One just would like to say this

It always feels slightly improper going into the front garden in a dressing gown with a toothbrush in one's mouth and toothpaste in one's hand. One is never quite certain why this should be, but it just strikes one as an activity that should be confined to the house, if not the bathroom itself. Strangely enough it always strikes one in this way after one has wandered absent-mindedly into the front garden in a dressing gown with a toothbrush in one's mouth and toothpaste in one's hand, which just goes to show, one never can know, can one? No, one can't. However, next time, one proposes a simple solution to this dilemma: instead of wandering into the front garden in a dressing gown with a toothbrush in one's mouth and toothpaste in one's hand, one will not bother putting the dressing gown on. The rose bush, one feels, is certainly of sufficient height now to protect one's modesty if and when the need should arise.

Dude. Like, just... dude. Whoa.... duuuuuuuuuude.

The above title succinctly and eloquently encapsulates my full feelings on the Hawthorn vs Sydney Grand Final, and can obviously serve as a handy summary, news report, and review of the whole affair. In fact, it would be pretty pointless writing anything else about it, ever again. Of course, some commentators may haggle with the strategic theorem expressed in my second ellipsis, but those people really don't know what they're talking about.

Sun rain wind clouds hail snow hail rain wind sun

It was a day like any other day - 

Sun rain wind clouds hail snow hail rain wind sun - 

In Melbourne, when the teams began to play - 

But when it ended, Hawthorn lost - or won! 

It was a year that happens every day - 

I mean... a day that happens every year - 

As... you'd... expect... when sydney came to play - 

Beer beer beer beer beer beer beer wind rain hail beer. 

But does it really matter in the end

How Hawthorn wins? I'm sure we'll get along

And join as one - or two - hold hands, and bond

In an absolute and utter trouncing of the swans. 

And when it's finished over said and done - 

Sun rain wind clouds hail snow hail rain wind sun. 

Wrote this on the train and tram in to the Dan this afternoon in full expectation of a Hawthorn victory. Happily, I wrote it in the tone of a person who doesn't know what he's talking about, which fits my actual personality to the ground. And now, I would like to share my ignorance about anything and everything with you all.

An extremely simple and attractive proposition

I hereby propose that the letters ACGT, denoting the four DNA nucleotides, be replaced with other letters. The letters would be carefully chosen so that, in a certain language, if arranged in a certain order, they would spell a series of incredibly shocking swear words. Thus, aside from providing us with the building blocks of our identity and millions of years of genetic inheritance, our DNA would also provide us with hours of light-hearted amusement.

The amazing exciting language of Englih.

The '' key on my keyboard ha topped working. Not jut any key, it' a key of ingular importance. You will know the '' key, of coure, it' the key for the letter that you ue to put at the end of mot plural and the letter you find at the tart of a number of other word.

Thing are getting quite eriou!

o anyway, conidering the tate of affair on my computer, I wondered if a imple redeign of the Englih language might not be in order. You know, eliminating the letter altogether, thu making the language of Englih altogether more treamlined and leek and elegant.

Here are jut a few of the new and exciting word you'll be able to ue:

piffing!
mahing!
uperlative!
weet! and avoury! 
uperciliou!

I am ure you'll all agree, there' a world of poibility out there. It wouldn't take much to make thi new, exciting Enligh language work.

Alternatively, I could get my keyboard fixed. I uppoe that' poible. Doe anyone know how to do that? I'm all out of idea on that front.

Announcement to everyone in general and to the world at large

Please pay attention to this:

Good. Now that I have made the appropriate fanfare, I would like to announce to everyone in general and to the world at large: BEATRICE THE CAT JUST PUT HER PAW OVER HER NOSE.

Now you may all go and attend to whatever needs attending to.

Third time lucky?

Wake up from a dream about icecream but don't get out of bed to get breakfast. 

Wake up from a dream about making cheese but don't get out of bed to get breakfast. 

Wake up from a dream about pom poms and get out of bed to get breakfast. 

Clearly, pom poms make me ravenous. 

The pre-Cromwellian gurn

As fine an example of the gurn in English literature pre-1600 as I have ever come across:

XIV
Who came at length, with proud presumpteous gate,
Into the field, as if he fearelesse were,
All armed in a cote of yron plate,
Of great defence to ward the deadly feare,
And on his head a steele cap he did weare
Of colour rustie browne, but sure and strong;
And in his hand an huge polaxe did beare,
Whose steale was yron studded, but not long,
With which he wont to fight, to justifie his wrong.

XV
 Of stature huge and hideous he was,
Like to a giant for his monstrous hight,
And did in strength most sorts of men surpas,
Ne ever any found his match in might;
Thereto he had great skill in single fight:
His face was ugly and his countenance sterne,
That could have frayd one with the very sight,
AND GAPED LIKE A GULF WHEN HE DID GERNE,
That whether man or monster one could scarse discerne.

The glossary in my edition of The Faerie Queene says this means 'grin', but really. I mean, really. And that's all I have to say about that matter.

On the wearing of ties on the weekend

There are some people who object to the wearing of ties on the weekend, saying they should only be worn for the most solemn and serious occasions. Personally I think that is exactly why ties should be worn on the weekend. Nothing is more serious than doing nothing, and the occasion should certainly be celebrated by the wearing of a piece of appropriately-chosen coloured neck cloth. 

I frequently wear ties on the weekend - don't you? - and each time the ceremonial knotting of the garment fills me with pleasure, just as a well-executed origami model, or a highly strategic manouevre in chess. It is true that one knots one's shoe as well, but shoes are necessary, and therefore best ignored. Ties, being pointless but pretty, can occupy hours. If you confine yourself to 9 folds, there are at least 85 ways in which your tie can be knotted, which should fill up your time nicely, although you might want to set your other weekend plans aside. 

But aside from the act of tying - if we can leave such an interesting act behind, for it is worth noting that ties are still known by the adjective describing this act, though just what this means for the meaning of 'tie' is anyone's guess - what are ties for if not to be shown? Just occasionally I like to put on my best bow tie and go and go and buy a series of exceedingly mundane things at the shops. A neck-tie in a half-Windsor knot gives just the right sense of decorum for those times when I go to the pub, drink a little too much, and read another gory poem. Add a dressing gown to the mix and you've got just about the perfect weekend costume, methinks. 

Of course, if things go on this way much longer, I may start wearing a tie to bed. Which of course sounds like a fine idea; I may start doing that right now. Like I said at the start of this post: nothing is more serious than doing nothing, and what could be a better example of that than that nothing you do every night in bed? A fit occasion to be celebrated, I would think. You can't eat cake in your sleep, after all - believe me, I've tried. You may as well celebrate it by wearing a tie.

All ye need to gnaw

"Beauty is tooth," wrote the poet John Keats, "and tooth beauty. That is all/ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

But then again, Keats was living at an age in which the dental sciences were far less advanced than they are now, and who suffered from problems with his wisdom teeth for years, so it is only natural that he should have focused on these matters in one of his most famous poems.

Stop tittling up the back

"A tittle is a small distinguishing mark, such as a diacritic or the dot on a lowercase i or j.... The word tittle is rarely used. Its most prominent occurrence is in the Christian Bible at Matthew 5:18: "For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled" (KJV). The quotation uses them as an example of extremely minor details. The phrase "jot and tittle" indicates that every small detail has received attention." - Wikipedia.

In spite of what Wikipedia suggests, I like to think that God is being literal here. In fact, I'm inclined to go off and create a sect of grammatical fundamentalist Christians, if there isn't one already. We could spend our time handing out proper nouns and semi-colons to the poor, or singing inspiring hymns like the following:

All things bright and beautiful,
All tittles great and small,
Diacritics, ampersands -
The Lord God made them all.

Each parenthetic clause -
Each hyphen and each dash
Asterisks, apostrophes,
The tilde and backwards slash

All things bright and beautiful,
All tittles great and small,
Diacritics, ampersands -
The Lord God made them all.

(Thanks for the excellent information, Alison!)

A tutorial in all forms of hedging

"Actually," says Rafe, "I was going to do a post on Aggressive Hedging...". But of course, hedging is an incredibly complicated subject that can only be explained by a small number of highly intellectual folks to an even smaller number of other highly intellectual folks, and often requires a ridiculous number of higher degrees with highly difficult letters in order to be performed well.

However, I will undertake a short tutorial on hedging now.

Aggressive hedging.

Recessive hedging.

Progressive hedging.

Very progressive hedging. 

And finally, here is an aggressive hedgehog.

Just so we're clear. Thank you for your time.

Exciting new concept for television

Coming up, Celia has a plan that will make her sweat more than ever! Will Roger be able to achieve the abscess of his dreams? But first - can Kate finally achieve through advanced surgery the ability to produce mucus behind her knees? That's next on Gland Designs!

A skerrick of Erick

Unveil thine arms, my JULIA, where

I may behold thine oxters, fair,

Frefh-flowered with thy native hair.

Sweet verdure of thy underlawn,

Thy garden grows untamed, unfhorn,

With golden glifters in the dawn.

Thy fecret arbour, daint with crulles,

Bedeawed by fpangling fweaty pearles,

Moved by the breeze in fportive fwirles -

There VENUS is, in full plain fight,

& winged CUPID doth alight,

& pleafure is, and all delight,

& there, I wis, a fhepheard may

Tende gently to his flocke all day

& finge a laefie lang'rous lay.

There PAN his oaten reed doth play,

& MARS puts fword and fhield away

In that moft high félicité.

Unveil thine arms, my JULIA, where

I may behold thine oxters, fair,

Frefh-flowered with thy native hair.

- Erick Herrick. Previous works of his may be found here and here. 

For a second there I thought it was somebody important

Sometimes when I am at work I will send an email to myself, then go and do some work and forget all about it. Later, when I check my email, I will get a nice surprise when I see that someone has sent me an email.

Hard simple cheesemaking made simple hard

Cheesemaking is really, really simple, which is one reason why you should say it is very, very hard. It is much more impressive to say something which you find simple is hard rather than something you find simple is simple. This is how Kevin Rudd got to be Prime Minister; he made the English language, which the rest of us find pretty easy, really, seem so infuriatingly complex that we all gave him a vote for his efforts. (And then he did the same with the economy.)

But anyway. Who would have thought that in order to make cheese, pretty much all you have to do is follow a recipe? This is, essentially, what I have been doing for these past few months. Some instructions are, it is true, a little odd. In the recipe 'mozzarella - traditional method', the first instruction reads:

1. Heat the milk to 90 degrees F. The pH should be 6.8. If it isn't, wait and test again. 

Traditional Italians always kept a litmus test around their house, don't you know.

I just made a provolone today: it's twisting around in the shower recess, looking like a rather small white knobbled and ugly thing that no-one would particularly want to eat. Because it is.

Of course there are always problems: starters that don't start, curds that don't set, or won't stretch the way you want them to, not enough ricotta which is so mooshy anyway that you can't collect it without it dissolving into the rest of the whey. It's all quite simple, the recipe book says; just heat it up to the required temperature, or let it mature for such and such a time, and it will magically happen.

Simple? Cheesemaking is hard! I don't know how people do it! The nerve of that book, trying to make something so hard as cheesemaking seem simple!

How to catch pigeons with a yo yo

Reading the instructions in an origami book while trying to fold an origami tiger is a little like reading James Joyce's Ulysses while attempting to catch pigeons with a yo yo. Check this out:

31. Inside reverse-fold the two lower flaps. These will be the hind legs. The folds at the top are formed in a single motion. Find, on each side of the centrelink, a discontinuous shaded flap with two layers. The junction of the two layers forms a tiny pocket containing the loose paper needed to.... 

And, while you are reading this and attempting to fold your tiny origami paper tiger with an even tinier sheet of paper, in one swift elegant motion, you find that you have folded a perfect paper ball.

PS Perhaps you may think I have neglected to instruct you on how to catch pigeons with a yo yo, but that is not the case. Here's how, in three easy steps:

1. Go into the garden with your yo yo. 

2. Do stuff with your yo yo.

3. Catch a pigeon.

Simple!

Ken this

Old Norse Kenning for sword: 'onion-of-war', or 'leek-of-war'.

Now use it in a sentence:

'I must be off now wife, for with my onion-of-war I must dice the field-sausages* to use in tonight's bowl-blood**'.

'But enough of Grimnir's lip streams***, friends, for now I must ride-the-cushioned-waves**** with the far-sight***** while battling-with-the-fridge-icebergs******.'

'Why do you trouble me, mother? For I was journeying on the flannel-highway******* to the land-of-pillow-song******** where my onion-of-war would be needed no more.'

UPDATE! - Yes,I don't actually use 'onion-of-war' in the second sentence. I didn't want to. Bah, to hell with the lot of you! I'm going to bestride the flannel-highway once more!

* Field-sausages: modern Timnish kenning for zucchinis. 

** Bowl-blood: modern Timnish kenning for stew.

*** Grimnir's lip streams: old Norse for poetry.

**** Ride-the-cushioned-waves: modern Timnish kenning for sitting on the couch.

***** Far-sight: modern Timnish kenning for television. (I believe German for television is 'fernsehen', or far-seeing'). 

****** Battling-with-the-fridge-icebergs: eating ice cream.

*******Flannel-highway: modern Timnish kenning for bed. 

********Land-of-pillow-song: modern Timnish kenning for dreaming.