If Coco were willing to ignore my own advice this would have been posted on the 8 September, but to have done so would be rather like a prime minister ignoring the law and refusing to obey the bill that the parliament had passed even though it had been lawfully enacted. In such circumstances Coco would deserve the most severe of censures, however, fearing an orthographic mistake more than fearing censure, Coco deferred this post to an otherwise opportune time.
Continue readingHumour
Ticky-tacky
Gaudiness
Fake News
Fake news is nothing if not new
Something you might need to relieve it.
I have not seen it, why would I want to? When a unique opportunity presents itself, we should not play with trifles. The BBC article refers to a film clip which has apparently been doctored, a term which is strangely used, but regardless:
Continue readingGaudeamus igitur
Student games at the First Viennese School
Things you might need to know.
- Buxtehude was Bach’s mentor.
- Buxtehude called Bach The Master, and nobody disagreed.
- Mahler was a superb master of key and modulation.
- Bruckner was a superb organist, so much so that it has been said that when he played the orchestra he made it sound like an organ.
- Schubert knew how to modulate but never wrote a successful fugue in his life.
- Palestrina was the father of counterpoint. If it could be counterpointed, then Palestrina knew how to do it, even if he had deemed it would have been quite inappropriate to have done so for his audiences.
- Paul McCartney is a successful song writer unlike Schubert but he neither knew how to write a fugue nor how to modulate, though he could change key.
It was at a gathering of music students and staff of the first Viennese school that the game gained great popularity. It was very much as all student games are full of challenges, where penalties and rewards were handed out to the amusement and humiliation of those who were willing to complete and also on those who refused the invitation to do so. The game was very simple. It was to right(sic.) a fugue. The fugue would be five minutes long, no more no less.
Continue readingCome, brave hearted lion eater: Chao Yuen Ren
施氏食狮史
首被平原的管家(Google-Coco)
Unregistered appointee
If you had ever thought that She sells sea-shells on the sea-shore was difficult – consider a puzzle in the style of Carroll –
Chinese is already confusing enough with all of its tones, characters, markers and lack of articles, inflections and tenses, but this poem really shows just how difficult Chinese is especially for the native Mandarin.
Continue readingNihilifaction: the wonders of kenotic quantum interactions
Bill and Ben
When Faith could..
Coco heard the other day about Bill and Ben, not the famous flower pot men, but a pair of mountaineering brothers, indeed twins, and their little sister. They were well known by all for their many adventures. They did everything together, and would only ever climb if they were both in the team.
Continue readingSiamese Grapes
Hmmm…this may not turn out quite as Coco had hoped..ah well here goes.
In the old days people used to write letters. Some of you will not even know what a letter could be different than these characters that we use to spell out words, but these different kind of letters were rather like posts in in this forum except that they had been written by hand using a pen to scribe letters out on a piece of paper. Such letters were greeted with great enthusiasm when they arrived in your house. They may have come from another part of the world and it may have taken several weeks to reach you (in those days in the UK you could send a letter in the morning and by the afternoon it would have reached and have been read by its recipient, but the postal service in the rest of the world was not quite as efficient as that. Since those days the UK has worked very hard to reach the same standard as the rest of the world). Often these letters would begin with an interesting story or description of an unusual event before going on to the real subject matter. Interesting things might be like, well, so much seems to revolve around those endless pictures of what is on the plate in front of you today, but it might be that you would be interested to know what I, the writer, of the letter had for breakfast this morning. Well, of course you are! Most of the time it was quite different, like the lady from sub-Saharan African who announced in her opening words that they had had a new toilet installed at their house. The choice of the preposition at is deliberate and accurate.
In fact one of these letter writers did so think that you would be interested in breakfast. Coco knew some people who worked in Brazil, well, actually in the Amazon basin, just a little way up the river…sorry it is easier to say down from the source a few hundred miles or so. Some would say the area was uncivilised, but there was a civil society among the tribes, just not the sort of civil society that you or Coco would expect, though Coco supposes today they are as busy posting into the forum of social media as anyone else. We would have called them hunter gatherers. Well one day, actually it was probably in a quarterly letter so far they were from any kind of even an irregular postal system, we were introduced to a typical breakfast, which could only be consumed of course after you had actually gone out of the village circle to gather it. French snails are interesting, aren’t they? Prawns, those cockroaches of the sea, are consumed in their millions. Aardvarks are known by another name which betrays their voracious diet. Well, here it is a five star Amazonian breakfast…
No, the grapes are not an illustration of that breakfast. Coco thought better of it. Coco changed his mind. Coco repented. It might put you off anything else that you might eat or want to eat today, or even for the rest of the week as ‘it’, the breakfast, preys upon your mind.
So let him turn to the point of this tale. The photograph is not there to show you what Coco had for supper, or anyone else had for breakfast, though it might actually do that, but to point out a fault in the grapes. There is probably also a fault in the image of the grapes, but Coco takes responsibility for that.
Should Coco take them back to the store which sold them and complain about their lack of quality control? Is this a defective grape, or has it been genetically modified? Or is it a twin? That is incorrect, are they Siamese twin grapes? Is it edible? Does the mechanism which controls twinning in grapes also produce other intensely kenotic or phthartic metabolic agents which would be toxic if ingested? These and many other similar thoughts and questions swim around as it were in a delirium.
Answers to these and many other questions may be sent on a postcard please to all of your friends. And if every one of those friends send this message, and any further messages, on on the day of receipt within one month the postal services would have to deliver approximately π billiard tonnes of postcards on the next day, if any postcards were available to be had.
One wonders why
It was the appearance of this in the local press that reminded me of a report from elsewhere that left me wondering why.
The story referenced above is devastating in the approach taken to hygiene in the kitchen but these give you reason to wonder.
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