h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I thought Charlie's dead was to do with Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping dressed as a woman.

>> ..to borrow my engine hoist so I shall be late going to a leaving do. A case of being retarded by my own hoist? <<


Cheers Duncan.

~jwf~

>> ..Black and White inevitably give the highest contrast...Think about it...<<


Black absorbs light and by contrast white reflects light.
So any part of a page of bleached pulp that is covered with squid juice will be very visible because it blocks the reflective light.

Yes contrast is the thing.
Red on blue or vice versa offers very little contrast. In most color blindness tests it isn't the hues that confuse, it's the lack of contrast y'can't get past.

Let's hear it for black ink on white paper!
Yay!


~jwf~

For many visually impaired people, the white page causes too much glare & they do better with white on black. I guess that yellow or green are sometimes better depending on rod/cone invovlement in the eye condition.

The red/blue difficulty is as was stated earlier, because of chromatic aberration & the eye continually adjusting focus.
Testing colour blindness is dependent on distinguishing differences in hue, not contrast.

At least on a PC you can adjust the settings to suit your own preferences. Not so easy with public signs etc.!

Yes, of course, Hel2. I remember the news about the dog dying.

<<'look at the juddlies on that!' are subtle enough to go unremarked>>

Subtle? You think?

<<'look at the juddlies on that!' are subtle enough to go unremarked>>

Mmmm - Mr Suave! - What can he be on about?

(Getting back to the contrast issue)

Yes, there are various conditions in which the excess light from the page will cause scattering or prism effects. For those so affected, other colour combinations may me preferable. It's a matter of balance, though. Even with the appropriate colours, reading for a person with visual impairment will not be as good as for one without. It is difficult to argue that a sub-group should be accommodated by a degradation for all.

For signs - as opposed to general text - the value of coloured backgrounds is debateable, given the type of reading tasks. Character font and size are probably more significant.

Three points:

1) I had heard that Sans Serif was invented for the purpose of making railway timetables legible in tiny print.

2) Cardinal Bembo also gave his name to a font (appropriately) though he did not design it himself (it is a Monotype font of the 1920s based on a 16th century font made by Griffo to print a book by Bembo). He was a Renaissance man (literally), a friend of Lucrezia Borgia and highly influential in the emergence of the Italian Madrigal and other cultural projects.

3) Brass monkey: OED says that that is a kind of gun or cannon

"1650 Articles Rendition Edenb.-Castle 4, 28 Short Brasse Munkeys alias Dogs. 10 Iron Munkeys.
1663 J. HEATH Flagellum (1672) 103 Twenty-eight Brass Drakes called Monkeys."

(a Drake is also a small cannon)

A new google search of 'brass monkey' these days will bring up several very interesting pages, most of which have abandoned the old story of shrinking cannonball racks. One writer even catgeorically poo-poos the wisdom of stacking balls in a pyramid - but that's just some ivory towered academic taking logic without practical experience way too far. And of course there is also a British commercial site selling underwear that refuses to let the legend die.

BUT...
moving right along...
a new and serious inquiry...

I have often heard the expression 'best of British luck'.
To me it seems to be usually said in a contemptuous or cynical way, indicating that there is some preconception that British luck is not the fun and happy equal of the famous and much favoured Irish luck.

I am at a loss to know why 'British luck' is held in such low regard. Or am I interpreting the tone or context incorrectly? Irony is often lost in translation. So can anyone identify the source of this expression or its true meaning?


~jwf~

I feel it's more used in a situation where the odds are stacked against you & the luck unlikely to materialise. Brewer says the phrase is used ironically.

Why British, I don't know - stiff upper lip & all that?

I was reading this http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-iri1.htm about the term 'Irish twins'.

I was reminded of another fertility-related term which I understand is used in Ireland: 'The shaking of the bag' refers to children born many years after their siblings. It refers to the shaking of the last sweet from a paper bag.

Very descriptive...if somewhat derogatory of the mother.

By the way...in Scotland, bags are still called 'pokes' - as in 'A pig in a...' And an ice cream cone can be a 'pokey hat'.

(Much confusion as Scotsmen enter English chip shops and say 'Give us a poke')

If "the best of British luck" is said ironically, that would hark back to the days when the British were top quadrupeds-that-may-not-be-mentioned-here.
When you are in charge of the situation (such as ruling an empire), luck is treated as largely irrelevant.

Does British luck have low esteem? In my experience, wishing someone 'Best of British' has positive - if meinhostish - connotations. Unless I'm just failing to pick up on the sarcasm.

no, I don;t think there was any deliberate attempt to be sarcastic or ironic when i have heard the phrase used. Mind you, I have always known it as just "Best of British".
Used, perhaps, in an undercanine or bad looking but not too serious situation.
Like, I dunno, borrowing the partners car, crashing it, going down pub to get over it and then wandering back home from the pub to tell said partner a) the car is written off and b) where you have been for the last 10 hrs and why you are as drunk as a lord, One's friends in said pub might say, when they find out what you are doing, 'Ah well, best of British mate' as you head off to face the music.

Although I would argue that it is becoming somewhat rusty from lack of use. Least in the circles I move in!

<>

That's how I've always heard it...

I have extracted the following from deep in cyberspace somewhere. I'd post the link but no one would probably find the paragraph in question before losing their enthusiasm so I have taken the opportunity to cutteded it and pasteded it and editteded it for effect. It is my sincere hope you will all consider the following as a possible source for the 'attitude' one used to hear in 'the best of British Luck'. An attitude of grim humour when facing an obvious and almost inevitable fate.

"...Gracie Fields was Lancashire born and reached the heights in comedy and film roles. In the summer of 1939 'Our Gracie' underwent a very serious operation and was told by her doctors to go to her villa in Capri and recuperate. She rested for six weeks.

...she travelled to France in November 1939 to entertain the troops. We hear her in full flight, with just a piano, doing just that in a recording actually broadcast by the BBC.

-Wish Me Luck- was from her very popular recent film 'Shipyard Sally' which took on a greater significance now that there was a war on.

In March 1940, Gracie married film director Monty Banks and three months later Italy declared war on the Allies. As Monty held an Italian passport he risked being interned on account of being an 'enemy alien'.

This threw Gracie into a quandary, so she arranged to do a nationwide tour of Canada to raise funds for the Navy League...
(but) whilst (away) she faced a terrific backlash from the British press and public, accusing her (falsely) of 'running away' with vast amounts of money and jewellery. ...(her next) disc wasn't released in the UK, a reflection of Gracie's rather persona non grata status at this time.

It wasn't until after the war that Gracie regained her former popularity with her homeland..."

Now this story, with all the grim realities that the song came to mean to so many during the war, has at least has some of the 'inevitability' factor I hear in the expression 'best of British luck', a kind of realistic fatalism of the undercanine kind which I have probably been mistaking for irony all these years. I mean, war is hell and all that, but by crickey, the tanks you get when you go off to sell war bonds and they call you a thief and traitor because you're married to a wannabe wop.


~jwf~

Is this a tale? This is a tale.
Are we convinced? We are convinced.
Thank you ~jwf~

It was a very interesting story.

I thought that Gracie Fields dated back to Music Hall days (ca. 1910 - not wartime.) So I've learned something thanks to jwf for today.

'Our Gracie' was Britain's highest paid film performer - she earned even more than George Formby.

The early 90's soul singer, Lisa Stansfield, also comes from Rochdale. Gracie's real name was Grace Stansfield. Presumably a family connection?