Oh dear - the day of my so-called "presentation on Elizabethan English" to Lynda's local U3A "Making of English" group draws ever nearer, and I spend most of the day looking at Act III of Shakespeare's Macbeth, to try and spot all the lines were Shakespeare made "grammar and syntax mistakes" as they would be called if he were writing today.
Shakespeare's Macbeth: a typical scene
I'm even starting to talk like Macbeth myself, which Lois tells me she finds "unhelpful". What a madness it all is!
Or as Lois puts it, "Birnam Wood to Malvern Rise is come " haha!
Surely the best fun any ghost has had ever, in the history of the world, and, may I say, wasn't it truly inspired practical joking on the ghost's part, to put it mildly!
Fascinating stuff! And I just wish I understood what that means about the attosecond pulses and the electron dynamics etc!
In tonight's programme presenter Amanda Holden hears from this young expert the details of this "secret code" that Georgian women used when they wanted to react discreetly to the men's approaches.
Difficult to remember, though, isn't it, we imagine, and presumably, also, easy to get wrong, which could have been embarrassing, to put it mildly. Oh dear!
Then we see her Amanda exiting the room, backwards of course, and with difficulty.
What a madness it all was !!!!!
talk about awkward! Macbeth comes in, all dressed up for dinner,
only to have the ghost of Banquo, whom he has just had killed,
occupying the only free seat at the table - what a crazy world we live in !!!!!
And what exactly is the etiquette with ghosts, if you want to tell them, "Excuse me, I know I've just had you killed, but I think you're in my seat"? I have a quick look in the standard guide, Debrett's.
I haven't got time to read the whole book, but a quick scan of the index at the back shows no entry for "ghosts, conversations with ".
Shome mishtake, shurely????
15:00 A text comes in from our local NHS doctor's surgery to say that Lois and I can now book our COVID booster jab appointment for some time on Saturday October 21st. Hurrah!
And by coincidence today, an email has come in from Tünde, my Hungarian penfriend, with the news on telex.hu this week that Hungarian researcher Katalin Karikó, has been awarded, jointly with American Drew Weissman, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine.
The prize has been awarded for the two researchers' work on the ground-breaking mRNA-based COVID vaccine: totally different from the world's previous vaccines, which were mainly based on weakened versions of the virus that they were targeting.
Together with her research colleague Drew Weissman from the US, Katalin Karikó has been awarded the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine by the Royal Swedish Academy for laying the foundations for mRNA-based medicine, which has also enabled the rapid development and practical application of new types of vaccines against COVID-19.
The Hungarian researcher, who has been working in the US since the 1980's, has faced several obstacles in her jobs but she has remained committed to her research topic and has thus officially entered the history of science. After Albert Szent-Györgyi and Imre Kertész, Katalin Karikó is the third Hungarian citizen to win the world's most prestigious scientific prize and the first Hungarian woman to win the Nobel Prize.
Lois and I have somehow managed to stay clear of COVID so far, and we owe you so much Katalin, and Drew too. We can't thank you enough.
And it's been a good week for Hungarian research in general, because Ferenc Krausz, together with Pierre Agostini and Anne L'Huillier, has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics.
[I suggest another trip down to the library. And I strongly recommend the "Bluffers' Guide" on the subject! - Ed]
["Electrons’ high speed has long made them impossible to study. The new experimental techniques created by the three scientist-laureates use light pulses that last a tiny fraction of a second to capture an electron’s movement at a single moment in time" (New York Times) - Ed]
21:30 Yes, "single moments in time" is what that Nobel Prize was all about, and, tonight, time is getting on too, and bed is calling us.
We've still got half an hour so we decide to see the first half of the latest episode in the Sky History channel's interesting documentary series, "Sex: a Bonkers History", episode 3: the Georgians", which is all about the Georgian Era in Britain (1714-1837)
Lois and I have a smattering of a lot of languages, only superficially of course, but we didn't know the language of the fans, the language that Georgian women used whenever they wanted to discreetly express their wishes to men. Women were a bit constricted in those times, because they had to wait for men to make the first move, needless to say.
The women's answer was to develop their own "secret code", using their fans.
And Lois and I realise again, for the umpteenth time, that these programmes never tell us what women did in winter, when presumably waving fans looked a bit ridiculous as well as being anti-social to the person sitting next to you. We think we should be told - and quickly: it's already October haha!
Women's posture and deportment were vital too in those days. And we see presenter Amanda trying to improve hers by walking with a pile of books on her head - Jane Austen novels perhaps, we're not told what the recommended books were.
Why not, haha ????!
22:00 We go to bed - zzzzzzzzzz!!!!
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