under the bridge downtown, is where I drew some blood

This is some tremendously nerdy fun - you know those signs you get on low bridges to tell you that you, a lorry driver, are about to unzip the top of your vehicle like an old-fashioned can of sardines? Different countries have different signage to warn unsuspecting drivers of what's ahead - the yellow diamond in the photo on the right is from the USA, in particular the low railway bridge in Durham, North Carolina which is notorious enough to have its own website.

In Britain we operate a system of red signs, sometimes circles and sometimes triangles depending on some rather opaque rules, with clearance heights listed in both metric and imperial measurements. If you thought the rules governing sign shape were arcane, though, wait till you hear the rules governing the derivation of the clearance height figures. I mean, I won't go into it here but the end result is that - somewhat counter-intuitively - a single metric height can be associated with several different imperial heights, and vice versa. 

This opens up the possibility of a sort of sign-spotting subculture emerging, and, as you might imagine, this being the internet, it has. This page lists all the combinations of signs that eagle-eyed people (let's call them people, for the sake of argument) have spotted around the country.

Lest I get too snooty about others' intense weirdness and nerdery, though, I should disclose that the first thing I did, about half-way through watching Matt Parker's video, was think to myself: ooh, I bet I know where a good one is that might not be on the list. And it is in this interesting location near Bishton, just a few miles east of Newport, where a minor road crosses the South Wales Main Line via an interesting take-your-pick over/under arrangement. Head for the level crossing and you might have to wait for a train to pass; head under and you won't have to do that but beware if you've forgotten that you've got the bikes on the roof rack. I have been through the tunnel, a few years back; I can't remember which car it was in but I do remember stopping just in front of the entrance and getting out to visually inspect the clearance, just in case. I assume it can't have been the current family enormo-vehicle, a Seat Alhambra, because there's a good chance that might not have fitted under at all. Don't imagine that going over the top means you can take a fully-extended cherry-picker that way, by the way, as there is also a maximum height restriction of 5 metres to avoid getting entangled with some power lines. 

Anyway, it turns out this is already on the database as the type specimen for the 1.7m/5'6" height combination. Interestingly the type specimen for the 1.7m/5'9" height combination is only a handful of miles away in Caldicot, part of a similar choose-your-fighter under/over tunnel/level-crossing set-up. The lowest signed clearance on the list is, thankfully, not on a road but on the Bude Canal and would presumably require you to own a very low-profile boat (a punt, say) and lie down in it if you wanted to pass underneath. 

buffering; please wait

It occurred to me after re-reading my earlier parkrun post, which included a picture of me lumbering sweatily towards the finish of my first-ever parkrun in 2013, that I was wearing my Welsh dragon Buff on my head and that furthermore there were probably a whole raft of photos from various outdoor activities over the years which feature me wearing a variety of Buffs in various of the many possible configurations. Moreover, having got a couple of Buffs for Christmas and, honestly, probably having enough of them now I thought it might be a good moment for an audit. So: pictured below is my Buff collection.

A quick run-through:

• The green bamboo-themed one at the top left is the OG, the first one I ever bought, from an outdoor shop in Keswick (possibly Rohan) in probably around 2008. Hazel bought one as well and we had an entertaining trip to a pub just up the road (possibly the Dog & Gun) immediately afterwards experimenting with the various wearing options, to the fascination of various locals.
• The red, white and blue one at top right is technically not a "real" Buff as I'm pretty sure it was from the middle aisle of Aldi, and was therefore almost certainly cheaper. Where it wins over the original one is in being slightly bigger; the extra fabric real estate is very handy if you want to make it into things like the pirate bandana or the beanie hat (see the linked video above for instructions) and have (like me) a freakin' mahoosive cranium. 
• The Welsh dragon one is probably the one I wear the most - you can see that I'm also wearing it in the Llanfoist Crossing parkrun photo in the previous post, for instance.
• The blue one was slightly bizarrely (but awesomely) given away as a free gift when I ordered some cheap maps from Dash4It.
• The one with the Norwegian flag on it was purchased in Oslo when we stopped there on the cruise we went on in July 2023.
• The YesCymru one is a recent replacement for one I had previously (further investigation reveals it was Christmas 2020 - I'm wearing it in the post-COVID Riverfront parkrun pic in the previous post), lost for a lengthy period of time, found in a slightly musty state in my golf bag to much rejoicing and then promptly lost again almost immediately. Commendably they are only a fiver on their website, though, so I just bought another one.
• The parkrun one was a Christmas present from this year, a sort of bonus item alongside the 50-parkrun commemorative T-shirt I also got.

A few bonus Buff-wearing pics, respectively these depict: the original green one, looking at a map with baby Nia halfway up Gray Hill; rocking a textbook pirate bandana cooking up some spicy noodles near the Ystradfellte waterfalls wearing the blue Aldi one; me (wearing the Welsh dragon one) and Hazel at the top of one of the Buttermere fells (either High Stile or High Crag); some heartwarming family shit featuring me wearing the YesCymru one (the old one, before the start of the lose/find/lose again cycle) and another parkrun one, this time of me wearing the Norwegian one while struggling to muster a sprint finish in (successful, as it happens) search of a PB at Riverfront. No pictures featuring the other two yet, though I expect I will wear the parkrun one to a parkrun at least once during 2026; seems only fair.

dark bookmark skidmarks

A couple of book-related points relating to recent book-related posts. 

Quite a few of the articles about From A Buick 8 make some reference to how it ties in with King's Dark Tower series. This is a series of nine novels, none of which I've read, published between 1982 and 2012, which are more in the fantasy realm than the (mostly) real-world supernatural horror genre that King is most famous for. It's not quite as simple as that, though, as there are references to the Dark Tower universe in many other novels, sometimes clear and central to the plot (Insomnia, for instance, which I haven't read) and some retconned via references to books published before the first Dark Tower novel, The Gunslinger, was published in 1982, for instance The Shining and The Stand. This page on King's own website lists the places where other non-core Dark Tower novels refer to events in the Dark Tower series, or where Dark Tower novels reference people or occurrences in other works. Those works include From A Buick 8, as it happens, and I quote (from that page):

The Buick 8’s previous owner was most likely a low man and the car a portal to the todash spaces from which creatures escape.

I have literally no idea what any of that means, and there is a sense in which it doesn't matter in terms of enjoying the novel as a stand-alone work. There is also a sense, though, in which not being familiar with the wider universe leaves a slight gap in the reader's understanding of the car's origin and its previous custodian.

I'm going to come out here and say I do not love this, and would prefer it if the novels could just be novels without having to tie in to some wider universe which you're expected to know about. I recall being a bit vexed when the episodes of The X-Files changed from being one-off weird monster things you could just dip into at will to pieces in some giant conspiracy theory jigsaw to which you were required to bring some background knowledge (like who the constantly chain-smoking dude was). Part of this is that, as much as I love Stephen King's books, I have no intention of committing to read any of the Dark Tower books, partly because ploughing through the whole series is a major commitment that I'm not inclined to make and partly because it's further into the realm of fantasy than I really like, that being a genre I have a limited appetite for.

Secondly, among the bits of promotional blurb on the back of my copy of Jack Maggs is the following review snippet from the Evening Standard:

Wait, what? Let's take a closer look:

I can see what they were probably trying to convey here - the reader will be reading so compulsively fast that they may fly out of control in some way analogous to losing control of a car - but, depending how childish you are, it's hard to avoid other interpretations. 

the last book I read

The Lay Of The Land by Richard Ford.

So this is Frank Bascombe. You guys have met before, actually - you might remember, a few years back. Frank is working as a realtor, or an estate agent as you Brits would have it, and has made a pretty nice living out of it. So much so, in fact, that he now runs his own company, Realty-Wise. He's moved out of the town of Haddam where he lived in the previous two books in which he features, The Sportswriter and Independence Day, and now lives not far away in the quiet New Jersey coastal resort of Sea-Clift. 

Frank is in his mid-fifties now (it's late 2000 when the book opens, in the controversial aftermath of the Bush-Gore presidential election) and, while he keeps himself in pretty trim shape, has had to make certain accommodations to middle age, not least in coming to terms with a recent diagnosis of prostate cancer, a (depressingly) quintessentially middle- and even old-aged man's disease. Any worries about how this, and its accompanying radiotherapy treatment regime, might affect regular combat operations in the bedroom department, if you know what I mean, and I think you do, are rendered sadly academic, at least for the moment, by Frank's second wife Sally recently upping and leaving him in a somewhat bizarre sequence of events.

Basically while Frank and his first wife Ann just got divorced in a fairly mundane way, Sally's first husband Wally disappeared, apparently in a fairly permanent way, shortly after returning from a tour of duty in Vietnam in about 1970. Well, OK, a bit weird, but these things happen, and Sally has put it behind her. Except it turns out it isn't behind her after all, as one day Wally just turns up out of the blue at his parents' place and announces he's been scraping a living in some sort of commune on the Isle of Mull for the last couple of decades. Frank isn't sure how to react to this news, nor how he expects Sally to react (still less what the legal ramifications are for his marriage to her). What he probably isn't expecting is for her to head off back to Mull with Wally - not necessarily permanently, so she says, but to try and resolve some unfinished business.

So Frank finds himself on his own in the run-up to Thanksgiving. Well, not quite on his own, as plans gradually come together to reunite what remains of his family for the day. His daughter Clarissa has been spending some time with him anyway as she's decided to take charge of the situation regarding his cancer treatment. Clarissa is herself navigating some life changes though - previously in a fairly stable relationship with her girlfriend Cookie, she has recently split up with her and is now back on solids with new boyfriend Thom. Frank's son Paul, meanwhile, of a slightly more challenging personality type but seemingly making a decent living as a slogan writer for Hallmark cards, is also due to arrive with his new girlfriend Jill. Finally, in a rash moment, Frank invites his ex-wife Ann (who, to be fair, is also Clarissa and Paul's mother) who seems to be going through a bit of a personal crisis following the death of her second husband.

Frank has a few things to sort out before he and the family can settle in to some serious troughing down into the old brined and deep-fried turkey and a couple of hundredweight of candied yams, creamed corn and similar incomprehensible American Thanksgiving cuisine. Firstly he has to go and facilitate the sale of a chalet with his Realty-Wise protégé, Mike, something he manages to fuck up after insisting the prospective client view the inside of the property, thereby inadvertently facilitating a mildly terrifying encounter with a feral fox. Then he has an encounter with Detective Marinara, who has transcended being named after a pasta sauce to rise through the police ranks and has been put in charge of investigating an explosion at Haddam hospital resulting in the death of a member of staff, as it happens someone known personally to Frank. No suggestion that Frank is a suspect, but Marinara wants to tie up a few loose ends. Finally, and most bizarrely of all, and putting a pretty comprehensive spanner in the Thanksgiving works, the Feensters, Frank's generally irritating and awful neighbours, are held up by a couple of heavily-armed feral youths who want to steal their cars (a couple of flashy and ostentatious Corvettes), and in the front-yard confrontation which follows both Feensters are comprehensively ventilated and Frank is shot in the chest - non-fatally as it turns out. 

A wibbly-wobbly dissolve now to a few months later - Frank is out of hospital having recovered from his gunshot woulds, and is on his way to another hospital to have his prostate investigated to see how the radiotherapy has gone. Accompanying him on the plane trip is Sally, returned from Mull and tentatively reunited with Frank. 

As I said above, this is the third novel in what a lot of people at the time referred to as the "Bascombe trilogy", presumably in the expectation that Richard Ford was getting on a bit, there was quite a gap between books and that that might be all of them. I think Ford himself may also have dropped some hints that that was likely to be it. Not a bit of it, in fact, as there have subsequently been two further books: the punderfully-titled Let Me Be Frank With You, a collection of loosely-linked short stories, in 2014, and then the novel Be Mine in 2023, which, as if to prove that people never learn, Ford's Wikipedia page confidently refers to as the "presumably final" novel in the series. I mean, maybe it is - if nothing else Ford is now 81, and this list exists, so, well, you do the math.

Never mind all that, though: is it any good? Well, yes, I would say it is, although it must also be said that standard sequelitis applies as much here as it does to lower forms of art such as, say, the Police Academy movies. The alert reader who's read the first two books will certainly observe fairly early on that the general structure here is very similar to that of Independence Day, just substituting in Thanksgiving as the significant event that the novel's events meander their way towards. And meander they certainly do, as the entire timeline of the novel's 700+ pages (more on this in a bit) occupies only about three days, and moreover the assumed climax of the book, the Thanksgiving dinner at which certain uncomfortable family discussions may occur, grievances will be aired, revelations, erm, revelated, etc. etc., never actually occurs, Frank's near-murder putting a stop to it (again, something quite similar occurs in Independence Day). So while the writing style is very smooth and digestible and Frank is an appealing middle-class everyman - bright, basically decent, occasionally mercurial and still haunted by the premature death of his son Ralph back in the early 1980s and the subsequent collapse of his first marriage - there are moments where the reader wishes the characters and their author would just GET ON WITH IT a bit. 

That general low-key meandery-ness and the general polo-and-chino-clad white middle-class-ness of it all makes the lurid purple-lycra-clad vulgarity of the Feensters even more jarring, and their subsequent messy demise doubly so, although I guess messy multiple murder in a quiet suburban setting - clearly a thing that does happen, especially in the USA - is inherently jarring and weird. 

The thing that resonated specifically with me was that The Lay Of The Land just happens to capture a snapshot of Frank Bascombe when he is exactly the same age that I am now. It's sobering, since if I were to be somehow rendered not constantly, painfully, conscious of how unbelievably old I am and obliged to work just from the description of Frank offered here and my own physical sensations I'd say: well, this old geezer is clearly quite a bit older than me: prostate cancer, occasional dizzy spells, bladder trouble (admittedly mostly a side-effect of the cancer treatment), while I, tragic male pattern baldness aside, am a fit and active guy, weigh no more than I did twenty years ago, still irrepressibly and priapically horny, etc. That sounds like a brag, and I suppose it partly is, but the main point is that this stuff happens to everyone sooner or later, and, also, I suppose, that one's own residual self-image isn't the best guide to objective external reality as observed by others.

The timelines, incidentally, assuming that my assertions about Frank's son Paul's age in the Independence Day post are accurate, go something like this:

• The Sportswriter
• Published: 1986
• Set: 1983
• My reading: ??late 1990s/early 2000s??
• Independence Day
• Published: 1995
• Set: 1988
• My reading: 2009
• The Lay Of The Land
• Published: 2006
• Set: 2000
• My reading: 2025

Finally, my paperback copy of The Lay Of The Land is not only an intimidating 726 pages, but is also printed on incredibly thin paper, so that it's a lot thinner than you'd expect. To illustrate this, here it is with my copy of Independence Day, which is 451 pages but about the same thickness, and my ancient copy of Stephen King's The Stand, which at 734 pages is almost exactly the same length but nearly twice as thick.

I assume the legend printed on the publisher information page and reproduced below is relevant here, though what it actually means is unclear to me. Conversely and contrariwise the print is quite large and widely-spaced at only 28 lines per page (Independence Day has 39), so if it were printed differently it'd be a lot shorter. This Guardian review, presumably of a differently-formatted hardback edition, lists it as 487 pages. 

Lastly, and more importantly, my copy is missing some pages around the middle of the book, in particular pages 361-362, 375-378 and 391-392 (i.e. four physical sheets of paper in total). The nature of the book being what it is we can be reasonably confident that no alien invasions, bukkake dungeon sex orgies or hideously-botched scientific experiments involving cloning Hitler happen on those pages, but it's a bit annoying nonetheless. The only other time I recall this happening was when I read Bluesman, though that was only one sheet (i.e. two pages). I see from searching for that link that something similar (a printing error rather than a binding error in this case) happened with my copy of Lolita as well. 

wordy num num

I was reminded by seeing Freedom juxtaposed with its immediate predecessor Candide that I'd done a post a while back about one-word book tiles. Here it is, and at the time (i.e. in early 2018) there had been 54 one-word book titles in this list; Freedom takes the current running total to 84. You may also recall (or just get off your arse and go and read the post now) that I also mentioned that the run of three consecutive one-word titles was unique; well, so it was, and so was the eventual run of four (Stick, Matter, Exposure, Nausea). I can tell you, without giving too much away, that the current run will end at two, so that record will stand for a while yet. 

Here's a more general survey of book title length over the lifetime of this blog:

• 84 one-word titles as described above;
• 114 two-word titles, most recently Feersum Endjinn;
• 91 three-word titles, most recently The Devil's Star;
• 53 four-word titles, most recently Strange Fits Of Passion;
• 42 five-word titles, most recently The Tiger In The Smoke;
• 12 six-word titles, most recently The Bridge Of San Luis Rey back in May 2017;
• 3 seven-word titles, most recently The Folks That Live On The Hill in February 2020;
• 2 eight-word titles, most recently One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich way back in November 2008;
• finally, a single solitary nine-word title, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea in January 2019.

Some way to go to crack the world record for greatest number of words in a book title, though, as this apparently stands at 4,558. Maybe next year. 

schauffele schauffele catchy python

You'll recall I made some scornful references to my general disinclination towards "checking exhaustively" and the like in my post about the Scheffler/Schauffele distribution of the first two majors of the golfing year. Well, my interest was further piqued by Bryson DeChambeau winning the US Open in June, and then further piqued by Xander Schauffele winning the Open at Troon just the other day. More specifically, what I mean by that is: it's not difficult to notice that the name DeChambeau shares quite a few letters with Schauffele, and then to pose the more general question: what's the maximum number of letters that the four major winners in a particular year have shared? 

This is one that is going to require checking exhaustively, and manually doing the legwork would be extremely tedious even for an enthusiast of data-related nerdery like myself. So I plunged off down a different alley, still squarely located within the general Nerd Central district, extracted the relevant data from Wikipedia, massaged it into shape a bit, and then wrote a Python program to do the relevant comparisons for me. 

The results are in the table below. These are the years when there was at least one letter common to all four major winners; implicitly it only includes years when all four majors were held, so nothing pre-1934 (when the first Masters tournament was held), a few missing years during World War II, and no 2020 (when the Open was cancelled). Also, we're only considering surnames here, and I've trimmed the occasional "jr." and "III" off the end of surnames where that made the comparison problematic or challenged my rudimentary Python skills.

Of the 84 "full" years, 29 appear in the list below, and only ten have more than one letter in the matching list. Perhaps slightly surprisingly, the two years (1953 and 2000) where a single player won three out of the four majors only have a single match each, Walter Burkemo and Vijay Singh spoiling the party for Ben Hogan and Tiger Woods respectively. Anyway, the main headline here is that of those ten, nine have two letters in the matching list and only one, this very year of Our Lord 2024, has a whopping four to put it well out in front. Obviously a whole year of people with absurdly long and letter-rich surnames helps. 

Year	Matches	Who
1935	r	Perry, Parks, Revolta, Sarazen
1948	on	Cotton, Hogan, Hogan, Harmon
1949	e	Locke, Middlecoff, Snead, Snead
1951	an	Faulkner, Hogan, Snead, Hogan
1953	o	Hogan, Hogan, Burkemo, Hogan
1960	e	Nagle, Palmer, Hebert, Palmer
1961	er	Palmer, Littler, Barber, Player
1962	al	Palmer, Nicklaus, Player, Palmer
1963	s	Charles, Boros, Nicklaus, Nicklaus
1970	c	Nicklaus, Jacklin, Stockton, Casper
1974	r	Player, Irwin, Trevino, Player
1975	a	Watson, Graham, Nicklaus, Nicklaus
1977	n	Watson, Green, Wadkins, Watson
1979	r	Ballesteros, Irwin, Graham, Zoeller
1980	as	Watson, Nicklaus, Nicklaus, Ballesteros
1983	so	Watson, Nelson, Sutton, Ballesteros
1984	er	Ballesteros, Zoeller, Trevino, Crenshaw
1989	a	Calcavecchia, Strange, Stewart, Faldo
1991	a	Baker-Finch, Stewart, Daly, Woosnam
1993	na	Norman, Janzen, Azinger, Langer
2000	s	Woods, Woods, Woods, Singh
2004	n	Hamilton, Goosen, Singh, Mickelson
2006	o	Woods, Ogilvy, Woods, Mickelson
2010	e	Oosthuizen, McDowell, Kaymer, Mickelson
2011	lr	Clarke, McIlroy, Bradley, Schwartzel
2019	o	Lowry, Woodland, Koepka, Woods
2021	m	Morikawa, Rahm, Mickelson, Matsuyama
2023	a	Harman, Clark, Koepka, Rahm
2024	chee	Schauffele, DeChambeau, Schauffele, Scheffler

a world in a grain of xand

Another men's golf major, two more additions to the list of record low rounds. You'll recall that that number has stood at 62 since 2017, and the list has now, as of the completion of the 2024 PGA Championship, expanded to five entries. Xander Schauffele's round on the first day at Valhalla is the more significant of the two as it provides the first example of a round of 62 leading to a victory, and also the first example of a golfer shooting the new(ish) record low score twice. You'll recall that Greg Norman and Vijay Singh were the only double-featurees on the old list. 

Player	Tournament	Year	Round	Result	Winner
Branden Grace	Open	2017	third	tied 6th	Jordan Spieth
Rickie Fowler	US Open	2023	first	tied 5th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	US Open	2023	first	tied 10th	Wyndham Clark
Xander Schauffele	USPGA	2024	first	WON	Xander Schauffele
Shane Lowry	USPGA	2024	third	tied 6th	Xander Schauffele

Two further related topics: firstly I can't hear Xander Schauffele's name without mentally singing "every day I'm Schauffele" in the style of "every day I'm shufflin'" from LMFAO's 2011 dance-floor banger Party Rock Anthem.

Secondly I was struck by the oddity of Schauffele winning the PGA after Scottie Scheffler had won the Masters; in particular that the name of the winner of the second major of the year contained 88.9% (i.e. eight out of nine) of the letters in the name of the winner of the first major of the year (only the "r" is missing). But is this a record? Well, no, or at least not if you allow for the trivial case of the first two majors of the year being won by the same person (and therefore the rating being 100%). That's rare, but has been done a handful of times, most recently by Jordan Spieth in 2015. 

A wander through the archives will convince you that there have been years where the rating has been zero (i.e. no letters were shared) - Floyd and Pate in 1976, Faldo and Irwin in 1990, Immelman and Woods in 2008, Willett and Johnson in 2016 for example. In other years the numbers bounce around somewhere in between. More than 50% seems rare - for instance Phil Mickelson in 2010 shares 55.6% of the letters in his surname with Graeme McDowell, but if you look at the following few years you get 30% in 2011 (Schwartzel/McIlroy), 50% in 2012 (Watson/Simpson), 40% in 2013 (Scott/Rose) and 16.7% in 2014 (Watson/Kaymer). 

I'm going to conclude that the Scheffler/Schauffele sharing ratio is a record, without checking exhaustively, because it seems almost impossible that it isn't, and I can't be arsed to do the legwork. I haven't looked, and am not going to, at the equivalent comparison between second and third majors of the year, but if the upcoming US Open is won by newcomer Rendax Easelchuff I imagine that would also set a record. 

here'th thumbthing interethting

You might recall, if you follow me on Twitter/X, and why in the name of God would you, that I have occasionally - as a twisted means of expressing my love for, and pride in, my kids, though in a typically British oblique and emotionally-repressed way - mentioned some of their fascinating genetic traits, all thankfully on the quirky and endearing side of the dividing line that separates them from the more extreme tentacly Lovecraftian horrors that must be DESTROYED WITH FIRE.

A couple of examples are below:

fascinatingly-named genetic conditions that I exhibit which I have passed on to my eldest daughter: Darwin's tubercle (unilateral), Morton's toe (bilateral, as I think it always is). also, Shatner's bassoon, etc. #genetics

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) January 13, 2020

the internet is great. I have one of these, as do my father and my eldest daughter. wife and other two kids don't have it. FREAKS! https://t.co/sh0F1C1dwL

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) June 25, 2019

Another example follows: I'm not sure that we've applied a greater level of scrutiny to the boy in terms of his development after his early arrival and spending the first 91 days of his life in a series of gradually-larger plastic boxes with bleepy machines attached in hospital, but I suppose it's plausible that we might have. Anyway, one thing I've always noticed about Huwie is what I perceive to be his freakishly enormous thumbs. I have always taken this as an indication of future tallness as an adult once the rest of his anatomy catches up with his thumbs - as an aside, although he is currently slightly below average height for his age, the canonical example of teeny prematurity not being a bar to tallness and sporting prowess as an adult is recently-retired cricketer Stuart Broad, born at 28 weeks (Huwie was 27) but eventually a strapping 6 feet 5 inches.

However, it turns out that this may have been en error of perspective - I don't mean that I was accidentally holding the boy's thumbs really close, more that my expectations for appropriate child thumb size will have been influenced by my two daughters. And why not, you might say, except that Nia, who is generally curious about all things and now has a phone with access to the internet, ran into the kitchen the other day excitedly shouting "Dad, I've got toe thumbs!". Sorry, love, you've got what? "Alys has got them too!" Hang on, what?

Well, it turns out that "toe thumbs" are actually a thing, that particular phrase being one of several common colloquial descriptions of a genetic trait more properly called brachydactyly type D. This is the most common form of brachydactyly, supposedly affecting around 2-3% of the population. To illustrate, here is a parade of thumbs:

So you can see that Huwie's thumbnails are almost circular or perhaps even elliptical, with the major axis oriented vertically, whereas Nia's are elliptical(ish) with the major axis oriented horizontally and Alys' thumbnails barely exist at all. We're not fully comparing apples with apples here because Alys (like me) is an inveterate nail-biter while Nia and Huwie are not. Nonetheless there is a stark contrast between Huwie's thumbs, which give a general impression of tapering elegantly, and the girls' thumbs which are squared-off and stubby. No suggestion of any other genetic consequences of having weird thumbs, thankfully, and the only practical consequence is that neither of the girls will be able to play the guitar in the style of Richie Havens. 

So if it's an inheritable genetic trait, Dave, you'll be saying, what do your thumbs look like?

My desk isn't broken, by the way; I had to stitch two images together (badly) owing to a need to have a hand to hold the camera with. It's hard to be objective about something that, after 50+ years of looking at them, implicitly defines my mental image of what a "normal" thumb looks like, but I'd say I occupy a centre ground between Huwie and the girls. My ellipses are definitely horizontal but there's a bit more nail (even allowing for their bitten state) than, say, Alys has. 

Just for completeness, Hazel's are below. She has pretty regular vertical ellipses, so I have to conclude that it's me who is the carrier of the genetic freakery here.

absolute bulltwit

Here's a bit of random fun: you'll probably have all seen one or more of the various internet things that attempt to categorise putting an animal's name in front of the word "shit" and the various subtleties of meaning that ensue. Just to be clear, none of these lists are definitive and there's plenty of scope for disagreement; I don't think that Urban Dictionary categorises "horseshit" quite as I would use it, and defining "bullshit" as "lies" is, while probably OK for day-to-day use, not quite in line with its specific technical meaning about which whole books have been written.

Anyway, the point of all the preamble is to introduce the results of a quick and unscientific survey which I cooked up after having occasion to use Twitter's (sorry, X's) search facility to search for instances of the word "bullshit" in my own tweets (sorry, "posts"). I can't remember why now but I'm sure it was important enough to justify taking some time off work to do. So here we go (one example for each):

bullshit: 51 occurrences

horseshit: 7 occurrences. Note that the specific tweet I chose here features a video where someone uses the word "bullshit" to describe essentially the same thing, thereby implying that the two terms are interchangeable in at least some subset of circumstances. I will reluctantly allow this.

dogshit: 7 occurrences

batshit: 2 occurrences

apeshit: slightly surprisingly, zero occurrences. Must try harder! I did once use the word "apeshittery" though which I am going to insist a) is a word and b) counts.

pigshit: once, here. This word doesn't feature in the Urban Dictionary list and pretty much has a single use case: as part of the phrase "thick as pigshit" or some variant thereof, as below.

sheepshit: well, no, but a near-miss here

All other animals: zero occurrences, with the caveat that I haven't appended the word "shit" to the end of every single animal, living or extinct, known to zoology and/or palaeontology and put it into a Twitter (sorry, X) search box. So it's possible that at some point in the past I used the word "pterodactylshit" or similar and it's out there un-found by my research.

Note that I have opted for slightly lower-resolution and generally less satisfactory screenshots over direct embedding; this just reflects my lack of faith in the Twitter (sorry, X) platform's long-term survival under the new regime. 

unn believable

A couple of footnotes to the last post - I have no idea how likely Siss and Unn are as names for young girls in 1960s Norway (The Ice Palace was published in 1963) but as a father of still fairly young children I can still vividly recall our nightly appointments with In The Night Garden and its cast of weird squishy nonsense-spouting primary-coloured characters, including the Tombliboos. Those are the three stripy mofos with the spotty trousers (source of much oh-no-we've-all-got-each-other's-trousers-on confusion and hilarity) who live in, and I quote, "an extraordinary bush". Stop sniggering at the back there. Anyway, their names are Unn, Ooo and Eee, for reasons which I assume are obvious. It wouldn't really have been in keeping with The Ice Palace's rather sombre tone for Unn's two sisters to have suddenly shown up and started playing the drums and having comical trouser mishaps, but the thought did briefly cross my mind.

Another example of inappropriate hilarity at serious moments was provided last weekend when the girls decided that we should watch The Railway Children for our Saturday night movie. Anyone who's seen this will know that the last scene (it's actually not quite the last scene, but you know what I mean) is a legendary not-a-dry-eye-in-the-house moment (unlike some other Jenny Agutter movies which demand a ready supply of tissues for different reasons). To guard against succumbing to this I was idly imagining whose appearance out of the smoke (i.e. in place of Iain Cuthbertson) would be most amusing, and I came up with Mr. Blobby; cue me ruining the scene for everyone with some most inappropriate guffawing. Here is roughly how I imagined the scene; you'll have to supply the sound effects yourself.

fancy a cormorant? well how about a shag then

Another post expanding on a bit of passing Twitter nonsense: the purpose of the original poster in tweeting the clip in the tweet below was to mock the seemingly uncaring attitude of the baseball batter to having just injured a menial member of the groundstaff. The thing that struck me, though, was (as my quote tweet says) the description the commentator gives of the job the guy was doing before he got pinged by the ball.

some amusing US/UK usage differences here, in particular at 0:02 "you see one of the folks out there who's SHAGGING BALLS being helped off the field" #fnarr https://t.co/5pfpbC7auh

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) July 19, 2022

It's a staple of lazy British humour that Americans don't understand the British usage of the word "shag", i.e. as a common euphemism for sexual intercourse, basically a slightly milder version of "fuck". It's not quite as simple as that, though, firstly because I suspect the Austin Powers films have brought the UK usage into the US lexicon a bit more, but also because there are US usages that are equally foreign to UK ears. 

There are actually a surprisingly large number of meanings for the word "shag", many of them common to both US and UK English: from shag pile carpets and shag tobacco (collectively, I suppose, nouns that could be back-formed from the related adjective "shaggy") to various large seabirds of the family Phalacrocoracidae. The US-specific ones include the dance craze that gave this 1989 film its title, and more specifically a meaning that we don't have at all in the UK as far as I know: to chase after something at speed. Highly amusingly to UK audiences it's usually combined with either "ass" or "balls" in standard US usage, "shag ass" having a general sense of hurrying or getting moving, broadly similar to "haul ass", and "shagging balls" having the specific meaning of collecting up all the balls whacked to various corners of the practice ground during baseball practice and returning them for re-use.

So I think the conclusion here is that if someone asks you for a shag in the UK it's pretty obvious what they're talking about; in the US you could and probably should respond to their question with one of your own, specifically: ass or balls?

making a spectacle of myself

A couple of things that came up recently over in the Twitterverse which perhaps warrant mentioning at slightly greater length here: firstly I was bimbling about on Twitter, as you do, probably while waiting for some pasta to cook or something, and saw this slightly niche tweet about legendary post-punk slash new-wave bassist Derek Forbes, most famously associated with early pre-enormodome-era Simple Minds in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Permit me a rambling anecdote before we get to the point: my old university flatmate Simon (mentioned tangentially here) was a huge fan of various 1980s bands, most notably Adam and the Ants, U2 and Simple Minds. I mean, this was around 1990 so these allegiances were not especially unusual (well, Adam and the Ants was a bit niche after about 1982), and I myself had a copy of The Joshua Tree, as did just about everyone else in the world. Simon was a big Simple Minds buff though and did the thing that everyone does when they like a band who took a while to really break through: tell everyone that they really prefer the early stuff before they got famous. With the benefit of 30-odd years of hindsight I have to concede that he was probably right, though: the later stuff still strikes me as emptily bombastic stadium rock nonsense (I suppose All The Things She Said has a bit of drive to it, although the video is a hideous mid-80s eyesore) but some of the earlier stuff is a bit more interesting. I have got into a bit of late-70s/early-80s post-punk lately like Wire, Magazine and Gang Of Four, and things like In Trance As Mission in particular are somewhat similar. That song features a distinctive bass intro (played by Forbes) which could have qualified it for the list here if anyone had suggested it at the time. Idiots!

Anyway, Forbes drags me back to the point, which is that I absent-mindedly trawled around some other tweets from the same account and pretty soon came across this one, which gave me a bit of a start:

✊ pic.twitter.com/JhtcCF9zQj

— Memorial Device (@memorialdevice) January 23, 2022

Just to make it clear, that is a photograph of me, aged probably about 2, and therefore from around 1972. After a brief period of reeling in surprise and spluttering WHAT WITCHCRAFT IS THIS it occurred to me that I had published that very same photo on the public internet back in 2013 as part of this blog post. That made it available to Google image crawlers, and hey presto, a search for "NHS glasses" or similar now leads you to this page featuring a different photograph of me as the header image (commendably my original post is properly credited at the bottom of the page), and also (if you scroll a bit further down the image results) the absolutely legendary primitive-1970s-lazy-eye-remediation photo above.

Anyway, no criticism intended, and Lord knows I am extremely cavalier about properly attributing images that I hoick off an image search for this blog, so glass houses, stones, etc. This slots nicely into second place in terms of Google search results infiltration by this blog, behind my continuing domination of the results for "joanna lumley plastic anus", thanks largely to this original post and the couple of times I've mentioned it here since. 

fiction section selection direction

A couple of observations following the last book review: firstly that this post that you're reading now breaks a sequence of five consecutive book review posts (Family Album, Outline, Thud!, Call For The Dead, The Shipping News), which I'm pretty sure equals a record set between November 2018 and January 2019 and observed here. [EDIT: anyone equipped with the ability to a) look at stuff and b) count will spot that it's actually a record-busting sequence of six, The Day Of The Jackal being the missing one right at the start]. Also observed there is that this isn't necessarily a cause for celebration, as it just reveals the dwindling of posts on matters other than what I've been reading lately. There are a number of reasons for this: parenting duties for multiple children, limited opportunities in a pandemic to go out and do blog-worthy stuff and probably most importantly since mid-2016 (when the blog atrophy really set in in earnest) a general feeling of futility about expressing any sort of opinion about anything in the wake of Brexit and Trump (and subsequently Johnson) happening. As many people whose day-to-day business it is much more directly than mine have said, this stuff is the death of satire - nothing you could ever make up could be as simultaneously frightening and absurd.

Anyway, let's snap out of that sort of attitude and return to more important topics, like: all this book review stuff is great, but how do you choose which book you're going to read next? Well, there are a few criteria, although in general I like not to second-guess myself too much and steer clear of giving it too much thought until the moment of needing to make a decision arrives (like, for instance, I've just finished a book and I really need a poo). There are obvious ones like probably not doing two Projects back to back ...

revised list follows: Jane Eyre, Don Quixote, Nostromo, Foucault's Pendulum, The Lay Of The Land, The Mayor Of Casterbridge, Ulysses, Blonde, The Book Of Disquiet, Swann's Way, Gravity's Rainbow, Cancer Ward, Tristram Shandy, The Goldfinch, Anna Karenina, Germinal. https://t.co/1YaHStc5gY

— Dave Thomas (@electrichalibut) November 16, 2021

... keeping an eye on not getting too male-author-centric, usually following a longish book with a shortish one and vice versa, and likewise a "light" book with a more serious one. None of these rules is actually so much of a rule that it can't be broken if I feel like it, though. 

Another way of looking at it is illustrated by the image below: my fiction bookshelves are arranged alphabetically by author as the basic minimum level of non-insane good sense dictates. So are the unread titles evenly distributed? Recall that there is some distortion in terms of alphabetic distribution, partly (but not entirely) brought about by my having several large blocks of books by the same authors (Iain Banks, Dick Francis, Stephen King to name but the most obvious suspects). 

The numbers here denote how many unread novels there are in each section - I can't remember whether I included The Shipping News in the numbers or not, but it doesn't really matter. For the purposes of the analysis that follows you'll need to imagine that the columns are lettered A-D and the rows numbered 1-6 as if the whole thing were an Excel spreadsheet.

So it's easy to see that the distribution isn't particularly even - the zeroes at D3 and B4 are largely due to a block of John Irvings and a block of Stephen Kings respectively (the one at D6 is due to that section being empty), and Iain Banks and Dick Francis largely account for the two ones at A3 and C1. The highest count in a single section is seven at D2, mostly among the Es and Fs, and there is a run of three adjacent sections at B5, C5 and D5 that includes seventeen incorporating the end of the Ms through to nearly the end of the Ss. So I could impose some sort of rule obliging me to do some sort of affirmative action shit and choose my next book from one of the most deprived areas on the shelves. I'm not going to, but I could. 

with phallus aforethought

Before I start here I should probably issue a trigger warning for discussion of GIANT GENITALIA. Anyone still harbouring trauma from real-life adverse experiences with GIANT GENITALIA should probably consider bailing out now.

So: you'll recall my reference to the unexpectedly large passage in The Godfather dealing with Lucy Mancini and her, ahem, unexpectedly large passage. Most of this stuff happens well into the second half of the book, but Lucy does briefly feature right at the start of the book (at Connie's wedding) when she and Sonny Corleone sneak off to an upstairs room for a quick knee-trembler and it is made clear that only Sonny's gargantuan cock can satisfy her, sex with anyone else resembling chucking a cocktail sausage into a wheelie bin or some similar metaphor.

Via one of those odd synaptic brainfarts that occasionally happens at times like this I was put in mind of my teenage attempts to write a best-selling novel, in collaboration with my best friends Mungo and Tom. I've mentioned Mungo a couple of times here before, including referring to his current occupation in the world of economics; well, it appears Tom is now a well-respected lawyer doing work in the charity sector that sounds terrifyingly close to being Of Actual Benefit To Humanity in some way. And, assuming those photos are reasonably recent, still with an annoyingly full head of hair. He's still ginger, though, so, you know, swings and roundabouts. Anyway, I imagine both of them will be delighted to find that the Google crawlerbots have now linked their names with a frivolous blog post prominently featuring the words GIANT GENITALIA.

The GIANT GENITALIA connection is this: we were unsure as to the best subject matter for a novel but were very clear that we wanted enormous sales realising flipping great wodges of cash as rapidly as possible, so there had to be EXCITEMENT and ADVENTURE and thus almost certainly SEX. I can't speak for Mungo and Tom (well, actually I'm 99.9% sure that I can) but my actual experience of sex (furious and relentless wanking aside) at this point was restricted to fast-forwarding through James Herbert books trying to get to the good bits. So we started writing, and, keen to do the fun stuff before any of the tedious scaffolding that establishes the plot and characters, went straight to writing some sex scenes. I do recall that one of them was on a plane, for reasons I can't now recall and which we may have not bothered to provide at the time, and featured a female character uttering the immortal line "bored of that cockpit and want to try mine?" which I remember Mungo (who came up with it) being very proud of.

Anyway, there was a whole section of plot missing after that which would have explained how we got to the next section, which was set on an island, some unspecified apocalypse having happened in between to make humanity revert to more primitive ways. By some also-unexplained sequence of events - radiation effects, speeded-up evolution, experimental knob surgery, who knows - certain members (ooer) of the human race had acquired comically outsized genitalia. Just in case you couldn't imagine what that looked like we also did some sketches - mainly Tom, I think, who was quite a handy artist - which got stashed under my bed or in a cupboard somewhere and forgotten and were later discovered by my mother, which was nice. 

Just as well we abandoned our writing efforts, then, you might say, as no respectable publisher - outside certain niche markets, anyway - would countenance publishing a book containing this sort of lurid nonsense. And I would have agreed with you, right up until about a decade later when I first read Brian Aldiss' Helliconia trilogy of science fiction novels, in particular the final one, Helliconia Winter. Here, while the centuries-long winter takes hold on the planet below, the orbiting space station Avernus monitors and sends information back to distant Earth. The space station itself, though, experiences evolutionary changes over the course of its millennia-long vigil, some of them enhanced by experimentation by the scientists aboard - well, you've got to relieve the boredom somehow, haven't you? Some of these are of a nature oddly reminiscent of our own feverish teenage imaginings:

Aldiss, as it happens, has a bit of previous in the sex-writing department, having published a trilogy of novels in the 1970s - A Hand-Reared Boy, A Soldier Erect and A Rude Awakening - which is a loosely-autobiographical series of sex comedies well outside his normal science fiction genre. They're hard (ooer) to come by (ooer) these days, but second-hand copies can still be found. I can't vouch for them as I've never read them. 

that's dentertainment

One of the things that will have been a major factor in determining the specific flavour of your COVID-19 lockdown experience, it seems to me anyway, is whether you have kids or not. Many people have (as part of a generally commendable look-on-the-bright-side attitude) written about how, hey, lockdown is tough and the general loneliness and sense of social dislocation is a mental challenge, but at least it's given them a chance to really get to grips with learning to knit, whittling that scale model of the Taj Mahal, playing the euphonium, and of course baking a bewildering variety of bread products, assuming that they'd panic-bought enough flour and yeast. 

As entertaining as those anecdotes are, my first thought is always: aha, there's someone who doesn't have kids. I mean I'll grant you we did have a half-hearted crack at making bread, but any serious hobbying designed to eat up several consecutive hours is a non-starter. I should add I'm not about to attempt to reach a verdict about whether a child-free or child-rich environment is better/worse/harder/easier in terms of surviving lockdown with sanity mostly intact, I'm just making the point that it would have been two very different experiences. As brilliant and generally delightful as our three kids are I will confess to finding the need to keep them constantly entertained a bit relentless at times, especially when combined with needing to keep up with schoolwork as well.

One of the things I expect a lot of people with kids have done during the period of enforced being-in-the-house is make dens, this being a thing that all kids love doing. I myself recall my parents having a set of rather bizarre brown foam-rubber furniture (probably an absolutely appalling fire hazard by modern standards) when we were kids, whose corner units, when flipped on their side, were perfect building blocks for dens. We don't have any of those, but as you'll see below the kids did manage to come up with some alternatives. Nia, as befits the oldest of the group, was generally chief engineer, with Alys providing labouring muscle and Huwie fulfilling a key quality assurance role by running into things and attempting to break them. 

So here is a pictorial summary of the 2020/2021 den-building season:

Number one is a solo effort from Nia. The legend on the front reads "Nia's umbrella den. Must have permishion." She insisted that she was going to spend the night in it, and subsequently did, commendably bloody-mindedly as it can't have been that comfortable. 

Use of umbrellas as a key element of den construction is going to become a bit of a theme, as you'll see. Luckily we have quite a few of them as Hazel has a stash of white parasol-style ones from her wedding photography supplies. 

The next one is an extension of the original concept to include a couple of extra umbrellas, some towels, a large number of clothes pegs and our pop-up Peppa Pig tent. An increase in the amount of interior room, but as you can imagine it's a bit of a complex labyrinth of umbrella-stalks once you're inside. 

The next one harks back to the original, but increases the headroom somewhat by introducing a couple of kitchen chairs into the mix. This one has a slightly yurt-y look to it, though we were unable to grout it with yak butter in the traditional manner as Asda were out of that as well.

Number four is similar to number two, but the addition of the two upright white parasols in the centre of the structure gives it a vaguely Middle-Eastern feel, or possibly just evokes thoughts of the Mound Stand at Lord's. 

Structural details of this next one are unclear except that it evidently encompassed one of the sofas. Huwie is revelling in the illicit thrill of being somewhere his sisters have probably forbidden him to be. 

A sudden shift of both location and design ethos for the next one as we relocate to the bunks in the girls' bedroom and a stark and simple design in white. There was a version of this which enclosed the top bunk (Nia's) as well via the addition of a couple of my old golf clubs and another couple of sheets, but I don't have a photo of it. I'm not sure whether Huwie is just messing about on the floor or has just been violently ejected from the enclosed lower bunk by the girls.

The next one is more of a pre-fabricated den, in that it's one of my old tents, which the kids insisted on sleeping in out in the garden. The original idea was that we'd put our family enormo-tent up and all sleep in it - what larks! - but tragically there wasn't room so Hazel and I had to take one for the team and sleep in our own bed. 

Those were all from the first half of 2020; what I like to call "denthusiasm" wore off a bit after that, or perhaps it was just my inclination to bother taking photos of them. Anyway, the next couple are from this year after we rediscovered our mojo. Here's one from February which all three of them insisted on spending the night in. You can see that it's basically three adjoining interconnected slumbering podules: Alys on the sofa, Nia in the middle on the floor and Huwie in the Peppa Pig tent. 

Finally, this one from a couple of weeks ago: no thought to sleeping comfort this time, just maximum unsupported internal span thanks to a light bedsheet-based design and use of four kitchen chairs. Once again the boy is taking his quality assurance role very seriously by seeing how many of the clothes pegs he can remove before the whole structure collapses on his head. 

So there you have it. I just get the feeling that we're starting to exhaust the possibilities now, so either we need to start getting back to normal life again or I'll need to start sawing up some furniture.