Personal Blogs

Q. Why was the motionless egg happy?

A. Because it was egg-static!

(Cracks up.)

It's Autumn, when each leaf

Tells me its story of bright hope.

One day

I was walking in the lane

Then a dark curtain

Fell on the world

I've liked this quote since I first came across it many years ago now.

We've all worked somewhere like that! Reputedly it's from Petronius, the 'arbiter', who was a sort of sophisticated trend setter and judge of taste in the time of the Emperor Nero. Petronius was the author of the Satyricon, arguably the first-ever novel, and a rip-roaring read even today. Eventually poor Petronius fell out of favour.

The quote above is beautifully written and seems exactly the kind of thing that Petronius might have written. But—sadly—it seems to be modern, written by Charlton Ogburn in 1959. I don't know how Petronius came to be given the credit, but the tone sounds so classical somehow that it's surprising it has not been translated into Latin.

“Tungsten, Astatine, Sulphur, Oxygen, Nitrogen”, he cried. “It's elementary Watson”.

All the kids loved swimming in the lagoon. Except Clark.

Nobody told him about the shark.

Just read an ad for 'Ibuleve', a pain-reliever that contains... ibuprofen. Evidently the name is a portmanteau of 'Ibuprofen' and 'relieve', but is it also a clever play on words?

'Ibuleve for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows...'

Perhaps the name will cause a placebo effect, so people will experience relief not only because of the Ibuprofen the product contains but also because they believe it's going to work. Perhaps that's the idea.

He found a spider down his back.

For many years I've loved this picture.

Der Bote des Herbstes (grün/violette Stufung mit orange Akzent)

Image: https://artgallery.yale.edu/collections/objects/43720

It's a watercolour by Paul Klee, a Swiss artist from the first part of the 20th century. When I saw it for the first time I wondered what the title meant.

It's usually translated as "The Herald of Autumn".

Gradually I came to see that we know this already, it's in the DNA of our language.

I think Bote is the same as bode=foretell; think of "this bodes well". And Herbst is the same as harvest, which was the Old English word for Autumn. It began on the first day of August back then, but it has shifted.

Image based on https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/30/Dinosaurs_Sci_Am_1884.png

It was Spring so I caught a raindrop

It was Autumn and I caught a leaf

It was Winter when I caught a snowflake.

In Summer I caught only sunbeams.

I took this photograph at the Open University. Can you see the outdoor sculpture in it?