A Gentleman's Domain

The Bag Has Flown

Here we are in England.  Chilly, and a bit brisk, and perfect weather for bracing country walks, followed by tea and toast when we return to the warmth of my mother’s kitchen.  Next week we will go to town (London).

Last year we came over in late spring.  Fewer thick clothes to pack.  Some of you, my faithful readers, may remember the fun and games we had with missed connections, long stays in unexpected airports, nights in hotels at the airline’s expense and a cumulative delay for over twenty-four hours.  For those of you who missed it, the full story is right here.

Anyway, we crossed the Atlantic again last Thursday night and this time, with three connecting flights, everything went like clockwork. No late flights, no missed connections, not even any dashes through airport terminals to catch planes at the last minute.  We got to Heathrow on time, collected our rental car and were on our way.  Everything went well for us.

Not for our luggage though.  Two of our three checked cases kept us company all the way to London, and they appeared on the carousel after we had been waiting only a few minutes.  Then we waited for the third.  It was one of those black rectangles with wheels and a telescopic handle.  There were dozens of them on the moving belt, but none was ours.  I had taken he precaution of putting a blue and grey luggage strap round it to make it easy to spot among all the others.  However, it wasn’t there to spot.  We waited hopefully until there were just a few bags left, going round and round, and maybe half a dozen passengers. 

I had never had a bag lost before, in over two hundred journeys by commercial airlines. I was rather starting to think that it would never happen to me – only to other people.  Serve me right!  Anyway, I went to the United Airlines baggage desk, which I couldn’t help noticing was very busy, and told one of the clerks that one of our bags was missing.  He took the baggage claim tag for the missing bag, scanned it under his barcode reader and tapped a few details into his computer.  Then he was able to tell me that the bag had been located in Washington airport and would be sent over on the next flight and delivered to where we would be staying. 

United Airlines were as good as their word, and a man in a white van showed up the following afternoon with the bag.  I was grateful, of course, but the thought uppermost in my mind after the whole thing was: barcodes are amazing things!
.

Wasting the Court's time!

Someone has been trying to procure a posthumous pardon for Dr.Crippen, as this article describes. That is all very interesting, but the fact remains that Dr. Crippen was guilty as sin.  The remains of Cora Crippen that were found buried in the cellar of the house in Hilldrop Crescent were wrapped in a pajama jacket of a kind that the doctor owned.  They could not have belonged to someone who lived in the house before the Crippens moved there because they were not manufactured before 1905.  The shop that supplied them was able to show the invoice  made out to Crippen for two pairs that were delivered to the house.  And to cap it all, the companion pajama bottoms to the jacket were found by the police neatly folded in  a chest of drawers in Crippen’s bedroom.  The remains were identified as belonging to a woman of early middle age and they bore a scar consistent with a particular surgical procedure, an ovarectomy,  that Cora Crippen had undergone in the US before the Crippens moved to London.  There can be no doubt that the remains in the cellar were hers.

Add to that the circumstantial evidence: Crippen parading his girlfriend in his murdered wife’s jewels and furs, and the way he tried to flee back to America, with his girlfriend disguised as a boy, and his guilt becomes even more obvious.  This bid for a pardon was a complete waste of the Court’s time.

.

Safe Eating

I took this photo some years ago in Pattaya, Thailand.   I never actually went to the restaurant advertised -- no objections to condoms but I can't stand cabbage -- but I was amused by their sign.  I often used to see English-speaking tourists takig photos of it, just like me.

.

.

Meanwhile, as Count Bordovsky tried to seduce Lady Irma.....

I see that Stephen King has published another novel. Well, it must be at least three weeks since his last one.  Anyway, I saw it on the table by the door at Borders a couple of days ago.  It’s called Under The Dome and like most of his books it’s a big, thick doorstop.  I’ll no doubt buy it, and very likely enjoy it, when it comes out in paperback.  I wonder what sort of blurb they’ll put on the paperback.  It won’t be the same blurb as on the hardcover edition because there is no blurb at all.  None.  I’ve never seen that before.  The back cover was bare, as were the inside front and back flaps.  No summary of the story, no reviewer’s comment, no author bio and photo. Nothing.  Maybe thy think that Stephen King’s name alone is publicity enough.  Probably they are right – I’m sure the book will sell, but I do find that very pretentious indeed.

If you get a new credit card these days, one of your tasks is to choose what design you want on the front of it.  Most banks offer a choice, varying from the patriotic (flags, eagles etc.) to the universal (moon, stars) by way of the environment (waterfalls, dolphins), the kitsch (kittens) and the irrational (signs of the zodiac).  Some banks even allow you to have a photograph of your own on your card: yourself or a family group or you three-month old baby or your pet dog or  your house.  All very nice. But I just stick with the basic card with the bank’s corporate logo on it.  I’m not being a curmudgeon – I just don’t see the point.  Who is actually going to see the design on your card?  Think about it.  Your credit card sits in your wallet or purse or pocket, and when you use it you whip it out, swipe it through the reader (chip and pin technology has yet to arrive here) and then you put it back where you got it from.  No one sees the picture.  Yes, okay, waiters might, but since you give them your card by putting it inside the plastic folder they bring you your check in, they won’t see it till they are over at the cash desk.  It’s not as though you and whoever you are paying are going to share a warm fuzzy moment as you share the pleasure of whatever design you have chosen.  “Yes, I love dolphins.”  “That’s right, I’m a typical Libra.”  “That was a group photo taken at our family reunion last year.  Not a very good one of me, because the card number goes right across my face, but you can see great-aunt Edna very well. Unfortunately, unlike the card, she has expired.”   Luckily, no soul searching is needed to pick your American Express design.  It’s fixed, though they do have varying backgrounds, but whether yours is green, gold or platinum is not simply a matter of your choice.

Here’s a thing.  Did you know that if you pick twenty-five people at random, it is more probable than not that at least two of them will share the same birthday.  In fact, even though it is not a mathematical certainty, it is a high probability.  I have never understood that.  With 365 possibilities (366 if you insist) I don’t see how this can be.  Our mathematics teacher at school demonstrated it to us by going round the class asking our birthdates, and he hadn’t even got to the second row before he had a match. He explained to us exactly how this is so , in mathematical terms, but I am afraid that in my case it didn’t sink in.  I’ll accept it, but I just don’t understand how it is so.  I have come across it occasionally in books and elsewhere, and it still mystifies me. But yesterday, for fun and out of renewed curiosity, I put it to the test.  I picked twenty-five of my Facebook friends at random and checked out each one’s birthday.  Sure enough, I found a match long before I had examined all twenty-five profiles.  Try it yourself.  It will most probably work for you too, but don’t ask me how.
.

Getting to the heart of the matter.

I was at the doctor’s for a check-up yesterday, and all seems well, I’m glad to say. All the usual procedures – stethoscope, deep breath, say “ah”,  cough, stand on the scale please, fill this, just a tiny little prick (in reference to taking  a drop of blood from my fingertip, for the benefit of anyone who thought the doctor was being insulting and inaccurate).    I also had an ultrasound of my heart.

I had had an EKG before, but never an ultrasound.  An EKG, if you haven’t had one, is the procedure where they wire up your chest and then take readings on something that looks like a lie detector – lots of needles making inky tracks on a moving roll of paper.  I found the whole thing interesting and relaxing when I had one, until the nurse, who was standing by the machine watching the readout, suddenly exclaimed “Oh, my God”   I sat bolt upright, exclaiming “What’s wrong?”   She replied: “My pen has leaked ink all over my jacket pocket.”   I didn’t know whether to be annoyed or relieved.  Anyway, I digress.  No EKG yesterday, but an ultrasound.

Now, I knew all about taking ultrasounds of pregnant women, to ensure that all is well inside --  in fact the first time I ever saw my daughter she was a grey shape among many on a cathode ray screen in a doctor’s office in London.  What I wasn’t aware of is just how many applications ultrasounds have now, and are a much used alternative to X-Rays, without all that nasty radiation.  So anyway, I let the technician stick a few electrodes to my chest, lay on my left side and he put what looked like a small electric shaver against my skin.  There was no sensation at all, other than a slight metallic coldness.

I was facing the wall, away from the machine itself so I couldn’t see the screen – no clumsy cathode ray tubes these days, but a laptop with a lot of extra buttons.  But I could hear my heart very well. Now, I always thought, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that a heart sounded pretty much like hearts do on TV dramas – a steady beat, not quite like a drum, but certainly sharp and percussive.  Not so!  A beating heart sounds like someone walking across a very muddy field in boots.  There is far more sloshing and squelching than beating involved.  In fact, I was alarmed for a moment.  “Is it supposed to sound like that?” I asked the technician.  “Yup!” he replied.

I reflected that if I were an ultrasound technician I might have a metronome concealed behind the laptop so that the patient could hear a steady beating, and feel reassured that this was a proper heart-like sound.  And if I felt in whimsical mood I could reach out and stop the metronome and at the same time say “Uh oh!”   What laughs the patients and I could share together! 
.

It is torture. End of story.

This has been around for a bit, but here it is for the benefit of those who haven’t seen it before. 

I’ve been an admirer of a lot of Christopher Hitchens’s writing, and I agree with many, though certainly not all, of his opinions.  He is a highly entertaining and enlightening humanist and anti-theist writer and debater, among other things.   He admits to having been a Trotskyist in his youth, though like many of the radical left has mellowed somewhat with age.  To the surprise of many, he is an ardent supporter of the war in Iraq.  That does not mean that he sacrifices his other values.  He was critical of the practice of torture by waterboarding, and  he arranged to be waterboarded himself, to see what it was like.  Ths shows what happened, and he gives his own conclusions afterwards.
.

.
He has challenged other political commentators, notably Sean Hannity, to try it themselves, but as far as I know, no one has dared.
.

Think again, lady!

Here's a wonderful, almost sad, example of self delusion.  I don't know who wrote the letter but it is pretty certain from what she says that she is from blue-collar, silent minority, Middle America. I've no idea how it all ended, when the mother realized what was what and had to use the G-word to describe her son.  I hope it turned out well -- I suspect it didn't.

.
.

Two Die At Spiritual Retreat Taking New Age Quack Cures

It is incredible that in this day and age, people still believe in this sort of unproven, superstitious drivel. This place apparently provided '...healing carried out by harnessing the consciousness of a dolphin, or "vortex experiences"...in which participants "experience our human energy system interacting with the earth".' And it is not incredible at all that there are people waiting to take large sums of money from the gullible for providing these "cures". To counteract this sort of crap, there is The Enemy Of Reason which is well worth watching all the way through if you can. The first episode starts at http://bit.ly/KQ7fu

A Strange Prohibition

.
But what if I want to buy some on Tuesday?
.

Four "classic" books

My lovely friend Julie at  Thinking About…  posed an interesting question.   If you had to choose four books published before 1970 (an arbitrary but harmless date), what four would you choose?  This was actually easier than I thought.  Sadly rejecting

Three Men In A Boat by Jerome K. Jerome
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Seven Minutes by Irving Wallace
Diary Of A Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith
and even My Early Life by Winston Churchill,

I decided on the following:

Great Expectations  by Charles Dickens
Thank You, Jeeves  by P. G. Wodehouse
The Day Of The Triffids  by John Wyndham
Flashman  by George MacDonald Fraser

Agreement or arguments, anyone?
.

Hooray for Dawkins!

An excellent speech and, as usual, highly entertaining.

Thursday Thirteen #89

Last week I listed thirteen movies I have never seen.  This week it's TV programs.   They are all pretty mainstream, and all are successful,  but I have never felt any inclination to watch them.  They neither interest nor attract, so I don't bother.

Thirteen TV Shows I Have Never Seen

.
American Idol

CSI (any of them)

The Biggest Loser

Entourage

Oprah

Will And Grace

Numb3rs

Survivor

Grey's Anatomy

The View

Bones

Southland

Everybody Loves Raymond
.

Thursday Thirteen #88

Either due to disinclination, lethargy or lack of opportunity, here are

Thirteen Movies I Have Never Seen

E.T.

Terminator

The Princess Diaries

Apocalypse Now

The Sound Of Music

The Passion Of The Christ

The Lion King

Reservoir Dogs

The Wizard of Oz

Gandhi

Toy Story

It's A Wonderful Life

Dances With Wolves

.

Dutch talk show host loses it

This is Dutch talk show host Erik Hartman losing it during a live broadcast of his show "Boomerang" -- I should say, former talk show host because he was fired after this incident.  I have heard that this was faked, but I hope it wasn't. Make up your own minds. Either way, it's funny!
.

.