Yesterday was May 4th - Star Wars Day. (Because: May The 4th Be With You. Don't blame me. I didn't come up with that.) Did you need The Force to crack these clues...?
12. Flaming satellite.
Named after a Russian street gang, the "sigue sigue" meaning "burn burn"...
6. Home security camera rotates more than half way.
I've got Blink security cameras on Top Ten Towers, in case you were thinking of coming round to steal my CD collection. If you rotate something through half a turn, that's 180 degrees. Just over that would be...
Nothing too heavy or existential for our final Cynical Self-Help post of 2023, though it is about something our brain does, and I imagine it's something we all experience from time to time... probably with greater frequency as time goes by.
You go upstairs to get something from the bedroom. By the time you reach the bedroom, you can't recall for the life of you what it is you want or why you came upstairs in the first place.
It doesn't have to be upstairs - it can be as simple as going from the lounge into the kitchen. Or even opening the fridge door. Why did I come here? What did I want?
For a long time, I believed this frustrating phenomenon was the result of advancing years. Then again, considering that it's been happening for as long as I can remember (although, as we've just discussed, "as long as I can remember" is a relative term), I've long worried my years actually started advancing at a very early age.
Turns out it's nothing to do with old age at all though... it's what scientists call The Doorway Effect. A series of experiments by Gabriel A. Radvansky and David E. Copeland which commenced in 2006 concluded that...
Memory was worse after passing through a doorway than after walking the same distance within a single room.
One explanation for this effect is down to what neuroscientists call episodic memory...
Episodic memory involves the ability to learn, store, and retrieve information about unique personal experiences that occur in daily life. These memories typically include information about the time and place of an event, as well as detailed information about the event itself.
Simply put: if you have a thought in one room, then try to carry that thought to another room, it becomes harder to remember. You wouldn't have forgotten what it was you were looking for if you'd stayed in the room where you first realised you'd lost it. Of course, that causes something of an issue when it comes to looking for them...
Louise gets very frustrated when she asks me to do a job, or add an item to the shopping list, and the first thing I do is run for a notepad to write it down.
"Why can't you remember?"
At last - I have an answer to that question! But will I be able to remember it when I go downstairs to tell her?
Another potential explanation for the doorway effect involves a slightly more complex understanding of how our brains are organised. BBC Science expounds...
As we move through our days, our attention shifts between [different levels of thinking] – from our goals and ambitions, to plans and strategies, and to the lowest levels, our concrete actions.
That's a clumsy generalisation of the different levels of thinking, but the fact is that our brain switches effortlessly between these different levels throughout the day. That's why we can drive home some days without thinking about the journey (or the mechanical process of changing gear or swapping pedals) at all. Other days though, our thoughts might be dominated by those things - if traffic is bad or our car is making a strange noise.
The way our attention moves up and down the hierarchy of action is what allows us to carry out complex behaviours, stitching together a coherent plan over multiple moments, in multiple places or requiring multiple actions.
They liken this to the old metaphor of spinning plates... but every so often, a plate falls and we can't remember what we're doing or why we're doing it.
Our memories, even for our goals, are embedded in webs of associations. That can be the physical environment in which we form them, which is why revisiting our childhood home can bring back a flood of previously forgotten memories, or it can be the mental environment – the set of things we were just thinking about when that thing popped into mind.
The Doorway Effect occurs because we change both the physical and mental environments, moving to a different room and thinking about different things. That hastily thought up goal, which was probably only one plate among the many we’re trying to spin, gets forgotten when the context changes.
If you want to remember more - stay exactly where you are! (Sidebar: would I have done better in my GCSEs if I'd done all my revision in the hall where I eventually sat the exam?)
No. This is the frustration we feel when we leave a room after an argument or contentious conversation and - too late! - come up with the pithy reply or put-down we should have used at the time. I'm kicking myself I didn't say...
A fire officer came to visit our workplace last week. When he looked at our fire plan, he complained that it wasn't a procedure, it was just a series of actions. I wish I'd thought to hand him a dictionary and ask him to look up the actual definition of "procedure". Too late now...
Because ongoing, irregular and intermittent series are the ballast that keeps this blog afloat, here's another one, in which I reflect on almost forty years of record collecting.
Over the last year or so, my interest in owning physical copies of the music I love has returned. There was a time, maybe about 5 years ago, when I considered going all digital apart from the essentials, but lately I've realised I'm far more likely to devote time to a record that I actually paid money to own a physical copy of. My hard drive is full of digital albums I've never listened to (except when serendipity throws up appropriate tracks for a Top Ten), but when I look at the CDs on my shelves, there's barely a one I haven't played until I was sick of it. And the majority of them, I'm more than happy to revisit when time allows. Even though I rarely actually need to take the discs out of their cases to play them any more, and until I get glasses (remember: no eye test until I'm 50), I can't read the majority of the inlay cards without a magnifying glass anymore.
And so, here's a series in which I will write about collecting records. Or CDs, since I long since had to sacrifice my vinyl dreams. (More on that anon.) I want to celebrate the joy of collecting music, now that I've rediscovered it. I have quite a lot to say, but I'll try to break it down into manageable chunks. And play some appropriate tunes along the way. Because, to quote Chicago, record collecting... it's a hard habit to break.
Here's a tune I was listening to on my headphones yesterday while walking in the rain.
Fact: if you Google the lyrics to this song, it'll tell you they sing that your tabloids should be stronger. Not tablets, which would make a lot more sense (and is the actual lyric). Makes you wonder if online lyrics are written by an Alexa-like AI that doesn't really understand language, just responds and transcribes sounds.
Welcome back. You know the drill. Songs with 22 in it. Remember that the Lime Green Rule now applies. Titles only, no more lyrical mentions. Unless I really, really like them.
Martin was first up this week, with a right old list...
No, you should have stopped before you got to Sting. As should Shaggy.
Hang on, though, here's Rigid Digit to second your suggestion - with added info...
...the second song of the "Charlotte Saga" (Charlotte The Harlot / 22 Acacia Avenue / Hooks In You / From Here To Eternity). The first two are Charlotte songs, the last two are a bit tenuous but still considered part of the ongoing story.
Fair enough. If we're going metal this week... here's my contribution.
But the real pick of the lot would be my Can-Con contribution ("Canadian Content", for those outside my home country, a term coined decades ago by government regulators of our airwaves to protect our ears from over-Americanization). How about the obscure and experimental b-side by Martha and the Muffins called "22 in Cincinnati"? Very moody, that one.
That's just weird. Is that a purring cat in the middle? (Amazingly Jim in Dubai seconded that rather obscure choice.) Still, we like weird here. That's why we keep The Swede around. Here he is with this week's even weirder selections...
'Room Twenty Two', a dubwise selection from the marvellous 'Black Market Meets Mired & Wise Owl in the Twilight Zone'.
Oh, and if we're getting lax about the Lime Green Rule now, what about the iconic opening lines of Billy Bragg's "A New England". A Classic, that one, though I suspect Billy's a bit older than 22 now.
It's worth pointing out that Billy Bragg is the easy way round most rules and regulations, lime green or otherwise.
The irony, of course, is that as of last week, we do have a new England (and Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland). Sadly, not the one Billy wanted though.
Of course, if we're playing that, we also have to play this...
This is one of Sam's favourite songs at the moment.
He doesn't know who Kylie is.
He doesn't know what a BMX is.
I doubt he even knows what a crush is.
But he loves singing along to the chorus, happily unaware that the song was written by Gerard Love of Teenage Fanclub or that Kurt Cobain once said, "If I could be in any other band, it would be BMX Bandits".
I think we can safely say that The Swede is this week's winner!
10. Lost your afterlife? Ask Syd's heartbreakers.
Syd Barrett recorded a song called Gigolo Aunt, which Urban Dictionary defines as "A Girl who is usually very cute and pretty that seduces men makes them madly fall in love with her using her specific ways".
