by Fern Shaw | Mar 30, 2015 | Water, water cooler
I’ve noticed a rather disturbing trend has raised its invasively shaped head on the worldwide web in the last few years.
The every single day of the year allocated to some cause or other trend. Frankly, I find it exhausting. There seems to be a post 20th Century gene that’s automatically wired into any being that has access to said worldwide web, never mind all forms of social media. I call it ‘The Post Modern Guilt Gene’.
‘Why the Guilt Gene?’ you make ask. Well, if you have a conscience – whether it’s vastly overdeveloped (like mine) or even if it’s just an infinitesimal smidgen of your primordial make-up – there seems to be a knee jerk response to every assigned day. That’s until you give yourself a stern talking to, otherwise you’ll be splabbing to all and sundry on days like … wait for it … Forgive Your Parents Day. I tiny goat you not. There is an actual bona fide day of this and it was today. I listened in horror and some disbelief as people from all over called, texted and e-mailed the radio station about what they had forgiven their parents about. Granted, a visceral Schadenfreude part of me did gasp and ooo while Pamela from Peterborough regaled all about how she had tried to forgive her mother for burning her hair with a homemade perm in 1985, but then common sense prevailed. THIS Day of Forgiving was neither relevant, nor important and certainly not worth clogging up the airwaves (or any other wave for that matter).
There are of course, aside from commemorative public holidays, days that actually are significant and are worth marking or remembering, but more often than not, they’re just silly. A few examples:
Towel Day – May 25
International Talk Like a Pirate Day – September 19. (Okay, I’ll admit, I’d probably participate).
No Trousers On The Tube Day – every year around January. (Do you really need to know what day exactly? Really?)
The aforementioned ‘Forgive your Parent’s Day’ – March 18, and not to forget, the all-important;
Fettucine Alfredo Day – February 7.
Perhaps I’m being irreverent (my usual resting state) and a bit mean-spirited, especially considering the tangents my brain takes me (and subsequently, you) on, but for my sanity, I think there will be a number of Days that I won’t be observing, commemorating or even acknowledging this year. Or any year for the foreseeable future for that matter.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve very N.B. matters in mind, as I hare off to the water cooler to make the water gloomph.
Hold the phone! How about an International Make your Water Cooler Water Gloomph Day? Think it’ll catch on?
by Fern Shaw | Mar 30, 2015 | water cooler
“Terry Pratchett 2005”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Ever have one of those weeks where you’re just ‘blah’. A friend of mine explained it as ‘when your spirit is disconnected from your body and your physical being bumps into walls and stuff’. This is a pretty apt description if you think about it – if your spirit is in residence of course. Another apt expression is ‘blowing bubbles’.
This was my week last week and this week too, so I’ve put on my Pollyanna pants and divided the weeks up as per the title.
The Sad was that I read that Terry Pratchett, genius, had died. If you’re not sure who Terry Pratchett was (perhaps you were lost on The Outer Rim) take a peek at 50 of his best quotes.
The Bad News, for greedy bookworms like me, is that despite an incredibly prolific career, with Sir Pratchett writing more than 70 novels, there won’t be any more from this prolific author.
The Good News – (isn’t it grand that there’s always a spot of good news?) – is that I can read each and every single one of those 70 novels again and again and again – in fact – I already have, numerous times over the years since I was first introduced to them.
You may have noticed that I called him Sir Terry Pratchett. That’s because Pratchett was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1998 and was knighted for services to literature in the 2009 New Year Honours. In 2001 he won the annual Carnegie Medal for The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, the first Discworld book marketed for children.
If you haven’t yet discovered any of his work, I heartily recommend that you do. You’ll find his bibliography here.
If you want me in the next few weeks, you’ll find me at the water cooler, clutching my *signed copy of ‘Mort’ (fitting, that); making the water bubble in the bottle and reading sections aloud.
Thank you, dear Sir, you will be missed.
*The signed copy, interestingly, was thanks to afore-mentioned friend, who, as a birthday surprise, took me to a fabulous fantasy book store to have my book signed by Terry Pratchett.
by Fern Shaw | Mar 11, 2015 | water cooler
March actually isn’t an unlucky or ‘bad’ month at all. It’s just that peskily prolific Shakespeare whose line it is that’s responsible for the month’s bad reputation.
We’ve all heard the saying, ‘Beware the Ides of March.’ The actual quote is from Shakespeare’s tragedy Julius Caesar (1599). The warning is uttered by a soothsayer who is letting Roman leader Julius Caesar know that his life is in danger and he should probably stay home and be careful when March 15th, the Ides of March, rolls around.
That said, the quote does reflect actual history because on March 15th, 44 BC, Julius Caesar was violently murdered, stabbed 23 times by a mob of senators who were led by his protégés and supposed ‘friends’ Cassius and Brutus.
Moving swiftly on from all that gore, there’s actually some cracker things that have occurred in the March month. Here’s a soupçon:
2 March 1969 – Concorde, the Anglo-French supersonic airline, roared into the skies on its maiden flight. The aircraft will travel at twice the speed of sound.
5 March 1936 – The British fighter plane Spitfire made its first test flight from Eastleigh, Southampton. Powered by a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine the aircraft will enter service with the Royal Air Force in the next two years.
7 March 1876 – The Scottish-born inventor, Alexander Graham Bell, patented the telephone. Look where that got us!
10 March 1886 – Cruft’s Dog Show was held in London for the first time – since 1859 it had been held in Newcastle. More recently the venue has changed to the National Exhibition Centre, Birmingham.
27 March 1871 – Legalised warfare – England and Scotland played their first rugby international, in Edinburgh; first blood to Scotland. Och aye!
30 March 1856 – The Crimean War between Russia and Europe was brought to an end by the signing of the Treaty of Paris.
Obviously there’s a lot more that happen(ed)s in March, but it seems to be a very fly-ee type of month, what with the Concorde’s maiden flight and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine powered Spitfire being introduced! I always wanted to fly on the Concorde, but that’s another story entirely.
So, take heart and regale your co-workers this March with your spiffy general and historical trivia knowledge. You’re sure to be the toast of the water cooler circuit.
by Fern Shaw | Mar 11, 2015 | Water, water cooler
‘You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.’ Have you ever wondered who comes up with such expressions or idioms? I often do.
Keeping matters pet friendly (aha aha) and water related (because that’s what we’re about – us here at AquAid, dont’chya know) you’ll find quite a few animal / watery idioms around. My task was to establish whether they are all true or where they originated from.
The horse/water idiom might possibly encapsulate the English-speaking people’s mind-set better than any other saying, as it appears to be the oldest English proverb that is still in regular use today. It was recorded as early as 1175 in Old English Homilies:
Hwa is thet mei thet hors wettrien the him self nule drinken
[who can give water to the horse that will not drink of its own accord?]
What’s even more interesting is that this particular proverb or idiom also applies to dogs. Dogs, you ask? Yes, dogs, I reply. It wasn’t until recently that I found out that dogs don’t sweat. They can pant or drink water to cool themselves down but they can’t do both at the same time and even if they’re too hot and you offer them water, they often won’t drink it – ergo you can also lead dogs to water but you can’t make them drink. I haven’t tried this out with cats, but then, they’re cats. Rather don’t go there.
I’m aware that this expression has another meaning, actually pointing at human behaviour, but I quite enjoy the literal sense too.
A fish out of water – Not feeling at home where you are. Okay, that one’s easy.
Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water – When you’re making a change, save what matters to you and dispose of the rest. Pretty self-explanatory, but were you aware that there’s a bit of bun fight about the literal meaning of this idiom? Apparently, there’s an e-mail doing the rounds about proverbs in the 1500’s and this one meant that as an entire household bathed in the same water, the water would get so murky that it was entirely possible the baby went out with the bathwater. Not true of course.
To drown in a glass of water – To be easily discouraged. I honestly hadn’t heard of this one before. I will suggest though that you don’t take this literally when refilling your glass at the water cooler. Your co-workers may get the wrong idea and label you a bit of a twit.
Blood is thicker than water – Family is more important than anyone or anything else. This idiom has always creeped me out slightly. Still not sure why. Perhaps it comes from watching too many vampire movies?
To pound water in a mortar – Making vain attempts. This I can identify with, except mine involved making a well in flour and pouring water in to make pizza bases. The dam broke, the water flowed out and I was left cleaning up sticky, yeasty, wet flour from every available kitchen surface. Thank you, recipe from Jamie Oliver, not.
by Fern Shaw | Mar 9, 2015 | Water, water cooler
Here’s some bamboozely info. to bandy about at your next network at the office, home or school (hopefully at school, you’re not networking as yet, but just chatting to your mates) water cooler – just what are indigo and violet and is there any difference between the two?
I blame the rainbow for this particular confusion. (As I type this I imagine a lot of ‘he’ men running (or loping) strongly away to avoid any discussion regarding colours other than ‘Oh, that’s blue’).
It was Sir Isaac Newton who discovered that sunlight falling upon a prism could split into its component colours. This process is known as dispersion. Newton named the component colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
Newton, who admitted his eyes were not very critical in distinguishing colours, originally divided the spectrum into five main colours; red, yellow, green, blue and violet. Later he included orange and indigo, giving seven main colours by analogy to the number of notes in a musical scale. Newton chose to divide the visible spectrum into seven colours out of a belief derived from the beliefs of the ancient Greek sophists, who thought there was a connection between the colours, the musical notes, the known objects in the Solar System, and the days of the week. I’ll be elaborating about rainbows, prisms, spectrums in another blog, patience!
According to Isaac Asimov, “It is customary to list indigo as a color lying between blue and violet, but it has never seemed to me that indigo is worth the dignity of being considered a separate color. To my eyes it seems merely deep blue.”
If a heavyweight like Asimov, possibly the greatest science fiction writer and father of ‘hard science fiction’, has an issue with defining the colour indigo, I’m in pretty great company!
Now that we’ve established that there is a difference, my next dilemma always is – which colour do I prefer? Dark blue-ee indigo or purple shock type violet?
I’d like to say that the answer is simple, but, it isn’t. When it comes to me and colours, I go all weak at the knees and dribble saliva a little. It’s very attractive, of course, but nonetheless true. As with many a good thing in life, colours undo me – it’s as if when I was just a newt in my Mum’s tum, she swallowed a paint box of colours and all that colour got into her bloodstream and it got passed on to me in all of its Technicolor glory.
So when it comes to indigo or violet, I’ll take both please, with a healthy dollop of blueberry on the side.
by Fern Shaw | Feb 18, 2015 | Water, water cooler
So it started like this … (I’m tempted to say ‘and that’s how the fight started’) … but that wouldn’t be correct. Or true.
It wasn’t a fight. What it was was the seemingly endless discussion about whether to go camping or to not go camping.
Whether camping was simply the best, cheapest way of getting away from it all or just some centuries’ old nomadic instinct from our predecessors which insists that you lug your household around to shivery destinations, I’m not quite sure.
The facts are you get 2 very different camps (ha!) when it comes to camping.
As you may have gathered, I fall into the no-camping-are-you-insane category.
I will relate just one story to you and perhaps you’ll understand why.
I went camping alongside a river with a boyfriend. It was an impromptu, rash decision fuelled by copious amounts of liquor the day before we ventured out. Due to work constraints, we arrived at the self-designated campsite after dark and parked on the sand at the river’s edge. Dinner was to be a potjie (or stew) which is traditionally made using water, seasoning, vegetables and a meat, no packet sauces or any other cheats aloud. Slight problem was we had no water. The river water was pretty churny and brown and we weren’t taking any chances. We proceeded to use the red wine we’d brought with us as the liquid base for the potjie. Only problem here was that the intense heat from the cooking fire meant that the liquid burnt off pretty quickly. Suffice to say that we ended up some hours later (the whole idea of a potjie is that it takes hours to cook (the originator of the popular ‘slow cooking’ that’s all the rage nowadays?) with half cooked, half singed meat, crunchy vegetables and no wine. It didn’t help that we were ravenous!
The camping didn’t get much better post dinner either. A friend, who ran river rafting expeditions from where we were camped, decided to creep up on us wearing a ski mask. With the sound of the river rushing by us didn’t hear him until he leapt out from the river bank – all 6ft.2 of him – and screamed at us. The following morning, deciding to depart from our rather ill-fated excursion, we discovered that the van that we’d driven in had sunk down into the soft, damp river sand and was stuck. An hour later armed with much choice language and two planks, we finally managed to extricate ourselves and head off back to civilisation. No-one could have been more relieved than I was.
I have since then had the occasional pleasant camping trip, but whenever the 2 camps set up (ha!) around the water cooler and tales of for and against start up, I’m sure this story has swayed more than a few undecided. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
