Santa Claus v. The Laws of Physics

I’m blatantly stealing this from elsewhere but it’s worth wheeling out at this time of year, I think. Merry Christmas! I’m signing off until January.

• So, Santa Claus has 31 hours to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he does the logical thing and travels east to west. This works out as 822.6 visits per second.
• For each ‘Christian’ household with good children, Santa has 1/1000 of a second to park safely, leap out of his sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute any remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever dubious snacks have been left, scramble back up the chimney, climb into the sleigh and move on to the next house.
• To achieve this, Santa’s sleigh needs to move at 650 miles per second, 3000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, a common or garden reindeer can run at 15 miles per hour.
• Even if each child only gets one small toy, the sleigh is still carrying 321,300 tons, not counting Santa, who is invariably described as overweight.
• If we’re generous and assume that magical red-nosed reindeer can carry ten times more weight than regular reindeer, Santa would still need 214,200 reindeer – increasing the overall weight of the flying vehicle to 353,430 tons.
• This alarming bulk of flying animals, gifts and a worryingly obese driver travelling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance, which will heat the reindeer up in the same fashion as spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere.
• The lead pair of reindeer will absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they will burst into flame almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them, and create deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team will be vaporised within 4.26/1000 of a second. Santa, meanwhile, will be subjected to centrifugal forces 17,500 times greater than gravity. A 250-pound Santa (a generous estimate) would be pinned to the back of his sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force.

Ho ho ho.

p.s. SEW7KNGMZYNH - sorry, that's just a gobbledegook code I need to insert for Technorati, apparently. I don't understand technology.

Santa Claus: Looked Like a Boxer

Sorry about the delay to the weekly service: Christmas is a bad season for finding the time to ponder stuff. So this week (well, for the past three weeks), I have mainly been pondering Christmas.

Back in February, I rather inexplicably wrote a blog about the origins of Father Christmas. In a nutshell, his jolly attire was first described in Clement Clarke Moore’s poem ‘A Visit from Saint Nicholas’ (‘’Twas the Night Before Christmas etc etc’) in 1823. In 1863, an illustrator named Thomas Nast first drew ‘Santa Claus’ (from ‘Sinterklaas’ – ‘Saint Nicholas’ in Dutch), gradually turning his coat from brown to red. By 1881, Nast had pretty much transformed the character into what we might through gritted teeth refer to as Coca-Cola Santa – bearded, jovial, a hit with the kids … a less disturbing Captain Birdseye, if you will.

But actual Coca-Cola Santa – the one who drives around treacherously snowy mountain passes delivering carbonated drinks – wasn’t invented until fifty years later (1931), making him three years younger than Mickey Mouse. The Coca-Cola Company had been trying throughout the 1920s to push Coke as a year-round drink (‘Taste Knows No Season’ proclaimed an early ad – a slogan latterly nicked by the likes of Magners and Pimm’s), and they eventually decided to appropriate Christmas. Coca-Cola Santa’s creator, Haddon Sundblom, used Clement Clarke Moore’s poem and Thomas Nast’s illustrations as his inspiration – hence the red attire – and the character finally made the leap from niche publications to national magazines, whose pages he graced for over thirty years. So: Coca-Cola did not invent Santa’s red suit.

But who is this Sinterklaas/Santa Claus/Saint Nicholas character anyway? Right. So Nicholas was a pretty ordinary boy from a third-century southern Turkish fishing family. Unfortunately, that’s about as much historical info as we seem to have, because the rest of his life story digresses into nonsense about miracle-working, for which he became known as Nicholas the Wonderworker. One of his miracles was to resurrect three boys whose remains were being sold as pickled ham by a mentally unhinged butcher.

Saint Nicholas was also known for his anonymous generosity to the poor, for which he inexplicably became the patron saint of pawnbrokers – who are surely known less for anonymously helping the poor than for conning them out of their prized possessions and selling them on at a profit? But I digress. The three golden balls (steady on) that often hang outside pawnbrokers’ shops are a reference to the three sacks of gold that feature in the most famous Saint Nicholas story, in which he helped a poor widower who couldn’t afford to give his three daughters a decent dowry, by secretly throwing three bags of gold into the daughters’ bedrooms at night. This presumably happened on or around 6 December, since that is when we celebrated Saint Nicholas Day at my primary school – Saint Nicholas C of E – although what our teachers neglected to tell us was that the three daughters were probably about to be sold into prostitution by their dear old dad.

Saint Nicholas is unique in that most of his bones have been preserved in one spot, a crypt in Bari, Italy. In the 1950s, the Catholic Church allowed a scientific survey of the bones. In 2005, when these findings eventually found their way to a forensic laboratory in England, it was revealed that Saint Nicholas was barely five feet tall and had a broken nose.

‘But what about the reindeer?’ I hear you cry. Well, Ancient Norse mythology tells of Thor, the God of Thunder, who was known to fly through the stormy skies pulled in a chariot by magical goats (that’s right, magical goats) named Gnasher and Cracker. Suddenly Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (invented in 1939) no longer seems quite so bizarre.

SEW7KNGMZYNH

IQ: Dumb-dumb-dumb

When we think about geniuses (genii? Or is that many genies?), we obviously think about Einstein and his ilk. You’d probably include Pythagoras on your list, although lord knows his much-ballyhooed theorem hasn’t done me much good in life; and Darwin, despite his anxieties about raising a mad and inbred family; and maybe Shakespeare, if you ignore The (so-called) Comedy of Errors and that best-forgotten one about nymphs and shepherdesses prancing around in the forest. You probably would not include Sir Paul McCartney on your list, despite perhaps enjoying a rousing rendition of ‘The Frog Chorus’ when you’re a bit pissed, and yet 16.3% of respondents to this week’s Guardian poll – Who Is The Greatest Living Genius? – did just that. According to the poll, Macca is deemed to be seven times more of a genius than the woman who identified HIV as the cause of AIDS, and only a little bit less of a genius than the man who invented the world wide web. (Massively in the lead with 40.7% was, of course, Stephen Hawking.)

So this week, I have been thinking about intelligence, genius and IQ.

‘IQ’ stands for the German phrase Intelligenz-Quotient (er, Intelligence Quotient), a term coined in 1912 by psychologist William Stern. There are two main ways of calculating IQ: the old-fashioned ratio IQ, which divides your mental age by your actual age and multiplies by 100, and the more modern deviation IQ, which measures you against an average IQ of 100, generally generating a lower figure than your ratio IQ. According to some tests, a score over 115 makes you ‘bright’, over 130 ‘moderately gifted’, over 145 ‘highly gifted’, and over 160 ‘exceptionally gifted’. A score of over 175 puts you among the ‘profoundly gifted’, an elite group containing less than 1% of the human population and chaired, one imagines, by Sir Paul McCartney.

The highest (ratio) IQ ever recorded was a whopping 228, which earned the aptly-surnamed Marilyn vos Savant a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Her enormous brain got a bit carried away with itself, however, and vos Savant went on to write a widely ridiculed book discrediting the findings of Andrew Wiles – who had just solved the notorious 350-year-old maths problem Fermat’s Last Theorem – showing that a high IQ isn’t necessarily accompanied by a great deal of common sense.

A lot of no-doubt-highly-IQ’d people have done a lot of research into IQ, and come to the totally underwhelming conclusion that a high IQ makes you more likely to live long and prosper, while a low IQ puts you at greater risk of accidentally injuring yourself whilst engaging in reckless criminal activity. Things that can affect your IQ include your parents’ IQ, the structure of your brain’s cortex, your childhood musical training, and whether or not you were breastfed (breast is indeed best).

So that’s IQs sorted out, but what about genius? While some scientists have come up with formulae to calculate genius (‘Measure a person’s general ability, then measure their cleverness, then square both numbers and add them together, then take the square root’ – JCM Garnett), others have spent lifetimes philosophising about what makes a genius. Personally I think anyone who has officially been labelled a polymath (a bit of an all-rounder) deserves to be called a genius – the likes of Goethe, who discovered a bone in the human jaw and wrote the marvellous Faust, or Benjamin Franklin, who drafted the Declaration of Independence and invented the lightning rod and bifocal glasses.

Yet more scientists – ones with far too much time on their hands – have trawled the annals of history to try to work out the IQs of people who had the audacity to be brainy before IQs were invented. Somehow they came to the conclusion that Goethe had an IQ of 179, putting him below Wittgenstein (190), but above Descartes (162), Mozart (153) and that thicko Charles Darwin (152).

But are all these numbers and tests ultimately meaningless? At my secondary school, we were compelled by the careers woman to do a test called the Morrisby Profile. We spent hours locked in the sports hall doing a variety of verbal, numerical and spatial tests to help us determine what sort of glittering careers awaited us in later life. One of the tests involved writing as many ‘S’s as you could in the space of a minute. The sports hall was freezing, it being November and the heating being off as usual, and I only managed about 30 before my hand turned into an icy claw. The test results criticised my poor dexterity and suggested I become a soil engineer.

Headlines: Behold the Front Page

If there’s one thing I loathe (there is not: there are many), it’s headlinese. I know headlines have to squash an awful lot of info into a snappy linguistic snippet, but the language used is just so ugly and functional. I don’t like the American convention of using commas instead of ‘and’ (‘White van, old granny involved in hit, run’), I don’t like the enthusiastic overuse of ‘bid’ – as in ‘X in a bid to quell rumours’ or, worse, ‘X in rumour denial bid’ – nor of ‘set to’, as in ‘X is set to storm the charts/launch rumour denial bid’, and I REALLY hate the ones that are just a string of nouns. From the BBC News website this week:

LUNG CONDITION AWARENESS CONCERN

CREDIT CARD SECURITY BREACH FEAR

And one that’s managed to slip in just a very short non-noun:

JAIL FOR HANDBAG FIRE ROW WOMAN

As one of my current favourite bloggers so rightly points out, headlines these days sound like cryptic crossword clues.

That said, there have certainly been some clever or otherwise memorable headlines over the years, and it seems fitting to celebrate them in a week that marked the 40th anniversary of The Sun newspaper, champion of boobies and Our Boys, and hater of anyone who won’t get their boobies out for Our Boys.

The Sun was first published in November 1969 with the headline ‘HORSE DOPE SENSATION’, which scores 7/10 on the string-of-nouns front but 0/10 for the pun-tastic ‘humour’ that has become the paper’s staple. Some Sun classics from over the years:

SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC, CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS
(Caledonian Thistle thrash Celtic in Scottish Cup match)

IT’S PADDY PANTSDOWN!
(Paddy Ashdown has affair)

ZIP ME UP BEFORE YOU GO GO
(George Michael caught cruising in public toilets)

NO KNOBBY BOBBY KEEPS JOBBY
(Policeman becomes policewoman, retains job)

WE’RE ONLY HERE FOR DE BEERS
(Diamond heist at Millennium Dome)

CHEGGERS CAN’T BE BOOZERS
(Keith Chegwin told to quit drink)

That last one’s a bit mean, but it brings me neatly to my all-time favourite ‘headline’, which I fear is more urban myth than authentic since I can’t find any non-anecdotal reference to it: ABSINTHE MAKES THE FONDAS GROW HEARTIER. Genius.

Funnily enough, The Sun’s most famous headline of all time is one that was only ever seen by a small portion of Northern England. When Our Boys torpedoed the Argentine ship Belgrano during the Falklands War, the paper ran with the headline GOTCHA. The first print run had already gone off for distribution by the time the editor thought it might be prudent to tone it down a bit, so the rest of the country got the same story with what was presumably considered to be a much more restrained headline: DID 1,200 ARGIES DROWN?

While some ‘hilarious’ headlines are simply awful (WE’RE ON OUR WAY TUTU SOUTH AFRICA – England qualify for 2010 World Cup), and some are used with far too much regularity (HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA?), and others are in horrifically bad taste even for a tabloid (SHOOTS YOU, SIR – Gianni Versace murdered), the occasional nugget of true brilliance makes a compelling argument for establishing tabloids and local rags as national institutions.

My top ten from this week’s research:

10. BROWN: I NEED YOU TODAY, OH MANDY
(Peter Mandelson is recalled to the Cabinet)

9. FOOT HEADS ARMS BODY
(1980s MP Michael Foot chairs anti-nuclear lobby group)

8. MONTY FLIES BACK TO FRONT
(Field Marshal Montgomery returns by air to the WW2 frontline)

7. SICK TRANSIT’S GLORIOUS MONDAY
(Beleaguered New York transit system bailed out)

6. ‘CHARLIE’ CHAPLAIN
(Prison vicar admits smoking crack cocaine)

5. SCENTS AND SENSIBLE I.T.
(Estee Lauder gets new and improved computer system)

4. IKE ‘BEATS’ TINA TO DEATH
(Ike Turner dies before battered ex-wife Tina)

3. BOOK LACK IN ONGAR
(Librarians go on strike in Essex)

2. QUEEN IN BRAWL AT PALACE
(Crystal Palace player Gerry Queen sent off for on-pitch violence)

1. FOUR KESTRELS MANOEUVRE IN THE DARK
(Hertfordshire man awoken by kestrels falling down chimney)

I can’t leave this subject without posting one of my favourite jokes from b3ta.com (albeit in slightly unfortunate taste), entitled ‘The only headline they’ll ever need’.

Fonts: The Best of Times (New Roman)...

At a wedding last summer, the conversation at my table took an unexpected but rather marvellous turn when someone brought up the subject of fonts. Everyone, it transpired, had a favourite font. When someone declared their favourite to be Verdana, I felt compelled to interject on behalf of Verdana’s more attractive cousin, Trebuchet – the font of this blog – only to hear a scream from down the table: ‘Oh my GOD! I LOVE Trebuchet!’ By the end of the lunch, I had promised to email a few Trebuchet-curious friends a sample of the font of glory so that they could put it to daily use and spread the good word.

The word font comes, believe it or not, from the same roots as fondue – the ultimate 1970s dinner-party fare – because type was formerly made of molten metal. Something I didn’t actually know until today is the difference between a font and a typeface. While typeface refers to the name of the lettering style – Times New Roman, Courier, Lucida, anything we would normally call a font – font is far more specific: 10-point Arial is technically a different font to 12-point Arial, even though they are the same typeface. If you really wanted to let your hair down, you could go for a different font entirely: 12-point Arial Italic Bold. Put that in your email and smoke it.

As you will perhaps remember from school IT lessons in about 1992, the whole point of typing anything on one of those new-fangled ‘computers’ was to use as many typefaces as possible. I used to write all my essays in an illegible italic typeface that seems to have died out, with main headings in Algerian and sub-headings in Brush Script, and with a healthy dose of Zapf Dingbats all down the margins. As long as I didn’t resort to the ‘dweeb’ of fonts, Times New Roman, I was a typesetting pioneer. (Unfortunately, a recent Facebook ‘What Font Are You?’ survey told me that I am Times New Roman, also cleverly intuiting that I am ‘a no-nonsense taskmaster … over the age of 60’ who has ‘always been good at math’.)


Times New Roman was first used in the Times newspaper in 1932, and was specially commissioned after the paper’s previous typeface – Times Old Roman (seriously) – was accused of being typographically uncool. It is perhaps ironic (will check with A. Morissette) that, in 1994, Times New Roman’s own uncoolness spurred a certain Vincent Connare to design the worst typeface ever invented: Comic Sans. He was designing some kid-friendly software for Microsoft and came across a cartoon dog with a speech bubble that contained text in Times New Roman. Realising it looked a bit crap, he started designing a new typeface based on traditional comic-book speech bubbles, literally drawing the letters on-screen using his mouse. The rest, as they say, is ghastly.

The typeface was originally called Comic Book but Connare didn’t think that sounded very typefacey, so he changed it to Comic Sans, since the typeface is a sans-serif one, i.e. it doesn’t have flourishy bits at the end of each stroke. Inexplicably, though, the capital I of Comic Sans is avec serif. Nowadays, with anti-Comic Sans hate groups springing up around the world, even Vincent Connare has admitted that his most famous creation is truly appalling. ‘If you love it,’ he once said, ‘you don’t know much about typography. If you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.’

Interestingly (are you still there?), the same man invented the font of glory, Trebuchet. He named it after the missile-launching device of medieval battle fame, because he ‘thought that would be a great name for a font that launches words across the internet’… Oh dear.

My new favourite font goes by the marvellous name Mrs Eaves. Mrs Eaves! It was designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996, and is based on the elegant older font Baskerville, which was designed in 1757 by typesetter and papier-mâché expert (thems were strange times) John Baskerville. Mrs Eaves is named after Sarah Eaves, who was Baskerville’s housekeeper. When she and her five children were abandoned by Mr Eaves, she and Baskerville got it on, working together and eventually marrying when the estranged husband died. Wikipedia describes her as ‘a forgotten heroine of typesetting’.

Mrs Eaves wouldn’t have used Arial in her essays, that’s for sure.

Guy Fawkes: Quite Some Guy

Four hundred and four years ago today, Guy Fawkes was at the Tower of London being tortured for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot – or Gunpowder Conspiracy, as it was known in 1605. As we all remember-remember from our school days, the Gunpowder Plot was an attempt by a group of British Catholics to blow up the Palace of Westminster and kill the Protestant King James I and most of the aristocracy. One of the conspirators, Guy Fawkes, was caught red-handed in a cellar in the early hours of 5 November 1605, and the rest, as they say, is bonfires, fireworks and ill-fashioned effigies constructed from bin bags and papier-mâché.

But what else? Given that, until I was about 10, I thought Guy Fawkes was a national hero whose marvellousness was celebrated annually by means of brilliant fireworks, a few choice facts seem to have slipped through the net.

It’s strange, once someone has passed into popular mythology in the way Guy Fawkes has, to imagine that that person actually had a date of birth (13 April 1570) or parents (Edward and Edith) or a day job (soldier and occasional waiter), and quite possibly also a wife (Maria) and a son (Thomas). It is likely that Fawkes’s extensive military experience is what qualified him to be put in charge of the 36 barrels of gunpowder hidden under the Houses of Parliament in readiness for the State Opening of Parliament.

Three things I did not know about the Gunpowder Plot until today:

1. The plot had been in the planning stages for a year and a half, since May 1604, and was postponed a few times due to a plague that delayed the State Opening of Parliament. As a result, the gunpowder had actually been sitting in the cellars since March 1605.
2. The conspirators intended to kidnap the king’s children, install one of them as a Catholic monarch, and incite a popular rebellion beginning in the Midlands.
3. They had rented a house next to the Palace of Westminster and begun digging a tunnel into the cellars. By a rather splendid piece of luck, however, the underground storeroom they were trying to burrow into came up for rent, so they simply laid down some cash and wandered on in.

The whole plan started to unravel in late October, however, when someone involved in the plot sent an anonymous letter to a Catholic member of the House of Lords, Lord Monteagle, advising him:

‘to devise some excuse, to shift your attendance at this parliament; for God and man have concurred to punish the wickedness of this time And think not slightly of this advertisement but retire yourself into your country where you may expect the event in safety, for though there be no appearance of any stir, yet I say they shall receive a terrible blow this Parliament and yet they shall not see who hurts them.’

Lord Monteagle made the letter public – possibly so that the conspirators would hear that they risked being rumbled – and the cellars were searched in the early hours of 5 November on the orders of the king. When asked by the startled searching officer who the devil he was, Guy Fawkes quick-wittedly answered ‘John Johnson’ (‘…but everyone here calls me Vicky’ – So I Married an Axe-Murderer), which presumably provided evidence enough that this shifty-looking gentleman clutching 36 barrels of gunpowder under the Palace of Westminster at midnight on a Tuesday had something fishy to hide.

Long story short, ‘John Johnson’ soon revealed his true identity after some good old-fashioned torture, the whole plot was discovered, King James commanded his subjects to commemorate the event with public fires and general thanksgiving merriment, and Fawkes and his co-conspirators were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered on 31 January. On the day itself, Fawkes contrived to avoid the drawing and quartering part of his death by leaping from the gallows, thus ensuring he died instantly.

So, all in all, an unfortunate sort of tale. But – and this is the facty cherry atop the facty cake – when children began cobbling together Guy Fawkes effigies in the nineteenth century and demanding ‘a penny for the Guy’, the word ‘guy’ gradually came to mean ‘funny-looking fellow’, and thence passed into the language as another word for ‘chap’. And that’s a fact.

Moon landings: 'One small step for everyone.'

In May 1961, JFK announced: ‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.’

And sure enough, on 20ish July 1969 (of which more momentarily), Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and ‘that other one’ (Michael Collins) were able to announce, ‘The Eagle has landed.’ The Eagle being the American-metaphor-laden name of their landing module. The Russians were not best pleased, having hoped to beat the Americans to the moon, and put out a sombre message on national radio, while an American flag flapped about (of which also more momentarily) beyond the night sky.

Poor Michael Collins never actually made it to the moon since someone had to man the space shuttle Apollo 11, so, like someone’s impatient mum, he was forced to circle round and round while Neil and Buzz bounced about and collected samples.

So that’s all quite a nice story. But there are a couple of popular misconceptions about the moon landings. Firstly, while the landing module did indeed touch down on 20 July 1969 (at 2017 hours GMT, to be militaristically precise about the timing), Neil Armstrong didn’t actually step onto the surface of the moon until 0256 GMT on 21 July – and surely GMT is the standard time by which non-earth-based events should be judged? It wasn’t any specific date by the moon’s standards, what with nobody ever having established time zones or an annual calendar on the moon. I think a strongly worded letter is in order.

Secondly, Neil Armstrong made a total balls-up of his pre-planned ‘one small step’ line, allegedly written by a weirdy-beardy British scientist called Gary Peach (although Gary Peach looks like the kind of weirdy-beardy old man who’d allege to have done such a thing – he probably shot JFK as well). The line should have been:

‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind’

So, like, a small step for a single specific man called Neil, but a big advancement for humankind in general. What Armstrong said was:

‘That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind’

- which is pretty much ‘six of one, half a dozen of the other’, since ‘man’ used in that non-specific context means the same as ‘mankind’. So essentially, one of the most famous lines in the history of the world doesn’t actually mean anything. A fairly epic mistake.

Not as epic as some of the conspiracy theories, although unfortunately I really don’t have time to go into all that here. The main theory, however, seems to be ‘the flag was flapping in the wind despite there being no wind on the moon.’ WELL, unless I have been entirely duped by trick photography, I can proudly announce that this is total nonsense. The flag was crumpled from being squashed into the glovebox for a week, and, as these two slightly-different photos show, remained crumpled in the non-wind of the moon. It later fell over when the Eagle took off.

The other theories involve mysterious letter ‘C’s marked on rocks (printer error, apparently) and vital tapes going missing in Australia (it’s a big place), and are all rather dull.

So, in conclusion, some people landed on the moon at some point in July 1969 and talked gibberish. And that’s (probably) a fact.

Going Underground

The Tube has been in the news rather a lot of late, with train drivers refusing to work unless they get a 5% increase to their frankly rather nice salary. But this is not going to be about that. There are many more fascinating things to say about the Tube than ‘fucking drivers…fucking union…fucking £40k to press “start” and “stop” all day’ etc etc.

So the Tube, right? It was invented in 1863 and is the world’s oldest underground transportation system. It covers 400km and has 270 stations, only one of which has a name that shares no letters with the word ‘mackerel’ (St John’s Wood), another of which has six – count ’em – consecutive consonants in its name (Knightsbridge), and only two of which contain all five vowels (South Ealing, Mansion House). The shortest escalator is at Stratford and the longest is at Angel. Only 45% of the Underground is underground.

The Circle Line opened in 1884, but is not the only ‘Circle Line’ that the Tube has had. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a ‘Middle Circle’ (essentially the Hammersmith & City Line), an ‘Outer Circle’ (essentially the Silverlink/Overground line) and a ‘Super Outer Circle’ (St Pancras to Earl’s Court via Cricklewood and Acton – doesn’t sound very super to me). None of these non-Circle-Line Circle Lines was actually a circle.

But nor is the Circle Line an actual circle, although it is at least a circuit. The first topological (geographically confusing) map of the Tube was created by a London Underground employee called Harry Beck in 1931. Looking at the squiggly mess that the integrated tube map was becoming, he realised that very few commuters actually gave a toss where the stations were, so long as they could work out how to get from A to B. Unfortunately, while the topological Tube map is quite top and logical (that’s what the word means, right?), it’s not very useful for nitwits like me who use it as their basis for London geography. I once took a train from Embankment to Charing Cross, for christ’s sake – which I think is the second-shortest distance you can travel. The actual shortest distance between two stations is from Leicester Square to Covent Garden (0.26km) and the longest is from Chesham to Chalfont & Latimer (6.26km).

A number of stations have closed down over the years, including Down Street, between Green Park and Hyde Park Corner; City Road, between Angel and Old Street; British Museum, in the obvious location; and a rather brilliant-sounding place called Brill, unfortunately located ‘beyond Amersham’.

But enough of all that. Here’s a video of a bloke skiing down Europe’s longest escalator, at Angel.

Sunflowers: Evil Geniuses (Genii?)

I currently have ten sunflowers shooting up like triffids all around my home, although admittedly two of them are recovering from unfortunate decapitation incidents.

Sunflowers rock. They grow terrifyingly quickly and can quite happily reach about ten feet in height. Although they’re a bit thick in some ways – what sort of flower flops in half if it’s not manacled to a stick? – they’re a bit clever in many others. For one thing, the big yellow flower that ultimately sprouts out at the top isn’t one flower but hundreds, which is why the flower is not called the ‘flower’ but the ‘head’. The yellow bits – petals, if you will – are just there to protect this mass of florets, each of which will eventually produce a new seed.

In one of those really cool-sounding facts that I simply lack the scientific knowledge to explain, the florets are organised in a way that somehow follows the Fibonacci Sequence – the sequence where you add the previous two numbers together, i.e. 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 etc – and it all has something to do with an alleged Golden Ratio and somehow all of the florets are at unique angles from the centre thus rendering them efficient, but seriously, I have no idea.

On a level more suited to my intellect, sunflowers like the sun. Until they reach their full flowering stage, they have a slightly eerie tendency to follow the sun throughout the day, which explains their Latin name – helianthus, Helios being the Greek sun god – and the fact that their name in numerous other languages means ‘turn-sun’: tournesol in French, girasole in Italian, and so on. Motor cells in the stem control this heliotropism (sun-following), angling the head so that it gets the maximum amount of sunlight, thus allowing the sunflower to continue its inexorable growth. The scariest thing is that, having followed the sun from east to west during the day, the sunflower resets itself overnight and sits there in the darkness, facing the east, biding its time, waiting for the sun to reappear and feed it…

So, in conclusion, sunflowers are gigantic, multi-headed, beady-eyed mathematical geniuses with a life of their own. I think I ought to put the bloody things outside pronto before they tie me up and ransack the house.

Row, Row, Row Your Boat

Right. I’ve been gone for an age. The reasons are too tedious to explain, but now, like Whoopi Goldberg, I’m back in the habit and raring to turn ‘Fact of the Season’ back into ‘Fact of the Day’ – or at least ‘Fact of Every Few Days’.

For the last six weeks I have mostly been moving house and growing sunflowers. I had a few hours to spare in the midst of all that so I trotted along to the Boat Race, and today’s facts are brought to you courtesy of that rather spiffing event.

The University Boat Race has taken place almost every year since 1829, when some no-doubt-ghastly Cambridge student by the name of Charles Merivale (I mean, honestly) challenged his friend Charles Wordsworth of Oxford to a boat race at Henley. Wordsworth (nephew, by the by, of the Wordsworth) was a student at Christ Church College, and his crew wore dark blue in honour of that college’s colours. It wasn’t until a few years later that Cambridge decided they also rather liked blue, and started wearing light blue, in homage either to Eton school or Caius College, Cambridge.

After a few years at Henley and on the stretch of river from Westminster to Putney, the Boat Race relocated to its current course, from Putney to Mortlake. The course is, for reasons best known to itself, exactly 4 miles and 376 yards long – that’s 6779 metres – and the current course record is 16 minutes and 19 seconds. The end of the course is marked with the ‘University Stone’ on the south side and, on the north side, a post painted in dark and light blue stripes.

Cambridge has so far won the race 79 times to Oxford’s 75. On four occasions one of the boats has sunk during the race, and both crews went under in 1912. (This photo is the Cambridge crew of 1978.) There was a bit of a kerfuffle in 1877, when the race adjudicator passed out pissed under a bush at the end of the course; when he came to, he declared the race to have been ‘a dead heat – to Oxford by four feet’.

But possibly the most bizarre Boat Race fact is that Hugh Laurie rowed for Cambridge in 1980.

Pancakes: Flip, flip, hooray!

I’ve just been to buy a packet of batter mix and a bottle of squeezy lemon, a tradition started by our forbears many hundreds of years ago.

Shrove Tuesday became synonymous with pancakes pretty much as soon as it was invented, because it heralds the start of Lent. Lent was a bit stricter in those days – none of this ‘giving up Brussels sprouts’ malarkey – and Christian types weren’t allowed pleasant things such as sugar, milk, eggs or smiling. In a crazed attempt to rid themselves of these sinful commodities on the last day of freedom, they tossed them all into a hot pan, and the rest is history.

But what, you may ask, is a shrove? Turns out it is nothing more than a common verb, the past tense of shrive, which – if I know you, and I think I do – you will appreciate means ‘to confess, repent and seek absolution for one’s sins’. Presumably the modern translation of Shrove Tuesday – Pancake Day – came about when people realised they weren’t doing a whole lot of shriving but were enjoying an inordinate number of pancakes.

When I were a lass I went to this boy’s house for Pancake Day one year, and we took it in turns trying to flip pancakes. Some of them got stuck to the ceiling, most of them landed on the floor, and all of them tasted foul. So, call me dull, I use a utensil to flip pancakes now that I am old. But by all accounts, flipping pancakes straight out of the pan is what Jesus used to do, and experienced pancake-flippers continue to operate to this day, often racing against other people of equal talent in what is known as a pancake race.

This bizarre tradition began on this very day in 1445 in the small town of Olney, Buckinghamshire, when a pancake-cooking housewife heard the church bells calling her to her shriving duties and dashed out of the house, forgetting – forgetting – to cease flipping pancakes as she ran. As I write, dozens of proud Olney women are emulating this woman’s absent-mindedness, and indeed pitting their so-called wits against the women of Liberal, Kansas, in what I imagine is the only international pancake race in existence, now in its 59th year. Judging by the town sign, all participants must be disguised as portly nuns.

It’s what Jesus would have wanted.

Superheroes (tm): Men in pants

Apologies. I have been remiss. During my blogging absence I’ve thought quite a few times of posting a very short entry – ‘Foxtons are a bunch of mimsies. Fact.’ – but couldn’t find the time in between increasingly irate phone calls to said estate agent.

So superheroes, right? Somehow or another I got to thinking about the fact that superheroes all wear tights and masks, and I wondered: What’s that all about, then?

The first superhero to wear the skintight ‘unitard’, as it is known, was Lee Falk’s 1936 creation The Phantom, the ‘Gray Ghost’ who became purple when colour was invented in 1939. Since that time, pretty much every single superhero has copied The Phantom’s enviable style. The Phantom was also ‘on-trend’ where pants on the outside and a mask through which no eyeballs are visible were concerned. He truly was the Coco Chanel of the superhero world.

But he was not the first superhero. No. Indeed, the word ‘superhero’ was coined in 1917 and subsequently trademarked jointly by DC Comics and Marvel Comics. Who knew? He was also not the first masked crime-fighter: that honour is bestowed upon a dinner-jacket-wearing character named The Clock – a nonsensical name until you learn that he left calling cards that said: The Clock Has Struck. (Really, that’s as tenuous a joke as Bond girl Dr Christmas Jones, so named for the sole reason that Pierce Brosnan can shag her and quip ‘And I thought Christmas only comes once a year…’)

In the course of my research, I’ve seen the Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), Zorro (1919), Greek and Roman gods (Olden Days) and Robin Hood (1400s) described as early superheroes, which makes sense. Robin did also wear tights… but I suspect it was simply the fashion of the day. I also discovered that Batwoman is officially a Jewish lesbian, which was quite a revelation.



Also: Foxtons are a bunch of mimsies. Fact.

Gaybraham Lincoln

It came to my attention today that it was the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth – which is handy because a) I seem to be in the middle of a series on February birthdays, and b) I know a fact about Abraham Lincoln. (ALSO, and this is a very exciting fact, it’s the 200th anniversary of the birth of the much-ballyhooed Charles Darwin, too – fancy that.)

As well as being one of America’s greatest presidents, having the world’s strangest beard and history’s tallest hat, there are mutterings and whispers that Abraham Lincoln was, well, y’know. ‘One of them’. A bit of a whoopsie, as Stephen Fry might say.

Here is the damning evidence against family man Honest (ha!) Abe:

1. In an episode of The Simpsons, he pinches Homer’s bottom. Fact.


2. He slept with men.


3. ‘Abraham’ sounds like ‘Gaybraham’.

Wait, what? Slept with men? Well, yes and don’t-know. At various stages of his life, he slept (shared his bed) with men, but as to whether he slept (‘accidentally’ snuggled up) with men is entirely open to interpretation. I like to think that he did.

When Lincoln was 28, he moved to Springfield, Illinois and shacked up with three men, one of whom, Joshua Fry Speed, shared Lincoln’s bed. But given that it literally was a shack and had only one bedroom, this was perhaps more of a practicality than a lifestyle choice. BUT, when Joshua announced he was moving away four years later, Lincoln dumped his fiancée and suffered a bout of clinical depression, which was only cured when he went to stay with Joshua. Joshua then got married to some woman so Abraham convinced the jilted fiancée to marry him after all. It’s a lovely story, really.

And THEN, once he was president, Lincoln and his bodyguard David Derrickson shared a bed whenever Mrs L was out of town. (Or so the story goes – perhaps she fled town having discovered her husband and bodyguard in bed together.)

I’ve also heard that the show at Ford’s Theater on the fateful evening of 12 April 1865 was ‘An Audience with Liza Minelli’, but have yet to verify that claim.

Happy Birthday, Town v. Gown Rioting

Like most people, I take a pointless interest in historical things that occurred on my birthday, 10 February. Queen Victoria married Prince Albert in 1840, New Delhi became the capital of India in 1931 and the ‘Deep Blue’ computer beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1996. It is also the birthday of Boris Pasternak, Harold Macmillan, Bertolt Brecht, Robert Wagner, Roberta Flack, Laura Dern, Keeley Hawes and newsreader Nicholas ‘Silver Fox’ Owen. Aleksandr Pushkin, Joseph Lister, Arthur Miller and Roy Scheider died on this day.

It is also, as you are doubtless aware, the feast day of Saint Scholastica, the patron saint of convulsive children and nuns (Christ, they were scraping the barrel with that one). On 10 February 1355, a terrible riot broke out in the (aptly scholastic) city of Oxford, at the Swindlestock Tavern. A group of boozy students complained to the pub landlord about their wine; he, responding in a manner described by witnesses as ‘saucy’, was smashed over the head with a wine flagon. This was enough to stir up pre-existing ‘town v. gown’ rivalries, and the two factions raced off to ring the bells of the City Church and the University Church, apparently the done thing in those days if one wanted to raise an angry mob.

The ensuing three days of what became known as the Saint Scholastica Day Riot saw sixty students and thirty townspeople slain in the streets of Oxford. Somehow, this whole debacle was deemed by the king to have been the fault of the townspeople, and for the next 470 years, the mayor and city officials had to attend an annual service of penitence at the University Church. It wasn’t until an incoming mayor said he’d have nothing to do with this nonsense that the tradition came to an end.

Bloody students.

Dickensian London: You simply must go

February, Month of Glory, is all about birthdays. I know people with birthdays on eighteen of February’s twenty-eight days, including a cousin, three grandparents, my two favourite childhood dolls, my very good self, and a boy from my primary school class who always used to wet himself and then cry.

Today is – or would have been – Charles Dickens’s birthday. (He’s not the ‘person I know’ for 7 Feb, by the way – there was also a girl at my secondary school with luminous yellow hair.) Charles Dickens is one of the most marvellous people who ever lived, and No.1 on my list of Historical People I’d Like to Have a Pint With. He was born in Portsmouth on this day in 1812, the second of eight children of the financially useless John Dickens, who ended up in Marshalsea Debtors’ Prison, taking the whole family with him. Twelve-year-old Charles had to leave school and support the family, and ended up working at a blacking factory underneath what is now Charing Cross Station, essentially sticking labels onto jars of boot polish.

‘A crazy, tumbledown old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats… The sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise visibly up before me, as if I were there again.’

We went for a walk around Dickensian London last week – it was like going back in time, fucking brilliant – and saw the steps down to the river where young Dickens might have, I don’t know, washed his glue brushes or drowned some rats. The river was higher in those days, and came up to the grim side passage of Gordon’s Wine Bar that is, I can attest, ‘literally overrun with rats’. Just off the Strand, we peered through the gates of a Roman Bath I never knew existed, and where Dickens suffered ‘many a cold plunge’.

Just off Lincoln’s Inn Fields, you can see yer actual Old Curiosity Shop, which – needless to remark – was not thus named in Dickens’s day, but it was a bookbinder’s shop that the good man himself used to frequent. We didn’t go there, however – we made a beeline for one of Dickens’s favourite pubs, Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese on Fleet Street. The pub was built in 1538 and rebuilt after the Great Fire of London, and Dickens used to sit by the fire in the gloomy, smoky little room to the right of the front door. I don’t think he would have drunk pints of Sam Smith’s Pure Brewed Lager, but that is what we did, imagining all the while that the large blonde tourist at his favourite table was a bearded Victorian man saying terribly witty things.

Turning 30: Get over it

My paternal grandfather, shown here in a portrait of himself he absolutely hated, would have been 129 years old if he were still alive today. Needless to remark, he is very much not alive today. He died in 1952 at the age of 72, unaware that King George VI had passed away and been replaced by Her Maj. The servants (yes) were forbidden from telling him, lest it hasten The End. But I digress. He was 34 years old – and thus beyond fighting age – when World War I began, and 59 years old at the outbreak of World War II. That’s pretty old.

So I’ve done a spot of research into the world’s oldest people ever. (Interestingly, the third website that came up when I searched under ‘world’s oldest’ was about prostitution. ‘Redirect: World’s Oldest Profession’.) It would seem there is quite some caché in being the crustiest person that ever did live, and numerous people have been discounted on suspicion of fiddling (or indeed forgetting – you know what old people are like) their dates of birth.

The current oldest living person is American Gertrude Baines, whose parents were actual slaves, and who will be 115 in April. Gertrude’s still a few years off the world record, held by Jeanne Calment of France, who made it to 122 years and 164 days before her death in 1997. She never did a day’s work in her life, took up fencing at 85 and gave up smoking at 117. The second oldest person ever is a Japanese chap (120 years, 237 days), who worked for 98 years and lived through 71 Japanese Prime Ministers, but he stands accused of secretly having been a sprightly 105 years old at the time of his death.

The rest of the top ten are women – and indeed, 90 of the top 100 oldest people ever are women. Presumably the times in which they all lived have something to do with that: most of these women were born in about 1890, making them only 20-something when World War I broke out and their brothers and boyfriends marched off to their deaths, leaving my aged 30-something grandfather behind to do whatever middle-aged non-soldiers did in those days. Pose for portraits and holiday on the Isle of Wight, by the looks of family photo albums.

Well, happy birthday, aged grandfather.

Father Christmas: Not topical in February

It’s the 1st of February, so what better subject for today’s facts than Father Christmas? For reasons best known to myself, I know lots of Santa facts, and intend to trundle them out whenever I’m stumped for a topical subject.

So, ’twas the night before Christmas (in 1823) when Clement Clarke Moore’s poem ‘A Visit from Saint Nicholas’ appeared in New York’s Sentinel newspaper.

’Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there…

The poem described Saint Nicholas’s attire and general jollity for the first time: ‘Dressed all in fur… his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot… a bundle of toys he had flung on his back… His eyes how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! … And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow… He had a broad face and a little round belly, That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly!’

Later that century (3 January 1863, to be precise), German-American caricaturist and political cartoonist Thomas Nast drew Santa as a portly, bearded, fur-clad, sleigh-driving fellow who visited Civil War camps in order to demonstrate his loyalty to the Unionist cause. If this image from Harper’s Weekly were available in higher res, you’d see that he is apparently lynching a puppet of Confederate leader Jefferson Davis. Who knew he cared?

Santa’s glorious victory in the Civil War served only to strengthen Nast’s obsession with the character, and he continued to sketch him for thirty years. Gradually, Santa’s jacket changed from tan to red, and the image of a jolly – but borderline morbidly obese – little chap was born. This is him in 1881.

It is a common misconception that Father Christmas was dressed in red by the Coca-Cola Company – but that’s another story.

Creationism: Words fail me

I visited the Darwin ‘Big Idea’ exhibition at the Natural History Museum at the weekend. The tagline – ‘If you had an idea that was going to outrage society, would you keep it to yourself?’ – refers to the fact that Darwin held off publishing On the Origin of Species for twenty years for fear that Christians (his wife/cousin included) would not be best pleased.

Fortunately, sane people don’t worry about such things in this day and age. But ‘I couldn’t help but wonder’ how on earth Creationist types – Sarah Palin and the like – actually explain the evolutionary stuff around us in a way that is so compelling as to discount Darwin entirely. Here is what I discovered.

So there’s something called ‘flood geology’, which tries to prove that the Genesis flood, of Noah and the Ark fame, occurred approximately 4500 years ago and was the cause of all the geological features and fossils we see around us today. Some Creationists argue that ancient dead things are buried at different levels in the earth’s rock because they sank more quickly during said flood. On account of being heavier, you see. So a dinosaur is heavier, and therefore lower – but not necessarily older – than Noah’s third-favourite cat.

Young Earth Creationists believe that the earth is about 6000 years old. Indeed, a seventeenth-century archbishop called James Ussher did some sums based on a literal reading of the Bible and deduced that the world was created ‘upon the entrance of the night preceding the twenty-third day of October’ in 4004 BC.

Old Earth Creationists, on the other hand, can explain how our world came into existence one autumnal Saturday evening in 4004 BC, and yet clearly hosted dinosaurs and whatnot long before that date. The Bible doesn’t specifically state that ‘the first day’ (God switches the lights on) was the same day as ‘in the beginning’ (lights on the blink). So he could well have created the earth, spent veritable eras creating and destroying dinosaurs in the darkness, and then settled on a new plan – the one with which the Good Book is actually concerned.

There is so much more of this stuff that will have to be left for another time. ‘Irreducible complexity’, for example – the theory that things are just so damn clever and fiddly that it’s simply not possible they weren’t created by a big invisible beardy man in the sky. There was a great quote from David Attenborough in today’s Guardian:

‘They always mean beautiful things like hummingbirds. I always reply by saying that I think of a little child in east Africa with a worm burrowing through his eyeball. The worm cannot live in any other way, except by burrowing through eyeballs. I find that hard to reconcile with the notion of a divine and benevolent creator.’

I love David.

The Royal Family: Icky

I’m no doubt preaching to the choir when I point out that there’s something kinda funny-looking about the royal family. ‘Buck-toothed, big-eared, horsey and inbred’ is probably nearer the mark. The shocking truth is that they are in fact all of the above.

The Queen and Prince Philip are both great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria – making them third cousins – as well as being second cousins once removed through King Christian IX of Denmark. Christian IX was himself Queen Victoria’s third cousin and had asked her to marry him before she chose Albert instead. Albert being her first cousin. Somehow, the fact that Victoria and Albert were both delivered by the same midwife makes it even ickier.

If you look at the (tiny) family tree below, you’ll see that the Queen and Prince Philip are also third cousins of King Juan Carlos of Spain – who is married to yet another third cousin’s daughter.

What is wrong with these people? Surely there are plenty of perfectly horsey fish in the sea?

Charles Darwin did a spot of research into inbreeding, spurred on by anxiety after marrying his cousin Emma Wedgwood, of the credit-crunched white-motif-on-blue-background pottery family. Back in the day – Victorian times, shockingly – this was quite the thing to do in order to prevent unsavoury sexual mingling with the inferior classes. Charles and Emma Darwin had a nice life and ten children, but somehow Charles couldn’t shake off the suspicion that there was something inherently… inbred and icky about his family. He spent years recording his children’s defects – ‘backward in walking & talking… attacks of shuddering & gasping & hysterical sobbing… makes many extraordinary grimaces’ etc etc – and eventually concluded: ‘We are a wretched family and ought to be exterminated.’

I’m saying nothing, but republicans may want to take note.

Mentos: Frothy

Today’s fact is less original than some of the others, but I’m doing it anyway for the simple fact that you must see the video below if you haven’t already. It’s absolute genius.

So the fact is: Mentos + Diet Coke = crazy explosion of fizz.

For once, I have done some research into the science behind this physics-class phenomenon. For some reason (oh dear, there goes the scientific gravitas), Mentos have greater surface tension than other ‘small oblate spheroids’ – round things – as well as a number of little pot-holes on said tense surface. Something called ‘nucleation’ occurs in the pot-holes, and carbon dioxide is released so rapidly that the whole thing turns into ‘a raging foam’.

Phew. Here’s the video:



While engrossed in the scientific volumes necessary to write the technical paragraph above, I discovered some very pointless things about Mentos, including the fact that ‘the typical Mentos roll is approximately 3/4-inch in diameter, 6/16-inches tall and 1.3 ounces.’ That’s right: approximately 6/16 of an inch*.

Most interestingly, however, you can recreate the experiment within your very stomach by eating a handful of Mentos and downing some Diet Coke! It ‘can result in people regurgitating the foamy result (as evidenced by numerous online videos)’, although ‘no actual news accounts exist of anyone dying from it.’

I must source these regurgitatory videos at once.

***

* And hello, surely that’s 3/8? Take that, boffins!

Can’t Get Enough of that Wonderful Duff

My brother’s boss sent him a helpful link to a website all about the dangers of alcohol this morning, and he helpfully passed it on to me, reminding me in the process of the time I registered with a new doctor and, after making something of a wild misstatement regarding my alcohol intake, was met with a raised eyebrow and sent to the waiting room clutching a leaflet entitled ‘Thinking About Drink’. Them’s were strange days.

So today I have mostly been learning facts about alcohol.

While alcohol has the effect of stimulating the drinker, it is not in fact a stimulant. On the contrary, the garrulousness, wild dancing, hilarious-anecdote-telling, sing-song-instigating, ill-advised-text-messaging and tearful revelations that accompany a night down the local occur because alcohol anaesthetises the part of your brain that governs self-control. The different areas of your brain get pissed at varying rates, which explains why you can go from ‘I bloody love you, mate’ to ‘LET’S JUMP IN THE RIVER!’ – and back. On the positive side – depending on what you’re up to – your pain threshold goes through the roof.

I also learnt that alcohol is technically a food, since it contains calories. Who knew? Indeed, a glass of wonderful booze contains as many calories as ‘a large potato’, the website told me. Unlike a large potato, however, alcohol has no nutritional value and doesn’t sit around waiting to be digested. It goes into your blood stream in a diluted form, depending on how much water you have in your body. Since muscle contains more water than fat, and women generally have more fat in their bodies than men, women are traditionally a bunch of hysterical lightweights and most likely to suffer from ‘behavioural instability’ and ‘emotional distress’. (I’m thinking Jean off EastEnders.)

There were all manner of other hideous facts – ‘blood-sludging’, ‘cell death’ and ‘decreasing penile size’ came up an awful lot – but they were rather depressing and would have driven you to drink.

Chin chin.