The Day of the Pancakes

Some pancake related thoughts. For my international readership - you should know that, growing up in England, we only ate pancakes once a year: on Shrove Tuesday. And the only topping we ever had was bottled lemon juice (or occasionally and excitingly a small plastic lemon filled with bottled lemon juice) and sugar. As a child who hated green vegetables and the like, the idea that once a year you were allowed to eat sugar for dinner was immensely appealing.

But travel broadens the mind. On family holidays to France, it quickly became apparent that our neighbours over the channel had pancakes (crepes) pretty much whenever they liked. And not just au citron. They would have them with much more exotic toppings like Nutella - the inventor of which died this week (I like to be topical).

Intercontinental travel broadens the mind still further. I first went to America aged seventeen. Officially half a lifetime ago since my birthday at the beginning of the month. You can do the math(s). My flight from Minneapolis to Denver was cancelled. The airline put me up in a hotel and paid for my breakfast. A tower of pancakes fried in butter with crispy bacon and maple syrup. Literally a tower. A tower has to be taller than it is wide. Good thing the airline bumped me up to First Class because I don't think I would have fitted into Economy after that breakfast.

Perhaps the most important development in the history of the pancake came about five years ago when my friend and sometime housemate manics rehash invented The Wasabi and Maple Syrup Pancake. Quite the experimental chef, I think he can sometimes go a tablespoon of anchovy paste too far, but he really nailed it with this one. I recommend that you all try it this week. Unless you are British of course, in which case you only have four hours before you have to wait a year...   

Crystal Update

I promised to update you on the potassium aluminium sulphate crystals I started growing in my airing cupboard. Due to the misleading nature of this blogpost's title and its accompanying photo, it proved to be my most popular post ever - garnering over 200 hits in the first hour. Which just goes to show no matter how long you spend carefully tailoring philosophical insights to delight your intended audience all they really want is the possibility of cheap drugs.

I'd always imagined growing crystals to be a spectacularly exciting thing to do. When I had my first chemistry set, I dutifully performed under appropriate supervision all the experiments included in the set except one: I was never allowed to grow copper sulphate crystals. My mother had read in the newspaper the story of a child who died as a result of waking thirsty in the night and, blindly groping in the dark, necking his copper sulphate solution instead of his glass of water. 

That didn't deter me though. I just figured I would wait twenty-three years until I was old enough to conduct my own experiments. But that I would conduct it safely in the airing cupboard because, as my mother knew all along, I am a terrible one for waking thirsty in the night and, blindly groping in the dark, necking the nearest wet thing to me. For all I know, potassium aluminium sulphate solution tastes exactly the same as three-day-old dusty ribena.

Over the course of a few weeks I turned this... 

...into this:

And now I have a load of aluminium sulphate crystals hanging around that really serve no purpose. They are not even very decorative. 

Barstools and Beer Bottles

Early on in my bartending career, I had a barstool thrown at me. To be fair, I don't think the punter in question intended me as the target. He was just throwing a barstool out of sheer rage at the unfairness of a world in which he wouldn't be served another drink in that establishment and it happened to head in my direction. He then stood in the centre of the pub glaring at everyone and shouting, "Bring your best man out - I'll fight him - send out your best man!" One of the regulars, a smart traveler girl called Mel, yelled back "He's behind you." The drunkard who wanted to fight the world whirled around to face a rather tubby and scared-looking Dorset police officer who had responded to a call and wasted no time radioing for back-up.

That was more than a decade ago. This week's nutter had a bottle to hand. And the intended target was definitely me...

Normally, I leave the dealing with nutters part of the job to the boss, but he was going loco down in Cancun. A man who looked drunk and wired had been muttering obscenities and was getting louder and people were starting to notice and feel uncomfortable. When I suggested that he move on after that drink he became abusive and threatening, emptying out his beer bottle onto the floor and holding it by the neck weapon-style. "Do you know who I am?" He asked before telling me (information which was extremely handy when I later reported the incident to the police). I bravely legged it down to the bottom bar and screamed "What the hell?" (the chosen swearword may have been stronger than this) as the bottle flew past me and lodged itself in a cardboard box full of spare glasses. 

Fortunately, the pub's pool team, the Temple Hashtags, were casually thrashing the Maid Marian Maids at their chosen sport in the bottom bar and responded promptly to my cry for assistance. The sudden appearance of six men, some of them with pool cues (although any experienced pub-goer knows that pool-players care far too much about their cues to use them as weapons) was sufficient to see my would-be assailant off into the night.

Now I consider myself to be a liberal person. But people who throw things at other people deserve, and I don't want to sound harsh here but I honestly think these hurlers of barstools and breakers of bottles deserve up to TEN (no wait ten might not be enough let's say twenty) deserve up to TWENTY hours of anger management counselling and a HUNDRED pound fine to be given to the hurlee. Actually make that TWO HUNDRED pounds. (I want to buy myself a Chromebook.) 

 

January Daffs

As you can imagine, the Xmas and New Year's holiday is an incredibly busy time for philosophers poets bartenders. So apologies for being away from my laptop for a month or more. My new year's resolution was to write a blogpost a week, a poem a month and a novel by the end of the year. Today is the fourteenth of January and I have just switched on my laptop for the first time. After I switched it on, I nipped out to do the shopping while it warmed itself up. (With a six-year-old computer there is no point asking it to do anything in the first thirty minutes, it will just have a tantrum and make you start all over again.) Lidl is selling British daffodils! Did I mention that today is the fourteenth of January? Does that seem a little early for daffodils to anybody else? Somebody must be farming them.

Obviously, with the new blogpost a week format that I won't be sticking to, you can expect the quality to be quite variable. I want to share an anecdote from work about a man who threw a glass bottle at me, but I'm still working on how to relate the story truthfully but make myself look like less of a coward - so I'll save that one for later.

So laptops and daffodils this week - meh - but keep checking back for pictures of broken glass and a severely damaged cardboard box and a suitably embellished tale of bartenderly heroics.

Ask Finnginn II: The Recursion Excusion

An emergency call has come through on the flashing red telephone I keep handy in case anybody has any obscure questions they are unable to google.

"Finn! Can you please explain: "Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight."?

I don't actually have a flashing red telephone, but I do have a facebook account and I am always pleased to receive your obscure questions as it saves me having to think up something to write about. The question is beautifully googleproof so, even though I started to answer it on my facebook page, I thought it deserved a fuller treatment here for posterity.

The sentence, "Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight", has been devised by wily linguists to show the limitations of the human mind's ability to parse overly recursive sentences.

A couple of technical definitions: To parse is, broadly speaking, to read and make sense of a sentence. Recursion is the property of language that allows a category to include an instance of itself. For example, a sentence may consist of two sentences linked by "if... then...". A verb phrase can be constructed from a verb and a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase. (Irrelevantly, the verb phrase, "...can be constructed from a verb and a noun phrase followed by a verb phrase," also happens to be an example of itself - but that's just me showing off.)

Back to our main plot:

"Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight" is an example of a triple embedded sentence. Triply embedded sentences are on the borderline of parsability. We can't understand them but we can understand how they would be understood if our brains were capable of it.

Let's break it down.

"Soldiers fight" is a sentence any native speaker can parse.

"Soldiers that soldiers fight also fight" is a similarly understandable sentence. 

In English, the "that" and the "also" are optional. We can lose them and have the double embedded sentence, "Soldiers soldiers fight fight". This sentence works in the same way as "Doors I close stay shut", or "Girls Georgie-Porgie kisses cry." It is a bit more confusing because both nouns are the same and one of the verbs is transitive and the other intransitive, but we can pretty much work out which verb belongs to which regiment and get a pretty clear picture of what is going on.

Now, if "Soldiers soldiers fight fight" is a legitimate sentence then we should be able to use the principle of recursion to plonk it down in the middle of "Soldiers fight" and give us our target sentence of "Soldiers soldiers soldiers fight fight fight". In fact we should be able to use the principle of recursion to extend our "soldiers" and our "fight" out to infinity.

Our human brains are capable of understanding that principle, but incapable of parsing a triple embedded sentence.

The Bergman Simile

I tried my hand at another job over the summer - leading groups of students from the language school on a walk along the Norfolk coast from Cromer to Sheringham. Most of them hated it (the weather was awful) and I don't think I'll be doing it again next year. The only reason I mention it really is because I came up with a great simile to describe how this job felt and I think it was under-appreciated at the time due to my friends' lack of knowledge of the oeuvre of Ingrid Bergman. 

To start with, whenever people asked me how a walk went, I would explain that I felt like Ingrid Bergman at the end of Inn of the Sixth Happiness. This would be met with a blank response and I would have to explain that (spoiler alert) at the end of Inn of the Sixth Happiness, missionary Gladys Aylward - played by Ingrid Bergman - has to lead a load of Chinese school children on foot over the mountains to escape the Japanese invasion of China. The simile works as follows: I felt like Ingrid Bergman at the end of Inn of the Sixth Happiness in that I (Social-Programme-Assistant Finnginn - played by me) had to lead a load of English-as-a-second-language students on foot around East Runton to escape the vagaries of the British weather!

Actually now I come to spell it out, I'm not sure it was that good after all. 

Making a Success out of Failure

What I love about success is that you can set the bar as low as you like. I consider my day a successful one if I manage to time leaving my flat to walk to work so that I arrive at the traffic lights at the bottom of Nelson Street during the thirty second window of a five-minute turnaround when it is possible for a pedestrian to cross without risking life and limbic system. 

Now I come to think of it, success in other people's eyes may be considered more important and be significantly harder to come by.

All this musing on the nature of success may have been brought about by the book I have been reading this week: The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure. This work of fiction started life as a conceptual art project by my friend C.D. Rose. Over the course of a year, he composed 52 biographical sketches of failed writers, uploaded them to this website (that now bears only an epitaph) and then deleted the archive. Melville House Publishing obviously thought that artistic completeness was an insufficient reason to lose these satirically astute literary portraits and practically bit his hand off to secure the publishing rights.

I've tried my hand at book-reviewing once before when I was still experimenting with a voice and purpose for this blog. I can't say it is a form that comes easily to me. The BDLF has already been reviewed by the Huffington and Washington Posts - both of whom follow the golden rule of book reviewing: start with a seemingly unrelated quote/fact/amusing story about traffic lights and then drop the book review in as if it was a footnote in a longer conversation about Anton Chekov, Samuel Beckett or the nature of success.

When you look up "success" in the index of The Biographical Dictionary of Literary Failure, it says simply "See failure", when you look up "failure" you are directed "passim". 

I hope the editor will see it as a compliment when I say that this would be a particularly good bathroom book. (Terry Pratchett once observed in a footnote that all the best books wind up in the bathroom or certainly the funniest and most read ones) I recommend all of you buy a copy for each bathroom in your house. Buy it from the publisher or, if you live in Norwich, pop down the Book Hive on London Street and get a signed copy.