Six Things, Volume 123
Cup of Tea | Chronotrains | Bike Jumping | Tombstone | Methinketh | Eightile
Thing 1 – Cup of Tea
Regular readers will know that I take childish pleasure in a well made Rube Goldberg machine. Silly, playful and almost entirely pointless, they represent, in their own way, the pinnacle of human achievement. Why simply pass the salt when you can spend weeks creating, through painstaking trial and error, a machine which nudges a thing to roll into another thing which triggers a third thing which opens out a fourth thing so that its weight unfurls a fifth thing and so on and so forth until you run out of things and your companion does, at last, receive the salt?
My fondness for the genre probably stems from early exposure to the drawings of Heath Robinson – absurd and impossible contraptions with pulleys and hooks and implausible physics, all held together with knotted string. I spent ages trying to figure out how exactly they would work – pull the lever to rotate the wheel to lower the weight to counterbalance the platform…
The graduation from the childish delight at still life contraptions to childish delight at moving ones was as smooth and frictionless as… well, as a well made Rube Goldberg (even if it only existed to sell yet more cars).
There are many wonderful examples of ingenious and brilliantly executed Rube Goldberg/Heath Robinson contraptions. This, I think, is my favourite.
Thing 2 – Chronotrains
“Three hours? Jesus Christ! You could have been in Leeds in that time.” – Alan Bennett
How far can you travel by train in 8 hours? How long will it take to get from Edinburgh to Milan? What European routes offer night trains?
Answers to these and many more from the excellent Chronotrains. Thanks to Jonn Elledge for this one.
Thing 3 – Bike Jumping
Ah, the 1970s. A decade when it was considered entirely normal to ask your friends to lie down in a line so you could cycle up a shonky homemade ramp and jump over (or very possibly into) them, Evil Knievel-style.
Good times, good times.
Thing 4 – Tombstone
Here is the finest tombstone of all. Note especially the border text.
Thing 5 – Methinketh
File under “basically pointless but somehow strangely fascinating” this dictionary of words used on Bluesky. I’m both relieved and faintly surprised that “methinketh” has yet to break its duck.
Thing 6 – Eightile
A nice little word game to finish. Spell words. A letter is added after each go. Get the eight-letter word to win.
Tea never tasted as good!
Chronotrains! Both useful and aesthetically pleasing