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On many, many clocks the snooze function is nine minutes instead of ten or five. Why oh why oh why is this the case. This is especially difficult since it has been suggested by many people that getting up on an odd number of minutes is bad luck.*

The thing is that I personally don’t use the snooze function. The problem is that if I had snooze then I would probably snooze forever. What I do is I turn my alarm clock off when ever it goes. This leaves me only one choice: get out of bed. When I used to be much more tired back in the bad old days I used to avoid snooze with it’s easy choices, and turn the alarm off but set a new alarm time of ten minutes from now. This gave me the extra ten minutes in bed that I needed and meant that I had made a conscious thought and so was at least partially out of my deep sleep.

So I was talking to my friend Alison who was wondering about why the snooze is nine minutes the other day, and I couldn’t remember the answer right away. I think this may be because there are about a million stupid reasons for it. The most common wrong reason is that digital watch makers wanted to only have to watch one digit of the clock and so made it be 9 minutes. This sounds pretty good. You would have to only remember one piece of data and watch for the number to be that again. But why not wait for it to be that plus one?

The real reason seems to be that it comes from analogue clocks. And that analogue clocks are slightly imprecise. And that the snooze was supposed to be 10 minutes or less. At first this meant that the snooze wheel ran for somewhere between 9 and ten minutes. But as the clocks became more and more intricate they became more and more accurate even with the snooze. At some point somebody decided to make it determined by the minute hand to add to the precision and at that point nine minutes was chosen as the largest number of minutes that is less than ten.

Then in the digital age when somebody was copying the clock they based it on this system. And then it got built into the National Semiconductor’s MM5370 digital alarm-clock chip which is used in most modern digital alarm clocks.

*Hey I don’t make these things up! People who think this, but want to use the snooze function, use this as an excuse to press snooze twice. Whereas this could be easily avoided by having the alarm clock go off one minute early (not that they’d ever do that).

Once while out with a group of girls, as the designated driver, I was able to discover one of the greatest secrets of the universe. That night the true reason why women take longer in the toilet than men was revealed to me, and also the related reason of why they go to the toilet in pairs.

In this perfect storm of a situation they were willing just for the night to reveal the utter truth of the situation, something that they have never done to a man who is sober. All I can imagine is that that night – they were really drunk.*

The answer is, of course, that they play tennis – in the cubicles. And as we know there is a common tendency of women to go to the toilet at the same time. This is because they have a match lined up and ready to go.

The exact rules are not widely known among men-folk but generally involve lofting the spare toilet roll over the tops of the cubicles. Games can take upwards of twenty minutes and this is the main reason that these things take so long. Toilet-tennis is rapidly being banned in chic establishments as it has been widely linked to the emergence of male homophobia. Male homophobia it is widely agreed is far more common than that among women. This is due to men’s inability to play toilet tennis.

Many years ago when toilets were coming into fashion, toilet tennis was invented. Both men and women played at first. But more often than not the men would find that the spare roll that they were using would fall into the urinal or bowl that was less guarded because they weren’t sitting down. Although most men didn’t care about the roll getting soggy, and just scratched the game, men couples leaving the toilets soon came to be scorned.

People who sat near men couples soon noticed the smell of urine on their trousers and so began a dislike among society of men going to the toilet together. To make matters good and equal opportunities a lot of chic restaurants, as I say, are banning tennis altogether rather than letting men sit in their restaurants covered in piss.

*Actually to get back from the pub to where the car was parked I had to take this merry band across a field which had cows in it. The part of the field we had to walk across was about a normal persons’ one minute walk in a straight line. And in that time two of them “got lost” and wandered into the middle of the cows. That’s how drunk they were. I can still vividly remember now trying to herd the ladies to one corner of the field after one of them declared that she would only answer to me shouting “Moo”.

This is the true story of the only person to have ever died on the Waterloo and City underground line. This might be because it’s the shortest line which probably means that if you fall ill there would be time to take you off of the train in time. And also because each end of the line results in a terminus there is no real speed for the trains and so you wouldn’t be very successful if you flung yourself in front of one.

But one man has done it. He succeeded where others had failed. He managed to kill himself on the Waterloo and City line. The way that this occurred was that he was drunk and on his way home from some serious revelling in the City. And mid journey he decided that he needed a pee. Now he must have been really desperate because the journey is frankly not very long. And clearly he was, but being British he didn’t feel he could just pee on the train that wouldn’t be very polite. So he opened the door between the carriages and stepped out. Amazingly he wasn’t killed by this simple act, so perched on the small interconnecting strip between the carriages he started to relieve himself. But clearly he didn’t do so for very long because he managed to create a simple electrical circuit between himself and the live rail and was instantly killed. It is not recorded which of the trains he was on, Walter, Lou, Anne or Kitty* but surely none of them can be blamed.

*No, really!

I’ve been to a few social gatherings in my time and at some of them speeches have been required. It’s an odd area because sometimes the people making the speeches are exacctly the kind of people who love making speeches and sometimes the people concerned have been forced into it.

I do love listening to a speech regardless of the quality because it’s usually entertainingly good or entertainingly bad. However if you are about to make a speech here are my two handy tips taken from real speeches that have gone well.

Tip one, for the person who makes a lot of speeches and does it well:
This one comes straight from the person I’ve seen make the most speeches in my life. He is famous for his speeches and always starts them with the same hoarey old line, “unaccustomed as I am”, which because it’s a lie and such an obvious one means he starts with a laugh every time. A good start is always important.

Tip two, for the person who doesn’t often make speeches and might be nervous.
Keep it simple and keep it short. If you’re stuck for a line that’s simple and short then you might like to use this one which was used at a wedding I attended and was the entirety of the only speech. First he went all out for making everyone quiet and so on. Then had somebody say, “pray silence for the speeches” and then he said, “ok everyone, lets get pissed”.

Note to American readers “pissed” in this context means “drunk”.

As I’m just moving at the moment and having some work done before I move in. And it’s revealed to me a very bizarre change that seems to have happened in the building world.

The thing is that there probably isn’t that much that changes in the world of workmen. This could of course be incredibly prejudicial, but I think it’s the case. I guess ease of access to electrical equipment and power tools have somewhat changed the job, but what I’m thinking of has totally revolutionised it. I mean to a tradesman this is the biggest thing since the portable radio, and all that meant was that they don’t now have to whistle which probably saves them a little bit on lip-salve and not much else.

The big change for them must have come with the invention of the mobile phone. This really must have altered the way that they work. Simply because now they can book in their next job while they are still doing their current one. It’s one of those technology situations where you suddenly realise “what on earth did they ever do before”? Did they have an answering service that they checked in on from time to time? Or did they only take calls in the evening?

I realised that the best way to find the answer to this was to simply ask them. But all of the people who are working for me said that they used to work for firms and be given jobs to do by the firm itself. So they had never worked as a sole trader without a phone. But then I wonder, is it not the mobile phone that has made it possible for them to quit their jobs and become a sole trader? It seems entirely possible.

Other things I have learnt from this moving experience:

1) Taking wallpaper off a wall where the wallpaper has had paint on top of it is really hard.

And

2) If you want to name your son after yourself then a really good name to have is Robert. I had two guys working for me at one point as a father and son team. The father was called Bert and the son Rob. It really helps to have two short names within your long name if you’re going to try and pull a stunt like that.

In last Friday’s article (
Deckchair of Death) I used the word Filtrum (or Philtrum it depends on your personal spelling preference) which is a pretty interesting word.

The Philtrum is the small groove that sits underneath your nose. And it’s interesting mainly because of what it means for search on the web*.

During perhaps 2000 / 2001 there was an advert made by British Telecom that was aimed at promoting the internet. In the advert a young girl walked into the center of the coliseum and was faced with millions of different people sitting there looking at her. The girl then piped up with a question which was, “What do you call the thing between your nose and your mouth”. Everyone in the coliseum goes quiet and then a guy stands up (wearing a lab coat) and says “It’s called a Philtrum”. And then the advert went on to extol the value of the internet as the place where you can find the answer to anything.

The interesting thing about that advert to me at the time was the at that precise moment there wasn’t a way to find the answer to that question on the internet. In fact it’s still the pretty much the case now. One of the hardest things to find information about on the internet is the collective group of “thing’s you don’t know the right name for”. It used to be joined by “things you don’t know how to spell” but Google solved that one so well that I know people who use Google as a spellchecker.

The big problem is that with this and many other things if you don’t know the exact right question then you won’t find the answer. Basically your only chance is if there happens to be an article which is titled with the question.

So say we actually plug “What do you call the thing between your nose and your mouth” with or without quotes into the major search engines. Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live all say no-way to it, with quotes they all say “no pages found” and without quotes they return answers which are equally useless. However ask does have the answer to the question the only article it returns whether you’ve put the question in quotes or not is the exact right one and bizarrely is an article about how best to search for an answer to the question. Actually to be fair to Yahoo the answer is the third one in the list if you don’t include quotes but that may just be because the page is actually on Yahoo!

My main point is that while they’ve got better in many ways no search engine other than ask have really dealt with this problem properly. Ask, unfortunately, still doesn’t return for me the best results in a normal search. So I wonder if the answer really is to have to recognise this is a special kind of search and return a different kind of page? I don’t know, but the problem remains as difficult as it once was – at least it does for Google.

*There’s another interesting thing too. According to Jewish tradition, in the womb every baby is taught all of the wisdom of the world by an angel, and then just before the baby is born the angel touches the baby on the upper lip (to shh the baby) which makes it forget everything it has been taught. Sadly the Talmud is silent on why this occurs. Maybe because it is bonkers.

In last Friday’s article (
Deckchair of Death) I used the word “Dander” which is interesting (I think, but then what is this site other than things that I find interesting?).

To get one’s dander up means to become angry. But the word dander doesn’t really mean angry unless the “get my/his/her/their/ones” and “up” are wrapped around it. The rest of the time dander describes scurf* shed from the skin. It has the same root as dandruff, which is a specific form of dander. Dander is more often used to describe the kind of animal skin dust that causes people to suffer from allergies.

So what on earth has this got to do with being angry? Although I don’t really have any allergies (except I am allergic to skin contact with Christmas trees – but it doesn’t come up much) I would imagine it would make you pretty angry – but that isn’t it.

So where does it come from? Well it seems most likely that saying somebody is getting their dander up is to suggest that they are becoming redundant. And although people do get mad when they get fired it isn’t that either. Basically redundant means to have too much of something and a certain time it was used to mean “to overflow” (as in the extra liquid is redundant it is overflowing). And it’s fair to say that a an angry person is one who is overflowing with emotions. So that seems to be it, although how the word mutated is still a mystery.

*Scurf? No? Really? Well that’s kind of scaly matter, skin cells or scales etc.