Humour

Forgotten things

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It is a quirk of time zones that today means different things in different places, and the tomorrow of GMT, may be the today of a different zone, though unlikely at this late hour to be the yesterday of any less further west than Hawaii.

With that in mind then, and understanding that already ten hours of today have elapsed where today is today, please kindly take note that that today is the day when some would have us to believe that nothing happened, but many interesting and disturbing things did happen on this day, some being so recent as to only achieve the silver Jubilee of their decadary this year.

We need only think of George III of Hanover, who was born on this day in 1738 to understand its importance for the later potential unification of the Saxon peoples of northern Europe, but for a closer personal connection an unnamed, for fear of infringement of the GDPR, lady was also born on this day failing to see the coronation of our late Queen by perhaps a mere thirty five hours.

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Anti-science

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When you speak with a man like Professor Angus George Dalgleish you quickly recognise the incisive mind of the man. If you wish to disagree with him you really must be sure of your ground. He is an eminent scientist, being a fellow of organisations of which an ordinary mortals like Coco could not even aspire to associateship, let alone membership.

So in this interview Death of Science where he speaks of the death of science if we disagree with him, we must be careful in what we say. It is patently true that science can have no forbidden views. All views are permitted and must be examined until they can be irrefragably shown to be false. Newton’s thoughts and propositions about motion were once thought to be so certain that the became the Laws of Motion. No-one had succeeded in devising any test that could disprove them. They stood firm for two hundred years, until someone noticed that they seemed to break down at relatively high velocities. It took an Einstein to find the correction to Newton’s Laws and, as yet, no-one has dared to elevate the theory of relativity to the status of Law. We are wary that it too may suffer the same fate as Newton’s Laws.

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Coloured

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South Africa’s Tyla sparks culture war over racial identity

English is a very difficult language as we who were born to speak it know from the moment we meet someone from the other side of the railway track (Coco would have said over the border but English speakers from other parts of the world may misunderstand what that means). It is not merely the orthography that confuses. Every English reader, who has read the preface of the OED, knows how to pronounce ghotti and what also it means.

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Translation

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We use the word translation in many different ways, accountants and theologians having quite specialised uses of the term which may befuddle, without a translation, the poor man on the Clapham omnibus.

When you try to translate Do you feel special? and Do you feel different? into certain Romance languages the distinction found in Germanic languages may be lost. Difficulties abound when seeking to give the correct and proper meaning of words in one language in a second. But have you noticed that there is as much difficulty when translating from even very closely related languages?

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Darwin’s Finches

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It was the proposal of the American Ornithological Society to rename some of the native birds of their homeland for reasons apparently dismissed by their counterpart body the National Audubon Society as reported by the BBC (US ornithological society says dozens of birds will be renamed) that prompted Coco to write. Once again it is evidence of a failure on the part of modern society to face its history – the journey it has taken to get where we are today – and it ready preparedness to efface its history in order to give the appearance of not participating in the sins of its fathers.

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The Prepared Piano

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Had we not known what was coming the backstage sounds may have indicated that the music that was to follow would be of, shall we say, an interesting nature. If you have ever listened to the Lord Denning of the now defunct Third programme in its modern guise, Tom Service, you will understand that we can all be composers, it is simply a matter of rearranging the notes, as we were to hear in the first two pieces for prepared pianoforte, into a new order to produce a new work.

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The Fall of Florence

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Saturday had an interesting evening, Beethoven, Ireland and Honegger. Daniele Gatti played Beethoven’s 4th concerto in a pleasant way that drew you in to the conflict that he portrayed. After a generous interval and Ireland’s Concertino pastorale for strings we were treated to what I had thought, and those of you who know anything about Honegger also would also think, would be quite a challenging piece, Liturgique, symphony nr.3.

Somewhat astonishingly however it proved to be as lyrical as Ireland’s pastorale.