Blog

On a recent trip to the West of England by car I counted these dead animals by the roadside – FOUR dead deer. FIVE dead badgers. That is just me at the times I was there. What are the totals in a week, in a month, in a year, every year?

The obituary for William Hurt in The Week mentioned that he suffered from logorrhoea.

It is: Elated or irritable mood, disinhibition and recklessness (social, sexual, financial), pressured speech, flight of ideas (rapidly jumping between tenuously related topics), grandiose delusions, and mood-congruent auditory hallucinations indicate an acute manic episode.

That sounds like manic depressive behaviour without the depression.

Over the past few days I have listened to several versions of Rachmaninoff’s Elegie op.3 No.1. That includes the version played by Rachmaninoff himself. Naturally, that recording is quite old, so the full richness of the piano as an instrument doesn’t come through like it can with modern recording. Tonight, because it appeared in the sidebar on YouTube I listened to the version by Alexey Botvinov, and almost from the first note I thought it was good and was going to be good. And it is good – and he is a wonderful pianist.

Here is the link to the video on YouTube

So then I wanted to know more about the man, because I have never heard of him before. That is not a big surprise because there are many pianists and others that I have not heard of. And this is his bio – or some of it from Concert-Media

Alexey Botvinov is an exceptional pianist in our time. The most famous Ukrainian pianist, Botvinov is one of the best specialists in Rachmaninoff music worldwide. Botvinov is the only pianist who performed Bach’s „Goldberg Variations“ more than 300 times on stage. He performed in over 45 countries.

As is my wont and pleasure, I looked up the origin of the word gibberish. Etymonline has the following:

gibberish (n.)
“rapid and inarticulate speech; talk in no known language,” 1550s, imitative of the sound of chatter, probably influenced by jabber. Used early 17c. of the language of rogues and gypsies.

jabber (v.)
“talk rapidly and indistinctly,’ 1650s, spelling variant of Middle English jablen (c. 1400), also javeren, jaberen, chaveren, jawin; probably ultimately echoic. Related: Jabbered; jabbering. The noun, “rapid, unintelligible talk” is 1727, from the verb. Related: Jabberment (Milton).

Two things come to mind. One is how cruel it is to speak of ‘rogues and gypsies’ as though the two are or were thought to be synonymous. Were I a gypsy, I would be offended to my boots. And in truth we are all gypsies displaced from somewhere or other.

The second thing that comes to mind is Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll. He probably named it because it is a nonsense poem – and probably I am the last person on the planet to get the connection.

In Britain, a free range egg is one laid by a hen that lives its life scrabbling about on grass. In other words, it is ‘free to range’.

Chickens that are raised in a barn are not free range, of course. They spend their lives in barns. In the worst cases they are packed so tightly that they can do little more than shuffle in place. We know the damage this does because hens who live like that can suffer from underdeveloped leg muscles so that they can hardly walk.

Now, for the past four months, all free range hens have been confined to barns to combat a nationwide outbreak of avian flu.

And from Monday, eggs sold in shops in Britain will have to carry a sticker or label saying they are barn eggs.

Four months is apparently, the cut-off point between barn and free range.

So on the 20 March 2022, they will be free range. And on the 21 March they will be barn hens. And that is why the title of this post is ‘When’ rather than ‘What’ is a free range egg.

Lots of things have cut-off points. They enable humans to manage the world without having to negotiate everything every time. But it is a bit ludicrous, do you not think, to call an egg one thing and not another when it is not a matter of the egg producer cramming hens in a barn, but of Government policy to deal with a disease outbreak?

What will the label say, I wonder?

Following the example of Bhutan, other countries adopted the principle of GNH – and tomorrow the 20th March is Gross National Happiness Day – passed by the United Nations in 2012 (resolution 66/28) on the model of Bhutan