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chorus

(sigh - I'd love a good solid frost and the opportunity to get my skates on....)

choir

(BTW, if any of you have a chance to see the Choir of Man, do it! I just bought tickets to see the show in London before the cruise. It will be my fifth time seeing it: twice on a cruise ship, once in Tampa, FL, and once in Chicago, IL.)

Gloria

(we had our first rehearsal tonight singing Vivaldi's Gloria)

high school

(I was in an excellent choir in school -- used to record and tour, though not my two years, alas -- and we sang Vivaldi's Gloria. It's such a fun piece.)

Mabel, re skating: I feel your pain.

Grammar (School)

(Eldest dot went to a Grammar, younger went to a Secondary Modern, both were suited by their school's academic level. I think the younger would have been switched off by the Grammar's academic level when she first went into senior school. As time progressed, she became more switched on academically & ended up in the 'Grammar Stream'.)

Regards,

Richard

Pedant

(Yes, I am one. A grammar pedant. It's by no means my worst flaw )

Editor

(the natural employment of pedants; ask how I know)

proofreader

the simultaneous knockout was interesting....

publishing

Reading

(That's the point of publishing, isn't it? Which reminds me, saw a fascinating 'Inside the Factory' programme on a book publisher that could create tens of thousands of paperback books an hour (3 million a week!) and thousands an hour of hardbacks. The scale was simply mind boggling. Oh, and we all wanted all the books, none should be allowed to escape.https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0027f ... 20Penguin.)

Regards,

Richard

Instructions

(apologies for the strange message, that was meant to be in Smile For the Day....)

Mangled

(Reading a manual, translated poorly from (usually) Chinese, can be a psychedelic experience.)

Ironed

(One Chinese idiom for 'Keep off the grass' translates fairly literally as 'The grass is smiling at you, please be kind'. What hope do automatic translators have? Or even human translators who aren't great?)

Regards,

Richard

hoovered

(That encourages me, a human translator - hurrah, not redundant yet! My favourite Google Translate effort, which I may have shared before, is its attempt to translate the phrase "taps and dies" - tools to create screw threads - into Dutch. Translated back into English it had become "taps on the shoulder and passes away". Or that possibly apocryphal example of the phrase "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" translated into Russian and back again, and ending up as "the wodka is wonderful but the meat is rotten" )

Vacuum

Space

(Very odd things happen in the vacuum of space, it appears. Things like PVC [which contain plasticizers] dry out as the plasticizers evaporate and then condense on other parts of the spacecraft causing potential electrical shorts, gumming up of solar panel pointing mechanisms, so such materials are utterly banned from anywhere near spacecraft. That's ignoring the effect of solar irradiation which releases highly corrosive atomic Chlorine & Florine from PVC & PTFE which are both bad news to equipment. Also one side of a spacecraft orbiting Earth in the sun can be operating at +180C (360F) while the side in the shade drops to -220C (-360F). To keep electronics working for years they have passive refrigerators built into the chassis of the spacecraft, where ammonia boils on the hot side, then condenses on the cold and circulates back to the hot side as a liquid where it boils again. This can keep the temperature differential of the electronics down to only 200C across the spacecraft. It's an absolutely brutal environment for machinery to work in.)

Regards,

Richard

Balls

racquets

noise (a different type of "racket" )

Richard, fascinating observations about PVC in space, something that as a lay person you simply never think about! As I'm just listening to a murder mystery I was immediately wondering whether something could be done with murder by vacuum-induced PVC evaporations...