Ogilvy and Mather

 There was a joke quiz question in the 90s. "What does TESCO stand for?" The correct answer was "Good food, great prices and a whole lot more".

For a brief period I lived with my sister in North London. She would sometimes drag me to Ikea in Neasden, which was a hellish journey, and the shopping was always a bewildering ordeal. Since those days I've always believed that the Ikea marketing slogan is "Ikea. In Neasden nobody can hear you scream".

Today I went to B&M on purpose. For those of you that don't know: it's a low-end homewares shop. Again it might not be the official marketing slogan, but I always think it's "B&M. Prepare for disappointment"

Richard "Outdated Cultural Reference" B

Frozen Shoulder

 As you get older you get to learn about a new load of medical problems. Raynaud's, Dupuytren's, Chilblanes, Halux Rigidus ...

One of the funniest ones is frozen shoulder. You won't remember doing it, but if you're a bloke you bought one bingo square to win an absolutely terrible prize. Women win it much less often. If your square comes up it'll be between the ages of 45 and 55, you are absolutely crippled for the best part of a year, but you get no sympathy and no adjustments are made to accommodate you.

It starts off with a slightly stiff arm, you think you strained it or slept awkwardly. Instead of getting better it gets worse week after week after week until you're in constant low grade pain. One of your arms is weak, stiff, painful to use, and there is absolutely no way you can lift it higher than your chest.

At some stage you'll seek medical attention, or you'll talk to somebody with intimate knowledge of frozen shoulder. They'll explain just how bad it's going to get (very very bad) and just how long it's going to take. If you're in the peak of good health it takes 9 months: 3 months freezing, 3 months frozen, 3 months thawing. It very often takes a year. During the worst 3 months you'll be pretty much incapacitated.

The best bit is that so many people have had it, and not one of them got any help, that you'll be treated exactly the same. Can't dress yourself? Tough luck! I'm sure you'll figure something out - maybe you can lay your shirt out on the bed and squirm into it, or hook it on using an umbrella handle. Can't use the gears or handbrake in your car? That sounds like a you-problem, nobody's going to drive you around. Disturbed sleep? yeah so was mine.

I expect you're thinking one of two things: 1) This affliction can't be THIS common and THIS debilitating. It is, and it is, and you just have to deal with it. 2) Oh yeah I remember that, I managed.

I found out what was wrong with me from a physio and was horrified at how bad it was, how little I could do, and how long it was going to take. I told my brother about it in hyperbolic terms. He said, matter of factly "Oh yeah, I had that, it took a year" and it was clear that I was going through nothing special and that no more sympathy or advice was coming.

On the plus side, you can suffer with it at most twice, and if you get to 55, you're probably safe.

Richard "Don't Complain, Don't Skip the Exercises" B

Ulysses

 On Saturday morning I got a couple of text messages from my mobile phone company about card payments. I had to urgently deal with some of the administrative aftermath of cancelling all my cards.

I hate being late to things, but on Saturday, after waiting to talk to the mobile phone company, I was.

I did manage to come up with this: it's the last bit of Tennyson's Ulysses, but reworked for being late, rather than being old.

Tho' much is missed much still waits and tho'

we are not now those men which in old days
turned up on time, that which we are we are;
One equal temper of the punctual folk,
Made late by time and fate, but strong in haste
To rush, to come, to go, and not to loaf.

Richard "hungry heart" B

Steering Wheel Spacer

 This weekend I've been doing recreational turning. I made a spacer to go behind the steering wheel of my kit car.

Stock:

Turned and faced:

Parted:

Laid out:

Set up:

Triangular:

Drilled: One of the holes is about 12 thou out of position.

I didn't like how heavy and cumbersome it was so I re-did the centre bore and the triangular faces with a 7.5 degree taper:

Richard "Parallel" B

Lost and Found

 Over the years I have developed two strategies for finding lost items.

First is to check all your pockets. My keys have a magical ability to migrate from the pocket that I think they should be in to a different one. Often a pocket in another garment.

The second strategy is not to look for them, but to sit down and think carefully about where you last saw it, and to think about where it might be. I once found a lost nut by knowing where I had left it, and working out that the only thing that had left that area was my inspection light. The inspection light has magnets on it and the nut was stuck to it.

This week I lost my credit card, debit card, driving licence and Tesco Clubcard, and I was unable to find them. I realised they were missing on Friday night and I had last seen them at the counter in Lidl on Tuesday. I had been to too many places to check them all, but I looked in the car, around my house, and in the pockets of every garment I had worn and bag I had used. I eventually admitted defeat and cancelled the cards and ordered replacements.

Reader I found my cancelled cards in the pile of laundry, the pockets of which I had painstakingly checked.

Richard "Where did you last look for them?" B

It Was This Big

 I have talked before about how much I love the fact that the standard meter is "the same length as some stick in Paris". Sadly this isn't actually true. It's been redefined a couple of times, both in terms of the speed of light, and in terms of wavelength of some particular light.

I was today years old when I found out that it's not just some random coincidence that, in the metric system, the acceleration due to gravity is almost exactly the same as pi squared.

Before the standard meter stick, there was a proto-meter that was defined as the length of a pendulum that swings once every second. The formula for simple harmonic motion is defined in terms of theta - the angular frequency and acceleration. Because of radians theta is 2 x pi x frequency. If you solve the SMH equation for a pendulum with f=1, you get l = pi squared.

It's squared because you need to differentiate twice to get from acceleration to speed to distance.

The meter used to be defined so that, if you know how long a second is, and you're sitting in a nice comfortable gravitational field at Earth's surface g=pi squared meters per second per second.

The name "meter" seems to make more sense now as well.

Richard "Blame it on the Metrologist" B 

It's my Party

 I don't remember this clearly, but I'm pretty sure that when I was a child my mum bought and cooked a lobster to celebrate something for one of my older brothers. I'm also pretty sure that my brother had no interest in eating a lobster.

I've just seen a very similar scenario play out with my goddaughter. She just passed the theory part of her driving test. Her mum bought a good bottle of champagne and Scicilian lemons, and when I visited their house we drank french 75's "to celebrate". I'm pretty sure that my goddaughter had very little interest in drinking champagne cocktails and that the celebration was for the parents and their friends.

Richard "vicarious" B

Turning and Turning

Screw you Caterham!

Part of the rear suspension of my Caterham has gone rusty so I've removed it, wire brushed it and repainted it. To refit it I needed a new pair of nylon washers. They're an odd size 17.5mm ID. 1mm thick. The good news was that these washers were easily available directly from Caterham. The bad news was that, with shipping, these two flimsy washers would have cost £10.

As It happens I have a short length of nylon bar stock, so, out of spite, I decided to make the replacements myself. I drilled and bored out the centre, faced off the stock, and then parted off two very short lengths. The project was a great success, other than the huge amount of material wasted as swarf, the surface finish, the dimensional tolerances, and the massive burr I raised when the parting cut met the centre bore.

Richard "But at what cost" B  

Dinner Party

On New Year's Eve I cooked a 4 course meal for seven. Do you recognise this menu?

Mulligatawny Soup - served with sherry

Fish (Cod in parsley sauce) - served with white wine

Chicken (roast, with roast potatoes and vegetables) - served with champagne

Fruit (salad) - served with port.

It was a social experiment that had got out of hand. The previous new year one of the guests was a German and as a cultural exchange program she showed us a sketch which the Germans often watch around Christmas time. The sketch is in English, it's black and white, and involves an old lady and her butler having a four course dinner. It's called "Dinner for One". When I found out that she was coming again I decided to cook the Dinner for One menu and see how long it took for her to recognise it. She spotted what was going on between the first and second course.

Next year I'll cook something simple.

Mulligatawny soup has become my goddaughter's favourite, and even if I say so myself, the parsley sauce was excellent.

Richard "Admiral von Shneider" B

Ambiguous

 I love and hate the Engligh language. It can be very specific. We have, for example, a fully fledged verb for using subterfuge to direct someone to one particular Rick Astley video. At the same time it can be wildly ambiguous. I once boasted that I'd taken 200kg of woodchip to the tip. My mentor said "nobody can have that much wallpaper". I was talking about chipped twigs and branches that I had taken out of my hedge. In the days before Christmas my sister and I were shopping for Christmas supplies. I said that we needed crackers. "No need" she said "My husband will bring a big box of them". I was expecting the pyrotechnic cardboard party favours that you see on Christmas dinner tables. He brought a big box of biscuits for cheese.

Richard "Suzi Dent" B