This might take a bit of explaining.
Last night was the first time, in what seems like a very long time, that your humble scribe was able to neck beer at the Pub Quiz. I know this is "small earthquake in Chile" news to you lot, yet it sits rather closer to home for Conrad. Sitting there being sternly sober as well as the youngest person in the room can be a bit wearing.
Patience, patience, I'm getting there. Okay, one of the questions was "What is 'Agliophobia'?" and none of our team could suggest an appropriate solution. I knew of a "Seraglio" which is a more refined name for a harem, and was certain that the word "Intaglio" existed, even if utterly unsure what it meant, yet "Aglio"?
Phil plumped for "Eagle", because if - er - you grow up in the Scottish Highlands then life is a daily battle for existence between you and the ferocious eagles who lurk on every lofty mountain peak and thatched roof.
Or not. Agliophobia is "obsessive fear of pain", according to the quizmaster. Conrad, utter coward that he is, feels this is less a phobia and more an expression of common sense. Where does it come from? Greek, apparently, and the Hellenic word for 'Pain', that being "Algo", which seems to misplace the 'l' somewhat - there's a joke in there but I'm in a hurry - and which leads, with dreadful inevitability, to the title for today.
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| Biggles and Algy. Close enough. |
More Of Father Brown
Or, back to being British. Conrad watched an episode ("The Invisible Theatre") last night, when he could have been researching for the Pub Quiz. Which posed the question - which member of this radio show cast is actually a murderer? or MURDERER if you insist. Personally I'd stick with lower-case, as upper-case seems a bit vulgar, definitely strident, approaching raucous, even. Don't forget that we're dealing with British murder here, no grandstanding or fainting in coils. Oh, and a note on radio of the time (the Fifties, remember? Do keep up!), since television <hack spit> was in it's infancy at the time. The episode quotes a total of 15 million listeners, not at all far-fetched, all the more believable when you witness people NOT mucking about on mobile phones.
| How to scare cats the Father Brown way! |
Also, note the radio stations available - The Light Programme (later Radio 2), The Home Service (later Radio 4) and The Third Programme (later Radio 3). No Radio 1 at the time, it was all pirates then, pirates as far as the eye can see*.
Take note of this, it's a vital clue. Not that many of you out there would understand it, because only people around at the time would have an "Aha!" moment as Fr. Brown did.
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| Mark Kermode: not happy with the cat-scaring competition |
Adrian Carton De Wiart
Yes, back to the indestructible British bullet-magnet again. Some people might have had enough of warfare if it ended with you racing against time and the enemy to reach the border. Not our Adrian! Ah, what it is to be young and in love, or old and belligerent down to your very bones.
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| ACDW in 1915, when he was only just getting the hang of being a bullet-magnet |
After his adventurous escape from Poland via Romania he returned to the UK and in early 1940 was asked to lead the British invasion force headed for Norway. The Norwegian campaign is, frankly, not one of the Allie's finer military moments. To call it shambolic would be erring on the side of kindness: ACDW's command ended up being bombed, shot, shelled, cut off without proper arms or equipment and told to hang on "for political reasons". He began his command in typical style when the aircraft he was travelling in got shot up by German fighters, although as he wasn't actually wounded he probably didn't notice.
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| Old and still bold |
Eventually the British were withdrawn, comforted only by the knowledge that the Allied invasion of Norway had been conducted with the French, so there was someone else they could blame. By the time Adrian got back to the UK he was 60, or, if you like, of retirement age. Told that he was now too old to command a division, you might have expected him to fade mournfully into the background.
Not our Adrian! He still had bullets to attract!
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| The ones that missed him |
More Of Maths
Just so we're clear, Conrad is only interested in the more abstruse aspects of mathematics, the bits where philosophy and conceptual imaginery are much more important that being able to derive the cosine of a Boolean splangent tensor**.
So, I approached Tom - Toothache Tom, just to remind you that the lad's not well and you're not to pick on him until he's better - about confirming a calculation about Shakespeare's Collected Works.
Premise: SCW = 884,000 words long, with an average word length of 5 characters, and with the potential for those to be any of 62 characters***.
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| Ambrose Bierce. He was a real character |
This means that there are 62 x 62 x 62 - and so on - until you multiply 62 by itself
4, 420,000 times. 62 squared is 3844; 62 to the seventh is over 3 billion. Tom broke Excel trying to work this out, and Google calculator simply responds with "Infinity".
The point I'm trying to make is that, given these odds, you are going to need whole galaxies composed of monkeys-at-typewriters to churn out the SCW.
Which, as Conrad hateth him Shakespeare with a hey-nonny punt up the rump, is a good thing.
Right, I shall now be off to do the weekly shop and to see what date-expired glop is going cheap. Which sentence has pushed us to over 1,000 words, hurrah!
* Obviously. "As far as the eye can hear" would be stupid.
** I made all this up. Can you tell?
*** 26 upper case, 26 lower case and punctuation.
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