Body Mass Index

The Body Mass Index (BMI) is in the news at the moment. I've been looking at my BMI and am distressed to find that I am an inch (2.54cm) shorter than my ideal height. If I could only grow taller by just that tiny bit I would be an "Ideal" 25 rather than an "Overweight" 25.6.

On the other hand, if I was to shrink to 5ft 7in (1.7m) I would then be "Obese", but as that is a loss of 6 inches I am hoping that won't happen.

Even better, I would have to get a severe attack of the "shrinks" to get to be "Very Obese" as I would only be 4ft 10in (1.47m).

At the other end of the scale I do hope giantism doesn't kick in, because if I were to suddenly grow to 7ft 2in (2.18m) I would be officially skinny, or "Underweight".

One fascinating fact though, I am lighter that 70% of Americans of the same sex, age and height though I am not sure how much taller I am than Americans of the same sex, age and BMI as me!

Hmmm.... What does the BMI represent anyway? It is your weight in kilos divided by your height in metres squared.... Well then that means that if you met with an unfortunate accident involving a steam roller that squished you out to so you were as wide as you are tall then the BMI index tells you how much 1 square metre would weigh (in kilos)....

Hang on though - how thick would I be, if I were rolled out square like a piece of pastry?

If we assume the human body has the same density as water (1kg/litre, or 1000kg/cubic metre) then we can work it out. A cube of water 1 metre by 1 metre by 1 metre would weigh 1000 kg, a cube of me 1 metre by 1 metre by x metres thick would be 25.6 kg, so substituting through I would be 0.0256 metres thick if I was rolled out square, or 2.56cm, or almost exactly an inch thick....

Put it another way your BMI is your thickness in millimetres if your were rolled out into a square!

My Cubicle

My Cubicle Song - have a listen...

I envy the chap in the song. He has got a 6 foot square cubicle - luxury! I would kill for 6 feet of office space right now.

Proximus has a fetish about desks and who sits where. They employ a removal company on a full time basis as they are always moving their staff around. I started on the 14th floor at a tiny desk that to my amazement was meant for two people - fortunately there wasn't anyone at the other half of the desk so I had a bit of space.

After 4 months I was moved to the 1st floor where I was crammed in on a long table with a metre to myself and people on either side. A metre is not a lot of space for a PC a phone, papers, keyboard, mouse, note book, scrap paper, coffee cup etc. Each day was a struggle to make sure I didn't encroach on my neighbours and to fend them off as they encroached on my space - and of course there was no privacy.

Fortunately I 'outlived' my neighbours and eventually I had the whole row to myself. That really pissed everyone off as there are, believe it or not, rules in Proximus about how much space a each grade of staff can use, with lowly contractors at the bottom of the list. The office secretary wanted to move me to a more crowded location, but I was saved by another piece of Belgian bureaucracy which manifested itself through the Proximus 'short move' rule which states 'thou shall not move less than 25m', so she couldn't cram me in to some really crowded desks nearby.

Two months ago I changed teams and was moved to the 2nd floor where I was in a little cubicle I shared with my boss. It was about 4 metres long and 2 metres wide and he sat at the far end occupying 3 metres and I had my regulation 1 metre. It was OK except when he had meetings.

I've just been moved again and I now sit in the area about 30 metres from where used to sit 2 months ago. My new 'desk' is just outside some meeting rooms in the middle of the 1st floor - I couldn't be further away from a window anywhere else in the whole building. I can see daylight over my left shoulder through a window, but it is about 25 metres away. All the light that gets to me is artificial.

I am now sitting at a unscreened bench with a PC on it with my neighbour less than a metre away - the only upside is that I am at the end of the row, but that does mean all the other 4 people on my bench have to walk past me to get to their seat. I no longer have a phone, or any screens around me and my desk, and oh yes, all the cupboards that hem me in from behind are locked and I've not got any where to put my stuff!

Haunted Dictionary

Here is an odd little story concerning the Concise Oxford English Dictionary

Many years ago when the Oxford English Dictionary was being compiled one of the major contributors was a Doctor William C. Minor, who surprisingly enough turned out to not be English but American. More surprisingly he was a resident of Broadmore (the criminal lunatic asylum) having murdered an Irishman in an unprovoked attack in a street in London. The poor chap was as "nutty as a fruit cake"; he was convinced that all Irishmen were out to get him and in addition he was inordinately fond of "wanking". Nevertheless he did have a very extensive personal library at Broadmore which he used to assist the compilers of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary providing them with early examples of words and their meanings.

When they discovered the truth about the "Surgeon of Crowthorne" as he called himself it came as a terrible shock to everyone involved with the dictionary and they stopped using the poor chap as a reference.

A little while later Dr Minor decided it was time to stop wanking and cut his own penis off (OUCH!!). He later became ill and with the assistance of Winston Churchill no less was repatriated to the USA in 1910 where he died in 1920 (still totally nuts, but finally diagnosed as being schizophrenic, poor chap).

If you don't believe me then, it is all well documented in Simon Winchester's excellent book "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" (see Wikipedia's entries on The Surgeon of Crowthorne and William Chester Minor). The picture at the top of this entry shows Dr Minor (sans willy I presume). .

But Dr. Minor's ghostly influence over the Oxford English Dictionary is still apparent.

If you take a copy of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary and rest it on its spine and let it go it will naturally, unless you've abused it, fall open at its centre. That's not much of a surprise, but, the first word defined at the top of the centre page can cause embarrassment or amusement - it is, on my copy and on every other copy I've tried, "MASTURBATE".

Does Dr Minor haunt the Concise OED?

Party Weekend

It was a very boozy weekend!

It kicked off on Friday with a GONADs run (for a full explanation of the GONADs see Gonads page on www.bmph3.com ). For the most tenuous of reasons (the Ascent of the BMV on the previous Tuesday) the theme was "Vicars Tarts and Virgins". A newbie to the Hash, who later in the procedings was named "Half Monty" hosted the GONADs in his pristine brand new flat - what a nice chap! We had a medium size pack of 9 runners, and once the hare had been selected by spinning a bottle, we had a good live trail through the centre of Brussels (set by Hippo de Hop, the Unhappy Harpy below). The hare was home in about 40 minutes, and those of the pack that managed to follow the trail in under an hour.

Then the fun began. As well as the runners there were a number of late-commers and non-runners so the pack swelled considerably and things got very silly!

It looks from the photos like I missed my vocation in life!

The full set of photos are viewable on Forrest Gulp's Fotki website or on mine my Fotki website but there are hundreds of them so here are a few of the sillier ones.

The Unwise Virgin

The Unhappy Tart

The Unhappy Harpy

Amazingly enough we did it all again the next night. Rhythm Stick threw an excellent party at her place on Saturday.

There was loads of food and drink and dancing and a good time was had by all.

Once again there are a full set of photos viewable on Forrest Gulp's Fotki website or on my Fotki website

Sunday should have been a day of abstinence but I was very kindly invited to Brunch by my landlord and landlady Jim and Olga. We went down to the "Place de Jeu du Balle" (famous for its flea market) to the "De Skieven Architek" (The Crooked Architect" - a curse in Brussels) see http://www.wcities.com/en/record/34,130392/13/record.html and had an excellent meal (I had Stoemp) and we had a couple of bottles of the "Best Beer in the World" from the Westvleteren Trappist monastry (see Wikipedia's entry and The Monastry's Website ).

The beer comes in simple unlabled bottles. We started off with the 6% which was a cloudy light beer somewhat like a "Blanche" and then an 8% which like its big brother the 12% is a rich dark mouthful of wonderment.

After all that I went back to the apartment and was asked by Olga and Jim to have a look at their computer which was misbehaving and spent the rest of the afternoon fixing the p.c. and drinking yet more beer...

This weekend I'm going to do it all over again, or at least something like it. It is Higgin's birthday and he has organised a major Hash related festival starting with a GONADs pubcrawl on Friday and a big party on Saturday that advertises a start time of 7pm and a chucking out time of 3am!

My liver is in the process of applying for political asylum...

House Decoration

Not a very exciting blog I'm afraid. Just wanted to share a couple of things about the simple activity of getting your house painted.

We decided it was time to bite the bullet and get the place painted externally by professionals early this year, but we had to wait until this month until the work started.

The first thing that had to be done was trim the undergrowth around the house which mean loosing a large part of the fabulous climbing rose that covered the front of the house in flame orange/red roses year after year - I do hope it grows back!

So far the following has happened

1. The painter electrocuted himself
2. The painter cut the satellite cable
3. The scaffolding lorry couldn't get into the drive and we had to wait 2 days until they found a truck small enough
   
4. The painter broke a window
5. The some of the sofits at the back of the house turn out to be old floorboards and they are rotten and need to be replaced
6. There at least 2 squirrel holes in the sofits and one in the roof
7. The some of the sofits at the front of the house are rotten and need to be replaced
8. The front door is rotten and needs to be replaced
9. We weren't sure if the painting could start because of the drought and hosepipe ban which raised doubt about pressure blasting the old paint off
10. The rain (yes there is an official drought, but since work started it has been raining steadily) means that there are questions about when the painting can start...

And they haven't even started painting yet!

If you want to see some more boring pictures of the house and the views from the scaffolding then go to

World Cup and Opera

As hinted in a previous posting Janet and I were in Italy during the World Cup final and experienced some of the euphoria it generated first hand. We had booked to go to the opera in Verona on Sunday the 9th July months before the World Cup even started and neither of us being a footie fan the date didn't seem significant.

Verona is special for opera as they use the second largest amphitheatre in Italy to stage it. So it is in the open air, and they use the incredible accoustics rather than amplification to really provide a wonderful atmosphere... you can see where this is leading can't you?

The opera was Aida, staged and designed by Franco Zeppharelli, so the set and costumes were spectacular.

Egypt, Italy and Zepharelli

Before the show started we had supper in the rather wonderfully named Bra Plazza. There were hundreds of football fans in full Italian regalia and armed with flags (how come the national strip is bright blue, but the flag is green, white and red?). Several of the bars had plasma screen TV's set up and for the first time, possibly ever, there were more people in the bars not going to the opera than going. The mix of formally dressed opera goers and the football fans made for an interesting spectacle.

After supper we went into the arena and found our seats, close to the floor of the amphitheatre, on the second tier of the stone oval.

The first two acts were wonderful - the singing was electrifyingly good and the set with its huge rotating pyramid was an enduring eye-full.

Radamès

Aida and the Princess

Ballet too!

More wonderful sets

Yet more wonderful sets and costumes

There was an intermission after the second act. As I went down to get a drink a buzz spread round the amphitheatre - there was a penalty shoot out... Well we all know the result. Just as I was handed my drink someone started shouting - Italy had won. Then the place went crazy.

Within a minute the stage was crowded with everyone from stage hands, to extras to the lead performers. The Pharoah was up there waving the Italian flag.

World Cup Madness Everyone was dancing, jumping up and down and shouting. After a few minutes of total chaos the orchestra came back and the conductor led everyone, the stage hands and performers, as well as the audience in the Italian national anthem. I'm proud to say that through watching rugby on TV I knew the tune and chorus at least and so joined in as well. Then we sang it all for a second time.

Slowly calm returned and after about 20 minutes the 3rd Act started... Then we realised what a lot of noise was coming from outside the amphitheatre - it sounded like a battle or riot was raging all around us. The performers soldiered on despite it being almost impossible to hear them...

And then the fireworks started. That defeated them. Aida and the lead tenor, Radamès, left the stage and had a conflab with the conductor as we listened to the roar of the mob outside accompanied by airhorns and explosions. After a few minutes the explosions subsided and the performance continued, but it was still almost impossible to hear a thing. The accoustics of the amphitheatre meant that if an explosion occurred in front of us we heard a bang, but if it was behind us we didn't hear a bang, but a sort of 'zing' or metallic buzz as the sound reflected off the stone tiers opposite.

The performance stopped once again in the 5th Act but the performers just stayed on stage until the noise - a series of firecrackers died out.

After the magnificent show was over and the encores complete we headed out into the bedlam of the Bra Plazza - it was like a scene from a Bruegel painting - a total chaos of wierd people. There were a bride and groom with her still in her bridal dress dancing and singing. There were drunks of all ages wrapped in flags or waving them. There were children and there were grannies all dancing with an amazing frenzy. Our problem was that we had to find our tour guide and then get back to our coach; a non-trivial task. Anyway we managed it and got back to the coach without loosing anyone despite the chaos. It was only then that I realised I had forgotten to take any photos of the celebrations!

Despite the fact that I'm not a football fan, like the 1966 World Cup final, this year's will be one that I will never forget! Oh, by the way I heard the second half of Aida a few weeks later, when I brought the CD!

All the photos can be see at http://public.fotki.com/SpottedDick/aida_in_verona/