Category Archives: maunderings

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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.

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 … Continue reading →

It’s an old sexist convention that you can sell your product with a picture of a woman with her mouth slightly open because having one’s mouth slightly open is reckoned to indicate sexual availability. Not by me, of course. Why … Continue reading →

I’ve never liked choral syncopation much. If you read in the back of a car, rather than looking out of the window, you will be carsick. I did this as a child to the accompaniment of Radio 2. But out … Continue reading →

Organic chemists know about the “magic bottle” effect. This is where if you use a particular bottle of stuff, the reaction goes, and if you use a different, though nominally identical one, the reaction doesn’t. I can think of at … Continue reading →

I saw the headline for this post and briefly thought “Infidelity Plus” was a new option on the independence referendum.

I have been contemplating the difference between dressing like Margaret Thatcher, dressing as Margaret Thatcher, and dressing up as Margaret Thatcher, all thanks to a letter in the Evening Standard from Liz Truss MP. I didn’t want to do that, … Continue reading →

There’s not a lot of point in more economic growth; it’ll just end up going to a few thousand or so people. What we really need is redistribution. But who’s offering that? Note that the Eurozone countries most under threat … Continue reading →