When I read Shetlandic

it is in Verdana in my mind’s eye:

B?D
JUPPM
AAMOS
UPPADOGA
HEDDERKINDUNK
YARG
VOAR
HENTILAGETS
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Two simple rules for avoiding a #shirtstorm

I’m going to assume for argument’s sake that it’s your choice if you’re a gentleman and want to flaunt your moobs or your coccyx. However, the zeroth?rule of cleavage, before anything you might see in glossy magazines, is?any cleavage you show must be part of your own body.

I’ve seen it said that you should only wear ties made of a material you’d?willingly wear a shirt in. As we have seen from the European Space Agency, this guidance is too restrictive for many people and not restrictive enough for some. However we can all agree that nobody likes a novelty tie. I therefore take the converse:?only wear shirts with patterns you’d willingly wear a tie in.

I hope these rules I have adumbrated are helpful.

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The opera-a-week challenge

New game for 2014: see an opera a week.

Some rules spring to mind:

  1. Cinema showings and DVDs count, but CDs don’t.
  2. Concert and semi-staged performances count.
  3. Plays in Ancient Greek count.
  4. Musicals don’t count.
  5. Carmen is an opera for the purposes of this exercise.
  6. Performing in an opera counts.
  7. You need to see 52 operas over the course of the year, with no more than a month between any viewings.
  8. Different stagings of the same opera count. For example this year I saw?Peter Grimes?at the Arts Picturehouse and in a concert performance, which would both count, but going to two showings at the cinema or two concert performances would only count once.
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Doo. Dee doo. Dee da doo… dee doo. (Doodly doodly doodly doodly doodly.)

The late Christopher Longuet-Higgins invented a musical shoe, which could tap along to arbitrary pieces of music that were played to it.

I wonder how easy it would be to write a tool that took music and rendered it into a sayable form like in the title of this post. It might tell us something about musical perception. I can’t see any practical uses. Unless you’re a novelist.

According to one question-answering site, though, there is great need of something that runs in the opposite direction, a sort of text-only Shazam: Whats that Beethoven song? [sic]

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On memorability

A few years ago, round about when the LHC was due to start up, at a beer festival, we were trying to remember the members of the Cabinet. This was jolly hard and remembering who was in John Major’s last cabinet from over a decade earlier turned out to be substantially easier.

Back in the present day, Tom Watson has resigned. “He can’t resign”, I said. “I don’t care what he’s done. He’s the only member of the shadow cabinet other than Ed Balls I can actually remember.”

Off the top of my head I think I can remember more members of Attlee Cabinets than I can of the present shadow cabinet, and probably so can you. Is this necessarily a problem for Labour? Michael Gove, for example, is Memorable for all the wrong reasons. But if your task is to present yourself as an alternative government, it might be helpful for people to be able to imagine it.

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Parliamentary arithmetic

I think I understand the Tory party’s thinking now. They’re using a special non-contradictory arithmetic where if you start with zero, and add x, you can get out any number you like.

Worked example: Take the number of UKIP MPs (0). Add the number of Tory MPs who aren’t speakers or deputies (305). Result: a working majority (greater than 322).

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Artisanal search engine optimization

Also, now that I need it again, the way of turning a table in a MySQL database into UTF-8 is described in this post here.

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I am going I am going

Basques: are they two-for-one at Noa Noa?

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Irregular verb

Basque: can you get one in Zara?

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Molly and Polly / Are two of a kind / They look both the same / When they’re seen from behind / But when they turn round / It’s easy to see / That it’s Molly with an M / And Polly with a P

That came back to me in a flash from more than thirty years ago earlier this week.

What if television programming for small children included little songs about integration by substitution, the appendices to Kennedy’s Latin Primer, or the ribosomally-encoded amino acids? It would make very little difference to the children as small children, but might help avoid dull rote learning later on.

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