Humour

Beware of your appetite

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It was in a BBC article, Your pictures of Scotland: 10 – 17 April, that the thought was provoked in Coco’s head. The article contains several quite delightful photographs including one of a short-eared owl in flight near Caithness, but it was not this that inflamed Coco’s thoughts.

But rather one of some large mammals in a field. The caption catches the attention:

Travelling through Embo, we came across this scene and wondered… just what was it that someone had fed those horses.

Allister Fraser © 2026
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Two doors

~ admin

You may know the riddle of the two men at the fork in the road. You are walking along the road and you know that there is a fork, one way of which will lead you to Althringham the other to Seudhampton. You wish to reach Althringham. There is only one signpost but both pointers say Althringham, how do you know which way to go?

Well you wait and hope that someone shall pass who will be able to help you. In due course a man comes along the road. You do not know where he comes from or where is he is going, but you do know that a man from Seudhampton will never the tell the truth, and a man from Althringham will always tell the truth.

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Impersonational

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It feels sometimes like waiting for the bus before there was real-time information about where the next one was, when eventually three would arrive together, so the first one is the standard warning which you may not need to read, and given the length of Coco’s musings he knows that at least one of you, dear readers, having chastised him off on several occasions for his wordiness, shall not read it. Many of you will be very well aware of the issue, and perhaps have no need to read any more than the next few words.

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Gnats and camels

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It was an amusing tale in the published by the BBC Council’s clean-up warning for St George’s crosses but also the co-incidence with an article published by the LICC that prompted Coco. We do so easily see the gnat, but fail to notice that there is a camel in our beaker of notoriously middle-class or upwardly-mobile freshly ground and brewed, steamed, iced, skinny, but extra hot, caramel latté (Coco’s judgement on that drink: ☹).

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Circles

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How often have you gone round in circles?

Resisting the temptation to look at the comments where there may be an answer to the puzzle which at first you thought was proving difficult only because you had not spotted the correct approach to the solution, you slowly begin to discern that in order to solve it it may be that you need one more piece of information. What do you do? Like every good student sitting an examination or test, you read the whole question again, carefully this time, looking for that one additional piece of information that will cause the solution to appear, rather like those pieces of art which you must examine with cross-eyes to see what is really there, out of the mass (mess?) of mathematical nonsense that already litters the page, but it is not there. You have found all of the information that is to be had.

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Epic

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Some say that mathematics is difficult, and the more proficient you become in it, rather like English, the more difficult it becomes to comprehend. When questions such as What is 1? are asked and you are told that One is -eiπ, you begin the grasp with credulity the ineffable complexity that is mathematics. You may then be told that Euler’s formula precisely defines all real numbers x by { eix = cos(x) + i sin(x) }. A mathematician somewhere will complain that having placed the equality within braces Coco thus invalidated what he had just proposed. Ah well, such is the world of the mathematician.

Picture of legendary Greek king Odysseus listening to the sirens.

The word epic springs to mind when setting out on the voyage of discovery that is mathematics, but have you ever considered whether epic is the right word to use? Epic comes to us from the Greek. We speak of epic poetry. For the Greek that is a poem that tells a story. It may be a short story or it may be a long story such as that of Ulysses (Homer’s Odyssey).

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Turkeys for Christmas?

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Whilst it is voting day in the UK, it is quite a different day in the former North American colonies. One of Coco’s friends pointed him to The False Prophet Rising: Part 2 – The Merging of Church and State https://i.ytimg.com/vi/BaoI5FPWO5o/hqdefault.jpg. It was not something that would normally grab his attention. Listening to the analysis of a Trump speech at the National Religious Broadcasters’ Convention – 2/22/24 reminded him very much of encouraging turkeys to vote for Christmas and not letting them know that they are on the menu. Having no influence as far as the choice of their new president is to be makes the detail of the various presentations in some ways superfluous which is a view contrary to that of the BBC (see US election 2024: Why the world is watching so closely https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/2048/cpsprodpb/CB97/production/_132291125_whitehouse_976getty.jpg.webp).

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Genus reassignment

~ admin

Times were very hard. The countryside was being squeezed by the urban population, rows and rows of solar panels were being placed not only upon the most productive arable fields but now even upon the pastoral land where sheep may have safely grazed. The panels it was true provided much needed shade from the summer sum, but the diminution of the number of animals put pressure on the economy of the canine population, making life very difficult for the wolves who had families to feed.

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