Sam Redlark

  image generated by Grok Fishguard Latin was the spoken language of English pirates (and a great many pirates from other nations) between the mid 1400s and the early 1700s. Its rise and fall mirrored the sweeping arc of that disreputable profession's golden age. Despite having common Latin roots, the tongue bears only a fleeting resemblance to its cloistered ancestor. Fishguard is a lively, tonal language where a single word can have wildly different meanings, depending upon cadence and where the emphasis is placed. It is near impossible to speak it without coming across as floridly poetic. Waves become “the flexing sinews of the ocean,” while surf is described as breaking on the shore in “sheering strophes.” Many attempts have been made to produce a written version of the language, which suffers under the restraint of captivity on the printed page, where its bright light dims. The nuance which lies at the heart of Fishguard, is evident in the traditional pirate greeting – a heart...

  image generated by Grok Professor Peter Mayne's essay, The Static Muse , ponders on those innocuous objects that become a source of inspiration for works of art and science. These are prosaic curiosities – some natural, some man-made – that one might walk past everyday without a second glance. It is precisely their unassuming nature – the fact they do not dominate the senses – that allows them to quietly impress themselves in our minds, where they stir the imagination. A pertinent example of Mayne's theory can be found in the English village of Steventon, birthplace of the writer, Jane Austen. The so-called ‘muse of Steventon’ is a short, broken-off sentence painted, in 4-inch-high Fishguard Latin* characters, on the interior plasterwork of the village's 12th century church. If you face in the direction of the altar, on a day when the light is good, you may be able to see this writing on the left hand wall of the chancel, just below the eves of the slanted roof. A few hun...

  image generated by Grok This is a complicated enquiry and the response will vary significantly from person to person. To answer it properly we need to ask ourselves: “What am I made of?” and “At what point does my body stop and the rest of the Universe begin?” In my opinion, the model that provides the best answers to these questions is Signature Field Theory, which is tied in with scientific thought regarding the ontological nature of human of consciousness and personal identity. Placing this theory into a relatable context requires that we travel back in time to a phone call that was made to Nottingham emergency services at 3:03am, on the 15th March, 2005. A man who identified himself as Frans Lloyd-Daley informed the operator that part of him had become trapped inside the Beeston multi-storey car park and had been there for several days. When asked if he required an ambulance the caller became irate and retorted that an ambulance was the last thing he needed. Further questioni...

  image generated by Grok On the 14 th of August, 2013, a man calling himself Peter Koller wrote cryptically in the birthdays section of The Telegraph : “Pavimenti is 125 years old and living proof that the secret of preserving mental acuity in old age lies in a handful of loosely connected words, alluded to in anger.” Pavimenti is not, as is implied by Koller, the oldest surviving person in Great Britain. They are a composite, created during the late 1880s by the seven men who compiled the midweek Highgate Tree Puzzle for the Whitehall Clarion . The newspaper, which still exists, has a solid reputation for foreign correspondence. It was distributed nationally up until 1945. The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a gradual withdrawal from provincial newsagents. Despite its shrinking footprint, it has adhered to a publishing schedule of six daily issues (there is no Saturday edition). It is now sold exclusively for £2 from a single kiosk, located at the halfway...

image by Grok   James Bond's unsuccessful attempt at giving up cigarettes forms a minor plot point in Patrick Redinger's short story – A Matter of Proportion . As a rule the character either smokes, or does not smoke, according to the whims of his handler. At the time of writing this is the author John Evoy (a pro-smoker), thought to be a pseudonym of Douglas Maskey, who is better known for his historical epics set against a backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. As a thought experiment, let us imagine for a moment that we have managed to drug the fictional James Bond, perhaps using a dart coated with a rare South American poison, fired from the tip of a customised umbrella; the kind that is only sold by a small family-run shop in Kiev. Let us assume that, having rendered this version of Bond unconscious, we have the power to set in motion the most extraordinary of all extraordinary renditions, removing him from the pages of the novels that bear his name and transplanting him into th...

  image generated by Grok Naresh Pandey developed his theory of galactic migration while working a part-time job at the Transport Department in New Delhi, where he helped to gather data for a traffic mediation study. It was from the platform of a cherry picker, raised 30 feet above various busy intersections in the Indian capital city, that he looked down upon the jostling vehicles and imagined each one as a galaxy moving independently through space. At the time of his eureka moment, Pandey was a hard-up PhD student of astrophysics at the Meerut Institute of Astronomical Sciences. The university is built around the ruins of the Bhumimitra Observatory, which date to the first century AD, although an observatory is thought to have stood there for many hundreds of years before that time. His theory, which did not arrive fully-formed, was initially sketched-out and developed over a series of papers and lectures. In 1997 these articles were re-written in layman's terms by their author a...

  image generated by Grok If he can overlook the implied association with one of Manchester United's north London rivals, Sir Alex would make a valuable addition to the board of The Foxes Arsenal Woodland Trust, in Bicester ('Footie Wood' as it is referred to by fans). The wood is made up entirely of Cobbs Oak. Each tree is dedicated to a former footballer, who are commemorated on plaques planted at the base of the trunks. Its origins lie in a request made in the final will and testament of the Oxford United star goalkeeper, Gerald Deller, that an oak tree be planted in his memory. His will went on to stipulate that, when the tree was fully grown, it should be chopped down and used to make goalposts. It wasn't until 1955, three years after Deller's death that the site of Foxes Arsenal was chosen as the location for his memorial. The land, which had lain derelict for many years, had been occupied by a large munitions depot during the First World War and by an aerodro...

image generated by Grok If you have a large sum of money burning a hole in your pocket and are planning on spending some of your fortune redecorating your home over the coming weeks, then you could invest in some Dimelow Domina Avem wallpaper.  The paper, which is hand-woven from reed fibres on a bespoke loom at the Dimelow factory in Wrexham, comes embossed with a variety of patterns. The manufacturers are happy to incorporate your own designs upon request. After it has been hung, the paper is brushed with a special sugar solution which is absorbed into the raised parts of the pattern. These act as tiny reservoirs.  During early Autumn, ladybirds who have found their way indoors to escape the cold temperatures will gravitate to the Domina Avem where they will plug themselves into one of the pronounced areas. The sugars stored-up in the paper will sustain them during their hibernation period which lasts until early spring.  I first encountered this unusual home décor in...

  image generated by Grok One of the home economics teachers at my old secondary school was obsessed with a woman called Edith Morfett, who had paid for her daughter’s lavish wedding ceremony, at The Durrance Hotel in Teignmouth, by taking in their laundry. She did this for seven years until the debt was paid off. Ms Morfett lived in a Mornedh – a traditional style of house that is unique to the south-west coast of England. They are built over or among rock pools. The ground floor is designed to flood at high tide. Traditionally, Mornedh's were used as landlocked lobster pots and fish traps, providing their owners with a subsistence living, rather like a seaside croft. There is sketchy historical evidence to suggest that, prior to being used for human habitation, Mornedh's were shrines built to provide a home for the sea when it crawled up onto the land. (This claim, made by Professor Gerald Hillier in the 1960s, goes in and out of fashion; it has been discredited and reapprais...

  image generated by ChatGTP In July 1945, the chief architect of the atomic bomb, J Robert Oppenheimer, pondering on the success of the recent nuclear test at White Sands, recalled a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” One hundred-and-forty-three years earlier, and approximately five-thousand miles to the east, another man of science, this one a “rattle-brained” naturalist by the name of Edward Caton, had also earned himself the moniker 'destroyer of worlds.' On this occasion the title was not self-appointed, but was bestowed upon him by his peers at The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Knowledge of the Natural Sciences (later it was renamed The Royal Society of the Natural Sciences by men with more common sense than its founders). Caton's grand folly, which was to earn himself a toehold in the footnotes of history, was the careless placement of a perfectly spherical gharial egg (a gharial is a narrow-jawed, fish-eat...

image by Grok A.I. Additional processing by GIMP The framework of the Crystal Palace was made from an iron alloy known as Mittene, which was patented in 1812 by Jean-Louis Fouré. The following year, Fouré was knocked down by a horse in the streets of Paris and only partially regained consciousness. He died in 1814 while in the care of the nuns at Petit Gethsémani in Montmartre. Eleven years later, a nephew of Fouré named Laurent Vigier, who worked in the naval shipyards at Brest, pushed for the use of his uncle’s alloy in the construction of the early ironclad warships. The weight of the material and the additional expense involved in its production meant that it was never a serious consideration. Only three vessels incorporating Mittene parts alongside conventional iron plate ever took to water. Mittene exists in a constant state of rapid chemical reaction and it is these processes that give the material its stability and high tolerance to external loads. The heat generated is around ...

image generated by Grok A.I. The Norwegian writer and commentator, Harald Bɵrja, is regarded as the founding-father of the mikro-estetisk (micro-aesthetic) school of art criticism. He has vigorously distanced himself from the movement. In interviews he defines himself as a scientist, for whom visual beauty is incidental and subservient to underlying physical processes that are invisible to the human eye and all but the most powerful microscopes and scanners. He regards the universe as deterministic and therefore void of any true creativity or spontaneity, which he demotes to a byproduct of artistic vanity. I will not delve any further into Bɵrja's complex opinions on this subject, mainly because all attempts to accurately translate his 2700 page treatise from its original Norwegian, in a manner that conveys its true meaning, have failed. Regrettably I do not speak the language well enough to make my own attempt. For Bɵrja, a masterpiece is defined by details that exist beyond the s...

image generated by Grok Nobody would dispute that the impression Harald Bɵrja has made upon the global art scene has been largely through force of personality. In the past he has been criticised for his use of intimidation and aggressive behaviour to draw attention away from his selective approach to the hard scientific data which underpins his methodology. I have been on the receiving end of one of Bɵrja's flem-flecked tirades, which was delivered three inches from my face in bellowed Norwegian, while an accompanying interpreter calmly listed an inventory of diseased farm animals (including many non-native species) that my mother apparently had congress with in order to bring me into the world. I was once a passenger on a cross-channel ferry, during a force 10 gale, and came away from that experience rather less rattled than I did following the five minutes that I spent in the rabid company of Harald Bɵrja. The source of our disagreement (as far as I can tell) was the beauty, or l...

image generated by Grok To get down to the fundamentals of this question we must be prepared to probe the human brain; we need to really dig our fingers in there and pry it apart. It is for these reasons that I do not advise readers to attempt any such study at home, or on a living subject. Hoph's Vesicle is a diminutive region of the brain that occupies the space between the amygdala and the lateral orbitofrontal cortex. It is unique in that certain external stimulus focusing around low level aggression, such as one might witness during an argument, cause it to become engorged and expand to as much as five-times its normal size. Possibly for these reasons, it is referred to by French neurobiologists as the “pénis du cerveau” (penis of the brain). The term was coined by Dufour (of course) and while one admires its lewd poetry, it is a rather fanciful description. In fact sexual arousal has been shown to have no effect upon this area of the human cerebrum. As Hoph's Vesicle enla...

  Recently I self-published a book – my second - a themed collection of short stories, titled Boiled Branches, Green Wood: A Book of Trespassers. After I finished writing it, I edited it, which took absolutely ages. I laid it out three times. OpenOffice corrupted the formatting twice; the first time in a manner that was so random that it gave me pause to wonder whether I was watching an emerging artificial intelligence failing to fully grasp its responsibilities. The second time was more comprehensive, in line with the application of some disruptive algorithmic principle, to which I had not been made privy. Apparently I was not the first to have experienced this unexpected reorganisation of the furniture in a saved OpenOffice document. The responses on the support forums were, at their most helpful and polite, along the lines of ‘Yeah, it’ll do that’. I have reached a peculiar point in my life where setbacks of this kind no longer fill me with self-righteous anger directed at an u...