Exploding Head Syndrome

Every now and again, while wandering around on the internet, you come across the answer to a question you hadn't thought to ask. This happened to me the other day, when I stumbled on this passage:

As strange as the name sounds, exploding head syndrome is actually a rare and relatively undocumented sleep phenomenon. While sleeping or dozing, a person with the condition hears a terrifically loud sound in their head, such as a bomb exploding, a clash of cymbals or a gun going off.

My first thought was, "Oh, so that's a real thing, not just some weird and random peculiarity of my own." My second was, "And it has a really cool name: Exploding Head Syndrome. I have Exploding Head Syndrome."

The article explains the what, but not the why, probably because no-one knows what causes it or what the mechanisms involved are. There are many comments by readers on that page, most saying that they have experienced it, but never knew what it was, just like me. However, many were also frightened by it and thought it might be some dire harbinger of serious illness. For some reason (and for the life of me, I can't think why) it never crossed my mind that it might be a symptom of something serious. It didn't hurt, I didn't have any after-effects from it, and otherwise I felt fine: it was just my head going bang for some mysterious reason of its own.

In fact, it never really frightened me that much, though of course it does jolt you awake suddenly when it happens. Mine seem to happen when I'm just on the point of going to sleep, so perhaps it's clearer to me that it's not a real sound, but something inside my head. My sounds also vary a fair bit and are rather inventive, so it often makes me smile. For example, I get the standard bangs and crashes, but also a sound like a grand piano falling on the floor from a great height, and another that sounds very like the Mac alert sound 'Sosumi', but at a deeper pitch. I quite like the fact that I have my own alert sounds, even if they do wake me up.

Suspended

We were in Bristol this weekend, for a wedding (the one I had to go clothes shopping for). The wedding celebration itself was great fun, so we had a lovely time on Saturday evening. However, because of travelling problems, we arrived later than we'd expected, and had to leave at lunchtime on the Sunday. This was a shame, because I was looking forward to wandering around one of my favourite cities. As we arrived, I was trying to remember how all the streets interlinked, and found that I didn't instantly recognise parts of the area I spent a year living in. Then I worked out that it is over 20 years since I was an undergraduate in Bristol. Gulp.

I slept really badly on Saturday night for a number of reasons, waking at 4.30 am and lying awake listening to the hotel's extractor fans rumble. I was particularly annoyed because the clocks had gone back an hour that night, so not only had I missed out on sleep, I'd missed out on the 'bonus' hour you get at the end of British Summer Time.

A morning walk in the bright, cold air of Clifton on Sunday morning cheered me up, though. Old Brunel built some pretty spectacular constructions, but I have an abiding and deep love for the Clifton Suspension Bridge. I never get tired of the elegant shape, or the way it responds to and emphasises the natural beauty and drama of the Avon Gorge. I love every gigantic nut and bolt of it. I've put a small selection of the photos I took in a set on Flickr (the whole collection would bore even the most ardent Brunel fan). I'm only sorry that we didn't get to see how it looks at night, now that they've replaced the old lighting with a new LED system. It does sound as if it would nicely accentuate the features of the bridge, while giving the impression that it is floating above the Gorge. However, I'm nostalgic about the warm, slightly random fairy light effect that the old tungsten bulb system used to have.

Parklife

As I cycled home from work through the park, I witnessed this scene:

Two magpies stood watching a hedgehog. The hedgehog was walking — slowly and very precisely — along the white line of a football pitch. The mapgies kept about half a metre from the hedgehog, but walked along behind it, watching it intently.

I'm sure that they were probably sizing it up to see if they could eat it, but I couldn't help thinking that — apart from the fact that they weren't wearing tiny, twee clothes — it looked like an updated and slightly sinister scene from a Beatrix Potter book.

Infinite monkeys

A couple of days ago, I went back to my office after leaving the computer for a short while, and heard the voice synthesiser reading out menus and other interface items. This — needless to say — was slightly freaky. The explanation was obvious, but still rather puzzling. You see, the cats have got into the bad habit of wandering over my keyboard recently. I've also found Bianca curled up peacefully on my MacBook's keyboard more than once. Considering that the laptop is on a raised shelf above the desk, you'd think this would be awkward, but apparently the toasty warmth of the processor and the shiatsu massage provided by the action of the keys is worth the trouble.

Evidently, in the course of either wandering across or lying on the keyboard, one of the cats had turned on a Mac OS X feature called VoiceOver: it is intended to assist people with visual disabilities by reading out the labels of whatever they are interacting with, text on screen and so on. The mystery part is that you turn it on with the Command-F5 keyboard combination: that's not easy to hit accidentally, even for a human with two hands. The F-keys are also quite small on both the external keyboard and the MacBook's own keyboard, so they aren't a big target.

My mind immediately conjured images of infinite numbers of monkeys sitting at typewriters. But forget the complete works of Shakespeare: if the cats ever randomly type 'FEED ME CAT FOOD NOW HUMAN', then trigger VoiceOver, I will be forever enslaved.

Memo to Bianca

Dear Bianca (Cat¹),

It's really sweet that you always want to accompany me to the bathroom if I get up at night. After all, I could get lonely in there, and a friendly, wide-awake cat is always a pleasant companion. And it's lovely when you rub around my bare legs — you have very soft fur, and it's nicely soothing.

However, we have to talk about the toe licking. I know that you're just being affectionate (or perhaps my toes taste of tuna?), but it's downright unnerving. You see, I try to maintain a state of being just conscious enough if I have to get up at night. But you have an phenomenally scratchy tongue and it tickles like nobody's business, particularly when you try to lick between my toes. That tends to rocket me into full consciousness pretty quickly, which — you'll realize if you've been following along — is a Bad Thing.

So the Executive Summary is as follows: leg rubbing = good; toe licking = bad.

Thank you for your attention (between bouts of pouncing on bits of fluff you've pulled out the carpet and trying to eat paper tissues).

Your pal and cat biscuit provider,

bsag

¹ I think this qualification is necessary for people who don't know she's a cat. Otherwise, there could be... misunderstandings. ↑

Cat occupations

Cats are strange creatures. Many seem to find themselves odd modes of unpaid — but deadly serious — employment. Maru inspects boxes with great thoroughness and Tom Cox's cat Janet (a he, not a she, by the way) collects retro plastic wrappers from a nearby lake for a living. One of our cats has also revealed her occupation recently.

When we got our cats, the previous owner told us that Bella liked to drink from the tap. This took some time to manifest itself, but after a few weeks, she would hop up onto the cistern in the bathroom and position herself near the tap, waiting for us to turn it on. You have to select just the right flow rate though, or she looks at you with that classic disappointed feline gaze which implies, "Oh, you just can't get the staff nowadays."

A short while after Bella started drinking from our taps, Bianca started her very important job: Advanced Basin Surveillance. If you have closed the bathroom door to get a bit of privacy, then open it, Bianca will come rushing in, and leap immediately on to the cistern. If she had access to a blue flashing light, I'm sure she would use it, because she shows Emergency Services levels of urgency. She then crouches down and watches the basin from close range with an intensity and focus that would shame many humans. She does this for very long periods, only changing position when a drop of water in the basin makes a break for the plughole, and then she's right on the case. It's hilarious to watch.

Between the two cats, it's actually quite hard to have the bathroom to yourself, and I've frequently found myself sharing a very small bathroom with two cats perched on the cistern or trying to walk around the edge of the basin.

Perfect afternoon

Life seems to have been incredibly busy and tiring recently, but I've just had one of the most peaceful and relaxing afternoons I've experienced in a long time. Mr. Bsag and I sat reading on the sofa with the cats, listening to Aleyn by June Tabor. He read the paper with Bianca lounging gracefully on his lap, while I started my library copy of Kate Rew's Wild Swim. I dreamed about how nice it would be to swim off a Hebridean beach or a Cornish tidal pool, while Bella purred in between us, her head and forepaws tucked into the curve of my hip, long whiskers twitching slightly while she dreamed some feline dream.

Dear Google Maps

Dear Google Maps,

We need to have a quick word about your walking directions feature. Don't get me wrong -- I love your maps, and dragging the selected route around to re-direct it is brilliant. I use your service a lot, and not just when I'm trying to find directions to an unfamiliar destination. For example, this weekend, I used the walking directions when I was too lazy to get out a map and a bit of string and measure a distance we'd just walked to a familiar destination.

You see, we often walk out to a favourite country pub at weekends, and take a number of different routes, depending on whether the footpath will be too muddy, or how much time we have for a leisurely walk. We were wondering how long each leg was, and had guessed at somewhere between 7 and 8 miles for the round trip. So I turned to Google Maps and set directions for each leg separately. Combined, the route came to 7.7 miles, which was pretty close to our estimate, but the time estimate was out. By quite a bit. Despite having set the method as 'walking' the time estimate read 11 minutes for the 4 mile leg.

That would make the pace 2.75 minutes per mile, which is quite a lick. The winner of the men's race at the London Marathon this weekend set a roughly 4.8 minute pace for each mile. Granted, 26 miles is more than 4, but even so. Furthermore, when you've had half a pint of lovely real ale (OK, a pint. All right, a pint and a half) while sitting in the sunshine in the pub garden, and are then meandering home in Fotherington Thomas mode, looking at the pretty wild flowers and butterflies, listening to birds singing and watching buzzards circling on thermals, your pace is substantially less than 2.75 minutes per mile.

In fact, it should be much easier to predict the time taken to walk a given distance than to drive it, because you are not going to get held up by traffic, roadworks and so on. So here's a suggestion, Google. Why not provide a slider next to the dropdown for walking directions, with which you can set your own walking pace? Set it at 3 miles/hour as default (which will be pretty accurate for most people), and then fast or slow walkers can increase or decrease as necessary. Then all you need to do is a simple calculation based on the measured distance.

Love, bsag xxx

P.S. In case you are wondering, our actual time for the 4 mile return trip was 1 hour 15 minutes. Without the beer, sunshine and when not in Fotherington Thomas mode, it would have been about an hour.

Yellowstone

I love wildlife documentaries. I grew up watching all the classic Attenborough natural history TV series, glued to the wonders he showed us, and desperate to find out more. I couldn't really tell you whether I watched them because I was obsessed with animals, or whether I was obsessed with animals because I watched the documentaries, but either way, both played a large part in my eventual decision to become a biologist¹. I still enjoy them now, and I often learn new things from them. I do find that my acquired pedantry means that I wince at over-simplifications or anthropomorphism in the commentary, but the photography is better than ever.

Yellowstone -- the new BBC series which started last night -- is a great example. There were breathtaking shots of the landscape in winter: stars wheeling around frozen trees; the air itself seeming to sparkle in an ice storm; ice crystals forming on the rich brown hair of a bison; an extreme close up of the feet of a dipper, clutching smooth nodules of ice as bright water flowed below. All of these sights are things that you and I could probably not see, even if we were allowed into the closed park and could stand the -40deg;C temperatures. The camera compresses or extends time, so that we can see processes we're too slow or too impatient to perceive. We can get up close to animals behaving naturally, and see every hair and feather sharply and look into their eyes.

In one particularly painterly shot, we saw the long furrow produced by a bison moving through the virgin snow with a meandering track. The shot was framed so that the track originated in the bottom left with the exhausted and weak bison pausing at the top right of the frame. It was so eloquent about the life of a bison in deep winter than no words were necessary.

And yet there are words, and swirling, emotional, overblown music. The commentary wasn't as bad as on some documentaries I've seen recently, but I found myself wishing that the magical red button offered an option to view the pictures with only the ambient recorded sound: no commentary and no music. If there could be a further option for a discrete, on-demand caption giving the Latin and common name of any of the species featured, that would be the icing on the cake. As it is, I'm tempted to listen with the TV muted, but then I would have missed the beautiful sounds of wolves howling, the craak of the raven and the huffing breath of bison and elk.

¹ After I decided that I couldn't be a vet because I was too soft and couldn't stand seeing animals in pain every day. ↑

Orphaned items of clothing

You know those sad, solitary items of unpaired clothing you see placed on walls or on the spikes of fences? Those orphaned, singular mittens and lonely socks? Have you found yourself wondering if they are ever reunited with their mate again? Well I can tell you that such happy reconciliations do occasionally happen.

Yesterday morning, I got yet another puncture on my bike, in the front tyre just like last time. I wasn't too far from home, so I decided to head back pushing my bike because I was running late for work. I stopped, took off my gloves and put them on my rear rack while I phoned Mr. Bsag to tell him to expect me back, then trudged back. It was only when I got back (fuming about the puncture) that I realised that only one of the gloves was still sitting on the rack. At which point I fumed a bit more.

Mr. Bsag travelled the same route later on and looked for the glove but could find no sign of it, so I was resigned to eventually ordering another pair. But what did I see coming towards the entrance to the park this morning, but my lost glove, mounted by some kind stranger on the branch of a shrub, waving cheerily at me. And there was much rejoicing...

De-militarised zone

In my previous post about my new Maxpedition bag I mentioned that I wanted to 'de-militarise' it a bit. I decided to create a bit of needlepoint work (or tapestry -- I'm such a newbie at this, I don't even know the correct term) which I could mount on the velcro patch on the front flap. The space available was quite long and thin (or 'widescreen' as I tend to think of that format now), so I needed a design which would work well in the space. Since I haven't done any needlepoint since I was in my early teens (and that involved using kits) I also needed a fairly simple design that would stand up to a few errors.

I've always loved the White Horse of Uffington, and I thought it would fit the space well. I'm no artist, but I had a go at sketching the outline of the horse on the canvas using the photo on Wikipedia for reference, and then -- like any good geek -- searched the internet to find out how one actually does needlepoint. Then I spent a happy weekend building up the design and learning how to keep the stitches neat. In the end, I was quite pleased with the result, though it has to be said that the back of the canvas is a disaster area. Still, that part is safely encased in velcro now, so no-one need ever know that I was breaking several cardinal rules of needlepoint. The Horse is a bit wobbly, but then so is the original, so it doesn't look too dire. I found it quite relaxing (when the silk wasn't getting itself into a Gordian knot), and I'm planning another panel for the pocket on the top of the bag. Any suggestions for designs?

Bag lady

My name is Bsag, and I am a bagaholic.

I'm not remotely interested in your Prada or Gucci or other 'It' bags: no, my thing is rough, tough bags with lots of pockets. My problem is not that I want to collect a lot of them, but that I'm absurdly picky and a perfectionist when it comes to bags. I want something that's comfortable to carry fully loaded, particularly when riding a bike (like a rucksack), but that is easily swung around to access the pockets (like a messenger bag). I want a bag that doesn't look huge on me but has enough room for the daily essentials plus a few extra bits for longer excursions. I don't want to rummage, so I like lots of pockets which happen to be the perfect size for exactly the kind of stuff that I carry. I want it to be tough, well made and engineered to last. Oh, and I want it to be waterproof (or at least showerproof) as well. That's not much to ask, eh?

{Read more...}

Borrow a purr

If you don't have a cat, but enjoy the sound of purring, you are welcome to borrow 30 seconds of Cleo's purring, recorded earlier this evening.

You'll need to turn the volume up a bit, because the mic on the iPhone isn't very sensitive. In case you are wondering, the funny squeaky sound at the start is her sniffing the iPhone.

Red hair

Last week in the Guardian Weekend magazine, there was a wonderful series of photographs by Jennie Wicks, from an exhibition called "Root Ginger: A Study of Red Hair". In the text accompanying the article, some of the redheads featured in the photographs talked about the variety of taunts and insults they have endured because of the colour of their hair. Any negative discrimination on the basis of appearance is absolutely wrong, of course, but are people mad?

Take a look at this gorgeous photograph of Jennie Wicks' daughter, Lucie. Go and look at it now, I'll wait her until you come back -- you may be some time.

Back? Is that not the most stunning portrait you've ever seen? That glowing mass of copper curls, the delicate golden threads of her lashes against the china blue eyes. I could look at that colour combination for ever. On a grey winter day, just looking at that little girl would cheer me up. All the pictures are lovely, particularly the one of Ray Ball, with his red beard gracefully fading to white.

I've always loved red hair. When I was younger, I dearly wanted a mass of flaming, Pre-Raphaelite locks, but was stuck with a dark mouse brown. Turlough was my favourite Doctor Who companion before the current run of series, and I have always found red hair beautiful. Mr. Bsag also happens to have red hair (a light copper rather than a deep red) -- just one of the many things I love about him.

Some people seem to hate difference of any kind, but I think it's childish. When we're children or teenagers, we want to be the same as all our friends, but surely we should grow out of that conformist, sheep-like attitude at some point? So much of the obsession with dieting and plastic surgery seems to be a juvenile urge to look as if you're from the same jelly mould as everyone else. I think that people who look different (and have quirky characters, tastes and interests, but that's another story) are fascinating and beautiful. I find 'conventionally beautiful' people utterly uninteresting aesthetically (and oddly unattractive), but find people with scars, uneven or prominent features or striking colouration stunning.

Where did the week go?

I'm amazed to find that a week has passed since I last posted here. It has been an incredibly busy week at work. By a series of unfortunate coincidences, I've ended up in a 'Perfect Storm' of important deadlines, and as a result, I've barely had time to draw breath. The next couple of weeks are going to be just as busy, but I'm determined to take a little break this weekend, or I'm not going to get through it.

As a result of all the stuff I had on, I missed seeing Obama's Inauguration. I haven't even watched the speech on YouTube yet, so I'm hoping to catch up with that this weekend. All of the coverage flowed around me: I saw people 'LiveTwittering' it out of the corner of my eye, caught sight of headlines on other people's newspapers and overheard people talking about it.

The day after the Inauguration, I heard two women discussing Barack Obama while reading their copies of Metro on the train: "He speaks clearly and simply. He makes so much sense." Her friend agreed with a tone of wonder. Even without all the other expectations of his Presidency, just having a President who can string a sentence together (though perhaps not an Oath!) makes it seem like a whole new world.

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