09:00 Lois has two old children's story-books, that used to belong to our 2 daughters, to that she wants to send to our 7-year-old twin granddaughters i Perth, Australia. So with heavy heart I try and navigate the Royal Mail website - the website to which I have previously officially awarded the title of "world's worst ever website".
the Royal Mail's crazy world postage zone display - my god!
There are a lot of bad websites in the world but once you get used to them you can usually learn to navigate through their badly constructed bits. But the Royal Mail site changes, seemingly every few days, from one bad configuration to another bad configuration, so you can never get familiar with it.
Eventually I manage to pay for, and print out, the posting label and customs declaration, which we stick on our parcel with Sellotape. What madness!!!!
11:00 We go out to the football field, and post the package to Australia through the slit in the local Royal Mail post-box. It just fits with nothing much to spare, which is lucky.
Lois posts off a package with 2 story-books to our 7-year-old
twin granddaughters in Perth, Australia.
Then we go for our usual walk on the field - it's quite warm again, around 70F/21C, and there are more people around than usual, including the usual set of old codgers playing slow-motion tennis in the tennis courts - what a crazy world we live in !!!!
16:00 After an afternoon nap in bed, a cup of tea and a piece of chocolate cake on the couch.
I look at my smartphone. There's a lot happening on the genetics and language front today. Steve, our American brother-in-law, has sent me the address of an interesting web article from phys.org on the genetic make-up of the Basque people of the Franco-Spanish border regions.
Scientists have now established that the Basques weren't originally different from the rest of us genetically - it's just that for 2 or 3,000 years they have "kept themselves to themselves" in their somewhat impenetrable, mountainous homeland, breeding almost exclusively with fellow Basques.
They chose not to get involved with the Roman Empire all around them, and the Romans more or less left them in peace, as long as they didn't cause any trouble - so no babies with Roman soldier-fathers born to Basque women. And later, the Basques also ignored the Arabs that flooded into southern Spain. That's why their current genetic make-up is different from the Spaniards and French people that live around their region. Simples!
17:00 I pick up David W. Anthony's book "The Horse, the Wheel and Language", which I got for my birthday.
flashback to my birthday last week - I showcase the
three books I got given, including (centre) "The Horse, the Wheel and Language"
I'm still in the early chapters of the book, but already I'm struck by what an exciting time it was around 3,500 BC, when wheels were invented and somebody thought of having wagons to transport their "stuff" around! What a thrilling time to be alive!
a typical prehistoric wagon
It was a bit like the birth of the internet age, perhaps. And just like the fact that the internet has spawned various new words that nobody had ever heard before (like "hashtag" for instance, or "unmuted"), and old words with new meanings (like "cloud"), it seems it was the same at the birth of "the wheel age". My god!!!
Lots of new words suddenly, many of them still around today!
1. Our word "wheel", which probably first appeared in about 3,500 BC, and at that time sounded a bit like "kuklos" and which is also from the same origin as our word "cycle" (through the Greek word kyklos).
2. Another, separate word for wheel, which sounded something like "rota", still seen in Welsh today, a word which also came to mean a wagon in some languages, including in Iranian and Old Indic (the original Indian language). Just like the plural "wheels" in English is slang for a car - in Iran and Old India, the plural of the "rota" word was used as a "cool" expression for a wagon. How crazy!
3. The word that sounded that in 3,500 BC sounded a bit like "aks", the origin of our word "axle".
4. A word that sounded a bit like "eyor", that in those days meant the pole or harnessing shaft used in wagons. We still have the word in English but we use it for an "oar", used to propel a boat.
5. A word that sounded a bit like "wegh", used for carrying "stuff" about - it's the origin of our word "weigh" - because you have to hold something to find out if it's heavy or not: simples! It's also the origin of the word "wagon" itself, and also of "vehicle" (via Latin).
Is the history of words not totally fascinating? Who would want to study anything else haha!!!!
What a crazy world we live in!!!! [That's your "craziness" quota for today, so just watch it! - Ed]
19:30 Lois disappears into the dining-room to take part in her sect's weekly Bible Class on zoom, with tonight's talk having some sort of COVID reference. Lois is too tired for it really, but she doesn't like to opt out - poor Lois!
I read the first 150 lines of the medieval mystery play, "Thomas of India". Lynda's U3A Middle English group is holding its monthly meeting on Friday afternoon on zoom, and this play is the group's latest project.
It's not too difficult to understand the medieval English of the play's opening lines, but I have to admit it's a bit disappointing to me that the action so far is taking place in Palestine, with cast so far limited to (in order of appearance) Mary Magdalene, the apostles Peter and Paul, the risen Jesus, and "Apostles 3, 4, and 5".
No mention of Thomas yet, or of India - but I'm hoping there'll be some scenes set in India later on. However, I'm going to let that one slide - for now!
20:00 I settle down on the couch and watch a bit of TV, a retrospective on MTV, the American music video channel which first started in 1981.
This programme is particularly interesting for me, because Lois and I moved to the States with my job in August 1982 for 3 years. I found that all the other Brits in the office over there were installing cable TV to watch the movies on the HBO and Showtime channels, so we thought we'd do the same soon after we arrived in the country. I'm not a big movie fan, but I discovered a few other channels I really liked, including MTV, and also the Weather Channel. Call me crazy if you like haha!!!
Martha Quinn, one of MTV's "VJs"
I didn't realise how difficult MTV found it to really get going over there - American record companies weren't interested in getting their artists to make videos of their songs: they thought it was a waste of money, and of course to start with, MTV didn't have much of an audience anyway, so the record companies rightly concluded that there was no money in it for them.
In the early days MTV relied a lot on showing pop videos by British artists. There was no dedicated music video channel over here in the UK, but artists had been making videos of their songs for years to show on the BBC's weekly "Top of the Pops".
MTV decided to start a campaign, using promos by various artists, to get American teenagers to phone their local cable company and "demand" that they include MTV in their channels. It was this campaign that really allowed MTV to finally take off.
MTV had no money in those days, but they persuaded Mick Jagger
to do the promo for one dollar - what madness!!!!
Pete Townsend
Pat Benatar
Boy George
Billy Idol
The Police
Eventually the cable companies became inundated with calls, and were begging MTV to stop showing these ads. My god, I don't blame them haha!!!
21:00 An exhausted Lois emerges from her zoom class and we decide to go to bed on a bit of Melbourne-born comedian Barry Humphries and the latest Sunday night programme in Barry's radio series "Forgotten Musical Masterpieces", with tonight's songs all dating from the year of his birth - 1934.
Lois and I enjoy hearing again the old Weston Brothers song from 1934, "Aint It Gorgeous" where the 2 brothers compare notes on their respective girlfriends, the first one posh, the second one not so posh.
"My sweet person came in Ascot Week
I met mine one night in Barking Creek..
Mine lets me kiss her down in the dell
Mine lets me kiss her sister as well
Mine wears her ribbons in places of need
Mine wears zip-fasteners for comfort and speed
Mine reads her novels by old-fashioned folks - Ethel M Dell her pleasure invokes
Mine buys me "Razzle" and explains all the jokes.
[both] Aint it gorgeous!
Lois and I don't recognise the name "Razzle" so we look it up on the web - it was a so-called "Men's magazine" published from the 1930's to the 1950's, and it was replaced in the 1980's by a more explicit version. We found some examples from the old version of the magazine:
What a crazy world we live in !!! [Go to bed1 - Ed]
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!!
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