Trivia

This afternoon, I learned from BH, who had been taking a peek at the puzzle page of today's Guardian, that the collective noun for pandas is an embarrassment.

First up, was why would one bother to have a collective noun in English for pandas? It is, after all, most unlikely that any of us are going to encounter lots of pandas in the wild.

Second up, that the Guardian was having us on, at best fishing up some tripe from social media. So off to my centenarian OED, where the entry for embarrassment was quite short, only a couple of column inches, with no hint of pandas or any other kind of animal. Just to be sure, I took a look at Longmans, from where the usage also missing - although it does offer 'embarrassment of riches'. So inching towards pandas.

Third up, off to Gemini to ask him about the matter. The start of his entertaining story is snapped above. A story which might be glossed as saying that the golden age of collective nouns in England was the fifteenth century when lots of upwardly mobile people made a big deal of flaunting their knowledge of field sports, with these collective nouns being big in that connection. Other people had a bit of fun by adding lots of nonsense to the lists of same.

Then there was something of a period of hibernation, until someone published a book about these nouns in 1968, inviting all and sundry to have a go at inventing new ones. The public rose to the challenge, and now, with the advent of the Internet, pub quizzes and social media there is lots of this stuff about. Words with no proper pedigree, provenance - or even currency - at all. The Guardian probably picked up its  'embarrassment' from some list on the Internet.

A story which checks out to the extent of my having no trouble getting hold of a copy of reference 1 and there being the Wikipedia pages at references 2 and 4.

Gemini goes on to suggest that maybe I should have a go at the text proper, not just the introduction.

The close of this part of his offering.

I should perhaps look into the oddity of lions making the cut back in 1486.

Gemini points out that pandas are very solitary animals and that you are most unlikely to come across a group of them in the wild - and furthermore that the Chinese do not have a collective noun for them.

All of which prompts the thought that all these collective nouns are a bit OTT anyway. Where is the value-add of having a special word for each sort of animal? In those cases where simple singular or plural are not enough, why not just say 'herd of' or have some special suffix - in the way of, for example, sticking 'er' on the end of red to make it more red - and have done with? Maybe someone has written a treatise on the matter? In sum, the whole business seems a bit inkhorn to me, to use a derogatory term which I believe was current in the Bard's time. 

With my closing thought being that linguists and anthropologists might get all solemn and serious about the way that language changes over time and place, but maybe a good part of that change is just driven by people having a bit of fun, a bit of a lark?

Work in progress. Maybe tomorrow I will take a proper look at reference 1.

PS: Friday morning: the quest continues.

I am now digging into reference 1 and have found a long, more or less humorous, list of collective nouns. Gemini's take on a murmuration is snapped above. All to do with murmuring rather than making fancy patterns in the sky. See page 120/218.

I associate this morning to seeing a lot of starlings flying around the tower of Gloucester Cathedral. It was early evening and very impressive, but I can't now remember whether it amounted to a murmuration. In the margins of a visit to RAF Innsworth.

References

Reference 1: The Book of Saint Albans - Dame Juliana Berners - 1486. There is a facsimile edition with an introduction by one William Blades, published in 1901 by Elliot Stock, freely available on the Internet. My copy was digitised by the Internet Archive, from a copy held by the Library of the University of Toronto, funded by Microsoft. I might add that quite a lot of digitised books that I come across seem to come from Toronto. Maybe I should ask Gemini why!

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Saint_Albans.

Reference 3: An Exaltation of Larks - James Lipton - 1968.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lipton.

Group search key: aisk.

One that got away

Being out of circulation at the time, I was unable to visit this fine crane which turned up somewhere in the vicinity of Sun Street in the City, the place where I did visit the bent crane, as noticed at reference 1.

A bit higher up. Quite tricky to get a decent shot of the whole thing with a telephone.

Lots more pictures of roughly the same thing at references 2, 3 and 4.

A first, in that there appears to be no trace of this particular outfit in the archive.

If one was quite rich, but still living in suburbia, it would be fun to hire one of these to lift one's new garden room into the back garden. One could make a bit of a festival of it with refreshments being provided for neighbours and crew. Maybe invite the mayor and the Surrey Comet along. And it t would put the people at reference 7 to shame. Sadly though, I imagine that there would be a lot of council hurdles to get over, before one could pull off such a stunt.

And while we are on technology, I read at reference 6 that money is pouring into the brain implant business. The latest hot ticket for speculators. Another pie that Mr. Musk has got his fingers into. Inter alia, it seems that US and Chinese investors have got more stomach for this sort of thing than those here in the UK: size does count.

See reference 5 for previous notice.

[Lifted from reference 2. Something to do with offshore wind farms in Taiwan. On rails rather than tracks]

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-bent-crane.html. I had thought this was last year, not the year before. The sort of thing which seems to be happening all the time these days. All the more worrying as I have been noticing rather larger lapses in the memory of elapsed time among older gentlemen recently!

Reference 2: https://www.mammoet.com/.

Reference 3: https://www.mammoet.com/equipment/cranes/crawler-cranes/cc-8800-1/.

Reference 4: https://www.mammoet.com/siteassets/06-equipment/cranes/crawler-cranes/cc-8800-1/datasheet-cc-8800-1.pdf.

Reference 5: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/06/reading-brain.html.

Reference 6: ‘I had a superpower’: investors pile into mind-reading brain implants: Start-ups developing thought-controlled technology are drawing venture capital funding from Silicon Valley to Beijing - Clive Cookson and Michael Peel, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 7: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/07/big-bath-1.html.

Chicken dinners

This being a record of a series of chicken dinners, qualified by the accidental encounter with risotto noticed at reference 1. I had been thinking, on and off, about having another go at something based on rice myself, having failed at previous attempts, many years ago now, to do better than a sort of savoury rice pudding.

The series was terminated by chicken soup, previously noticed at reference 2.

The day in question started with the rather sickly holm end at the upstream end of Manor Green Road, previously noticed at reference 3, snapped on this side from the sunny, the most damaged side. I have learned since that trees, branches of trees, can recover from early leaf loss of this sort: we shall see if this one does.

BH was in charge of the chicken and my contribution went little further than preparation of the all important cabbage, a sort of summer Savoy on this occasion.

Followed up by another damson pie, fuelled by fruit which had continue to fall onto the path up our back garden from a neighbouring tree.

Enamel pie dish from China visible top left. The pineapple nic-nak from our branch of Oliver Bonas below that served to contain the many damson stones.

Gemini corrects my spelling in the snap above. Knicknack it is.

And there was more to come. The sort of thing a former correspondent ought to have been into, a mainly resting actor very hot on matter rhythm ought to have been into, although he tended to focus on Elizabethan blank verse (often unrhymed iambic pentameter) , Alexandrines and James Joyce, almost to the exclusion of all else.

Having checked with OED, which agreed with Gemini, our conversation moved through knickers, then playing the bones and ended with playing the spoons in east London pubs, perhaps providing the rhythm section to the old joanna. I quote:

'... When actual rib bones became less common as everyday domestic scrap, cutlery stood ready. Two matching dessert spoons held back-to-back, with an index finger acting as a spring fulcrum between the handles, make an extraordinarily fast percussion instrument. When someone who genuinely knows what they are doing gets hold of them, they produce a machine-gun clatter that easily rivals Spanish castanets or orchestral snare work...'.

Taking in the old rhyme 'knick-knack, paddy-whack, give the dog a bone' on the way.

At this point, we consulted our cook books about paellas, risottos and biryanis. Even more stuff out there on the Internet. A lot of the recipes were quite complicated with celebrity chefs looking to add value, or perhaps playing to those who rate a dish according to the number of ingredients - a measure which has the disadvantage that ready meals, tinned foods and so forth are going to win every time. Lots of ingredients, particularly powdery ones, is easy in a factory.

But the basic idea seemed to be fairly standard: fry a few chopped vegetables, add some rice and fry for a bit longer, then slowly add some stock until the rice is more or less cooked to taste. Then add some protein, likely pre-cooked chicken, fish or shell fish of one sort of another.

I tried something even more basic with the left-over chicken, snapped above and that worked well enough. Well enough to give a simplified paella a go the following day. I did bother with saffron, which coloured the rice up nicely, but I didn't bother with fish or shell fish on this first occasion.

And although I say it myself, I thought it all went pretty well.

Rounded off with some strawberries, probably from Sainsbury's. Small but entirely satisfactory, taken without sugar. The only catch being that the left-overs did not stand very well.

PS 1: they sell a lot of paella out of large steel pans in Borough Market. I continue to wonder how they deal with the left-overs. Or do they usually judge it just right, with the last pan emptying just as the queue dies down? The Estrela at Vauxhall does a good one too.

PS 2: along the way, I noticed the luxury patch of grass at reference 5. I have since had a word with the lady of the house, who explained that there was indeed a water meter hole in the middle of the patch. She consulted the water board, who came to take a look at the hole, full of water at the time, and they assured here that there was no leak. 

Perhaps what they really meant was that the meter was spinning which meant that the leak, if indeed there was one, was on her side of the meter and so nothing to do with them.

Which fits well enough with the gas people having recently replaced our gas intake from road to meter. All of which, incidentally, went very smoothly: they really could push a new plastic pipe up through the old one - which looked iron rather than copper to me. See reference 6 for previous notice. The same rule could apply in both cases: the utility is responsible for the pipework up to and including the meter, regardless of whether that pipework is on public or private property. What is different is the location of the meter. How come the lawyers have not got themselves stuck into all this?

PS 3: I associate to a story of or from my father, apt to wear rather battered, old-style working clothes when gardening. He used to deal with unwelcome callers by suggesting that they talk to the lady of the house.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/cheese.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/more-water.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/two-early-mornings.html.

Reference 4: https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/paella_7100.

Reference 5: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/there-be-water-in-pond.html.

Reference 6: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/the-gas-man-is-coming.html.

Group search key: 20260822, aisk.

The start of September

There had been enough rain by the beginning of the month to bring two striking thistles out of nearby verges.

Presumably the same species, with the differences being down to context. Is the weaker appearance of the second just down to deprivation of something or other?

Presumably they start to shoot up and flower at some point. But is that something that would happen soon, if unmolested, or would they wait until the spring?

Google Images seems clear enough that the first image is a common thistle (Cirsium vulgare), with this flat rosette in the first year and (usually) the tall, flowering stem the second. This is consistent with both references 7 and 8, although neither provide a similar image. But Bing turns one up at reference 9.

I pass on separate checking of the second image.

Back at home, the end of my spectacles case caught my eye. The rectangular array of white dots decorating the outside had turned into a spiral. What was going on here?

Closer inspection suggested that this was the result of the slight misalignment of the top and bottom of the case, with the top shifting one step with respect to the bottom. Which did not seem terribly satisfactory as a proper spiral is not made up of arcs of circles.

But I thought I would give it a go in Powerpoint, just to see. Which resulted in the snap above, with four loose ends rather than two, which I had not managed to work out inside the brain, without access to paper and pencil (or Powerpoint, as the case might be).

You can cheat by shifting one half two steps rather than one with respect to the other half. You still get four loose ends, but they are more agreeably aligned this way. More spiral like - but not what is happening in the case of the spectacles case.

The basic idea was to chop a nest of circles in half using the Snipping Tool, and then to put the two halves back together appropriately. Then adding in a couple of missing arcs. But I would say that I found it a bit fiddly to add the final arc at the top, resorting to the arc shape, which I do not use very often. It might have been quicker to use the remove background tool, but then I do not use that very often either. Was I missing something?

I wonder how difficult it would be to ask Copilot, which I think is embedded in Powerpoint these days, to produce the figure? Would he have managed a better job than I did?

In the meantime, I have brushed up a little on some long forgotten geometry.

And while we are on mind games, I have recently been brushing up on the NATO alphabet of reference 2, and found that I had mislaid 'uniform' and was reduced to asking my telephone. All back in place now, I am pleased to be able to report.

From there I moved onto the animal game, a version of that reported at reference 3. In brief, the idea is to roll through the alphabet giving the common name of a mammal for each letter. Water mammals are allowed. An important rule is that if a B comes after A, B cannot name the same animal as A, nor can it name a sub-group or super-group of A. So while it might be tempting to use 'elephant' for 'E', that would rule out using 'Indian elephant' for 'I', which is even more convenient.

For this game, I did not resort to the telephone, managing to recover 'hyrax' and 'urial' under my own steam. I knew that there was some group of animals for 'X' which included sloths and anteaters, but failed to recover 'Xenarthra'. And Wikipedia failed to include it very visibly at reference 4. There is, however, reference 5. The word makes it to Webster's, although not to OED - and I give it the benefit of the doubt.

As it happens, one of my holiday reads was the book at reference 6, from which I learn that these animals are important in the myths of the first peoples of South America, although I don't think that Lévi-Strauss uses the X word: he may not have been aware of the connection, despite his extraordinarily wide reading. But more of that in due course.

On a slightly different tack, during my latest visit to the hospital, I was using the same notebook that I had used during a previous visit, a Pukka Pad from the branch of Smith's there. I was reminded that I had spent quite a lot of time on a version of Simpson's paradox, getting as far as generating some examples of my own. I had meant to write it up, but, in the event, the matter only made a passing mention at reference 12. It is described properly at references 13 and 14.

But what I cannot now recover is what sparked my interest in the matter in the first place, or how I found out that the paradox had been named for Simpson. Maybe it will come back to me, and maybe  I will have another go.

Moving on to today, out to check the pond, where the water was all present and correct, gently washing over the bar below the brickwork at the bottom of the snap.

Neither geese nor coots to be seen, but plenty of noisy ducks and some moorhens. I think that the blobs of reference 1, which I had thought might have been goslings, were actually large stones on the top of the island.

Maybe tomorrow I will remember to take my monocular to help me along, as I had intended today.

PS 1: there was a senior moment in the course of checking OED for Xenarthra. I pulled the first volume off the shelf, before the brain worked out that I really wanted the (rather heavier) last volume. 

Noting in passing that whoever bound up my copy, perhaps the library at the school at Guildford who were the original owners, started well, with modest volumes only a couple of inches thick, but got meaner as they worked their way through the alphabet, with fat volumes, three or four inches thick, getting more common.

PS 2: the wretched Letby business has reappeared in the news with the publication of the Thirlwell Report, to be found at reference 10. I am not yet good for its three fat volumes, but I am turning the pages of the summary, a modest 75 pages. All rather depressing. Previous notice is to be found at reference 11.

PS 3: I have now tracked the paradox to its source. It seems that it was a digression which was spawned at the time of the post at reference 15. I did do some further work on it after I left hospital, but did not bring it to the point of a post. The curious reader can try reverse engineering the figure snapped above.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-end-of-august.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/08/breaking-rhythm.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-alphabet-game-revisited.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-toed_sloth.

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenarthra.

Reference 6: The jealous potter – Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1985, 1988.

Reference 7: https://bsbi.org/learn/resources/identification-guides/thistle-i.dentification.

Reference 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirsium_vulgare.

Reference 9: https://keys.lucidcentral.org/keys/v3/eafrinet/weeds/key/weeds/Media/Html/Cirsium_vulgare_(Spear_Thistle).htm.

Reference 10: https://thirlwall.public-inquiry.uk/the-report/#Summary-report-on-report-page.

Reference 11: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/search?q=letby.

Reference 12: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/09/another-library.html.

Reference 13: https://world-of-mathematics.com/blog/simpsons-paradox-and-causality/.

Reference 14: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox.

Reference 15: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/11/sex-on-bridge.html.

Reference 16: The interpretation of interaction in contingency tables – Simpson, C. – 1951.

Group search keys: 20260901, 20260915

Fake 207

This one, from the second floor cafeteria of Epsom Hospital, had me fooled. It did not occur to me that these walls were fake, and I only found out that they were when I tapped them, having gone across to investigate what I had thought was a change of colour from something brown to white. While the counter hand assured me that they had been white all along. Maybe she had not been there at the time of my last visit, rather more than two years ago now.

I suppose the stuff comes in sheets, rather like sheets of plywood or plasterboard, but I am at a bit of a loss as to how they might be fixed to the substrate, whatever that might be.

This post to mark my return from a visit to the hospital: a couple of days in A&E followed by something over a week on a ward, in the course of which I acquired a pacemaker.

In the course of which I came across a lot of ill people, some very ill, all being looked after. But dignity in dying did come to mind, and nothing that I saw disturbed my firm belief that we should be able to call time, if we so choose, when we are very ill, when life is no longer worth living. So I was very disappointed to learn, while I was inside, as it were, that the Assisted Dying Bill had been narrowly been voted down in our House of Commons, having been blocked by some troublesome Lords, after having been passed by the House of Commons, last year. All noticed in these pages from time to time, for example at reference 2. 

At least our MP, a Liberal Democrat, was an 'aye', even if only an aye by proxy. So I made the right call in not bothering to write to her office again about this. A record of her vote is snapped above.

Gemini explains about proxy votes. In response to a supplementary, he goes on to explain the mechanics of a proxy voting twice, once for himself and then again as a proxy.

At least some relatively minor, but still sensible, reforms we do manage to get through, this one in 2019.

In the hospital, I did not have access to Gemini in my usual way, through my laptop, but I thought I would ask him what the Chinese did about all this, on my telephone. After all, they are a very big country and must face similar issues.

I was surprised, nevertheless, to find that the position there sounded very much like that here. The powers that be are dragging their feet, while the population at large wants some change. With one of the powers in their case being their traditional values with regard to care for the old; roughly speaking taking the role of the Church in our case - with our new Prime Minister (brought up a Catholic) and our new Archbishop (the head of the Anglican Church) both being opposed to change.

Being on my telephone meant that my conversation with Gemini was not as well supported as it is on my laptop, but I did discover that I could export chunks of it to email, resulting in the snap above.

A little later, I picked up the interesting piece at reference 4. Maybe Bush has a point: we need to move on from endlessly debating the small print and look at the bigger picture? Maybe the failure of the present bill will provide an opportunity to open up the debate in the way that Bush suggests.

On a lighter note, I thought that the catering at the hospital was pretty good. Once one had worked out how the menu worked and which things you liked and which you didn't, you could feed well enough, with a sample being snapped above. 

That said, it also helped to have someone who could provide top ups like grapes and plums from the outside. Such things might, of course, been a bit nearer to hand, had Sainsbury's been allowed to have a go in what had been in the White Horse, just outside the hospital gates - but that is another story. Finding notice of same is left as an exercise to the reader.

On another day, medical matters clashed with catering matters, and I think I got one of the meals offered to the private patients upstairs. I dare say in their case it would have been decanted onto a plate. I thought it was pretty good, even if the chick peas were not up to the standard of those which used to be sold in bars in the Canary Islands. There they were allowed to touch the chick peas up with a little pork! These ones from the people at reference 6, not previously heard of.

Noting that M&S had a go in a corner of the hospital proper a few years back - a go which did not seem to last very long at all. I don't know why they pulled out: was it part of the fallout from Covid? Also the W H Smith's inside serves very well as a convenience store, even if they do not run to fruit. They do, for example, run to the TLS, in which, as it happened, there was another end of life piece, reference 5, to which I may return in due course. For the moment, I only offer my rather cynical, off-the-cuff reaction, that it was written by a lawyer with fees to be earned. Got to keep the pot on the boil.

PS: I am getting rather lazy about checking output from Gemini. Must do better!

References.

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/fake-206.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/07/demo-two.html. Which reminds of the days when Central Hall in Westminster had a fine cafeteria in their basement. Sadly, there is now just a very inferior replacement in a ground floor corner.

Reference 3: https://www.dignityindying.org.uk/. The fight goes on!

Reference 4: Britain’s assisted dying debate was hobbled by a lack of candour: Legislation defeated in parliament last week was so narrowly defined as to be unworkable - Stephen Bush, Financial Times - 2026.

Reference 5: A matter of life and death: When doctors and families fall out over medical intervention - Charles Foster, TLS - 2026.

Reference 6: https://www.maplefinefoods.co.uk/. 'Quality Halal Meals Tailored for the NHS'. The source of the snap above.

Group search key: fakesk.

The end of August

Nearly the last event of August was a visit to Stamford Green Pond to check the levels again.

Coots, ducks and geese had reappeared, after their absence when the pond was more or less dry. For some reason, leaving just the moorhens.

BH has been reporting on a pair of Egyptian geese and their brood, and it may be them on the island in the middle, although zoom is not very helpful on this occasion. Hopefully back for another look tomorrow.

Gemini had a good story to tell about the moorhens, snapped above. Moorhens like damp mud, coots don't. A story which is corroborated in part at reference 1, although one could be a bit picky on one or two points.

I have learned that both coots and moorhens can fly perfectly well.

Home to attend to a lentil lunch, as snapped above.

Proceedings started about 11:30, with 8oz of lentils well washed in cold water, then added to 2 pints of clean water and brought to the boil. Boiled for between 5 and 10 minutes, then adding some sticks of cross-cut celery and dropping down to simmer.

On the side, prepared the flavouring: butter, onions and an elderly leek, fortified by most of a baton of saucisson from Sainsbury's out of Bastides. This last being much easier to peel than the slightly posher version, from the same company, offered by Waitrose. Added to the lentils about 10 minutes before the off, just after 13:00.

Plus brown rice and white cabbage.

Good stuff, as ever, with hardly a dead fly to be seen. Tracking down the previously noticed vegetarian origins of which is left to the reader. Origins which were provided, as I recall, by Gemini.

PS 1: goslings flying off to find some proper water does not fit with the Gemini story very well, and there are plenty of foxes about. How old does a gosling have to be before it can fly? Are the bumps and bubbles to the left of the geese on the zoom something else altogether?

PS 2: Gemini suggests that it takes goslings around three months to fly. I shall have to quiz BH on when exactly they appeared. Maybe the foxes had them after all.

PS 3: I read in today's FT that one Chris Wormald has received considerable compensation for his rather crude and very public dismissal from the Civil Service. He may have been badly treated by past PM Starmer, but if Gemini is right that the deal he has negotiated is in addition to his fine Civil Service pension, I think he has been rather greedy: settling for half a mill would not have looked anything like as bad.

But then again, Gemini also tells me that he will have to pay tax on the compensation, so he will actually net around half the headline figure. Optics still bad though, as public relations people might say.

Search says that the FT did not mention the tax angle, which is perhaps wrong on their part.

Something to provide food for thought at the better class of bar. Perhaps not TB.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moorhen.

Reference 2: Keir Starmer approved £860,000 pay-off for sacked civil service chief: Settlement for Chris Wormald far exceeded standard contractual entitlements, former PM was told - George Parker, Financial Times - 2026. 

Group search key: 20260830.

Fast and loose

Probably during my short stint at the Home Office, twenty years ago now, I was told that an important part of managing prisoners, apt to be violent and apt to have mental health issues, was that they should all have a settled release date. That is except for the relatively few on whole life or indefinite sentences - with these last having, I think, now been abandoned, at least going forward.

So it struck me this morning that our new leader playing fast and loose with sentences was being rather irresponsible. He is certainly attempting to address the very real problem of prison overcrowding, but he must also be making the job of managing a difficult group of prisoners much harder than it might otherwise be.

And while I am on, I also pick up the matter of the obscured label of reference 1, a label which Google Images tried rather too hard to read. It turns out that the second line was not the variety name we were both expecting, rather the common name of the species - 'giant reed'. Now that I know the answer, hard to see what was so difficult about the original image, something like that above.

Brain stuck in a rut and unable to get out? To look out and over?

While the previous day had seen my walking stick deep inside a crack in the clay at the top of Clay Hill Green. I dare say a garden cane, without the rubber bung on the end, would have gone a good bit further in.

Plus what I took to be a fine display of chrysanthemums in the very rustic raised bed, previously noticed at reference 3.

Google Images tells me that I am quite wrong, once again: 'The image shows a vibrant border of blooming dahlias (Dahlia), likely single-flowered or collarette varieties, growing alongside a garden path in front of a white house with arched windows'. He allows that the two can look quite alike, but come from quite different parts of the aster family. Must take a closer look at the leaves next time I am that way.

PS 1: I have also read that people detained in secure hospitals sometimes complain that they are under indefinite sentences - and would be much happier in a regular prison with a regular sentence.

PS 2: the title of this post being further evidence of the Anglo-Saxon fondness for linked pairs of nouns, preferably alliterative, noticed earlier today at reference 2.

PS 3: temperatures in the house have eased off to 70°F down and 74°F up. Slowly getting back to normal.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/a-late-entry.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/09/pots-and-lollipops.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-end-of-month.html.

Group search key: 20260820.

Pots and lollipops

[A large prehistoric pottery vessel from Arizona - a bulbous jar with flared rim, with encrusted, rough surface, later wax residue on the inside - height 7.25, width 7.5 inches - sold at Bonhams Skinner]

I have been reading, albeit rather slowly, the biography of Claude Lévi-Strauss, the eminent French anthropologist of the 20th century, at reference 1. The editor of my edition suggests reference 2 as a good place to start to get to grips with the work of the man himself, and I took him up on his suggestion. And have now, also rather slowly, been having a go at that.

Given that the book is, in large part, about the artisan potters of South America, it struck me that some background on these potters and their pots would be helpful - background which Lévi-Strauss does not think to provide - at least not yet.

My first stop was the article on pottery and porcelain at reference 3, which was helpful, albeit rather focussed on the fancy pottery and porcelain coming out of factories, rather than from villages deep in the jungles and forests of, for example, the Amazon. Factories which, I might say, have been around for well over a thousand years, if not several thousand years.

I then took a look at references 4 and 5, from Wikipedia. A bit of basics: '... Pottery is traditionally divided into three types: earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain. All three may be glazed and unglazed...'. In ascending order of both the difficulty and the temperature of firing.

But I was puzzled about the cooking pots in the forests of South America. It seemed unlikely that they were glazed - but on the other hand, if they were not glazed, what use would they be as cooking pots, because they would leak? At this point, I thought I might get on a bit quicker if I engaged with Gemini.

The opening question

My opening question - the answer to which was basically no. But village potters did have access to finishing techniques which gave some of the water proofing of glaze.

Matters were then confused my being referred to the factories and fancy pots of references 6 and 7, some way from the villages of present interest. He also told me something of the cracking of pots under thermal stress - be that from cooking the pots or from cooking with the pots. And something of the changes that came with the Spaniards in the 16th century.

Probably not word perfect, but near enough for my purposes.

First supplementary

This was something of a diversion, a wonder about the origins of the common phrase 'pots and pans'.

I had thought that there were perhaps several dichotomies encapsulated in the phrase: deep vs. shallow, wet vs. dry cooking, warm vs. hot cooking and earthenware vs. metal. This last on the grounds that earthenware pots could not take the thermal shocks involved in frying over a hot fire.

Gemini tries to point me at the first of these, deep vs. shallow.

But I thought that he was a bit weak on etymology. Littré does have a substantial entry for ‘pot’, which looks much the same as the OED one. Amongst various derivatives, we also have potage, potable, poterie and potier. And his 'poterie' includes household goods made of pewter (literally tin) or iron - not really included in the English term ‘pottery’. He also has ‘pan’, mainly as applied to coats or walls, but not in the present sense. An example of the way that different people organises things, think about things, in different ways - part of what can make translation so difficult.

He points me to the helpful reference 8, which includes a nice image of a pot, complete with scale, but of too low a resolution to look well here. And that which is now included above is a bit more relevant in terms of provenance.

Gemini tries to tell me that my phrase is as much a testimony to the Anglo-Saxon fondness for linked pairs of nouns as to anything deep about the nature of pots and pans. A fondness expressed, for example, in the wealth of double barreled names invented by marketing people. But I am not listening.

However, I do accept his diversion into the provision of legs for pots and pans.

Second supplementary

After a pause, I go in for a bit of checking with Bing, which prompts a second supplementary. Which kicks off an extended digressions into the different phrase 'pot and pan', rhyming slang for man or father, and then into the ways of OED, both in print and now online.

He pulls up lots of evidence of the use of the phrase 'pots and pans' from well before 1900, including a quote from Thackery's 'Vanity Fair', which he says he got from OED.

After a while it turns out that this quotation from 'Vanity Fair' is to be found in the online entry for 'lurk' at reference 9,  which I would never have found under my own steam, from my print copy. However, now I know where to look, I find that it is there in my (hundred year old) print copy. I wonder whether my print copy really is obsolete, and take a look at references 10 and 11 - from which I learn that the answer is probably yes, provided I stump up a subscription. I don't think that you don't get it all for free. Yet to press the 'GO' button for that one!

Third supplementary

I find that I cannot make much sense of the layout of the stairs in a posh town house, as described by Thackery, and so try Gemini again.

Not so successful this time, as I still have not got the hang of it - the entertaining, if rather highly coloured, video at reference 12 notwithstanding. A video which, appropriately, was generated with the help of AI.

Conclusions

One does learn from Gemini, but one is sucked in, one is tempted down time-consuming, if interesting, by-ways. Which might suit me and which may well suit Google, with a view to revenue in the medium terms. Building all those big data centres is an investment, not a gift.

Also a reminder that learning is a two-way street. One wants the instructor to be responsive to your needs and interests, but he also needs to tell you what you actually need to know. He needs to tactfully put you on the right track.

Matters which bear on the need to ask him the right questions, on the likelihood that the first question may not be very clever. There needs to be a conversation, a process.

And, going back to my start point, I can now see that artisan pottery is a tricky business, with lots of mishaps and breakages, which makes the construction of elaborate myths and stories about potters much more plausible than it had at first seemed. So, there has been some progress.

PS 1: I was prompted by all this to turn up reference 13 again. Also helpful: the place of pottery in the technologies available to early man.

PS 2: the low resolution of the image of an old pot at reference 8 was surprisingly irritating visually, despite it being just the right sort of pot, with a scale bar. Now replaced by a slightly larger American pot at the head of this post.

References

Reference 1: Lévi-Strauss – Leach E R – 1970, 1985.

Reference 2: The jealous potter – Claude Lévi-Strauss – 1985, 1988.

Reference 3: Chamber's Encyclopaedia - several thousand authors - 1959 revision of the 'New Edition'.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pottery. 

Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceramic_glaze. 

Reference 6: https://australian.museum/learn/cultures/international-collection/chimu-pottery-and-its-meaning/.

Reference 7: https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/moche-decorated-ceramics.

Reference 8: https://medievallondon.ace.fordham.edu/exhibits/show/medieval-london-objects/cookingpot.

Reference 9: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/lurk_v?tl=true.

Reference 10: https://www.oed.com/dictionary/.

Reference 11: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/9780198605553/?cc=gb&lang=en&#.

Reference 12: https://youtu.be/dirVAqkCyhU.

Reference 13: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-outsider.html.

Group search key: aisk.

Alder?

After the morning trip to the pond noticed at reference 1, back again in the afternoon, to find that the algae, after a day in the sun, had put out its bright green sheen again.

While the water was creeping up to the top of the spillway.

And then there was the matter of the small tree, growing out of the bank, sporting lots of small fruits. Was it an alder - a tree I associate with bogs and fens, this without being at all familiar with it.

Google Images is happy to agree with me. Common alder (Alnus glutinosa), to be found at reference 2.

The distinctive fruits - a sort of cross between a pine cone and an acorn - turn out to be the female fruits, while I had not noticed the cylindrical male catkins, waiting for next spring. The leaves, some with serrated edges, look about right.

A solitary bullrush on the exit channel.

PS 1: the FT is clearly on a roll with this chicken business. Having noticed one piece at reference 1, there is another one today at reference 3 - and I think that there are more.

I learn that most of the chickens we eat are between 30 and 40 days old, so not much of a life. And that a small number of breeds - say three or four - account for an awful lot of them.

The piece also talks of broiler chickens in broiler houses, which prompted BH to wonder where the word came from. The lazy way forward was to ask Gemini, who, for once, got into a bit of a muddle with layout and input-output, but who did give me the answer.

It seems that one use of the word 'broiler' started with chicken farmers, to whom it means young chickens suitable for fast cooking by direct heat, what we would call frying or grilling. Roasters are slightly older birds, and boilers even older, usually retired egg layers. Presumably the cock of 'coq-au-vin' was originally a retired farm yard cockerel. The term then generalised to chickens mass produced in big sheds generally.

Then in the US, cooks distinguish grilling, with heat below, as in most barbecues, from broiling, with heat above, as in most indoor cookers. Next stop Websters and OED.

PS 2: I have now consulted both OED - where broil gets near a page - and Websters. And had a further interchange with Gemini.

Broiling was indeed hot cooking of any sort. Roasting was a bit cooler and more controlled, in an oven. Boiling was cooler still, in boiling water, in a pot. But in current US usage, grilling is usually outdoors and broiling indoors.

OED goes into the other meanings of broil - as in brawl, embroil and imbroglio. Which, as Gemini explains in the snap above, arises from the conflation of two quite different French words brûler and brouiller.

He even closes with a joke. A bit Pooterish, but a joke nonetheless.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv6.blogspot.com/2026/08/more-water.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alnus_glutinosa.

Reference 3: Norway vs the world’s favourite chicken: Billions of meals each year are made from the fast-growing Ross 308 genetic strain of birds. But a backlash is gathering pace - Richard Milne, Susannah Savage, Ian Bott, Financial Times - 2026. 

Group search key: 20260826.