Six Things, Volume 82

Cats | Crokinole | Covers | Plum | Birds | Iswas

Oct 19, 2024

Thing 1 – Cats

I found myself thinking about the film The Graduate the other day. Not sure why. I suppose it’s one of those things that swills around in the general mulch, with bits of it floating to the top from time to time. Brains are funny like that.

Another thing brains do is this: they get silly.

Which is why it occurred to me that had the short scene between Benjamin and Mr McGuire taken place some time in the mid-1990s, it might have had a different focus. Here’s the original scene.

And here’s how it might have played out 25 years later.

“Ben, I just want to say one word to you – just one word.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Are you listening?”
“Yes I am.”
“Cats.”
“Exactly how do you mean?”
“There’s a great future in cats.”

In this, Mr McGuire would have been right on the money. Because we all know that the main use for the internet has been, is, and forever will be cats.

Obviously at this point I could just spam you with cat videos, but I like to feel that I’m a little bit above that. Not much, obviously, but at least a little bit.

Oh go on then.

The reason cats met The Graduate and did a little dance with it in the maelstrom of brain stuff I call my subconscious is probably that I read this article about them being cleverer than babies. Or, to be more accurate, they performed ‘better’ than babies in a word association game. Having watched the video in the article my impression is that the cat in question is doing little more than being a cat – mostly a furry vortex of disinterest, occasionally spurred into action by stimuli unknowable to the feeble human brain. But then I’m not Science, so what do I know?

The other cat-related titbit (tidbit if you’re American – I’m a firm believer that the sooner we accept and embrace the differences between our two versions of English, the better off we’ll all be) that floated into view this week was the contention that cats are liquid. This isn’t a new idea, but this recent study put it to the test more rigorously, presenting the cats with holes of either decreasing height or decreasing width and measuring the response (rather than, say, filming it and uploading it to YouTube for clicks, diverting though that can be).

The paper itself is here.

It’s just occurred to me that if I were so inclined and had the technical expertise I could do a whole video thing in which famous movie lines have one word replaced with ‘cat’ – “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a cat”, “You’re gonna need a bigger cat”, “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my cat. Prepare to die”, that kind of thing. Just as well I’m not so inclined, isn’t it?

No more coffee for me today.

Incidentally, here’s a nice little clip from an interview with Dustin Hoffman about his screen test for The Graduate.

Thing 2 – Crokinole

“The Pudding did a thing about Crokinole!”

“Sorry, what?”

“Crokinole! The Pudding! They did a thing about it!”

“Saying the same words in a different order doesn’t make it make any more sense. Try another way.”

“OK so The Pudding is a website. In their own words, they ‘create visual essays with data’”

“With you.”

“And Crokinole is ‘the best game you’ve never heard of’.”

“Gotcha. So a website that creates visual essays with data has featured the best game you’ve never heard of?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Well why the hell didn’t you say so?”

Look, I’m not saying Crokinole isn’t niche. But it does feel pleasingly retro, in the style of Bagatelle or Shove Ha’penny. And it is fun to play. There’s a virtual demo version in The Pudding’s story, but once you’ve mastered that you can play against a bot here, and from there it’s a short (if slightly expensive) step to getting a real board.

Thing 3 – Covers

Bluesky user Neil Norman And His Cosmic Orchestra posted this excellent alternative Penguin Classics book cover.

Inevitably, social media being social media, people joined in. These are a few of my favourites.

The whole thread is here.

Thing 4 – Plum

It was the 143rd anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s birth this week. I celebrated by digging up some of his best lines (there are a lot). Rather than subject you to 1,000 words of ‘How Wodehouse Made Me Who I Am’, how about I just give you some of them?

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

“He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.”

“It isn’t often that Aunt Dahlia lets her angry passions rise, but when she does, strong men climb trees and pull them up after them.”

“It was one of those still evenings you get in the summer, when you can hear a snail clear its throat a mile away.”

“The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.”

“As if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.”

“He was in the frame of mind when a weaker man would have started writing poetry.”

“Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.”

And finally, vital life advice:

“Every young man starting life ought to know how to cope with an angry swan, so I will briefly relate the proper procedure. You begin by picking up the raincoat which somebody has dropped; and then, judging the distance to a nicety, you simply shove the raincoat over the bird's head; and, taking the boat-hook which you have prudently brought with you, you insert it underneath the swan and heave. The swan goes into a bush and starts trying to unscramble itself; and you saunter back to your boat, taking with you any friends who may happen at the moment to be sitting on roofs in the vicinity. That was Jeeves's method, and I cannot see how it could have been improved upon.”

Thing 5 – Birds

A little quiz about which birds are most closely related to which other birds. You don’t really have to know anything about birds to have a go – just follow your intuition and expect the unexpected.

Full disclosure: I got 6 out of 8.