xaphod

There's actually sometimes a reason for this. I have a beautiful pair of Aldo boots, but the manufacturers fouled up the heel attachment which is a bit off-centre. I always feel as I'm walking on the edge of the heel, so when I'm standing I give the boots an inward lean to attempt to get the heel in the right place. It wasn't a fault on the particular pair of boots I bought. I took them back and tried on a couple more pairs, but they were all the same. In the end, I kept the first pair, but, much to my regret, I won't be wearing them for long outings. Xa

I was working on an airfield once, many moons ago, when all the computing power was a VAX mainframe. We had a lightning strike in the middle of the field .... HUGE great bang which caused simultaneous soiling of many trousers in some of the huts at the edge of the field. The problem was 'ground bounce' where the earth potential is no longer constant due to the huge insertion of current into the ground where the lightning struck. Boy, did that make a real black mess of the back of the VAX where all the terminal connections came in from the VT100s spread around the site. Xa

It's a bit off topic, but I remember a comment I made to an ex g/f.

Instead of the usual 'there's method in my madness', I reversed the phrase as a bit of a joke, to

'There's madness in my method'. To which her reply was 'there's truth in jest'.

Yes, she was great at put-downs, but later I had the last laugh by putting her down, ie dumping her.

Xa

. At least 20 cyclists reported they had been injured by an aggressive buzzard, which attacked them on a Devon country road, the A3072 at Brandis Corner, near Holsworthy. The buzzard became too confident, met its match taking on a car, and died. Xa

The following is a paraphrased version of the Johann Hari editorial in 'The Independent' of 28th May 2004.

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In the Television programme Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, a group of five gay men enter the life of a badly-dressed straight guy. They gasp and tut their way around his flat and wardrobe, gaping at the ways of the mysterious heterosexual. He is then taken into hand: they ensure he is plucked, deodorised, and re-dressed, before being presented to a cheering girlfriend and mother. the show is a cult hit in the US, and a British version launched last week.

The show is straightforward peddling of prejudice. It is all the more aggravating that the producers no doubt consider themselves terribly radical and 'right on'. Queer Eye is based on a myth: the idea that gay men are somehow more stylish.

I am tragic and irrefutable proof athat this is untrue. I realised that something was wrong with the way I dress when my friends started buying clothes and throwing them in the washing basket, in the hope that I would unwittingly wear something decent. Even my grandmother asked "Oh Johann, why can't you dress like those nice gay boys on television?"

Some people might imagine that camp behaviour is and inherent part of being a gay man. Aren't we somehow - perhaps genetically - more feminine? Aren't camp and gay basically the same thing? It's only if you look at the history of camp that you understand how flawed this belief is. Camp behaviour evolved in the 18th and 19th centuries for a good reason. Gay men couldn't be open about their sexuality, so they developed a shared way of behaving. Only by acting in a certain way could they send signals to each other and find sexual partners.

So camp behaviour represents the values of the 19th century closet. To survive and retain any sense of self-esteem, the gay men of that generation developed a camp outlook on life. Its main features were irony, theatrical frivolity, an aristocratic detachment from the worries of straight people, parody, and an emphasis on style over substance. It made sense then. But, I've got news for you, the closet is broken and wer're never going back - yet too many gay people are still trapped on an out-moded camp-site.

The persistence of camp has also led to a dysfunctional gay culture. In a camp world, it doesn't matter what you do, so longer as you do it with style. This explains the camp man's admiration (and staggering willingness to vote for) Margaret Thatcher. Sure, she introduced the most explicitly homophobic piece of legislation in decades with Section 28 (*), but, darling, did you see her boots?

The truth about gay people - as we finally shuffle past the twitching, ball-gowned corpse of camp - must be dull, dull, dull. In reality, we are not gifted stylists and geniuses with eye-liner. We are just as likely to be mediocre - or brilliant - as our straight brothers.

Being welcomed as performing chimps for the straight folks does not mean we've won the battle for cultural accepatance. No, it will come when we are (rightly) seen to be as boring and lacking in style as anybody else.

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(*) Section 28 was a piece of legislation that forbade the teaching of positive images of homosexuality over heterosexuality. Not wishing to be authoritative, my interpretation was that school children were to be taught that heterosexual relationships were the norm. Homosexual relationships were mentioned, but that was all.

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Spot the slip where Mr Hari is not as quite as 'right on' as

he might wish ! This part is verbatim from the newspaper.

This aside, I thought I would post the article for people to comment on .... it raises a few questions, other than mine.

The bit about Margaret Thatcher's boots. I remember she wore some straight-leg cossack boots with perhaps a 3" medium-thickness stacked heel, in the mid 80s when they were popular. My question, is, just what is it about boots that sets guy's all-a-tizzy?

Xa

Sounds like life in general .... a bitch. you're not alone How's it go ..... pleasure is merely a temporary reduction in the pain level. Xa

For me, the existence of Victoria Beckham conjours up the word 'irrelevant'. In writing this, I've already wasted too much of my life commenting upon her occupation of this planet. Xa

The sun is shining, The sea is blue, But, those attending, Best wishes to you. ..... in other words, I'm off sailing. Xa

Yes, could be worth a trip up to town in the week. Xa

.... busy .... put me down as a maybe. Calv ..... what you up to that weekend ? Xa

Yep, I've got the sweaty feet problem too. Before anyone says anything about smelly feet, I'm fastidious about cleanliness of feet and hose, so this doesn't arise. Not wearing the same pair of shoes every day is also a good plan, but with the number of shoes I have, that problem doesn't arise either. As has been said, modern patent is an impervious plastic coat applied to leather. From the few patent shoes I have worn, my feet are soon uncomfortably swimming in sweat after a couple of hours, so I avoid plastic/patent like the plague. I bought the dragon boots from Bananashoes a while ago, knowing they were plastic, but I had fallen in love with them. I wore them for 2 hours and had to take them off because they were too sweaty. I found condensation in the folds of material around the ankle which shows how much plastic doesn't breathe ! Some boots are leather upper, but with a plastic lining. From the outside, these look good, but are still sweaty. A textile lining is cheaper to make, but OK with leather uppers, because it still breathes. Leather soles are available on some 'all leather' boots/shoes. Unfortunatley these wear much more quickly than synthetic soles, so they really need a rubber sole for durability. In short, the best pair of boots are leather uppers, leather or textile lining and synthetic sole. I have a couple of very nice boots where the manufacturer has provided leather/synthetic soles, but these are rarely found. Xa

Sorry xaphod but you are not even gonna tempt me to try the feet behind the head routine,have some dignity man!

PS i loved that programme!

OK .... I know it looks grotesque, but it won me a few pints at Uni when some of the guys refused to believe I could do it. It was not too bad when I walked around on my hands, but when I fell over backwards, I was stranded !

PS ..... what programme ?

Xa

A high-street bank tried and failed to give away money.

Staff placed a sign in the window of Barclays branch in Croydon, Surrey, inviting passers-by to step inside and collect a free £5 note (7.4 USD).

But no-one took up the offer because, it is thought, no-one believed the offer was genuine.

The experiment was designed to help Barclays understand 'what engages customers as they walk past our branches'.

Xa

copy that into your post with the

tag in front of it and the tag behing it, nhoj62

Note that there must be no 'white space' between the tags and the url.

Xa

Blade .... yes, I was a HHGtoG fan for a while. I tried to type ZAPHOD, but hit X by mistake and didn't notice before hitting return, thus setting up my old IP irreversibly and forever. The reason I posted this thread was that the quack invited me in for a check up because I havn't seen him for about 10 years. One of the things he asked me to do was the above .... I have always been pretty flexible, so there was no problem doing that. The thought occurred that I might try it in my 5" Fuss courts, so, arriving back home and changing, I just manged it. As Blade says, you find tendons you didn't know existed, especially at the back of your knees. Now .... shall I see if I can still get my feet behind my head. Xa

I got a few dirty looks from some of the older members of the choir group and one older man asked me "Do you really need to be taller, young lady? Your feet will hurt so badly you'll never be able to wear those again." (I was still taller than him with my shoes off--being 5'10" ain't that bad--so the poor guy was probably just jealous!)

I suspect the following might raise a laugh.

http://www.tallgirls.co.uk/en-gb/pg_35.html

Xa

Nice one, Az, Thanks for putting the thread back on track. Certainly a break from too much math. Xa

..... now do it wearing 5" heels. Xa

Wow, I thought that high-school maths would be regarded as a trivial aside. Actually, all the problem is that way back when, I got the equation upside down, that's all. Funnily enough, I havn't made that mistake again, especially after Auntie Babs (maths mistress, 23, blonde, infinite legs, mini-skirt era) made a pubescent boy feel like a fool. HF ..... I don't call that heavy .... if you don't like just a tiny bit of maths, please feel free to ignore it. It won't matter too much if you do. Xa

Apparently, Heisenberg didn't consider himself an expert, then. If memory serves me correctly, when the captured German Nuclear Scientists, of whom Heisenberg was their leader, found out that the USA had set off a successful atom bomb (and therefore had obviuosly been able to construct one) they refused to believe it for nearly 3 months, especially when they found out what it was made from (U-235, as opposed to U-238). They had been trying, unsuccessfully, for 5 years to make U-238 fission. Heisenberg's calculations, primarily done with a "slipstick" (sliderule), showed that the amount of U-235 need to fission was 100 times greater than was actually required, and therefore separating enough of the isotope out was deemed impossible. It seems that, early on, he had "misplaced" 2 decimal points. Since no one on his team ever questioned "the great Heisenberg" or his calculations, the Germans never were able to build a successful reactor. The designs they came up with were later shown to not be able to start, much less maintain a fission reaction--even if the Allies had not been able to bomb the crap out of them.

Professionals can be surprisingly dim at times. Heisenberg wrongly thought the criterion for a self-sustaining fission reaction was that the critical mass had to be of sufficient size to capture all 3 (or so) neutrons from a fission event. Actually, providing one fission event has a probability of initiating slightly more than one fission event, the number of events will grow exponentially, admitedly at a slower rate than if all the neutrons were captured. The mass of material to satisfy the Heisenberg criterion of capturing all the neutrons must, of necessity, be much greater than the correct 'just enough' criterion.

It is very easy to labour erroneously when one has not established the correct fundamental premises of the problem. For example I confused the hell out of my maths teacher (a Cambridge grad) when she tried to sort out one of my mathematical disasters. Eventually when she saw that I put

tan(x) = cos(x) / sin(x)

at the top of the work did she insinuate that I was a stupid plonker.

Xa

Xaphod - I don't think my old teacher was being an anarchist, he was just bemoaning the "youf" of today (he did that a lot). And that every time he put out some lined paper, people would take it and write on it. Odd that; being a classroom.

Professionals can be surprisingly dim sometimes. I remember my old landlord who had a new house in the town where I first started work after Uni. I used to maintain that you could do open heart surgery on his kitchen floor, it being so clean. Dammit man, if you cook in a kitchen, you are going to make some mess. The floor will get cleaned when we do the blitz at the weekend.

He really hit the roof one evening when the other lodger and I nipped out for a beer 10 minutes before closing time, leaving a load of washing up in the sink. Unfortunately he returned while we were out and had worked himself up into a right old state by the time we got back, nicely mellow.

The bowler hat fully descended on his head (what do you expect from an uptight lawyer) when he came out with the line....

It is your first duty to do the washing up before you go out and enjoy yourselves

Xa

Hi Nikki,

I guess your teacher was being sarcastic, or have teachers got politically correct anarchy nowadays ?

here's another.

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An expert is someone who knows some of the worst mistakes that can be made in his subject and who manages to avoid them.

Werner Heisenberg

and one from me, bearing in mind that the boating urge is great upon me

Experienced yachties and novices make exactly the same number of mistakes, but I try to make mine out of sight of the yacht club.

Xa

Daz .... Yes, I thought I would PM you on the offchance you were free. I'm not 100% sure whether I will appear at Hayway or not. If I do, it will be more for the social side of the meeting than for serious shoe shopping. BTW, you being a bank wallah, what's the going rate for a business mortgage of £200k, secured on property? The best quote I have is base rate+2.5%. Loveheel .... I must admit I really liked the look. This induced me to buy them, more than any practicality of wearing them, summer approaching and all. Xa

Can't remember where I saw this one ...... When you have learned not to fear death, then you can live life. .... bit anarchic ..... could be Nietzsche Xa

. The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. Amen Xa