Spirograph Flowers

When I was a young boy, there was an art toy available called Spirograph. It was a plastic bracket with geared circles cut out of it. The plastic bracket was accompanied by plastic gears with holes in them to hold pens in place. Each gear piece had a different shape or size.

The purpose of the Spirograph set was to create flowers out if geometric repeating shapes. I called them Spirograph flowers but they actually had a technical name that I can't recall.

To create the so called Spirograph flowers, you would choose a gear piece and place it in the nested gear circle. You would then place a pen in a hole on the gear piece and then use the pen to turn the gear around. You would then create two rotations on a line because the gear piece would go around the nested gear hole and it would rotate on it's axis at the same time.

At any point you could remove the pen and place a different color or change the hole that the pen sits or change the gear piece. You could also colour in some of the spaces in the pattern and the combination of colours is unlimited. If you made many changes to the flower then the chances are that you had created something very unique. Every kid and adult that had a Spirograph set wanted to create a one of a kind outstanding spirograph flower.

I think there are different sets available now and some of them are very sophisticated with many brackets and many gear pieces.

Calendar logic

In my time and my society, time is divided up into years, months and days. There are twelve months in one year but the 365 days that make up one year can't be divided evenly by 12 so each month has a different number of days.

I remember how many days each month has because I saw a pattern in the values, and apply a rule to know.  Let me explain.

If I want to know how many days there are in a month I ask myself 3 questions very quickly. Firstly I ask is the month February because that is the only month with 28 days. Then I ask if the month's numeric value is an odd or even number. March is the 3rd month so it is an odd number. Then I ask myself if it is before august because all odd months before august have 31 days, all odd months after august have 30 days, all even months from August have 31 days and all even months before August have 30 days except for February with 28 days.

Aretha dead high street sick

If there is one thing that is clear in the UK it is the perils of the high street. Retail is very challenging and many companies are closing down their stores. They are competing against internet based stores and companies that pay less tax.

Home base is closing down some of their stores and so is house of Fraiser. I remember Brantano also closed down recently. Some people blame brexit but those people have forgotten about BHS and Woolworths and all the other department stores that closed down before the referendum.

Aretha Francklin died a few days ago and I will remember her final days as the high street crucible. The world I live in is changing very fast and soon I won't recognize it.

Spider Ghost

Yesterday I went to the bathroom to use the toilet only to discover there was a big spider in the bathroom. I dealt with the spider the only way I know how, I took the vacuum cleaner, pulled the brush off and left the two rigid tubes on the hose. I the turned the vacuum cleaner on and extended the tubes at arm's length towards the spider and sucked the micro beast into the vacuum cleaner. My Vacuum cleaner uses cyclones so I could see the spider's twisted body inside.

I then got a strange sensation, I felt like something was crawling inside my throat. I get that every time I deal with a spider, it was all in the mind but a small silly part of me feels like it is the spider's ghost.  I dealt with that sensation by eating ice cream.

The good thing is I won't worry about a spider jumping on my balls when I'm taking a shit. And the spider is in the trash can outside, I'm sure there are insects in there for it to eat, we all lived happily ever after.

What July means to me

July 2018 has passed by and it is now August. July 2018 in the UK was very hot, most of the month was in a heat wave and there was almost no rain. Grass throughout the UK dried up.

My birthday is in July and this time I went with my family for a meal. The final football match that decided the winning football team in the world cup was on my birthday. It turned out to be France. I wasn't disappointed with the result because I think that Enland played very well this time and they came 4th overall.

I returned to an old hobby of drawing during this month. I drew some pictures using just paper and pall point pen, it is a very cheap hobby.