That Ain't Right

< "Kowalski, why the hell were you illegally parked ?"

"I was handing out tickets..."

"In a strip club?"


The first month of questing comes to a close today, with a piece of red-hot info that made me tremble with the kind of silent-majority outrage I thought only cabbies and Mail readers experienced:


Traffic wardens are allowed to park in disabled parking bays, and also on double yellow lines.

This comes from a story in London Lite, everyone's third favourite London-based free paper, which explains how a Teddington-based traffic warden decided to try and boost their presumably rock-bottom local popularity by pulling up on double yellows outside a school in order to hand out tickets to parents, quite possibly whilst parking with their handbrake and flicking a lit fag into the playground, and also maybe even while being called Kowalski. A local resident by the frankly ludicrous name of Des Rock busted his punk ass to the council, but they claimed that wardens are in fact allowed to park on double yellow lines and in disabled spaces as long as they're giving out parking tickets, which loosely translates as "listen, my wardens get results, and they can park on yo' momma if it keeps the money comin' in".

So next time a stern, slightly patronising warden is looming over you, wanting to know what exactly was so important that you dared to park on a red route ten minutes too early, just remember that they can get away with parking in spaces designated for people who struggle to move around independently, so that they can charge other people for parking in places they shouldn't park, and see if you can withhold the howl of injustice that surges upward from your weary heart. But I'm going to close on a lighter note for the little people in this world, fighting against the oppressive squares who occasionally check that we're parking where we're supposed to. We had our car parked on our street for a whole week without a valid permit. How'd you like that, traffic pigs? Woo hah! Stick it to the Man!


P.S. We had a valid permit indoors. We'll pay any fine. Please don't send Kowalski round.

Brass Monkeys

< The original brass monkey

This is, if memory serves, the closest I have come to the midnight deadline, so it's going to be quick today. My fact came from work, from one of the lovely people I support in my role as a Tenant Support Officer. He informed me that the phrase "freezing brass monkeys", meaning very cold indeed, the phrase in full being approximately "cold enough to freeze the balls off brass monkeys". In a new, exciting chapter for Quest For Knowledge, I'm going to verify this fact as I write (time's tight this evening). So, what I learned was:

The phrase "freezing brass monkeys" is a naval term, referring to wintry conditions where icy seawater came on board the ship and froze around cannonballs, which when put in a pyramid next to the cannons, which were stored on brass trays, known as brass monkeys.



Technically the original phrase was "cold enough to freeze the balls of brass monkeys" but got changed over time to the slightly saltier, testicle-referencing phrase that builders still use within earshot of small children to this day. That's how he told it anyway. Let's see if he's right...



The answer, predictably enough is maybe. Wikipedia says not, plenty of other sites stick to the cannonball theory, although they generally claim that the contracting of the, ahem, balls caused them to fall, which would revert the phrase back to "cold enough to freeze the balls off brass monkeys". The main alternative explanation is, disappointingly, that it comes from actual brass monkeys (small trinkets popular all over Asia), particular the 'three wise monkeys', a trio of shiny chimps who represent see no evil, hear no evil and speak on evil by placing their hands over the relevant body parts.



Anyway, of the three key parts to his yarn (the tray being called a brass monkey, the cannonballs being frozen, and the actual wording of the phrase) only one looks like it's right, but personally I believe it - it seems logical enough. The same fella also, however, claimed that tea has more caffeine in it than coffee, which isn't true - don't worry I resisted the urge to correct him on the spot, though I may be forced to bring it up at a later date before my teeth start to itch.

A Third In Engineering & 10,000 Episodes of Countdown

< "Go to bed before I set the clown on you"

I watched an episode of Room 101 last night which featured the comedian Mark Steel, who further cemented his reputation as a bloody good bloke by attempting to consign Bono, Ben Elton and oppressive school teachers to oblivion. The first two made it in, and as Meat Loaf so rightly said, two out of three ain't bad. During his argument against teachers, he informed the nation that he had been expelled from school at 15, which I thought was a great example of how little academic success really means. Sadly, it was last night and I'd already done that stupid Lego thing. Coincidentally, I found the following out just moments ago, on a football website, no less:

Carol Vorderman left university with a third in Engineering. She achieved a third in every year of her degree course at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge.



Now I know it's not quite the same as leaving school at 15, but I think it demonstrates that academic ability doesn't necessarily make you intelligent, nor does a lack of it make you less so. I don't think anyone could argue that Vorderman's not clever (though in recent years the Botox does seem to have stunted her arithmetical powers), yet she only achieved the same degree level as her former co-host, Richard Whiteley. Much as we all loved Whiteley (I particularly liked his attempt to make up a fresh quip about starting the letters game every single time) he certainly wasn't the sharpest tool in the box - that time when he got the numbers and nobody else did drew a reaction akin to the wonky-eyed kid catching the ball in a school cricket match. When Diamond Des Lynam rolled in and started suavely rolling out correct answers twice a week, it was all a bit embarrassing.



Anyway, Countdown is a game that tests your mental capacity to such a terrifying extent that only pensioners with a half-century of Telegraph crosswords and autistic 9-year-old boys seem capable of playing it properly, and two schmos without a 2:2 between them managed to make a success of it, so good for them. Vorderman earns £5 million a year from the show (all of it immediately blown on plastic surgery) while Whiteley, sadly now revealing the great Countdown Conundrum in the sky, has spent more minutes on our screens than anyone else in the history of television - with the notable exception of the girl on the Test Card who, though now mostly sidelined by 24-hour telly, has clocked up a staggering 70,000 hours. Incidentally, the lairy-looking little clown toy is called Bubbles and is still owned by the girl, Carole Hersee.

Bricks of Joy

< A Lego model I made, aged 8. Not really - mine was way better

The quest reached new levels of laziness today, as I didn't even have to search for anything on Google: a rather funky pixellated logo at the top informed me that the humble Lego brick was patented 50 years ago today, which admittedly sounds about right, and fails my criteria by not being constantly true, and not being all that interesting. This on the other hand, is:

Lego bricks made from January 28, 1958 are still compatible with those made now.

Lego bricks are the coolest toys in the world. I'm a Lego traditionalist though, and have to look away with misty eyes when I chance upon some garish new Lego set painted all the colours of the rainbow. The idea is they're supposed to be reusable: when they've got 'Hogwarts' written on them, it's hard to build a credible miniature hospital with them. You can't beat the original 2x4 brick: it's durability (they never break, although I did bend one once while sleepwalking into a bookcase, which was most concerting), it's versatility, it's total and unexplained lack of green bricks. the fact that nothing on Earth hurts more than stepping on a Lego brick without any shoes on.

I've been delving a little into the history of Lego, and have discovered that it was set up about 25 years before they patented Lego bricks (must've been a lean period), and also watched a frankly brilliant guide to how those pesky bricks are made. I've been forced to abandon my search for more information, however, as the endless corporate jargon on the Lego website about their 'vision and ethics' (vision - more bricks; ethics - bricks good!) is starting to sour my childhood memories of building things that vaguely resembled the new Scottish Parliament. The final straw is a claim on Wikipedia that asked children to not refer to Lego bricks as "Legos" but instead as "Lego bricks or toys" to "protect and preserve their brand". Basically to make sure that they can launch breakfast cereals, cars and computers (all, naturally, made out of Lego) at some point in the future. Besides, when have you ever heard anyone ever call them Legos? I bet any kids who ever made that faux pas are still finding bricks about their person to this day.

Bolters

< The Knack: "We're gonna slow things down now"

I got out of bed unfeasibly early this morning to watch the Australian Open men's tennis final, which pitched world No.3, and example of how good Andy Murray would be if he wasn't British, Serbian Novak Djokovic, against the unseeded and unheralded Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the French world No.38 who dispatched Murray in the first round. As well as being a fairly entertaining match between two of the least glamorous names you'll find in any sport, it also taught me another new word, which applies to Tsonga and his shock run to the final:

A 'bolter' is a term applied to unseeded tennis players who reach the latter stages of the Australian Open tennis tournament.

This tournament has a history of unfancied players getting through to the latter stages; in recent years Marcos Baghdatis, Rainer Scheuttler, Thomas Johansson and other people you've never heard of have forced their way through to the final, with Johansson actually winning the trophy. It's an Australian tennis-related phrase, but technically would apply to any lowly player making a breakthrough to the latter stages of a knockout tournament. The greatest bolter of all has to be Goran Ivanisevic, who won Wimbledon in 2001 despite being about 40, having one change of kit and seeming to be on the brink of insanity. The moment he won is up there with It's A Wonderful Life in terms of embarrassing, unexpected tear jerking. Other honourable mentions include Millwall reaching the FA Cup Final a few years ago (I lived in Cardiff at the time and can still remember walking past rows of 4x4s that had ferried the Man Utd fans down, while Millwall fans arrived on what appeared to be freight trains) and cheeky churchgoer Shaun Murphy winning the World Snooker Championship (although surprisingly, he has proved to be quite good).

It's great that unknown players cause upsets often enough to have their own nickname; on this occasion Tsonga became another bolter that fell short, losing in four sets. One article I read claims that the Aussie Open bolters fall into 2 categories - those that go on to greater success, and those that never produce a run like it again. The writer makes an odd analogy to The Knack, the U.S. band who managed to come up with My Sharona, but never troubled the charts again. I wonder if when they play gigs now, whether they have to just play My Sharona 12 times in a row, and if they attempt to "play a new one" they get bottled out of the venue. Anyway, when the tennis was over, we went to buy walking shoes (it's always wild at Knowledge Towers) and My Sharona came on the radio. What does that mean? Should I become a professional tennis player, or start an AOR combo? Hard to know which would be more disastrous.

Gef The Talking Mongoose

- Gef: "Come on guys, where's your sense of humour?"

Went to a photo exhibition today called 'Seeing Is Believing', which purported to be a feast of supernatural imagery, but was instead mostly a load of old toot; the front part of it was photographs 'inspired' by the paranormal, which is really missing the point. The back part was better though - it featured lots of (annoyingly small) pictures from the archive of Harry Price, a 20th century 'psychical researcher' who went and investigated odd activity all over Britain, including the hauntings at Borley Rectory and the amusingly named Crawley Poltergeist. The trouble was that there was hardly any information on the places, or what Price found out while he was there, and there were a few things that I really needed to know more about, chiefly an image of Gef, a talking mongoose who lived with a family on the Isle of Man. That's right, a talking mongoose. On the Isle of Man.

Anyway, some rudimentary research has uncovered a few things about ol' Gef: he appeared in the home of the Irving family in 1931, and shortly after, or so they claim, began giving them sass-mouth. Gef began by aping James Irving's phrases, but soon found his own voice - he claimed to be from New Delhi, and liked to sing popular songs and 'joke around' with the Irvings. On one occasion (and I have seen this written in about four different articles) the little trickster 'took things too far' by pretending to be poisoned. You'd have thought he'd gone too far when he scurried into their living room and started singing 'Danny Boy', but apparently not. There are a few theories behind who this enigmatic mongoose really was: a poltergeist, a mongoose who couldn't in fact talk, or MADE UP (one of those is mine). But the fact I have learnt is this: Gef the talking mongoose is an example of a cryptid, and...

A cryptid is an animal that does not really exist.

That's a slightly loose definition - an animal can still be a cryptid if it is later proved to actually exist, or if it has a feature that does not exist in other members of its species (in Gef's case, his fine glossy coat... and his ability to speak English). Some other examples of cryptids include dragons, unicorns, the Yeti, the Loch Ness Monster, the beasts of Bodmin and Exmoor, and the okapi, a real animal which was thought until the early 1900s to not exist. A bit like the female brain then. Anyway, the Irvings got tired of having to listen to a cryptid creature doing stand up in their front room every night, and moved out in 1937. Gef is believed to have gone out in a blaze of glory a few years later, having been gunned down by a farmer who'd had to listen to a shrill rendition of 'In The Mood' one to many times. It appears he was knocking around in the States until recently - and was even accpting e-mails here. I sent Gef a request for one of his crazy tales of mongoose life, but the e-mail address doesn't work any more. Looks like our Gef, like the littlest Hobo, just keeps movin' on...

A Quantum of Questing

< Brosnan: "Oh boy"

I generally think I'm pretty good with words, so I was surprised to realise today that I didn't know what 'quantum' meant. It's a word you hear a fair bit - Quantum Leap, quantum physics, and the in-no-way-pretentious title of the new Bond film: Quantum of Solace. A BBC article politely enquired whether I knew what it actually meant, and to be honest, I didn't (it sounds a bit like a Googlewhack) and was happy enough not knowing, as being able to understand lame titles like Never Say Never Again and The World Is Not Enough only ever led to teeth-clenching annoyance - for me anyway. I'm not a Bond fan, I've tried, I just think they're rubbish films, but I do appreciate that there are differences in quality, and while I'm not sure who was the best Bond, I know who the worst was - stand up, Brosnan, you smug bronzed twat.

Brosnan brings the odour of cheese and cheap cologne wafting onto the screen whenever he pops up (see The Thomas Crown Affair) but some of his Bond films veer towards parody - the crap accents, the worse CGI and the unforgivable one-liners; I remember when he guffawed to poor Denise Richards in one of the films (they all merge into one really) that "I thought Christmas only came once a yuhr". Her character was called Christmas you see. And clearly, she'd just come. I could barely keep my popcorn down. Anyway, I was mildly excited about Daniel Craig stepping in as a new, slicker, subtler Bond in Casino Royale, but sadly, that was a bag of old cock too, with Bond moving from the sleazy to the deeply sinister - they upped the violence but didn't change Bond's reaction to it; thus I witnessed the blond Bond literally beat a hotel porter to death before coolly muttering something along the lines of "I didn't order room service" with a wry smile. Genuinely unsettling. The follow-up, which will doubtless lull me into believing it might be half-decent, before being as rotten as that hotel porter by the time the last film finally finished, is entitled 'Quantum of Solace'. And so the BBC website was asking in mocking times, what does quantum mean? Well, it means this:

The word 'quantum' means a quantity or amount, a specified portion, or anything that can be counted and measured. It is also used in physics to describe a unit of energy, and also the smallest amount of a physical quantity that can exist independently.

The phrase 'Quantum of Solace' is derived from an Ian Fleming short story (not sure if the film is too), and apparently is equivalent to saying 'a crumb of comfort'. For example, "I went to see another dire James Bond film, and the only quantum of solace was that we went to Nando's afterwards". Interestingly, a 'quantum leap', as in the TV series, is actually the smallest movement possible, involving tiny particles moving tiny distances. For example, Pierce Brosnan becoming sexually aroused.