Ta-ta TELEX!
I was reading that this month, BT are finally abandoning the TELEX service. That made me think! When I started in my first job, in a City of London ad agency, I was fascinated by the big, desk-sized machine down in the mailing room, attended by men in brown coats, that sent and received real printed words.
When I started a second career (of sorts) about a quarter of a century later, it was still the TELEX service that we used - at first our messages were sent and received by the Maidenhead Chamber of Commerce (CHACOM G), who would telephone and read the message to us before putting the hard copy in the mail. Wow!
Then we, the company that is, acquired our own TELEX number (a six-digit address on the TELEX network) and a little box with a small keyboard which was the descendant of that brass-bound polished box in the mail-room... now we could type in messages, and then see them transmitted, at all of 300 baud, 300 changes of state per second. TELEX used a 5-bit code, so that was around 60 characters a second. That 5-bit code was the reason why you could only have CAPITAL LETTERS, and there was no '£' sign - there just weren't enough codes available to allow for lower-case letters and so on.
Our first computer had terminals running at 1200 baud. With updates we were able to communicate at 2400 baud, and later at the dizzy speed of 9600 baud. TELEX was already looking a tad more tortoise than hare. And then - the FAX machine arrived! OK, you still had to prepare an original document and scan it in, but this was real progress, since you could send diagrams and pictures - pretty low resolution, and only in black and white of course, but again - wow! The TELEX terminal began to gather dust...
Once everyone was on a LAN, and the Internet was taking off, along came e-mail... now you could send text, pictures, music even... and the quality was as good as the recipient's PC and software could make it. The fax was still used for legal documents and the like, but TELEX? How the hell did it last this long? Well now it has reached the end of the road. A technology that lasted for seventy years - things certainly change more rapidly nowadays! Time to put it out of its misery, and shake out the spiders and the dead insects from the terminal... the lines must have been pretty quiet for some time now - cue tumbleweed and the sighing of the wind...
5th March 2008
The year that saw my birth was 1937, and just before your humble and obedient put in an appearance, two big names departed. One was Guglielmo Marconi, who checked out the day before I checked in. Radio stations around the globe observed a two-minute silence. For his departure, not for my appearance on the scene, I hasten to add. Some days earlier, it was George Gershwin, whose busy work schedule was abruptly terminated when he succumbed to a brain tumour.
It's time once again for the annual Oscars bash in LA, in which I couldn't be less interested. And for why says you? Well, in the year I mentioned above, George and Ira Gershwin received their sole Oscar nomination, for a great chanson, entitled They Can't Take That Away From Me -- a wonderful standard still heard frequently today:
The way you wear your hat... The way you sing off-key...The memory of all that... No, no they can't take that away from me...
So George popped his clogs with an Oscar on the sideboard, right? Wrong... the gilded manikin was passed to Harry Owens, for a piece of Hawaiian-style schlock called Sweet Leilani, that Bing Crosby had found and insisted on singing in Waikiki Wedding to the chagrin of the contracted song-writers, Robin and Rainger. Oscar Levant said of Harry Owens "His music is dead... but he lives on forever". And that, children, is why I wouldn't trust the Academy to find their own buttocks in a bath-tub when it comes to selecting the goodies - they're liable to chow down on the wrapper and throw away the toffee.
Rant over!
24th February 2008
I have just discovered that Nick Bradbury's wonderful RSS Feed reader, FeedDemon is now FREE! That's right, the best of breed is now buckshee - just click on the link and download the installer.
I, of course, have been paying for it up until now... Not that I begrudge a penny of it, it's a great product.
24th January 2008
With all the nuttiness flying around among the cerebrally challenged supporters of 'Creation Science', otherwise known as 'Intelligent Design', it is definitely a good time to be reminded of the man who set all of modern biology and related sciences on the right track, that of reality.
Charles Darwin was born on 12th February, 1809 - an auspicious day, if you are into such things, as a certain Abraham Lincoln first saw the light of day on the very same date.
It's important to realise that the term 'theory' has two distinct meanings - to the average Joe Soap (including me) it's a term implying a hunch, an unfounded suggestion - 'It's my theory the murderer was left-handed, Inspector' - that sort of thing. But that isn't what a scientist means by 'theory'. For him (or her) a theory is what you have when an hypothesis has been tested and found to be sound, and to fit the facts - the tests can be repeated and will return the same positive results. So when a wild-eyed, bible-waving twerp says 'Evolution is only a theory', he is merely demonstrating that he doesn't know what a theory is. After all, gravity is only a theory, too...
Anyway, let's remember Charles Robert Darwin on 12th February, a reluctant genius, whose 'On the Origin of Species' released the enquiring mind from the thrall of legend and myth. Good old Char-lee!
24th January 2008
An interesting piece of news today, on the JREF site's weekly 'Swift' page, concerning the Million Dollar Prize offered by James Randi to anyone who can demonstrate any paranormal ability under test conditions.
The $1m prize has been on offer for ten years, during which time not a single applicant has even passed the preliminary test. The 'celebrity' weavers of miracles have kept a low profile, and not offered themselves, preferring to keep their chicanery to themselves. The American 'psychic' Sylvia Browne did promise to undergo testing on the Larry King Live TV show in 2001, but wriggled back under her stone without ever coming up to the starting gate.
Today, it is announced that the prize is to be withdrawn, as of 6th March, 2010. The JREF can make better use of the money than letting it sit there at Goldman Sachs while wingnuts and the deluded make applications no-one can understand, let alone conceive tests for. So... a little over two years remains, in which you can make your attempt on the prize, should you believe you can dowse, or make people urinate (yes - that one happened) or see inside people's bodies to diagnose their health problems, or perform any one of the other looney-tunes feats, beloved of the woo-woo fraternity/sorority. Just go to the JREF site to find out how.
Roll up, roll up and earn yourself a cool million. Only US Dollars of course, but still... Ooh... it's all gone quiet...
4th January 2008
Hold very tight there! Fares, please... And off we go again on yet another swing around the sun. Soon the days will be seen to lengthen, and we'll all start bitching about the weather, too hot or not hot enough, and... it'll be October, and Christmas will be starting all over again.
Oh yippee...
Happy New Year!
PS: And best wishes for a swift recovery from his hernia operation, to Ken Dodd: we're not ready to lose him yet!
1st January 2008
Well I shall not be sorry to say goodbye to 2007 and welcome in 2008 in my usual madcap, drunken, wild way... fast asleep by 11 pm! It's not been the most all-round enjoyable year. The early months had something of a shadow cast over them by my nascent requirement for surgery to deal with lung cancer, and the subsequent period of recovery. Then there was the summer that never was, and the threat of flooding - fortunately we here escaped narrowly, unlike the folks further north who are still trying to pick up the pieces of their lives.
An erstwhile colleague from the early 1960s has sent me a picture of me, that I don't remember at all. It looks as though it might have been taken for a magazine article - we were promoting a record at the time. My thanks to drummer Bob Burnard for the image.
Damn it, was I ever really that young? I may weep...
All cynicism aside, may I wish all and sun-dried a very happy and even prosperous (huh!) New Year? May I? Ta...
31st December 2007
Stone me -- over a month since I last added to this compendium of tripe. Doesn't the time fairly whizz by? I'm inspired, if that is the word for which I grope, to type up the odd note by the acquisition of a very useful book...
Elsewhere I have waxed eloquent about my bread-maker machine, which I have been using for nine or ten years now (well, I'm on my second machine actually, but let it pass) to furnish my table with the staff of life. And jolly well it has done it too. The thing is, up until now I have just slavishly made the same two or three recipes culled from the User Manual that accompanied the machine.
Enter a Saga Zone message board poster, who, in a thread about the use of said machines recommended a fine book, which recommendation I pass on to you, gratis, no extra charge, there will be a silver collection as you leave this page, entitled "The Complete Bread Machine Cookbook", by a certain Sonia Allison. It's a cracker! Amazon have it...
I now know how to glaze a loaf, how to combat hard water... and the results are an improvement in something already very acceptable. So I'm very happy with it. Pass the butter, please...
9th December 2007
As may have become apparent to the casual browser through this cavalcade of crap and genius, I'm not much of a one for taking life seriously. But I do have my moments of introspection, in which I stroke my chin(s) and ponder... in particular, over the question of religion. As I have stated at the bottom of the page, I am atheist, not 'An Atheist', which simply means I have no gods, and apart from a couple of years when a callow youth (we were dead callow at 17 in those days) have always been so. Now, it seems that with the publication of a small number of books, by Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens et al, in which religion is submitted to enlightened examination, the matter has been pitch-forked (presumably by a small fork-tailed demon) into the public arena in a big way. Predictably, this has provoked shrill and strident reactions from the faithful, as though we haven't had centuries of pious balderdash from them. What it hasn't provoked is one single refutation of anything said by the critics of religion, merely ad hominem attacks on them, and a string of straw-man arguments. The godless say 'You make these claims, of gods, of original sin, of redemption and so on. Please give us evidence to back them up.' And we wait... and still wait after thousands of years.
We're not really used to religion in the UK being anything other than a blurry background to life. In school assemblies we mumbled and sang and were not really affected by any of it. The vicar was a stock foolish comic character in literature and farce (although Trollope created noble characters, e.g., Mr Harding in The Warden), forever being offered 'More tea?' The Parish Magazine came through the letter box regularly in many a suburban home, and was useful on the floor of the budgie cage. Hatch, match and dispatch were the only contact most had with it. But within a mile of where I grew up in North London, I can call to mind at least five churches, two of them being large C of E Parish Churches, that no longer exist, or have been converted to something more useful, like flats or in one case a pub. Not a thriving force, whatever they care to tell us.
The godly raise the same old issues, time after time after... For example:
The New Atheists... Having no central dogma, no credo and no sacred texts, the atheist people are individuals, not members of a sect, or adherents to any movement. As somebody said, to create such a single-minded body would be like trying to herd cats. There's nothing very new about people being free to express their feelings on this subject, but it is certainly desirable. The army of New Atheists is a figment of the fevered godly imagination.
Atheists want to ban religion... Who says so? I would say that if you want to believe something, then it's your right to do so. But it isn't your right to attempt to foist it on those of us who don't believe it. So carry on regardless, but keep it at home, please. Not in the House of Lords.
Atheists want to destroy religion... Not really. Most feel that what consenting adults do in private is their own affair. As the special status of religion (being protected against investigation) withers, so people will be free to make up their own minds, and perhaps even think rationally about it.
Without our God there can be no morality... Oops! Bit of an admission, that? Are they saying that if they didn't believe in and fear a supernatural entity they would be out right now, raping and pillaging - is that what they really want to do? Is it only their fear of divine retribution that is holding them back? Daniel Dennett describes religion as 'Belief in a supernatural agent or agents whose approval is to be sought', and it rather sounds as though he's right. But of course until the Ten (Rather Lame) Commandments were brought down from the mountain it was perfectly OK to murder, steal and - er - covet. Not! I think every religion and every moral philosophy has a version of the one great precept we know as the Golden Rule: treat others as you would wish them to treat you. Says it all, really - the rest is flummery, deception and delusion.
Coming soon, another invention of the godly: 'The war on Christmas' - book now!
8th November 2007
At this juncture I should explain that I have a blind spot where numbers are concerned. People, good people, have sat me down and tried to explain things to me, things like Accounts, VAT, Pools Permutations, the Beauty of Mathematics and the like. As a result I can confidently say that I know exactly what human speech sounds like to a dog. When Fido sits attentively with ear all a-cocked, he can't extract any sense from the jumble of sounds his human interlocutor issues, but instead gets a notion from the tone of it - try saying 'Good boy!' to your noble friend, only as though you were scolding him, and watch him cringe and look desperately guilt-ridden. It's fun, but be sure to reassure your chum afterwards. Anyway, that's how I feel when people talk numbers at me - all I hear is 'wurble-wurble-wurble'.
Much was made in my schooldays, of a famous bubble named Pythagoras. To him numbers were mystic and full of portent and stuff. He spent a good deal of time fooling about with the sum of the squares on the opposite two sides - opposite, that is, to the hypotenuse on which another square was in residence. He proved them to be equal, and I'm sure he was right. We were taken through a multiplicity of proofs, arithmetic, alebraic, trigonometrical... I would have been happy to take his word for it and move on...
Now, however I learn something far more interesting about the man. He set up a commune of sorts, and imposed dietary restrictions on those therein. His diet was vegetarian, but there was a caveat: they were to eat NO BEANS! His belief was that breath was the basis of all life. Eating beans made you fart, and this meant that the beans you had been eating were the heads of your ancestors, see? Now if they had taught us that kind of Pythagoras theorem I might have made more sense of it, and it would certainly have been a damn sight more interesting.
25th October 2007
Staring at my raddled features in the shaving mirror this morning, a further fragment from one of the Richard Murdoch parodies on Alexandre Luigini's Ballet Egyptien (see below) zoomed up, arthritically, from my unconscious. Or sub-conscious - take your pick. It's sadly incomplete:
Force-meat balls are very indigestible
Unless you eat them covered with cheese
Climbing up Mount Popocatapetl
You must [dum dum dum] and
Cover your knees.
Doubtless the Mexican mount appears once again because its rhythm fits the metre of the verse with such fine precision - and because it sounds silly, too. I rather think that he rhymed 'force meat' with 'horse meat' somewhere, but I don't know where... still, I do well to find my own way home sometimes...
23rd October 2007
This fragment of verse is all I have of Richard Murdoch's "Ballet Egyptien" parody - it's from a gramophone record rather than a BBC recording.
That's what I said when I first posted this article, back in 2003, and as it turns out many people did remember bits of it, and the additions they sent me are shown below. Richard 'Stinker' Murdoch seemingly used different versions for each performance. I think it's worth putting it up here again, in the hope of attracting more snips and snaps of poetic genius...
My aunt's name is Ella Wheeler Waterbutton,
She lives down in Burton-on-Trent.
When she goes out shopping on her bicycle
She always gets her handlebars bent.
Steak and kidney, seven and a tanner's worth,
A little bit of chicken and a marlin-spike.
Hutch and Ted Ray at the Metropolitan
Are doing even better than at Heckmondwyke.
Sabotage at Poole in Dorset,
Camouflage my uncle's corset ...
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday,
Saturday, Sunday, Monday ...
Plastic pyjamas,
Are never quite what they ought to be.
Gentlemen farmers,
Are never quite what they're taught to be.
Seventeen fiddles in a second-hand suitcase
Semolina pudding in a very old flute-case
Cabinet Ministers shout
"What a very silly song" - I'm out!
(13th April 2005 - a kind lady named Julie Foster supplies me with this alternative verse)
Late night final, put another penny on
And win a little money on the football pools
Climbing up Mount Popocatapetl
Is a little bit above a boy at boarding school
Dave Allen (no, not that one) remembers the couplet: "Aberdeen has lovely houses, Gaberdine makes lovely trouse's!" (28th February, 2007)
Mike Walker contributes:
Corned beef and mustard are not the things to eat in
bed,
Rhubarb and custard are just the things to eat
instead,
Seventy two fiddles in a second-hand suitcase
Uncles raving cos he's broken his bootlace,
What a silly song to sing, Goodnight.
Thanks too for further variants to Keith Francis, who marshalls his memories in New York, and in April this year sent me:
Climbing up Mount Popocatapetl
With a funny little hat on and a boy scout's
knife
(Something something something something)
And carrying a letter for the parson's wife.
21st October 2007
Sandy Toksvig quotes her father as having said that the best way to have a happy childhood is not to give it up when you're an adult. I'll drink to that... (scotch and wa-wa please) and I am emboldened to confess that, being retired from day-to-day moiling and toiling, I get to see some interesting TV programming aimed at the little persons (pass the sick-bag). You know, amid the frankly awful cheapo animations there are some fascinating products. I have most recently discovered The Backyardigans, a computer-animation music series in which the main characters have imaginary adventures in their common back garden. Sounds a tad pedestrian so far, but the characters are: Pablo: A fluffy blue penguin with a tendency to panic, Tyrone: An orange moose..., Uniqua: No one knows what she is, but she is pink with antennae and polka-dots... and Tasha: A yellow hippopotamus - Uniqua's chum. Not so dreary after all..? The speaking and singing artists are real children, by the way
The adventures always include musical routines, animated from film of live dancers, and each episode features a different kind of music - Calypso, Country, Tango, Swing and Reggae among others. There's a sly sense of humour behind much of the dialogue, the songs are hip, the dance routines are well choreographed and it's funny on several levels. It's animated in Canada.
The big show at the moment must be Lazytown, from, of all places, Iceland. It has the biggest per-episode budget of any children's TV series (said to average $1,000,000) and it shows. Combining live actors, puppets, CGI and breathtaking physical stunts it goes like the clappers... which is appropriate because it has a mission to make children more active, and less prone to lie around playing computer games. It also promotes the eating of fruit and vegetables... In spite of all this it manages to be highly entertaining!
There are just three human characters: Sportacus (Magnús Scheving), a slightly elfin strong man who lives in an airship, and modestly describes himself as a 'slightly-above-average-hero', Stephanie, an eight-year-old girl seemingly obsessed with all things pink, played, danced and sung by a winsome young teen-aged actress named Julianna Rose Mauriello, and the character with whom I confess I identify most, the villain, Robbie Rotten. He lives in a strange underground lair and wants only peace, laziness and quiet (see? me all over...), and continually tries to put a stop to the children's more healthy activities. He considers himself to be a master of disguise, and the cast never recognise him until he is unmasked, as he eventually is in every episode. He is played by Stefán Karl Stefánsson (credited as Stefan Karl), with prosthetic chin, brows and hair and remarkable body language.
The puppets are Stephanie's new friends (she only just arrived in town) Trixie - a mischievous girl, Ziggy - a sweet-eating small boy seldom parted from his favourite Lollipop, Stingy - an acquisitive, rather prissy boy who's favourite word seems to be 'mine!' and Pixel - a computer geek. Stephanie is in Lazytown visiting her uncle the mayor, Milford Meanswell, who is not the brightest and best, but he means ...
The creator of the show, Magnús Scheving, is a champion gymnast, and his character is forever in motion, often through the air... (I find myself wishing he'd just walk somewhere for a change).
Last year I enjoyed a Spanish creation, once again computer animated, Pocoyo. A series of episodes featuring a toddler, his puppy (Loula), a pink elephant (Ellie) who enjoys ballet dancing and always appears wearing a blue back-pack, and a yellow duck in a green hat (Pato). 'Nuff said, I think! Stephen Fry narrates the English-language version. Often very funny.
Admittedly these shows are the diamonds on the dross-heap that is labelled, rather dismissively, 'Kids' in the SKY listings, and there is a morass of mediocrity there as well. But these gems are worth a glance, for their colour, music and thoughtful production.
23rd September, 2007
No - pull the other one! You must have seen the reports (that have been all over the web, as well as proving highly diverting for listeners to Terry Wogan) of Nepal Airlines novel approach to aircraft maintenance.
The Corporation has been experiencing problems with one of its aircraft. So they slaughtered a couple of inoffensive goats on the tarmac in front of the recalcitrant kite - after which it made a trouble-free trip! Well of course - it would, wouldn't it?
"The airline's top management was consulted before the worship and goat blood were offered to the deity, an NAC official said. The idea to offer a sacrifice came to an airline engineer who said he dreamed that a deity was angry because the corporation had not appeased him by sacrificing goats." One of the less appealing deities, one surmises...
Well that gives me an idea for the next time a car plays me up - I'll top a gerbil or two where the car can see me do it and that'll teach it a lesson.
7th September, 2007
Some of the very best authoritative documentaries to have been made about our world and its denizens are those fronted by David Attenborough. I think we can agree on that, yes? Good. So it comes as a shock to read that the BBC, in its infinite foolishness, has sold The Life of Mammals to a Dutch evangelical christian TV channel in Holland, along with permission to alter and censor them.
The station say:
We’ve been ‘adapting’ nature films since we started. It’s no secret. We don’t believe that man descends from monkeys.
Well - I doubt that David Attenborough believes that either - we share a common ancestor with the other apes and with monkeys, which is a rather different thing. But then if, like this channel you are in the business of disseminating ignorance, you will talk that kind of twaddle. What they are doing, of course, is editing out any reference to evolution, which just happens to be the basis of our understanding of biology, zoology, botany... and also happens to be the only explanation that answers all the questions so far...
For the BBC to connive at this is nothing short of scandalous.
6th August, 2007
Be honest, now, does anyone give a toss about 'Jacqui' Wossname, our revered Home Secretary, having sucked on the odd muggle a quarter of a century ago? Put your hand down, Vicar... no, I thought not. But what does get up my proboscis is the way people in her position hasten to try to mitigate the offence, saying that she had smoked it "just a few times", and had "not particularly" enjoyed it.
It's that last bit, about not enjoying it that makes my skin crawl. We had the same old slush job from Bill Clinton: "When I was in England, I experimented with marijuana a time or two, and I didn't like it. I didn't inhale and never tried it again." All I can say is, if he didn't inhale, he hadn't really "tried it"... and what was not to like, or enjoy?
We hear nowadays that stronger strains, such as "skunk", are now in use, but way back when Ms Smith (I knew I'd remember it eventually) and Bill toked on the odd joint, it was all pretty much of a muchness - mild euphoria, maybe a happy hour or two of laughter and then a desire to raid the fridge. Pretending it was an unpleasant experience does nothing to render the action more legal or less dastardly. So enough with the weasel-words, and just say you're sorry you did anything so gosh-darned awful, but hey, so did everybody else, didn't they? 'Course they did...
19th July, 2007
Love this story about the Cerne Abbas giant and the promotion for the Simpsons Movie! The picture of a doughnut wielding, Y-front wearing Homer has been created in water soluble paint right next to the big priapic guy, and the local Pagans don't think it's funny. I, on the other hand, think it's a hoot.
As a result of this 'insult', Homer is threatened. 'We’ll be doing some rain magic to bring the rain and wash it away.' That's Ann Bryn-Evans, joint District Manager of the Pagan Federation in Wessex talking there.
To quote the man himself, 'Yeah, right! That'll work!' Still, at least the Pagans are harmless, and are not considering reprisals against the citizenry in general, like some other nut-jobs we could mention, but just poor old white-wash Homer. So on with the dance!... if the weather doesn't oblige within the next few hours as it has done so often this summer. If wet, in the church hall...
17th July, 2007
The pregnant pause since my last paragraph was made even longer by a mysterious problem that stopped my ftp access this week. Demon, my ISP, who host these golden pages, announced that they would be migrating their homepages to a different server or servers, and since that was accomplished, some of us have been unable to upload things. Finally I, for the first time ever, essayed a 'chat' relationship - Demon offer a choice of Sales or Technical chat connections, and I must say that it worked very well. The outcome was that after setting up a new password I was able to connect, only I still couldn't see my files! Then it was explained that one of the folders I could see would be where they were to be found. Bingo! Back in business.
In case you wondered, 'ftp access' refers to File Transfer Protocol which, among other things, allows web authors to copy their immortal witterings to the host server. In case you didn't wonder, ignore this paragraph...