Increase in boob circumference and other things

In the constant quest for knowledge that bedevils us humans, I have been reading The Hair of the Dog and Other Scientific Surprises by Karl Sabbagh and have learnt how to work out the extra amount of rope needed to raise a length of rope encircling the world at the equator by about 3 feet or 1 metre. Thinking along the lines of the size of my waist when I was young, and the size of a belt to encompass it now, I thought the new length of rope would need to be a good few miles longer than the equator hugging line. But I was wrong. Not only that, I have learnt that you don't even need to know the circumference of the world, or its diameter! There are equations to explain it but for readers of this blog it is sufficient to know that the actual answer is about 6 metres, or 18 feet. Which is about a thousand miles less than the answer I had in mind. It turns out that any size of rope circle needs to be lengthened by 3.14 units to make a circle 1 unit larger in diameter; 3.14 being pi.

Excited by this newly-gained knowledge, I have just been encircling my left bosom with a tape measure in order to work out the size of bra I would need if the circumference of the  bosom in question was increased by half a cm all round, which would, of course, mean a base diameter of twice that size, namely one centimetre. Based on the rope-round-the-equator lesson I think the circumference around my boob would be 3.14 cms bigger.

When I tried to explain all this to Mr A, saying the new boob measurement was all to do with pi, he said, 'You should've put the tape measure round your belly then if pies are involved.'

Sadly, of course, and I expect my female blog readers will have worked this one out, all of this careful measuring and the imaginary 1 cm extra around the base wouldn't give me the new cup size.

'I'm just going to read on to see if Karl Sabbagh has included a chapter on the increasing mass dimensions of mountains,' I told Mr A.

'Yeh, right,' he responded, 'why not see if he's written a bit about mole hills, that'd be more near the mark.'

And, again he wondered why I hit him!!

Dirty stairs

A frisson of excitement fluttered through me as I bent double on the third stair from the top, dustpan in left hand, hard-bristled brush in right, vigorously brushing the crack between the flat bit and riser of the top stair. Gingerly, I backed down a step, breathing deeply as I started to attack the next stair. It was then that the realisation hit me that my life had become somewhat mundane. True, I had painted a lively portrait of an exotic lady on Tuesday, but this chore had pathetically sent my pulses racing. Not only that, I was cleaning even though no visitors were expected! By the time I'd denuded the fourth stair of dirt (my target number for the day as it happens) I had worked out a plan to get the zing back into my life.

'Darling,' I purred.

Mr A dragged his attention from the Murray match, a brief startled look shooting into his eyes as he took me in before turning back to the tennis game.

I had discarded my jumper and bra for a see-through top, and the dustpan and brush for a feathery anti-static mop that I wafted seductively over his crotch.

'Get off,' he said, grumpily, 'Murray could win this.'

'I've been practising,' I said in my sexy voice, 'if you come with me to the stairs I could tickle the crack between your flat bit and the riser.'

'No thanks, but I'd like it if ... Good shot Andy!'

Knowing the stairs weren't a good place for such activities, I waited for his suggested change of venue. 'You'd like it if what?' I prompted, jutting forward a hip.

'I'd like it if you'd put the kettle on. I'm dying for a cuppa.'

He wondered why I hit him, but, to tell you the truth, when I thought about it later, I was slightly relieved. Shenanigans on the stairs at our age could have ended in disaster and it would have been difficult explaining it to the medics, and our neighbours, and the kids!

Tuesday, 26th January 2010. Today, Newton's Inverse Square Law

I have been trying to battle with Newton's Inverse Square Law, don't ask me why, I don't know myself, but I just need to know.

I have learnt that if two objects attract each other with a gravitational force of 16 units, and the distance between the two objects is then doubled, to get the new force of attraction which would, naturally, be less, you must square the doubling which is 4, then inverse it which is 1/4, so the new force of attraction is a quarter of 16 which is 4.

How Newton worked that one out from an apple bashing him on the head as he lay under a tree is beyond me. I once had a large tom cat land on my head as I lay under a tree and all I discovered was that it hurt. If I'd been Isaac Newton though I'd have have probably calculated the moggy's weight from the gravitational force that it hit me. Instead, I experimented with centrifugal force, spinning it round by its tail then releasing it at high speed back to our neighbour's garden where it belonged, except that it overshot the mark by several fences.

It proved to be a scientific experiment of sorts though because, according to next-door-but one, as it passed overhead its meow was a clear example of the doppler effect. Quite satisfying to a nerd like me in my constant quest for scientific knowledge. It would be just my luck to die just when I'd got the hang of it all.

Rid Planet Earth of human beings. A serious piece, for once..

The big problem with Planet Earth, as most people will agree, is that too many human beings are trying to live on it and off it. The logical solution, therefore, must be to stop so many babies being born, and to lop off a whole tier of old people. 

Stopping so many being born could be achieved as follows:-

1) Get the Pope to change his view on contraception - participating Catholics please lobby him, it is urgent.
2) Only give child benefit to the first two children born of any one woman. And don't give it in money, give it in things essential for children's welbeing, like shoes, preferably made in the country where the children are born. (Helpful for jobs and carbon footprints - no pun intended.)
3) Encourage homosexuality. It is clearly on the increase and well done to those who already practise it. Maybe God has got his/her/its eye on the situation and has decided to create more gay people who are unlikely to bear offspring. Or maybe Planet Earth itself has somehow managed to influence human DNA in that respect as a self-protective measure.

Lopping off a whole tier of old people could be achieved as follows:-

When people over the age of three score years and ten become ill they should be denied treatment of any sort and, if their condition worstens, be given a delicious-tasting lethal cocktail, with their favourite music playing and their loved ones around them. A death to be looked forward to instead of the ghastly endings endured by so many whose lives are dragged out to the bitter end.

If the human population continues to expand there will undoubtedly be more famine, droughts, wars and disease and, if the planet ultimately manages to rid itself of humankind, all the animals, plants, fish, etc. would rise up and cheer, 'Good riddance to the lot of you, you destroyers of a perfect world,' if they were able. Hopefully, when the next batch of homo sapiens then evolved in a few million years time, the planet would have recovered from our lot.

There we are. That's solved!!

There is a Dog God

I have called this picture There is a Dog God and it is thought- provoking because, firstly, it assumes there is an animal-specialist god and, secondly, the words dog and god happen to be anagrams of each other. Ignoring the anagram thought-provocation and addressing the greater issue, could it be that a God - dog god, pig god, penguin god or otherwise - could organise food to fall from the skies. It is a concept that is a bit hard to swallow. Not the doggie bones, you understand, but the idea. Were the Israelites really treated to manna from heaven during their flight from Egypt, or were they telling porkies?

Say No to the Common Market!

Cutting edge news this is not, but this is a picture of a meaningful poster I have kept since the referendum of 1975. The year when the British public blew the chance to break free from Europe. Sob. Very nice people individually, I hasten to add, and even en masse, but not good to work with, i.e. quite good at making rules (which we keep) but no good at abiding by them.

In the run-up to the referendum of 5th June 1975, my Common-Market-loving husband was aborad on business so I took the chance to display this red poster and another blue one (that I still have and I am open to offers to buy either) in our front windows. When he returned from his trip he was not best pleased and it is a miracle that both posters were not immediately torn into shreds, as well as his hair (which he had in abundance then). I don't really remember, but I guess I must have invited him upstairs, nudge nudge wink wink, and whilst he was shedding his trousers and his brief case, carefully crept down to remove the posters, managing to stash them away for this blog thirty-five years on! What a lost opportunity that referendum was though. Sob again.  

More jolly good advice

I am reading about canny little entities that seem to have awesome fighting spirits and minds of their own, namely bacteria. For every new antibiotic that is designed to kill them, they try to figure out a defence strategy. It's like a very dangerous game of chess or a fencing match between an ill person and a bacterium, with death being a strong possibility for the loser.

They don't really have minds of their own of course, they just reproduce and evolve in a matter of hours and, if just one of the millions mutates to be resistant to the antibiotic during  that process the descendents of it will flourish even though the rest of them perish. It's all very complicated but my piece of jolly good advice today is always finish off your course of antibiotics and don't wear pink shoes.

Honestly, that owl!

They say pets often resemble their owners, but not that they sometimes ridicule them. However, could it be that this owl's choice of hat is a case of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, or is the owl being downright insolent? 'Twit twoo' tells us nothing, so we'll never know. We'll also never know whether the dog placidly sitting with the owl on its head is in on the joke or is dreaming up a plan of its own.

Talking of dogs, our daughter's dog was beside herself with delight when we went to their house for dinner last night. She twirled and twisted then lay on her back with her legs in the air. She wasn't at our house on New Year's Eve so I don't know where she's learnt that kind of behaviour.

If you look carefully at the picture you should see the Christmas puddings (from our Xmas crackers) nestling in the twiggery and branches of our tree. We have had our fun winding them up and racing them so they have been put out to retirement. Just like old greyhounds. And donkeys. And some old men!

Life is back to normal: dinner at friends

Fabulous dinner at friends last night. 'If you could invite ten people, alive or dead, to dine at your table, who would you ask?' was a question posed. I personally would like to have Jesus, to ask him who he thought his Dad was; Princess Diana to ask if she knew who bumped her off; and Claudia Winkleman because she seems such fun. Mr A suggested Mao Tse Tung but was rather put off when it was pointed out that he wouldn't be able to understand him. And Bart Simpson was ruled out for obvious reasons, i.e. he wasn't real. As it was, the people actually sitting around the table couldn't be bettered: four artists and their spouses lead to a lot of jollity, deridery and good almost-clean fun!

The weather-enforced confinement is finally over but it has taught Mr A and me something. We discovered, during that imprisonment, that we were amazingly compatible, which, although having being married for 56 years, has come as a pleasant surprise. So we did make the right choice, we both contentedly sighed as we sipped our cocoa. That last bit was made up - we don't drink cocoa.

Was beginning to think agoraphobia, due to the surprisingly enjoyable weather-related confinement, had set in but no, with nerry a glance back I skipped outdoors and into the passenger seat of our snow-released car. It is now I must apologise to my regular blog readers, for it has been pointed out to me that bottoms seem to feature a worrying amount. But, despite that observation, I have to report that somehow the melting snow had seeped through the car door and into the cushion residing on the passenger seat - on which, of course, I sat down. Without mentioning the b word again, it is sufficeth to say a part of my anatomy became wet. Anyway, after flinging said cushion over my shoulder onto the backseat, though clipping the headrest first sending it obliquely into my husband's head (which didn't go down well), I located a plastic bag and sat on that for the journey that my derring-do husband accomplished with expertise, our slushy icy sideroads still being somewhat hazardous.

We had ventured into town a) for me to keep my appointment with my very nice hairdresser who keeps my hair trimmed in good order (I would say 'very nice' even if I hadn't given her my blog address thus knowing there was a good chance she would read it); b) to return the slanket (blanket with sleeves)given as a present, because it is so vast you could hide a herd of elephants in it; c} for husband to change the M & S trousers I had given him because I had got the inches and cms mixed up and he had never ever been that shape.

Sent my lovely sister-in-law a card to express the whole family's relief that her hip operation had been a success. Hip hip hooray. The old ones are always the best.

In the item below, written this morning, I was devoid of words of wisdom to pass on, but now inspiration has hit me and I am passing on a tip to help with oil painting.

If your paint is too thickly applied, lie newspaper over it to remove paint and then re-establish.

However, if you are out in the fields, quietly painting a landscape, and you realise your picture is a gungy mess, you can do no better than Freda (the protagonist in my novel The Pig and I). In her determination to create a masterpiece, she bravely slides her bare bottom over her overly painted mess, thus creating a painting of subtle beauty. This selfless act was inspired by her pet pig, Hermione, who, a few months earlier, had knocked her portrait of the local mayor off her easel and then sat on it, leaving a gross imprint of the mayor's face on the pig's backside and a work of art on the canvas. This set Freda on the path to success in the portrait painting world. A lesson to all of us.

On reflection, the newspaper method is best.

'My mouse is playing up,' I groaned.

My husband vacantly dragged his eyes from Jamie's Dinners, looking slightly concerned. 'What's wrong with it?' he asked, knowing he had to respond since reading Men are from Mars Women are from Venus.

'I have to push really hard on the left side to get it to do anything.'

His attention was now definitely off the lasagne recipe he'd been studying. 'Is that what you do?' he asked, looking amazed.

'Yes, and now I have to roll it around the mouse mat like mad as well.'

Now Jamie's lasagne recipe wasn't even being covertly glanced at. 'You havc a special mat for it!'

'Well, you can do it on the desk top but it isn't so good,' I explained, trying in vain to sound patient.

'Oh, the computer mouse. Do we have any fresh rosemary, thyme or bayleaves in the house?'

'They're all in pots on the decking hiding under melting blankets of snow,' I anapped, although I shouldn't have. Tonight's dinner is going to be good.

Yesterday, I rashly wrote that I would write a helpful hint each day. But already I've dried up. Any ideas would be welcomed.

WHAT NEXT? SAID THE SNOWY OWL, rather grumpily. What next indeed!! It's more like living in Narnia than the UK - but with central heating and no bad people or lions.

My Nearly-New-Year Resolution is to include a helpful hint in my random musings. Today's is for artists and is about mixing greys.
1. Cadmium orange + blue (not cobalt)
2. Ultramarine + Alazarin crimson + cadmium yellow OR yellow ochre
3. As 2 but use cerulean blue for a cooler grey
4. Cobalt + Light red for a warm grey
5. Ultramarine + burnt umber
6. Cerulean blue + permanent rose for a silvery grey

Having displayed the group sculpture below, I now can't resist showing off my d and g-d's giant octopus which is spreadeagled on their table-tennis table as if trying to flatten it. If it really could iron out the curves and waves in the wood surface the whole family would have to alter their well-practised ping-pong shots because we've all got used to the ball shooting off at weird angles. But there you go. Good and bad. Ying and yang. Full cream and skimmed.

It is snowy white, plump, firm, yet malleable - no, not my bum as one might think, but the free sculpting material that has dropped down from the sky. My daughter and granddaughter have been at it again (see Sophie the snow woman in a previous item) and proved that my artistic DNA has permeated down through the generations and my living has not been in vain.

Still snowed in! Have had to cancel the Tuesday portrait session, so the 21 talented artists who usually show up to portray the sitter in whatever medium they choose will have to do a self-portrait or get their spouse or dog or cat to sit. A pity tortoises have hibernated, because they would clearly be best, a cross between an animal portrait and a still life.

Talking of tortoises, reminds me that years ago when we had three of them - this is a very sad true story - when we lifted them out of the snug straw and crumpled paper in their normal hibernating box, they looked rather glassy eyed. All three of them. After tucking them back in for a few days, they still looked the same. Not sure if they were dead or alive, I buried them up to their wizened old necks under a bush hoping that if they were alive they would scrabble out. But each time I bent down to check on them it was the same. Three inert tortoise heads with glazed eyes stared blindly back at me. See, I told you it was sad.

Today I am languishing indoors thinking up another good invention which is how to program ones car go from A to B by itself, so that you can have a kip as you travel along. Until the finer details of that one have been sorted out, the picture above shows another idea for the advanced life drawing group: the trampoline session.

Another day of imprisonment due to yet more snow. I'm quite getting to like it. No need to get dressed or washed. Just placidly sitting thinking up good inventions. Currently, I'm trying to work out how to make road surfaces turn red to warn a crossing pedestrian when a dangerously close vehicle is approaching.

In the meantime, I'm displaying a painting of another good idea for an advanced life drawing group. This one is the skateboard session.

During this long period of enforced imprisonment due to the ice and snow, I am thinking up new inventions: outer-space solar generators, virtual hairdressers, etc. But while my fevered brain works out the finer details, I am displaying a painting of one of my previous ideas for advanced life drawing sessions, this being the parachute jump one.

How deep is the snow?

How deep is the snow? I wondered, unable to venture out for a second day for fear of falling and thus, on account of extreme age, breaking into a smithereen of bones. I dug out some welly boots and, armed with a ruler, stepped outside, dragging my feet through the thick virgin snow on the tundra decking. Reaching the table I lunged my ruler vertically down into the the deep blanket lying on top of it. 23 cms was the answer. I then bent and jabbed the said ruler several times into the cold squeaky whiteness around my feet. 23 cms also. It was then that I noticed that I was wearing a long woollen skirt which had become thickly coated with great blobs of glue-like snow.

Back indoors, the welly boots refused to leave my feet and, during the struggle that ensued, seemingly more snow was delivered onto our carpet than was lying on our entire back garden. Eventually the welly boot tussle was won and I mooched off to change my skirt and put on my indoor boots - worn all winter to stop chilblains - but it never works. I then rooted around to find a proper ruler which I measured against the snow-measuring one and found that the snow was 9 inches deep. When I told my husband he just nodded and smiled. Through this agreeable response I realised he hadn't heard a word and that his ears were plugged into the cricket. 'Looks like we'll lose,' he groaned, 'the three worst batsmen are left and there are two sessions to go.'

'Just two sessions,' I scoffed, guessing that a session might conceivably be longer than an over. 'Of course our three worst batsmen can hold out - it will be a draw.'

And it was a draw. Respect!!

'Nine inches,' he said later, 'are you sure?!

It may just have been a coincidence that he was looking down at his flies area as he spoke. I often find that the time-lag that occurs between me speaking and he responding quite often leads to misunderstandings. 'Yes, that's 23cms.' I said.

'That's about it,' he replied.

As if to prove that art and woman's lib genes are inherited, my daughter and granddaughter created a fetching snow-woman and coloured her with powder paint.

Clearing up the meaning of my blog name

For anyone interested, Artistricky It is not Art is Tricky as some people have deduced (although, of course, art is quite often very tricky). It is Artist Ricky, me being an artist. And me once being known as Ricky until many years ago my then-young husband put the kaibosh on it by saying it sounded as if I was a floozy, thus displeasing me but pleasing my dear mother who thought it sounded as if I had rickets. I had liked the friendly warmth of Ricky, compared with the rather hard-edged sound of Erica, but, there we go, girls let men get the better of them when they are young. So Ricky went out the window - until now.