Seemingly trivial things that intrigue you

Strange goings-on at the beach.

A man and women were carrying what looked like a homemade, large but lightweight rectangular frame down the beach and into the sea, standing it upright. They then took it back up the beach then down, up, down and back up.

The man then donned what looked like a bright red hazmat suit, complete with hood. The suit was inflated a la Michelin man. Now fully ballooning, he proceeded to waddle down, arms outstretched, to the shoreline, stood on a rock and looked out to sea. After a while, he went up the beach, removed the ‘hazmat suit’, and they continued with their frame antics.

A Welsh custom? Perhaps. As I heard no singing and crucially saw no sheep, I’m doubtful, but intrigued.

If it is art, he should probably find another vocation.

Antony Gormley considering updating his skinny beach statues in line with the obesity epidemic?

I'm intrigued by how this can be new news.

Surely with our knowledge of eye movements while reading, linguistics and cognition, the idea that our brains process one word at a time has long since passed. They just seem to be confirming a theory I've been aware of for some time that, because of our experience of the world (context) and grammatical structures, there is a fairly limited number of possibilities for 'what is going to happen next' in any sentence, and as long as there are no major surprises to trip us up (e.g. "I'll do that yesterday"), we can whizz along. I'm absolutely sure that I don't normally sound out words in my head as I read, especially when I'm reading at speed.

OTOH, I think my slowest reading speed is when I'm reading about phonetics and accents, as I always find myself having to try out loud every word cited.

Speed reading as such has been de-bunked. It is actually skim reading, followed by winging it. I do this for a living.

Dilemma resolved: I put up my annual Facebook "It's less than seven weeks till the evenings start drawing out!" cheerer-upper along with a link to the article, so I know that my friend will see it, but it's not shoving his face in it. I know he'll just dig in with his hatred of all things winter (with two replacement hips and sparse snow anyway, he can't even look forward to skiing), but hey ho.

Sounds like there's been some good early season snow up high. I will wait to see if my hot Christmas lunch at 1100m is in T-shirts and shorts weather, like the last two years, or something more seasonal.

That was my first thought as well!

They were both called Valentia by the Romans. Different suffix, but this has been lost.

Exeter in total gridlock at 1pm today... the sort where roads are full of stationary cars in both directions on all the approaches to the city centre, as people try to skirt round one jam and find themselves in another. Obviously I was on my bike, so just sailed around all of them and sallied forth to the Teign Valley.

What's intriguing is that I can't find any report of what was the cause.

Nah, they'd just push the corpses off to the side of the road and carry on.

When traffic goes wrong in Exeter, it goes wrong big time, thanks to the lack of road crossings of the Exe... apart from the M5, there are only two between the centre of Exeter and the Channel, so once they come to a standstill, all the radial roads leading to them quickly back up too, with no alternative. When you're not driving, it's quite schadenfreudely funny, all those tin boxes completely useless.

Less funny when flooding is involved, like in Valencia. Currently 200+ dead.

Ah yes, of course.

A bit concerned that I used 6.5p of electricity between 7 & 8pm. (Still intrigued why EDF couldn't get the data off my smart meter, and thus lost a customer. Also, on the plus side, Octopus's website is 100x better.)

Oh, I might have been doing it wrong all my life.

Nah, big button = big job. Or so I thought.