Six Things, Volume 92

Clouds | Overlapping Lives | Doppelgänger | Forest Sounds | Cigarettes | Geogrid

A day late, because Christmas, this is the last Six Things of 2024. Many thanks for all your support – it wouldn’t be the same without you (dammit, it wouldn’t be ANYTHING without you).

Happy New Year.

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Thing 1 – Clouds

So complete has been the cloud cover recently, so thoroughgoing, that at times I’ve had some idea of what it must have been like to live on the planet Krikkit. For those unfamiliar with the place, it appears in Life, The Universe and Everything, the third volume of Douglas Adams’ five-book¹ Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy trilogy.

The sky on Krikkit was so dull and featureless that the planet’s citizens had no word for it. They simply didn’t look up. This was, of course, before they discovered the existence of the rest of the universe, a discovery that transformed them from happy, peaceful people to rampaging xenophobes intent on the annihilation of everything. But that’s a whole different saucepan of amphibians.

The sky has been dull, is my point.

And yet, as one interested in observation and curiosity, I feel I should do my best. Can I find fascination in that uniform Tupperware blankness?

Of course I can.

I have no difficulty with the concept of looking up. I’m a birder – it’s what we do. But while I’ve devoted plenty of time to learning about our avian friends – their lives, their behaviours, their favourite TV series (73% of those who expressed a preference chose Detectorists) – my cloud identification skills are no more sophisticated than Charlie Brown’s.

I keep on meaning to rectify that situation. Perhaps 2025 will be the year.

The first place I’ll go will be the website of the Cloud Appreciation Society. There are plenty of resources for the cloud-curious there. I’ll probably start with the ten main cloud types and work from there.

They also run (cloud-based, appropriately enough) courses, and Pretor-Pinney has written several books to help the beginner with their cloud-learning journey. I have one of them somewhere, bought during one of my one-week bursts of enthusiasm some years ago.

Other cloud-related stuff:

– If you want even more cloud detail with a touch of extra science, the World Meteorological Organisation provides it.

– Every year, on Cloud Appreciation Day (in 2024 it was Friday 13th September) the society invites people to upload their photographs of the sky to the memory cloud atlas. I see absolutely no reason why we shouldn’t all do this in 2025.

– Maria Popova of The Marginalian did one of her trademark fascinating explorations on Norwegian artist Knud Baade’s cloudscapes.

– Perhaps all you really want to do is draw a ducky or a horsey on photographs of clouds. If so, then this is the site for you.

– Finally, if you want to know where it all started, blame Luke Howard, who was the first to suggest a cloud classification system in his 1803 essay On the Modifications of Clouds.

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Thing 2 – Overlapping Lives

The aforementioned Luke Howard lived a long and fruitful life – 91 years and 113 days, from 28th November 1772 to 21st March 1864, to be precise.

This little nugget got me thinking (I try to do as little of this as possible, especially at Christmas), and so, as I occasionally do, I played a round of Overlapping Lives.

Here’s an example of how it goes:

Oliver Cromwell (25.4.1599 – 3.9.1658) lived at the same time as

Edmond Halley (8.11.1656 – 25.1.1742), who lived at the same time as

The Marquis de Sade (2.6.1740 – 2.12.1814), who lived at the same time as

Robert Browning (7.5.1812 – 12/12/1889), who lived at the same time as

Charlie Chaplin (16.4.1889 – 25/12/1977), who lived at the some time as

Emmanuel Macron (b. 21/12/1977)

So that’s a direct line of six overlapping lives, from Cromwell to Macron. Lordy.

Another favourite (particularly because of its juxtaposition of the musical and the extremely non-musical) is this one:

Johann Sebastian Bach (31/3/1685 – 28/7/1750) lived at the same time as

Lorenzo da Ponte (10.3.1749 – 17.8.1838) who lived at the same time as

Camille Saint-Saens (9.10.1835 – 16.12.1921) who lived at the same time as

Prince Philip (10.6.1921 – 9.4.2021)

From Bach to Prince Philip in four lives. Mind blown.

If you’re interested in one including our cloudy friend Luke Howard, I only got as far as this:

John Harrison (3.4.1693 – 24.3.1776) lived at the same time as

Luke Howard (28.11.1772 – 21.3.1864) who lived at the same time as

George Santayana (16.12.1863 – 26.9.1952) who lived at the same time as

Jimmy Connors (b. 2.9.1952). Or, if you prefer, Nile Rodgers (b. 18.9.1952). Or, if you prefer, David Hasselhoff (b. 17.7.1952). There are loads of options – take your pick.

I feel sure there are some even more astonishing overlapping lives to be found. If you find any, do let me know. To kick off your researches, there’s a Big Map Of Who Lived When here. And a Big Think article with more overlapping lives (restricted to single overlaps) here. One of the more fun ones is Tolkien (1892 – 1973) overlapping with Eminem (b. 1972)

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Thing 3 – Doppelgänger

It’s basically impossible to prove, but there’s a strong likelihood that somewhere in the world there is someone who looks exactly like you.

I’m not talking about professional celebrity lookalikes. That’s a different jug of squid altogether. Out of curiosity, I had a quick look at the site of a lookalike agency, from which I gleaned the all-too-predictable insight that plenty of people being touted as lookalikes bear, at best, a passing resemblance to the celebrity in question (and, quite often, what the celebrity in question looked like when they were most in the public eye something like twenty years ago). The most startling discovery on the site – to my innocent eyes, at least – is the existence of a professional C3PO lookalike.

Sorry, what the?

I realise I’m the idiot here. If you can, for the meagre investment of a few rolls of stiff plastic and a tub of shiny gold paint, persuade people to pay you for public appearances, then more power to your stiffly articulating elbow.

More interesting – again, to my impressionable eyes – is this project by Montreal photographer François Brunelle, who for the last 25 years has been looking for, and photographing, real life lookalike pairs. The project was triggered when someone told Brunelle he looked like Mr. Bean, and he started thinking about the idea o

You can find more of these photos on François’ Instagram feed.

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Thing 4 – Forest Sounds

Want to listen to a random forest?

Course you do.

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Thing 5 – Cigarettes

Old newsreel stuff is always worth a minute or two, not least so we can point at it and chortle about how odd/different/ridiculous everything looked/sounded back then. For a healthy dose of ‘gosh hasn’t the world changed?’, here’s a short clip about life in a small family cigarette factory in the early 1950s. Two things jump out at me (quite apart from the whole cigarette thing) – the accent of the narrator (RP with a transatlantic twang to my ears) and the splendid exuberance of the woodwinds in the accompanying music.

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Thing 6 – Geogrid

Geogrid is a fun daily game to test your knowledge of geographical stuff. Surprisingly easy/difficult (delete as appropriate to your expectations).

1. You may choose to argue that Eoin Colfer’s 2009 And Another Thing…, written in 2009 with the blessing of Adams’ widow Jane Belson, means it is in fact a six-book trilogy, but I prefer to stick with what the original author wrote.