Friday, August 14, 2009

visitor, umpire, manners?

Posted by PicasaToday's blackbird, with take-away.
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In the convenience store a young man stacking shelves asks: "You play cricket?"
"Too old", I say. "You'd make a good umpire with that hat!" A panama, in fact, foldable, which arrived in the post the other day wrapped in a tube.
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"Manners maketh man," according to the 15th century prelate William of Wykeham. May be. But according to a tv programme on the cell, it is rather: 18 kilos of carbon, nitrogen, water phosphorus, iron and a few other elements organised into something like 100,000 billion cells.

6 comments:

Roderick Robinson said...

Nice to switch away, briefly, from physics and run through a different pantheon of great names in science. Perhaps you and I should form a Rehabilitate Rimak Society.

Unknown said...

Rimak seems to need rehabiliting where I am concerned. Neither Google nor Chambers Biographical Dictionary can help? Maybe he featured in the programme,and I failed to not the name. Please enlighten.

Lucy said...

Hasn't blackbird been busy!

Roderick Robinson said...

Sorry, I misspelled his name though I'll swear I've seen it with an "i". Here's an extract from The Guardian's TV reviewer:

"Rutherford's (presenter of The Cell) favourite, though, would seem to be Robert Remak, a German embryologist who, as Rutherford told it, had basically founded embryology, but had been unjustly overlooked after his friend Rudolph Virkow passed off his research on cell division as his own.

Bastard.

So that's Robert Remak, everyone. Tell your friends. Robert Remak."

Unknown said...

Thankyou. According to Chambers, Rudolf Virchow, apart from being a pathologist, was a liberal member of the Richstag and strenously opposed Bismark. I remain politically and scientifically neutral and only a tantinet less ignorant than before. But report this only for the sake of balance. While it was open, I peeped into Le Petit Larousse and note that Virchow gets a mention but not Remak. Ok, I'm won over in favour of the underdog and overlooked. Vive Remak.

Unknown said...

I see that I misspelled rehabilitating, not an usual mistake for me. It looks awful though. I hope I wouldn't speak like that.