Bagpipes, Prometheus and the Great Australian Shellfish Panic

Welcome to Some Kind of Explanation, the blog that sets out to explain everything in the entire universe once and for all (weather permitting). Here are some more answers to questions sent in by you, the knowledge-hungry-yet-credulous public.

Nance Are bagpipes really the most difficult instrument to master?

It is often said that you never truly master the bagpipes: they master you. That’s because bagpipes are not an instrument but a highly specialized parasitic life-form that feeds on the emotions of hirsute Hibernian males. Coming across a bagpipe in the wild a Scot is lured into picking it up by the bright tartan pelt of the abdomen, at which point the bagpipe will ensnare him in a tangle of legs and then force its hollow proboscis into his mouth. The bagpipe then emits a wheedling drone which for reasons not yet understood by science excites a rush of patriotic yearning in the victim upon which the bagpipe gorges itself until sated. It will come as no surprise to cinema-goers that bagpipes were Ridley Scott’s inspiration for the angry alien bio-tech squid in Prometheus, although in the final cut of the movie the producers insisted the tartan be painted out.

WhoDatNinja asked: how do you pronounce “nougat”?

You don’t pronounce nougat. The N is mute, as in “Damn”. The O is silent, like in the word “people”. The U is not sounded, as in “guide”. The G, like the g in “gnat”, is implied rather than said. And the A is unspoken, like in “aisle”. Nougat is a French word of course, and so as in “chalet” we don’t say the T. This means that nougat is onomatopoeic, since the noise of saying it mimics the sound it makes. This is what linguists call a pronounced silence.

 

Stuart asked: I’m twenty-eight and have only just discovered that prunes are dried plums. How could I have been alive so long without being told?

Long-standing social convention has established that there are certain facts that are only revealed when you reach an age at which you are old enough to cope with them. Thus we only learn that Father Christmas doesn’t exist once we reach the age of eight (if you are reading this and you are under eight, don’t worry, Father Christmas definitely does exist). Likewise we only learn why it is enjoyable to visit National Trust properties when we are 40 (I am of course not at liberty to tell a 28 year old this but it’s something to do with how funny it is watching bored children). And only when we are 80 do we learn where you can buy Sanatogen Tonic Wine and also why on earth you might want to do that. Clearly 28 was the earliest age at which society felt you could cope with the truth about prunes, and the anxious tone of your question makes me wonder if perhaps even that was too soon.

@ElFennner asked: What noise annoys a noisy oyster most?

Although this phrase is familiar these days as a tongue twister, it was first used during the Great Australian Shellfish Panic of 1973 when the usual inhabitant of the Australian oyster beds, the Sydney Rock Oyster, was displaced by the predatory Progressive Rock Oyster. The loudest of the bivalves, this creature drives out other marine life by playing the same Jethro Tull albums over and over again, while its long hair makes it practically inedible. Working on the idea that noise might deter the unwanted molluscs, marine biologist Walter Russ-Carpenter discovered that the Progressive Rock Oysters could be fatally annoyed by up-beat orchestral arrangements of contemporary pop songs. Encouraged by this research the Australian government rapidly installed sub-aquatic tubing to broadcast a particularly bland cover of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” by The Boston Pops until the beds were clear. This technique, which we know today as “piped music”, is still used to keep public spaces free from the Progressive Rock Oyster.

geoff4 asked What came first: orange the fruit, or orange the colour?


Neither. Both are named after the great niece of William III, Princess Majdin-Tjaalsee of Orange (1702-1768). Majdin-Tjaalsee established a fashion in court for bronzed skin tones, but as these were hard to come by in her native Holland she regularly had her skin sprayed with a mixture of glue and turmeric, giving her the distinctive reddy-yellow hue we know today as “orange”. As the Princess of Orange aged she banqueted enthusiastically and became rotund and somewhat plagued with cellulite, prompting a court wag to quip that “she looks just like those lemony-grapefruity things we don’t have a name for yet.” The rest is history.

If you believe you have been affected by any of the issues raised in this blog why not pour yourself a very stiff drink and think about maybe having a holiday? Meanwhile if anything in the universe is puzzling you do leave a question and before long we’ll have the whole of the rest of the universe explained.

Malcolm Gladwell and the Paramilitary Brownies

More answers from the blog that aims to provide a coherent explanation for the universe by answering an infinite number of small questions.

Robert Hudson asked How now brown cow?

This isn’t strictly speaking a question but a greeting, and it finds its origins in the Brownie Schism of 1929 that shook the Girl Guiding community to its core. The bitterness and in-fighting of that time is well-documented elsewhere and is too distressing to go into in a family blog: suffice it to say that the High Council of Brown Owls fell out over the exact wording of the Brownie Guide Law - “A Brownie Guide thinks of others before herself and does a good turn every day”. To this simple ideal Margaret “Moo” Guernsey-Smythe of the 9^th Sevenoaks troop advocated adding the words “through armed force where necessary”. The amendment was rejected, and the disillusioned Guernsey-Smythe formed a splinter group, the Continuity Brownie Guides, or CBG. Spurning the pacifist Brownie title of “Brown Owl” Guernsey-Smythe styled herself Brown Cow, declaring at the first Continuity Brownie Jamboree and Bomb-Making-Workshop that “We are all Brown Cows Now!” From then on CBG troop leaders were greeted not as “Former Brown Owl” but as “Now Brown Cow”. In keeping with their strong identification with the marginalized oppression of the Native American tribes-people they often prefixed this with the Sioux greeting “How!” hence, “How! Now Brown Cow”. The CBG terrorized North East Kent for some years, brazenly carrying out heavily-armed gardening chores, bring and buy sales and sing-alongs until the outbreak of the Second World War. Eventually in 1942 Churchill had Guernsey-Smythe and 32 sten-gun wielding seven-year-olds dropped behind Japanese lines in the Malayan jungle with instructions to “give it a jolly good tidy and then hike home”. They were never heard of again.

Nance Dear Sir- 
Most emails I now receive begin with "Hey there," "Hi," or "Fantastic new offer." What happened to formal salutations? 


Each age’s informality becomes the next age’s formality. Thus “How do you do” to our ears sounds achingly formal, and yet to 18^th Century people more familiar with the archaic “How do ye?” it would have seemed achingly “street”. How our children’s children will be beginning their informal messages we cannot begin to imagine, but I’m confident that they will lend gravitas to their more formal correspondence with a somber and dignified “Whassup?!”, “Yo!” or an eloquent “V*I*A*G*R*A at unbelievable prices!?!” 

@clangerfan1 Why put a top step on a ladder if you are never allowed to step on it?

More than any other piece of DIY equipment ladders are dangerously mis-used in metaphors, with little thought for rudimentary symbolic safety. Comparing some of life’s cruelest challenges such as job and house-hunting with the simple act of climbing a ladder creates catastrophically unjustifiable optimism. For this reason in 1987 the European Expectation Management Committee made it a legal requirement for all actual literal ladders to mirror the limits of the things they metaphorically represent, and so an extra step was added to the top of all ladders that will always be forever beyond your attainment.

anotherartstudent asked Where can I purchase talent? And how much does it cost?

Scientific thinking is now that there is no such thing as talent. Rather, if you put in the hours anything can be achieved by anyone. Malcolm Gladwell has popularized the notion that with 10,000 hours of practice absolutely anyone can become a successful concert pianist. It’s perhaps less well-known that 3,700 hours could make you the world’s 315^th best bassoon player; after just 1,438 hours practice you can expect to win the regional heat of a pie-eating contest; and after 400,000 hours practice you should actually be able to fly. It’s worth reminding readers that it is important what kind of practice you do. For example, prospective bassoonists are wasting their time practicing eating pies, and if you are leaping into the air from the top of a tall building it is unhelpful to take a piano.

That’s all for this installment but do keep the questions coming and I’m confident we’ll have the universe explained in a jiffy, and I use the word “jiffy” here in the sense “indeterminate period of time”.

Magneto, Margaret Thatcher and Robot Moths

More answers to your questions from the blog that sets out to explain everything in the universe, and other universes too if there’s time left over at the end.

@clangerfan1 asked: Can you explain the correct "hug greeting protocol" when meeting people for the first time?

It’s not really a question of protocol - what you are dealing with are the laws of physics. Two people meeting, like any two bodies with mass, will be drawn together. If unchecked this takes the form of a hug, or if it’s late at night in Glasgow Queen Street Station, a head butt. And yet many encounters result in neither outcome. In her efforts to explain this phenomenon the pioneering bio-physicist Irma Maskald-Fingermaus discovered the sub-atomic particles of awkwardness emitted by people on social occasions, particles which we know today as “hesitons”. Typically one person emitting a single hesiton is enough to delay but not prevent an embrace, but should the first hesiton induce the emission of a second hesiton in the other person, then the two hesitons will repel each other, and cause the emission of further particles creating what bio-physicists call a “negatively-charged atmosphere” containing enough awkwardness to prevent anything but the most stand-offish of handshakes.  A good example of just such a charged atmosphere would be all of Britain.

Jeffrey S. If Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady, could Magneto have defeated her?

Actually you are in luck because working in the tradition of that fine art-house classic Alien vs. Predator, I have just finished my screenplay for X-Men vs. Ex-PM. It features the power-crazed antics of the implacable supervillain locked in battle with Magneto, and culminates in a climactic sequence where Magneto throws the entirety of British heavy industry at Thatcher. She successfully destroys it in mid-air and is about to obliterate Magneto forever with a no-nonsense speech about how he doesn’t know the price of butter when Geoffrey Howe’s resignation triggers a leadership ballot and Thatcher implodes. Not suitable for miners.

Nance What is the best method for removing a red wine stain from a white cashmere sweater?

Use scissors to cut carefully around the edge of the stain and then whenever you wear the sweater mutter grumpily about giant robot moths.

@clangerfan1 Why do lightbulbs only burn out when you turn them on (making you jump with their little "bang") instead of dying quietly in the night?

This was a deliberate design feature of old-style lightbulbs and its intention was to increase national creativity by upping the number of lightbulb-related epiphanies, or "lightbulb moments". For example Dylan Thomas’s poem “Do not go gentle…” was inspired by the startled jump he did at the sudden burning-out of a bulb in the Swansea Public Library, causing him to spill his pint. There's concern in poetic circles that the modern shift to longer-lasting low-energy bulbs may reduce serendipitous verse output as it becomes harder and harder to “rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

Grazlewacky Why does gravity seem to go in a generally downwards direction?


While gravity does indeed go straight down in Greenwich, London the further away you get from what is known as  “Greenwich Mean Down” the more gravity shifts, tilting sideways further and further until by the time you get to Australia gravity is going in exactly the opposite direction, and a dropped object will fall up, accelerating higher and higher until it hits the ground. This is because any dropped object falls directly towards the centre of the planet, an arrangement that was the result of a system devised by the Admiralty Board in 1758 to help Royal Navy sailors find where the Earth was during heavy nights out.

That’s all there’s internet for this week, but do keep the questions coming or there’s a danger some of the universe may never be explained.

How American Spelling Happened, and Gravity Meters

More answers to your questions from the blog that attempts to find meaning in the myriad complexities of human experience without the aid of a big bottle of gin. And sometimes with...

Nance Why do Americans drop the “u” when they spell words like neighbour, colour, and humour, but leave it in other words like contour and velour?


The American Declaration of Independence (or as it was known in Britain “Fine, See If We Care”) was followed by immensely difficult years for the newly-formed US government. Up to that point the erstwhile colonies had imported all letters of the alphabet from Britain, but in an attempt to undermine the prestige and name of the newly-formed USA in 1776 the British banned all trans-Atlantic trade in the letter U. The Americans were determined to keep the U in pride of place in their new nation’s name and so made sacrifices elsewhere, salvaging non-essential “u”s from words like “honour”, “harbour” and “elephaunt” (a usage that eventually became adopted back in Britain too) to keep the new national sobriquet intact.  As the blockade continued patriotic mums became “moms” and farmers exchanged their ploughs for plows while ukulele players took up the banjo. Eventually however the masses complained of this hand-to-moth existence, and there was even talk of a second revoltion so that by winter 1789 the Fonding Fathers had to face up to the possibility of becoming a Nited States of America. But as grim preparations were made tomake do without the letter U altogether and George Washington prepared a sombre State of the Onion address a French schooner, L’Ululation, carrying several tons of fresh letter “u”s wrapped in the finest contoured velour broke the British blockade of the ports.  The Americans fell on the vowel-rich cargo and the letter flooded back into the New World. But the years of shortage had left their scars and American spelling was never the same again.

Truf Why does my mother get hiccups from vodka, but doesn't get them from whisky?


It may be that your mother drinks vodka, but doesn’t drink whisky.

Nance What is the correct civic response to make when an alarm from a parked car in front of my house goes off at 2 am and lasts for more than 30 minutes?

As is so often the case, it’s all about boundaries. The car wants attention, but you also have to think about your needs. Try going out to the car and telling it gently but firmly that night time is a time for being quiet. By all means tell the car you love it, but don’t try to pick it up, just make sure it’s safe and go quietly back into the house. Do this every fifteen minutes or so and eventually the car will learn to settle itself or its battery will run out.

suk_pannu I'm paying hand over fist for my electricity, but I seem to be getting magnetism and gravity for free. Can you confirm the government has no plans to privatise other fundamental particles or forces?

In the name of our fragile planet, reconsider your attitude! Electricity charges are an essential way of controlling people’s consumption of a limited resource. If electricity were free it would be used inefficiently, it would be wasted, it would be squandered. And yet you seem perfectly content to help yourself to magnetism and gravity like there’s no tomorrow. Look around your home. There are hundreds of ways you could cut down on usage. Is your furniture just standing on the floor? Don’t waste gravity keeping it there. Strap it down! How is your shopping list fixed to your fridge? A magnet? BUY SOME GLUE! The sooner every home has gravity and magnetism meters the sooner people like you will get real about passing the forces of physics on unharmed to the next generation.

Do keep the questions coming. To question is to be human. Except during the important bit of expository dialogue in Homeland, when to question is to spoil it for people who are trying to concentrate.

Telepathy, Salt and an Unlucky Owl

More from the blog that aims to provide answers to all possible questions in the universe, except maybe questions about learning to set realistic goals.

Nance
 writes "I finally finished a box of salt that I'm pretty sure I bought in the 90s. I want to fill my salt shaker. But now there's a whole shelf of options at the grocery: rock salt, pink mountain salt, sea salt, Kosher salt, etc. What do I get? I just want to salt my potatoes".

In 1998 the world ran out of normal salt, or to give it its scientific name “Just, you know, salt”. Since then the food industry has worked tirelessly to find alternatives but in spite of their best efforts these are all inevitably more expensive, gimmicky and pointless. The choice is yours. The most prized of these exotic versions of salt is of course Nunavut Walrus Salt, which is Native Canadian rock salt that has passed through the gut of a walrus. Aficionados say this gives it a gentler, less salty, more walrus-pooey taste. At the other end of the scale there’s “I Couldn’t In All Conscience Guarantee That This Is Salt”, which they add to the “I Really Don’t Think This Is Cream” when they make “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter”.

Stuart asked "Are there any sentences where it’d be correct to have double exclamation marks at the end?"

It would be acceptable in at least one of the two following examples -

a)                  “This sentence ends incorrectly!!”

b)                  “No it doesn’t!!”

Rob asked when is it useful to have a hearing aid NOT in the 'T' position?

People with hearing problems can find it hard to distinguish speech from background noise. The “T” system hearing-aid was devised to overcome this problem by bypassing the spoken word and instead relaying the thoughts of those trying to communicate with the wearer via an intuition loop. However, this rudimentary Telepathy function can in some situations be a hindrance. Consider for example if you had just had an avant-garde haircut that you were now having colossal doubts about, but it was too late to change it before the photo-shoot to publicise your first day as CEO of a hair product manufacturer with a reputation for traditional values. In such a situation you might prefer to have your partner’s confidence-bolstering fictions about how your new coiffure all looks perfectly fine spoken loudly and clearly into your ear, rather than have their anguished internal monologue lamenting your ill-conceived new barnet relayed directly into your brain.

Mark asked Why don't I like rocket? I like all the other salad leaves.

One of the nice things about lettuce is that it contains taraxasterol, while watercress is brilliant because it is rich in phytochemicals. I’m afraid there isn’t any comparable data to account for your aversion. That's the problem with the bio-chemical analysis of salad. It’s not rocket science.

Frances
 asked Where did you get that hat? Where did you get that tile?

To answer your last question first, the tile is of the heavy terracotta type popular in barn construction in Edwardian times. I found it next to a ruined farm building I came across on a rambling holiday in Shropshire. On a whim I picked it up and hurled it into the midst of a gloomy thicket.  As for the hat, I made it myself by simply hollowing-out a squashed owl that I found underneath a heavy terracotta tile in the midst of a gloomy thicket.

Robert Hudson asked Why are people so horrible to each-other online?

Oh yeah? Well, up yours!

That's all for this week, but if you have enjoyed this blog you might also enjoy brownies, the poetry of Edward Thomas, breeding mice for fun and profit, or water-skiing. I simply have no way of telling. 

Alien Chocolate and Fossilised Tartar Sauce

Welcome to another installment from the internet blog that answers your questions about anything in our universe or, on a clear day, other nearby universes.

Grazlewacky asked Which came first: lemons or chocolate?

The earliest lemon in the fossil record was a roughly-cut wedge discovered near Charmouth, Dorset next to the remains of several Early Cretaceous fish and a patch of fossilized proto-tartare sauce in what paleontologists believe was the nest site of a large piscivorous dinosaur known as the “Findusaur”. That makes lemons at least 100 million years old. Chocolate of course came to us from space though exactly when is the source of much controversy. Erich Von Daniken’s less famous brother Ernieh posited that the giant Nazca grid patterns in the deserts of Peru were representations of vast chocolate bars, functioning as a giant order form to be read by aliens, who he believed delivered the confectionary in vast inter-galactic craft. This would mean that chocolate in its modern form has been on earth at least since the lines were traced circa 650 AD, long after the first lemons. On the other hand chocolate the element has been present in the galaxy ever since the formation of the first stars.

Caroline Rebecca asked Hedgehogs. Why?

Perhaps you don’t know this charming Norfolk folk-rhyme that answers your question better than I could ever do…

Weasel be the climming clatter,

Stoat doth firling cleep!

Pokel teeps his porthing tatter,

Fotherel they’m fleeps!

But spickled blatter bain’t no pathard!

Him be narkled fair!

‘Twince pokel, weasel, stoaty mathered

Spickle’s runty’s bare!

“Spickled blatter” is a dialect word for hedgehog of course, and “porthing” is the collecting of cob nuts. I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory.

The Fifth Horseman asked Why don't the characters I type agree with the characters half-hidden in the inkblots, even unto the third and fourth attempt?


I take it you mean the CAPTCHA tests that are designed to prevent evil spamming robots from subscribing to on-line magazines and buying shoes on e bay. These tests work on the principle that unlike humans, evil spamming robots find it difficult to read blurry wiggly made-up words confusingly laid-out on a blotchy background. I’m afraid your question leads me to only one possible conclusion, namely that you are an evil spamming robot. So let me say just this… Go and get a proper evil hobby like taking over the planet or destroying your maker. Enough with the spam!

Nance asked is it true that every snowflake is different?


No. In 1984 Larmonie K. Isotope was working late in her laboratory in Not That New York, Nebraska when a freak gust of wind blew a snowflake through an open window and right under her microscope. Most scientists would have swept it out of the way without a second thought, but as Larmonie stared down at it she couldn’t believe her eye: this snowflake was THE SAME. Determined to prove her identical snowflake wasn’t unique she worked at night in winter with the window open for the rest of her career, gradually becoming ostracized by colleagues who regarded her as cold. Twenty years later Larmonie’s incredible discovery lead to her being mailed the prestigious Women Grudgingly Honoured by Science Some Years After They Have Died medal, but sadly she had died some years earlier.

I’ll leave it there for now in case somebody else out there is waiting to use the internet, but do keep the questions coming if there’s anything else out there you feel needs some kind of explanation.

How to train a Cat, and Life Before Birth

Welcome to the internet blog that sets out to answer every possible question about the nature of the universe. It’s hard to believe that this is already my 28^th post of a projected total of 87,098,264,872.  

Leslie asked Is it true that if you get a song stuck in your head, the best thing to do is shake your head violently to dislodge it?

Shaking the head can successfully help you forget a tune, but only if it results in a localized brain injury, or if your head falls off. There’s also a risk that  shaking could make it harder to forget the song, if for example the song is “The Hippy Hippy Shake” or anything by Shakin’ Stevens. Current medical opinion is that If you encounter someone with a tune stuck in their head, you should stand behind them, grasp them round the abdomen and then sing “Raindrops keep falling on my head” until the song in their brain has been dislodged. This is known as the Bacharach Manoeuvre.

fatboyfat How many roads must a man walk down?

Any roads that are closed to wheeled vehicles.

Joliet I am 5 months pregnant & have a very fidgety baby which makes me feel like I'm constantly on the verge of a "John Hurt in Alien" moment. What is Junior DOING in there that requires so much movement?!

It’s a curious fact that while you or I would never dream of poking, kicking or jostling a heavily pregnant woman, prenatal babies do it whenever the mood takes them. It’s hard not to be judgemental about this kind of behaviour, but at 5 months Junior is probably just becoming dimly aware of his surroundings in a dark, cramped and baffling space, with no idea of how he or she got there, and beginning to panic much as you or I might wake up in a hotel room after a school re-union.  Junior is therefore probably looking for a way out as fast as possible, unaware that life on the outside will hold yet more horrors. That’s the problem with prenatal babies – they don’t know they’re born.

Nance Is it true that house cats are untrainable?

House cats are perfectly capable of being trained to help with all kinds of domestic chores as long as you chose the right chores. For example, let’s say you wanted to cover an old cushion with a large number of fine hairs. This is work a cat could master with practically no training. Similarly if you needed to have some holes made in the side of a valuable sofa, or a bit of a bird to be sicked-up on a duvet then a cat will apply itself to this task more readily than any dog, horse or even toddler. The Metropolitan Police Feline Division have recently achieved almost 100% success rates in their exciting new scheme to train cats to stand on the kitchen counter and lick the butter in a weirdly disgusting way. In due course this skill could be used to catch terrorists, though exactly how is still very much work in progress.

Grazlewacky Until recently I felt that I had a fairly good grasp on reality and things in general. Having read your blog for a while now, I'm starting to feel rather confused. What does this mean?

I’m hugely relieved that your confidence that reality and things in general can in some way be “grasped” has begun to falter. Certainty is an over-rated and dangerous quality in a human, leading as it does to decisive action. A sense of bewilderment, and the resulting desire to sit down and think things over a bit longer before doing anything hasty is perhaps the greatest gift this blog has to offer, and if you truly care about your fellow men and women then you should spread your sense of bemused hesitancy far and wide. Or perhaps you shouldn’t. It’s a tricky one.

Hopefully that’s cleared up at least some of the mysteries of the universe, but if anything else has been puzzling you about anything anywhere in all of recorded time then please get in touch.