat. Giving up his territorial rights won him an enviable number of attractive companions.

I don't really understand why it's an intrinsically good thing to be sitting next to someone pretty on the bus, but maybe the "friend" also ate a lot of crisps and lard so that the girls had to touch his legs to get past him to the seat. On the whole, though, the book's not so much sexist as zoological, dealing with women as a new and fascinating species:

Women, when expressing sincere feelings to other women, do not shake hands. They gently hold the other's hands in theirs and with congruous facial expressions communicate their deep sympathy. Often an embrace that endorses their attitude will follow. Very seldom will a woman use this gesture with a man. It seems to be specially reserved for communication with her own sex.

Additionally, women are believed to "hear" airborne sound with their antennae, using hair-like sensors at the tips; and a woman who happens upon a new food source will return to the nest, repeatedly touching the ground with the tip of her abdomen, producing a chemical trail. When she meets with her nestmates the excited woman will harass them by knocking against them and touching antennae, which causes other women to follow her trail back to the food source.

To be fair, Nierenberg does this sort of alien-observation thing to everyone, not just women: "Clergymen, lawyers and academics tend to steeple often, as do business executives. Our research data indicates that the more important an executive feels he is, the higher he will hold his hands while steepling." This is why particularly self-important business-men have been known to start belly-dancing casually during tense negotiations, sometimes on top of a small stepladder.

After a little practice, Nierenberg suggests, interpreting people's gestures becomes easy, particularly if you're willing to experiment:

The delicate balancing of a shoe on the toe of one of the feet tells a man, "You're making me feel comfortable in your presence." Should you want to test this, the next time a woman performs this gesture, say or do something you think will make her apprehensive or uncomfortable and notice how quickly she puts her shoe on.

and to observe:

( Picture of a man poking his fingers into his eyes, which shows that he can't see something. No, really. )

As with the other books I've examined, How To Read A Person Like A Book includes exercises to test how you're going — in this case, some pictures of women that you're supposed to look at, with instructions "without reading the captions, try to determine the nonverbal communication of each of the five girls whom you might see at a typical social gathering". I've included three of these five, with the captions blurred, so you won't be tempted to cheat:

( Picture. )

Now that you know how to read body language, be careful not to abuse the power! I can give no advice sounder than the very last paragraphs of the book itself:

This week's Lesson from the Stacks comes from Stephen Hayes's NINJA Volume II and NINJA Volume III. ( picture ).

I don't know why a primarily medical library has two books on how to be a ninja, but I'm glad it does; reshelving books is dull, and the best way to make it fun is to pretend that you're really a secret book ninja, familiarising yourself with your weapons and environment for the time when you'll need to start running sideways up bookshelves or spinning hardbacks across the room to bury them in the wall. The NINJA volumes are a big help in this, covering everything from "yoga-like body conditioning exercises" and "short stick fighting" to "ninja "secret knowledge" of the universe" (quotation marks in original) and "energy channeling".

For any other purposes, it's a slightly bemusing series, alternating arresting passages (I enjoy the categorisation of invisibility into invisibility achieved by preventing light from reflecting from you, invisibility achieved by taking away the perceiver's ability to see, and invisibility achieved by disguise) with sections on how to balance electromagnetic power fields using secret hand movements (here is the church, here is the steeple, open the doors and unleash a blazing torrent of focused energy into the faces of the people). It also insists that ninjas' reactions to their surroundings should take one of five classic forms: air, earth, fire, water and heart void, and that if you are a ninja harnessing the power of earth, for example, "you are the junior high school principal confronted by a thirteen-year-old troublemaker who did not expect you to come upon him. Your natural feeling is one of total power that can handle all and the needs to fear nothing." (The completion of the implicit "Captain Planet, he's a ninja / Gonna take the villains and them injure" song is left as an exercise to the reader.)

As the high-school principal example demonstrates, this is a modern take on the concept of ninjas. Mr Hayes discourages his readers from sticking to old traditions where these are no longer relevant:

Obviously, moving through the street in a robe with a red basket on one's head while playing a bamboo flute is no longer the best way to blend in, even in rural Japan.

He is therefore careful to demonstrate how his ninja moves can be applied to the modern world. He shows, for example, the steps of a forward roll, and then photographs of its practical application. While in the time of the original ninjas a forward roll might have been used to dive from a crumbling stone bridge onto the top of a passing carriage containing the kidnapped daughter of a warrior lord, nowadays it can be used to ( get out of a car. )

Similarly, he shows you how to do a sideways handspring. While these might have been used in the past to vault across precarious turrets toward the bedroom of your victim without dropping your blowpipe, the modern ninja is more likely to use them to ( cross the road. )

Like last week's ECG Interpretation Made Incredibly Easy, NINJA contains exercises allowing the aspirant ninja/ECG interpreter to monitor his or her progress.

Exercise one: Meditate on the frailty, ever-degenerating vitality and impurity of the human body.

Exercise Four: Meditate on the fleeting transiency of the self in the universal scheme.

Exercise Ten: Imagine you are in the future looking back at the present, which will appear as the past from your viewpoint in the imaginary future.

Unfortunately the answers seem to be somewhere in the missing Volumes I and IV, so I don't really know how I'm going, and I haven't even started on my favourite, Exercise Three from Volume III:

For reasons of investigative work, personal privacy or professional need, comb through your own background to find the root characteristics that will permit you to create three distinct, alternate identities for yourself.

( Steps One through Five, photographed because there's too much to type out. )

Although it's no longer 1980, Stephen Hayes still seems to be around and a ninja, selling ninja-look pants cuffs which you can wrap around the legs of your trousers to make them look more ninja-y. I don't know whether they work with skirts, though. Maybe if you buy the XL for "extremely large calf size" and just put both legs into it at once.

Last Thursday I dropped my camera.

This was inconvenient, because it meant that instead of taking photos of things, thus:

( A photo of a thing. )

I had to remember the thing, and then on returning home several hours later to draw a picture of it in paint, thus:

( A picture in Paint of a thing. )

Though my powerful memory and practiced computer art skills render the two images above virtually indistinguishable, recording the world in drawing form does take up to ninety seconds longer per image; and the alternative plan of taking my laptop and a USB-powered scanner everywhere would break down on those rare occasions where the thing I wanted to record wasn't a sign. So yesterday I phoned the police to see if anyone had handed the camera in (note: this is a lie. Actually my mother phoned the police; it hadn't even occured to me that the police might be where you look for lost property. I don't know what else they unexpectedly do — maybe you should try phoning them the next time you run out of clean teatowels or need to convert celsius to fahrenheit).

Someone had! Hoorah! Admittedly, when I actually walked into the police station, the woman behind the counter turned to her colleague: "Tell the sergeant it's the lady with the curlers," she said. It's now time for a FLASHBACK to a couple of weeks ago, when I was wearing bright pink curlers, stage glasses and a laboratory coat, and had taken seven or eight photos of myself on the subsequently lost camera, because I'm easily amused.

The sergeant came out with my camera. "Ah, it's the lady with the curlers," he said. He turned the camera on and flicked through to one of the photos with me in curlers, just to prove it. He showed me the picture, because I might of course have forgotten. He held it up again and looked from me to the photo and back again just to make sure. Then I signed some forms ("yes, I am the lady with the curlers" I think they said), and left, and I have my camera back.

The lesson learnt from all this, anyway, is that curlers these days are made of velcro (velcro!), that putting velcro in your hair is about as good an idea as it sounds, and that curlers make my hair very very straight. As always, the internet provides a wider context, this time with a laughably pointless experiment demonstrating that eating breadcrusts won't help either ("David takes a hair sample from Michael's scalp so that when he comes back in two weeks he'll be able to determine if eating crusts has made Michael's hair go curly"). Yes, this really was the most interesting article on making hair curly I could find.

So, remember Sixteen Across, those short stories I was writing as part of my thesis on online fiction? A handy combination of crossword clues, interlocking fiction and map of Adelaide, ideal for anyone who wants to make an appointment in the city centre and then have a good excuse for not turning up. I've busily spent the last few months working on the other part of the thesis (current status: 180 footnotes and rising) and eroding the readership of the stories to occasional strangers searching for "discoloration of thumbnail", "fifteen there's still time when she walking down town", "thicken arms photoshop", and "is there supposed to be hair down there".

In today's exciting news (well, last week's exciting news really), new stories are being posted again, with extra hints (the solution to each one is an answer to the first question asked within it), the ability to check your answers, and a livejournal feed of links to new stories at 16across. Exciting puzzles! Sinister characters! Suggestions that maybe I'm more nervous about moving than I thought! The perils of colouring your hair! Mysterious robot ghosts, or, um, something! An ongoing attempt to convince myself that editing things manically after they're posted is justifiable because mutability is a primary characteristic of online fiction, and that a four-month gap is a demonstration of the importance of maintaining regularity in installment-based fiction!

If you're not interested in short stories, though, have a quotation from the twelfth-century Natural History of Adelard of Bath, which I've only just discovered exists and which is fantastic, though it doesn't seem to be online.

Nephew: So solve this problem for me first: Why don't men have horns?

( Well, why? )

Like every single one of you as far as I can tell, I work in a library. Unlike the rest of you, I'm only there two afternoons a week, and all I do is (a) put books back on the shelves, and (b) tell people that the AV collection is on the next floor up (sometimes I wait for them to ask me first). On the plus side, the library is primarily medical, full of books like The Textbook of Pain, You Can't Catch Diabetes From Your Friend and Spine. Because I never write anything else here, clearly it's time for a new weekly feature, which I shall call "Lessons from the Stacks". (Actually I don't know if my library even has stacks; do any shelves count, or just the posh ones that patrons aren't allowed to see?)

This week, ECG Interpretation Made Incredibly Easy.

The Made Incredibly Easy series also covers fluids and electrolytes made incredibly easy, dosage calculations made incredibly easy, and pathophysiology made incredibly easy. They're all good, featuring a student nurse who specialises in looking confused:



There are even drawings of little hearts, and cheerful quiz scores with italicised medical puns like ( we hardly need to monitor your progress (two more pictures) ).

ECG Interpretation is my favourite from the series, because it's the only one with a "treating symptomatic bradycardia" flowchart, the line "at times, it can be easy to mistake atrial fibrillation for junctional rhythm", and the advice

To help you remember where to place electrodes in a five-electrode configuration, think of the phrase "white to the upper right". Then think of snow over trees (white electrode above green electrode) and smoke over fire (black electrode above red electrode). And of course, chocolate (brown electrode) lies close to the heart.

In a world where there are so many things that aren't supposed to be easy (making a difference, stuff, life, school, losing people, and LIVING against my oppressive self and working to confront and eliminate my privilege, apparently), and the things that are supposed to be easy are relatively meagre (basically, geometry and catching flathead), it's nice to see that ECG interpretation can be one of the latter.

It's also nice to see, elsewhere, that this encouraging you-can-do-it view of medicine isn't new, with this charming 1877 advice:

I hear men say, "I have not learned anatomy or physiology because I have not had the opportunities," and I answer, the opportunities are all around you, you do not require a dissecting room, physiological laboratory, or costly apparatus. Any butcher will furnish you lungs, trachea, larynx, heart, liver, kidneys, etc., and any hog a digestive apparatus. Any dog that you can pick up on the road or street will furnish you a subject; chloroform him and examine the action of the respiratory apparatus, and the action of the heart; kill him and he offers an excellent subject for dissection of muscles and blood vessels. The "rooster" that wakes you too early in the morning is a most excellent subject. Take him in for rent, and having dissected him, prepare his skeleton for the office—he makes a fine specimen. Two or three years ago I stimulated our class to make dissections of dogs, and it was wonderful how they gathered them in off the streets, and still more surprising how much they learned of anatomy and physiology in this way.

(The follow-up quiz with "Four or five right: it's easy to spot that you've been dogged in your studies dog dog bark dog DOG DOG DOG" unfortunately isn't online.)

To summarise today's Lesson from the Stacks: it's white on the right, and snow above trees, except when sounded like "ay" giving battle in vain. If you try it, and find out whether that's the patient's right or yours, let me know.

Chocolate advertising has always been a ramshackle affair, from early associations with human sacrifice through to publicity posters that feature fighting children, chocolate-based graffiti, and a giant bee. The ninteenth century brought a chocolate shop named after Madame de Sévigné, who famously recommended chocolate to her daughter ("if you are not feeling well, if you have not slept, chocolate will revive you") but who rather more famously retracted her advice in a panic ("chocolate is the source of vapours and palpitations, it flatters you for a while and then suddenly lights a fever in you that carries you to the grave", and furthermore "the Marquise de Coëtlogon took so much chocolate during her pregnancy last year that she produced a small boy as black as the devil, who died").

Come the twentieth century, and by 1907, Lindt were commissioning maps and historical pictures with chocolate advertisements in the background, for distribution to schools. In the 1990s, Milka's purple-cow advertisements were so widespread that "a poll of Swiss pre-school children [...] revealed that half of them believed lilac to be a natural colour for cows". More recently still, Switzerland brought out stamps scented with chocolate, after experimenting with chocolate-flavoured stamps but deciding that people would lick them too much.

This brings us, haphazardly, to 2006, and my point. Recently, we had some chocolates, some Booja-Booja Organic Champagne Truffles in fact: delicious, dairy-free, gluten free, wheat free, but surprisingly less rhyme free than most packaged food. On the back of the box there was a poem:

In a tiny town, not far away,
Not long ago, but not today,
There lived a chocolate maker man
Who had himself a chocolate plan.

There's a lot of this poem. It covers the whole back of the box, in three columns, 119 lines. It tells a story of tragedy and despair, of a chocolate maker who struggled to "get the tastiness just right" but couldn't — "his one big dread that made it tragic, they didn't have that special magic!" One night, however:

He heard a voice not in his head
So he crept downstairs to the chocolate shed,
And in the corner stood a figure,
A broad smile and a nose even bigger.
But the maker refused to budge.
"Who are you, and why are you here?"
"I am Mr Booja Booja, my dear."

Mr Booja Booja had come to help the chocolate maker, but would his shadowy powers be enough? ( Spoilers! )

I was going to suggest some similar poetry for other chocolates:

The substance he then did mix into a delicious curl
And decided he would call it a Twirl!
This wonderful treat brought from the land of chocolate
By the cunning mystery of, er, Professor Pocolate.

Or perhaps:

Mrs Paja-Maja comforted the Nestlé man
And told him she would help him as best she can,
So she brought in a choir of chocolate singers
And she broke off four of her chocolatey fingers,
And she wrapped them in a sheet of bright red plastic,
And called it a kit-kat, because she was just so marvellously fantastic.

But there's not really any point, is there?

When I was small, I had a tape of nursery rhymes which I would listen to while I fell asleep. Every now and then, one of the rhymes would segue into "and threw it out the window".

Little Jack Horner sat in the corner eating his Christmas pie;
He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, and threw it out the window.
The window, the window, the second-story window;
He put in his thumb, and pulled out a plum, and threw it out the window.

Twenty years later, and in today's degenerate world it turns out that you can't sing nursery rhymes that end "and threw it out the window", even in the privacy of your own kitchen, without prompting surprise. However, I certainly didn't make it up myself: it's even a game, where everyone takes turns to sing a nursery rhyme and interpolate "and threw it/him/them out the window" until nobody can think of any more.

The other defining example of this sort of thing comes, of course, from Aristophanes, the famous scene in The Frogs where Aeschylus tries to prove he's the better dramatist by interpolating "lost his bottle of oil" into speeches from Euripides:

EURIPIDES [reciting]:
Aegyptus, who, the oft-told story runs,
Once put to sea with fifty daughters fair,
Touching at Argos-
AESCHYLUS:                 -lost his bottle of oil.
EURIPIDES: What do you mean, lost his bottle of oil? You'll regret this.
DIONYSUS: Recite another prologue. I believe I see the idea.
EURIPIDES [reciting]:
Lord Dionysus of the fawnskin cloak,
Who leaps with ivy wand amid the pines
Of fair Parnassus-
AESCHYLUS:                 -lost his bottle of oil.

Kevan pointed out, presumably in the hope that it might stop me singing, that there's nothing to bind this sort of substitution to drama or nursery rhymes; it'd be easy enough to do with English poetry, players taking it in turns to recite a poem and segue into "throw it out the window", dropping out of the game if they can't think of anything to recite (or if they get through a poem without finding anywhere to put the window). Perhaps, to stop games from going on for ever, there could be a rule against repeating poets. It doesn't quite work in livejournal form, but as proof of concept I offer:

( Drayton, Donne, Blake, MacNeice, Larkin )

Bonus points if it rhymes, perhaps? However dubiously; whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath thrown the window oote.

In related throwing-stuff-out-the-window news, we find an enthusiastic French page on the advantages of throwing yourself out of the window (I don't know what it says but it's French, it must be clever). Elsewhere, there are references to people who would celebrate Thanksgiving by throwing coins out of their windows to the starving urchins gathered below, after heating the coins up on the stove; and tales of Naples, where it's traditional to celebrate New Year by throwing fireworks and furniture out of your window. Most of you will have seen bluedevi's lovely Postwodehouse, an experiment based on stories that P.G. Wodehouse used to stamp his letters and throw them out the window, trusting passers-by to pick them up and put them in the postbox, too lazy to do it himself. Finally, on incipient cult 43things, we find six people who want to throw their TV out the window, which -- since a few of them have had this ambition for over a year -- must be more difficult than it seems ("AAARRGHGH!!! This isn't going well", one of them writes, having perhaps tried it but found too many curtains in the way.)

Anyone in the United Kingdom!

So I'm probably moving to the UK around July, for somewhere between a year and ever. Unfortunately I don't know what town to live in. I thought I'd just visit all of them and then decide, but it turns out you have a whole heap of towns over there; then I thought I'd live in whichever one had the rudest-sounding name, but they all have rude-sounding names. Consequently, I'm reduced to asking Livejournal for a shortlist: what town or city should I live in? An exciting prize of cake and books to the first person to suggest the winning location! Biscuits to anyone who suggests a candidate that I deem promising enough to visit! (No prizes for anyone who just pastes a huge list of every town in the country into a comment, or does something similarly clever!)

Bonus points for:

• Trees.
• People who will be my friends, or failing that who will pretend to like me if I give them cake.
• Decent public transport; also major inter-city railway lines and/or bus routes.
• Sensible visiting distance to lots of other places.
• Fun things to do; I don't know, kendo lessons and a local board-games group and plays to watch or something.
• Bumblebees (just one would do really, or just a bumblebee within visiting distance; I've never seen any).
• A decent chance that I could find work there within six months or so (my skills include baking too many cakes, writing, putting books on shelves in the right order, stage-managing amateur sketch comedy, accidentally wrapping my hands in sticky-tape, and being glibly clever).
• Not being stupidly expensive.
• There will be a person with me, so nowhere with by-laws against people.
  

Anyone in Adelaide!

So I'm probably moving to the UK around July, which means I have huge piles of junk to get rid of. If you want some piles of junk, let me know! Books and soiled kitchen implements, mostly. Some art supplies. Even if you don't want my junk, do you want to come over for board games and cake? This might be your last chance - I'm taking all the board games and cake in the country with me when I leave.


Anyone elsewhere!

You are of no use to me at this time.

So. Right. Yes. Ahem.

I've been terribly busy with a thesis, you see. And it's online! Here! It's all a bit unnerving! Intersecting short stories, organised as clues to a soluble crossword, two there at the moment, a new one every Monday and Thursday; read them if you like, "5 Down" should be quite good.

Boston Eruv History: Brilliant circumvention of orthodox Jewish Sabbath restrictions (no carrying anything outside, including keys; no rainhats) by eruvs, which are areas that, though technically outside, count as inside via a train of logic seemingly running "so, a wall is still a wall even if it has doors in it, right? Well, telegraph poles and wires are kind-of like doorframes...". Unfortunately a lot of the stuff online about eruvs seems to be panicked flailing about ghettos and people "toting automatic weapons" ("well, I wasn't going to bring any semi-automatic weapons out today, but since I was taking my keys anyway..."). "Please notice that both the WHITE HOUSE in Washington and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg are inside ERUVS!" Oh no! Those evil orthodox Jews, at this rate they'll be wearing rainhats in the White House on the Sabbath! Whatever can we do?

zReportage.com: The Hair Trade: "The Balaji Temple in Tirumala--the second busiest in the world--collects tons of hair each week, thereby generating an estimated annual income of tens of thousands of dollars for the temple."

abc7news.com: Leaking Bodies Uncovered At Popular 'Body' Show: Preserved bodies at an art show not quite holding together. "The I-Team spotted moisture beading up across faces, dripping inside chest cavities, and pooling beneath feet. Plastination experts tell us, it's evidence of a rush job." (via Quiddity). There's a slight tone of disapproval in the story; people should stop making art out of dead bodies, and go back to using crushed beetles and the urine of mango-fed cows and ground-up Egyptian mummies, like everyone else.

The Smithsonian Magazine: Art That Goes Boom: "Rather than the expected night display in glittering colors, he plans to set off Black Fireworks - typical pyrotechnic forms such as chrysanthemum bursts rendered in black smoke against a daylight sky."

The Boston Globe: Marketers see babies' noses as pathway to profits: Marketing aimed at babies, featuring scented products that will hopefully translate to a lifelong fondness for the brand's characteristic smell. ""You won't be able to argue with your brain," says branding specialist Martin Lindstrom." (via Stayfree) No billboards in space, though.

CNN.com - 'Vocabularians' submit top unlisted words: Please no. "The editors of Merriam-Webster dictionaries got more than 3,000 entries when, in a lighthearted moment, they asked visitors to their Web site to submit their favorite words that aren't in the dictionary." It's worse than you think; the full list reaches its height of horror with, I think, "chillax", apparently meaning "chill out/relax". Google indicates that the word's in limited use, but there's certainly How To Chillax instructions (step one: turn off your spellchecker) and a shopping guide. I know there are descriptive linguists here (or descuists, as the hot new neologism has it) so I shan't say anything more about this unless someone cares to lure them into another room by talking about how much they love Strunk and White.

Carrot Trivia - 101 things you never knew about carrots:
Brilliantly rubbish Interesting Facts about carrots. "Amazon bookstore includes over 36 books with the word 'carrot' in the title." "In the 1960s, Viola Schlicting, from Texas, created the first carrot cake". All it needs is a few more exclamation marks and superfluous capital letters. If you're not interested in carrots (or sufficiently well-versed in carrot lore to already know that "the classic Snowman's nose is always a Carrot"), you could try these two interesting facts about bananas, or this page about potatoes, but neither of them live up to Apple Trivia, which allows you to "wow someone with your knowledge of your favourite fruit with these top ten apple facts". This would work better if my favourite fruit wasn't cherries, and also if one of the facts wasn't "4% of an apple is made up of vitamins and minerals. The rest of the apple, more than 80%, is made up of water". It would also possibly help if there were more than eight apple facts - the missing Number 10 is that people who like apples aren't very good with numbers.

The Museum of Food Anomalies: How sweet, it's photos of food that look very slightly like something else if you squint, usually "a face, because see, three dots!". Not so much "look at our peculiar food" as "look at humanity's pattern-finding abilities and the pathos of our enthusiasm". I had some spaghetti for dinner on Sunday; maybe I should have taken a photo, it looked quite a bit like hair, assuming your hair's off-white and frequently covered in mushrooms.

boardgamegeek.com: Games that should have zombie expansions, but don't: Of course, as the list points out, it's difficult to think of a game that couldn't do with a zombie expansion. But the Carcassonne Zombie Version sounds fun. And I do enjoy that one or two of these prompt someone to "I already did a zombie version of this".

The Story of The Mammoth Cheese of Perth Ontario: From 1893. "A large poster giving some particulars of the cheese and a complete time-table was sent to all stations on the route and many people turned out to see the cheese pass by." (via Pratie Place) In unrelated sentences about giant cheese (perhaps I should start collecting these), the project manager of Cheese Kingdom says "Our next project is to transform our water tower into a giant Västerbottensost cheese which appears to hover in the air." (If you're not unhealthily diverted by sentences about giant cheese, though I can't imagine why you wouldn't be, feel free to snigger at "Västerbotten" sounding slightly like "vaster bottom" instead.)

Food for Thought: Making Food Look Good: Photographing food. "That great looking bowl of cereal on the cover of your cereal box is actually cereal and white glue, instead of milk, to prevent the cereal from getting soggy." Motor oil for pancake syrup, and "those natural-looking bunches of grapes are sprayed with baby powder deodorant". I bet they're just making this up, to stop anyone else at photo shoots from eating the food. "Yeah, I know it looks really nice, but all that chocolate sauce is actually... er... anti-dandruff shampoo. Yes. My anti-dandruff shampoo. None for you."

Tweezer Times: Beverage Buzz: Photographing drinks, and more evidence for my "they're blatantly making this up" hypothesis. "Our favorite bubble-maker is a splash of Kodak Photo-Flo in some of the liquid you're showing... Carefully spoon the bubbles onto the surface of the drink with a small baby spoon or use an eye-dropper or plastic pipette. You can also use beaten egg white or buy fake glass bubbles."

Trengove Studios Inc.: Though on the other hand... fake acrylic ice-cubes from around $30 each; custom-made plastic splashes of water; glass spills of liquid and swirls of toothpaste; foam-boosting chemicals for photographing beer.

creativepro.com - A Focus on Hocus Pocus: Posters, stage money, instructional cards and diagrams for magicians. Also includes brilliantly deluded instructions from 1905 on how to flirt by biting off the ends of cigars meaningfully, or folding napkins, or, if left without equipment, resorting to eye signals: "Closing right eye slowly--You are beautiful. Covering both eyes with both hands--Bye, bye. Placing right forefinger to the right eye--Do you love me?". Placing right forefinger in left eye--You look even prettier without depth perception.

Feeding America: Museum Objects: Mostly cooking utensils. "Most often used before dessert was served, a crumb scraper was used to clean crumbs and other food particles from the table."

The women's petition against coffee (1674): Someone getting quite cross about "that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, has so Eunucht our Husbands, that they are become as Impotent and as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is brought." (via scribblingwoman). And yet elsewhere it "is also excellent to kill Wormes in young or old, to dry all manner of Tetters, Ringwormes, or any other evills", while hot chocolate "expells poyson, cleanseth the teeth, and sweetneth the Breath; provoketh Urine; cureth the stone and stranguary, maketh Fatt and Corpulent, faire and amiable". Maybe the first reviewers were accidentally drinking stewed curtains from the photo shoot instead.

Chicago Tribune | The Wizard of Why: Terrifyingly dull article on food-researcher Brian Wansink (he has a wife who is visiting her family! And a brother named Craig whom he played Jeopardy with when they were both small! Also, registration is required, and not worth it, unless you want to take up stalking food researchers in your spare time!), but the actual research has some interesting snippets, not to mention experimental subjects fed from "special bowls designed to refill slowly as they ate" (more here). Relatedly, analysis of just how much nicer zucchini biscuits taste if you call them "nana's" (pdf; in summary "a bit, but eh, if you're eating zucchini biscuits I don't trust your tastebuds anyway". The study suggests sample names for restaurant food including "Iowa Pork Chops", "Snappy Seasonal Carrots", "Ye Old Potato Bread", and, presumably going for the underexploited cannibal market, "Classic Old World Italian").

ThisisLondon: Woman earns £100,000 helping students cheat: "I have had one of my lecturers set a question and his student come to me to produce the essay. I give the work back to the lecturer, they write it, I give it to the student who hands it back to the lecturer who ends up marking his own work." (via Halvorsen)

Playing to the senses: food as a performance medium: From the middle ages ("the four and twenty blackbirds, which would have been placed inside the crust after the pie was baked") onwards, rapidly decreasingly compellingly ("Rios lay on a transparent mattress filled with potato chips, which she "chewed" by rolling around on it").





(Incidentally, I seem to have a free Flickr pro account floating around, so if you want it, let me know. Be someone I quite like, though, if possible, or failing that someone who can spell.)