My Dad's Diary : Sat 29th March 1947

"Doris still bad.

Having bad time with her.

Newcastle beaten by Charlton 4-0

Cambridge beat Oxford"


Mam was never an easy patient.

The second sports result refers, of course, to the Boat Race. Oxford were regarded as favourite, but lost. The Times rowing correspondent suggested the "Boat Race was as disappointing as the weather in which it was rowed".

Here's Johnny!

The distribution of condoms to the athletes at the Athens Olympics made a number of news bulletins.

Less widely reported is a news story on the BBC News website, provided by the BBC Hindi service.

You can read the full story on the website, but it seems that the weavers of the holy Indian city of Varanasi are getting through around 600,000 condoms a day.

Varanasi is home to the world-famous Banarasi saris, and weavers are rubbing condoms on the looms' shuttles so that they're softened by the lubricant, thus making the process of weaving faster.

There are around 150,000 to 200,000 hand and power looms in Varanasi alone and almost all are using the technique. And every loom has a daily consumption of three or four condoms.

There's an interesting little side panel in the story which lists other Unusual Uses for Condoms:

• Villagers use them to carry water when working in fields
• For waterproofing ceilings: condoms are spread under the cement-concrete mortar
• They can be mixed with tar and concrete to give a smooth finish to roads
• They can be placed over the ends of guns to protect them in desert sandstorms

Of course, they can also be.....I was tempted to end on a rather coarse note, but as I often have to remind Patsy123, this is a High Class blog.

Logophobia

Well, the Olympics are upon us, complete with drugs and lying scandal from Day One. For want of the energy to click the off-switch, I watched part of the opening ceremony. Am I the only one to have been irritated by the DJ's clumsily repetitive background electronica, or is it just that I no longer appreciate the alleged "youthful" approach ?

I hear from various sources that megabuck sponsors of the Games, including Coca-Cola, have protested about logos. They've protested to such an extent that anyone found wearing or carrying something which blatantly bears the logo of one of the sponsors' competitors is liable to be expelled from the venue.

Keep on Rockin' in the Free World.

Arm and Hammer

It's been a funny couple of days. Yesterday was taken up with yet more paper-clearing. One of the annoying things about clearing kipple (a fine word coined by Philip K Dick for accumulated paper) is that when you open something and decide to tear it up, it almost inevitably involves doing something else before you can actually tear it up. So, if you don't do that required thing, you have to put the original piece of paper back into another pile.

Regarding this as self-defeating (and acknowledging that this is what contributes to the huge piles of kipple in the first place), I decided to make sure that all the chains of requirement were carried through to the end.

Even if this led to the wrath of Patsy123 who was waiting for me to help with assembling various bits of IKEA flatpackery.

Which it did.......but we'll not dwell on that.

Anyway, I finished assembling her new computer desk with the aid of a hammer. This rare item of toolbox gimmickry was something Patsy123 doesn't have. My friend CJ doesn't have a pair of pliers. How do women get along without hammers and pliers (he generalised)?

After seeing her off to London again, I wandered home and sweltered a little in the garden. A turn about the Martock Bean Enclosure shows that three whole bean pods have developed and there may be more to come if I can remember to buy some slug pellets.

And then it was a bit of a slump in front of, alternately, the tv and the monitor. Should have stuck with the monitor, but instead I half-heartedly watched a 1987 movie called Over the Top.

Made by Golan-Globus, in fact directed by Menahem Golan, it starred Sly Stallone and featured him as former loser making good in the world of boxing. No, sorry, what made me say that? In the world of armwrestling.

The finale took place in Nevada (Las Vegas, I guess, but I wasn't paying that much attention) at the World Armwrestling Championships. Inevitably, Sly done good by beating a HUGE mountain of a man, some twenty feet bigger than himself, and in so doing, won the love of his estranged son and the grudging though unstated respect of his father-in-law.

Yeah, you got it. Absolute bollocks.

But it got me to thinking: is armwrestling one of those "international" sports the Americans so love, like baseball?

So I googled it. And lo and behold, it has member organisations in just about everywhere you can think of. Even Scotland.

I didn't think it possible, but here's another sport I can add to those I already take no interest in. Wonder if I'll be ignoring it as part of the Olympics?