Sometimes a Cigar is Just a Cigar

I recently said that I was disappointed with the effectiveness of my popcorn cannon. One of my friends suggested that the problem might be the moisture content of the kernels, and I think she might be right.

I've now got yet another project I never wanted. This time running a series of experiments with a popcorn cannon using kernels at different levels of moisture content. I do have a humidor that doesn't get much use, but the hygrometer is broken and the louvred box of damp sponge is missing. I plan to "age" the kernels at different moisture levels in the humidor then try popping them, and keeping records.

Richard "This popcorn tastes like a Romeo y Juilieta Number 3" B

Holiday Plans

I need to stop finding out that new interesting things are possible. I found out recently that a skilled blacksmith can hammer enough energy into a cold piece of mild steel that it will start a fire. As well as all the other things I want to achieve in my lifetime I now want to hammer a piece of steel hard enough and long enough to start a fire. My noodle arms and terrible fitness mean that this will be pretty much impossible.

This weekend I found out that in the 1800s there was a lead mining boom in South Dakota and a lot of Cornish were recruited for their mining experience. The important bit is that you can still buy a Cornish Pasty in South Dakota. Now I'm going to have to find the holiday allowance, money and accommodation to fly to the Dakotas just to buy a pasty.

Richard "to do list" B

My Lobster is too Buttery

 I'd like to say these are "nice problems to have" or "very middle class problems" but I fear the truth is that the problems which beset me are quite unusual. It's my birthday and there have been two disappointments.

I bought myself a popcorn cannon, and while it will support 8 bar and survive an explosive decompression, it takes forever to build pressure and it doesn't actually pop many of the kernels.

On top of that my chiffonier has a silk lined cutlery drawer, which now has a moth infestation.

Richard "I know just how you feel" B

Plagueis

 The dark side of the force is a pathway to many abilities some would consider unnatural. I'm going to argue that one of the abilities conferred by the light side of the force is to make flight school exams easier.

If I were a fighter pilot I'd have probably learned to fly motor gliders, then a Chipmonk, then a turboprop trainer like a Tucano. Then a fast jet trainer like a Hawk, and then finally transferred to whatever type I fly, like a Typhoon.

Luke Skywalker probably learned to fly the hover car as a child and we know that he was competent in the T-16. Shortly after he arrives at the secret rebel base on Yavin IV he is flying an X-Wing by himself on a combat mission. This will be the first time he's operated outside of atmosphere, and the first time he's used an astromech droid.It will have been cut to maintain the runtime of the film, but I expect there was a training montage where Luke Skywalker completed the type conversion course from T-16 to X-Wing. I imagine scenes of him with a folder full of papers and notes and a stack of flight manuals. Him in a classroom with an instructor at a blackboard. Him sitting in the back seat of the rare training variant of the X-Wing with a large sign that says "Solo from front seat only". Him taking an exam. Him demonstrating some maneuver with a model X-Wing. Him sitting on the front of the X-Wing trainer.

All this must have been done in the time it took the rebels to decode the stolen plans and plan their assault. He clearly did very well in flight school.

Richard "always fade out of a montage" B

Recovery Drink

 A couple of weeks ago I climbed the hardest route I've ever done. It was a crack climb, so you're holding a good proportion of your weight by jamming your hand into a gap and making the hand as fat as you can. It's also overhanging at about 20°

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mSrFJI4BQwA

Somehow this route grabbed my imagination and I spent a lot of time and effort learning to climb it. It's the achievement in my life that I've tried the hardest to accomplish. The first time I got to the top I had made both sets of knuckles red and sore and they were bleeding on the right. My right foot was bruised, I was very out of breath, and my core muscles felt like I'd been made to do sit-ups until I couldn't even move.

It was 100% worth it.

Richard "wide boyz" B

Scales

Instead of doing a weird escapology act to weigh myself underwater, I made an appointment with the sports science department of a local college and had a load of health tests and body composition analysis done. While I'm generally fit and healthy, a full 23% of me is fat, which is rather high. I have to either lower my target weight or increase my muscle.

It reminds me of when I went out with a fantastically thin girl. She lived with me for a year and a diet rich in pasties and red wine allowed her to put on a little bit of weight. She's much more polite than me. When the doctor asked he her weight she gave some impossibly low number, the doctor then asked for he "target weight" she wanted to say "fuck off" but managed to subsititute that with "I haven't got one".

Richard "full fat" B

Dress Code

There are several photos of my late father doing informal activities (lawnmowing, boating, standing outside his house with his family, etc) while wearing a shirt and a tie.

I've just been to a track day with my brother. Thankfully it's not competitive motorsport so we don't have to wear fireproof suits, but we do still have to wear long sleeves and long trousers. The narrow pedalbox in my car also means that we end up wearing "racing driver" shoes. I like to wear a cardigan to trackdays to offset the fact that the racing driver shoes make it look like I'm taking the day altogether too seriously, but this time it was far too hot for a cardi.

Other than the crash helmet and the shoes I was dressed in summer mountaineering clothes. Very lightweight and slightly stretchy slacks and a similar pullover. My brother was struggling to find something with long sleeves that wouldn't be too hot and would stand the rigours of a day of driving. He very nearly chose a cotton dress shirt, and if he had he would also have worn a tie as a tribute to our father.

The chap with whom we were sharing a garage was a distinguished older gentleman, and judging by the livery on his towing car, he owned a Ferrari dealership. Without a hint of irony he was wearing a dress shirt both to drive and to prepare his track cars.

Richard "Brian James Race Shuttle 3" B

Paris Fashion Week

 One of my friends is the most stylish and glamorous woman I've ever met. She works in an office, but she looks like she's going to a modelling job. For an evening of heavy drinking at my house she had dressed as carefully as you or I would to go to a wedding. Just sometimes, however, she looks as classless and ordinary as the rest of us.

I gave her too many drinks, made her unwell and she had to go home. Apparently between the taxi and her front door she exploded into a fountain of vomit. Her husband had to sluice her off with the garden hose before she was even clean enough to walk indoors to the shower.

Richard "over-served" B

Hip Hip Hop and you Don't Stop

 There was a comments thread that I enjoyed. The idea was that your rapper name is "Li'l" + The last reason you were in a hospital. There were some great submissions like Li'l Fracture, Li'l Infection, Li'l I Work There, and Li'l Abortion.

I introduced my niece to the game and said that I was Li'l Stitches. She however is much more exacting about root cause analysis. Rather than Li'l Trauma and Li'l Shock, she said that she and her husband are actually Li'l Fell from a Horse and Li'l Plane Crash.

Sadly this makes me Li'l Climbing Accident, or even more insulting - Li'l Skill Issue.

Richard "Li'l Elderly Father" B

Book Club

 I'd like to recommend a novel, and to tell you a little bit about it.

It's called "Just Stab Me Now" and for the most part it's a fantasy and romance story about a widowed noblewoman on a diplomatic mission to the court of a foreign queen. It's also a story about an office worker and part-time author who's writing the story you're reading. It's also a series of vignettes that take place entirely in the author's imagination as she "talks" to the characters while she's writing her book.

Despite the fact that the real author, Jill Bearup, has invented a whole new way of telling a story, it's not a masterwork of literature. What it is is great entertainment. It's a nice length, it's an easy pageturning read, and it's a whole lot of fun. There are two adventure stories that are thoroughly entertaining, there are two romance stories and one of them is genuinely heartwarming, and the way that the characters rebel against the author is laugh-out-loud funny.

I feel a bit bad for the author. She's come up with something as new and inventive as the epistolary novel, but I think it's one-and-done rather than the start of a whole new genre.

The best bit is that the author and the characters can talk about the tropes and forms of romantasy, but still use them or subvert them. I think it's both a love letter to and scathing criticism of romantasy genre fiction.

Richard "TLS" B

Escapology

 I have a reputation for getting into ridiculous situations. I swear that this one isn't real, just the product of a thought experiment: I'm wet and cold, wearing only swimming trunks and a climbing harness. I'm in a wheelie bin full of water that's balanced precariously on a plank. There's spilled water everywhere. I'm desperately trying to reach the jack handle of an engine hoist that's attached to my harness, to lift me vertically out of the wheelie bin.

I'm a bit worried about my weight, but I don't know what my target weight should be, so I'd like to know how much muscle and how much fat I'm carrying. I can weigh myself easily enough and measure my height, but I'd need to know my volume to work out my density. Obviously that would be done by submerging myself and measuring how much water is displaced. If I had a bath I could make a couple of marks on the side of it with wax pencil - one for the water level when I'm completely covered and another one when I'm out of it. Then it would simply be matter of counting how many buckets of water it takes to fill it back up to the top mark. I don't have a bath, nor waterproof pencil, nor goggles to see where I'm making the top mark when I'm underwater.

I do have a wheelie bin, and I'm pretty sure I could fit in it. It would seem to be much simpler to fill it to the brim, then get in it, and measure how much water was displaced. I couldn't sweep all the spilled water up off the garage floor well enough to measure it, but I could weigh the bin it before and after. My bathroom scales don't go up far enough to cope with a wheelie bin full of water, but that's easily dealt with. We'll put a scaffold plank on a paving stone at one end and the bathroom scales at the other. The wheelie bin will be on the plank 20% of the way from the stone to the scales. A little applied maths will tell of the actual weight.

The only problem that remains is getting in and out of the water filled wheelie bin without tipping it over and without getting stuck.

Richard "apparently a gym can do this more easily" B

Choice of Words

 There's an old saying in computer programming that the two really hard problems are naming things and cache invalidation, and off-by-one errors.

I think I've got a pretty good vocabulary, but I was drinking with a very skilled software engineer who has a superb vocabulary and he took the liberty of filling in the holes in mine.

I was telling a story about how awkward it was taking the phone number of a single pretty woman at the climbing gym who was less than half my age. I swear that we swapped numbers so that I could add her to a whatsapp group of people that climb after work on a Monday evening, not anything... ummm...

My friend instantly filled in the word "predatory".

Richard "how about unseemly" B

Rocky

I recently saw the film Project Hail Mary at the cinema. I'll let you know what I thought of it in a minute, but we have to go on a long detour first. To my shame I got caught up in the hype of commentators and critics saying how wonderful the film was and I saw it the week it opened.

In 1995 there was an album called Jagged Little Pill that generated the same amount of critical acclaim and excitement. You couldn't turn on the radio without hearing it, and everybody was saying how wonderful it was. I distinctly remember watching some music awards programme and there was one dissenting voice who said it was a good album, but nothing special. That in a few years time nobody would be saying it was particularly important. He was right. There have been plenty of good albums by a female singer song writer with something to say, the only thing different about this one was that it had swearing and funk rock bass playing.

My review of Project Hail Mary: It's a good film, you'd probably enjoy it. It's a long way from the best sci-fi film ever made.

I think what has happened is that cinema has been pretty mediocre for a while, and sci-fi has been completely overlooked in favour of franchises and superheroes. I don't think the critics and commentators would be praising P.H.M so wildly if it had come out in the same decade as, say, The Day The Earth Stood Still, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, Alien, The Terminator, The Matrix, or Contact.

Richard "The Critic was Paul Gambaccini" B

Null

 There are lots of questions that seem like they would produce a simple yes or no answer, but in fact they don't.

I think I annoyed my brother a little bit by answering "yes" to "have you got a barometer?" and then, after quite a long conversation answering "no" to "have you got a serviceable barometer". However I stand by my first answer. I kept my late father's barometer for sentimental and historical reasons. While the needle does move a little bit, it's unreliable and wildly out of calibration.

If the answer to "have you still got dad's barometer" is "yes" then the answer to "have you got a barometer?" must also be "yes"

Richard "Do you still beat your wife?" B

OBD2

 I usually consider myself to be pretty good at faultfinding, but the evidence from this week doesn't back up that idea.

Pulling away or changing direction in my Fiat Panda started making a gurgling noise. My first thought was fuel, but nothing smelled of petrol, so that didn't seem likely. There must be rainwater getting in. No. Everything was about as dry/damp as it usually was. It can't have been hydraulic fluid because the clutch and brakes worked fine. There also isn't a pubble under the car. The coolant level is normal, so I was stumped. Battery Acid! The battery must be half empty and the engine bay will be corroding terribly. No, it was dusty and dry like usual.

The answer came when I tried to go rock climbing. I had left my gym bag in the back of the car and there was a half drunk bottle of water in it.

Richard "hydration" B

Relative Humidity

 How was your first track day of the year?

I took my Caterham to Pembrey on Sunday. Some of the day was excellent. The car behaved impeccably. The new suspension is very impressive. The tyres and brakes came alive in a couple of laps each time. Both my guest and I had a good session on track.

However the weather was bitterly cold, strong winds, and varying wildly between drizzle, heavy rain, and bright cold sunshine. We both got cold and wet. We weren't allowed into the cafe until 8:30 and we were kicked out at 14:00. There is no other shelter in the paddock (unless you brought it with you) and the necessity of being able to see out of my car on circuit meant that I had taken the windscreen and roof off.

We drove home wearing wet clothes in a car full of wet upholstery, weather gear, tools and equipment with the cabin heater running full blast. We weren't cold but we weren't dry either. I now smell like a wet dog and I think I might have a mild case of trench foot.

Richard "worth it" B

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