It’s just a phaser we’re going through

The main weapons in Star Trek are phaser beams – as I understand it, they’re beams of light which are “in phase”, thereby packing a hell of a destructive punch (I imagine a kind of super-laser).

Now, when the good ship Enterprise fires at an enemy ship and misses (which seems to happen more often than not), the beams just keep going on past the target. And on, and on, and on …

And they’ll keep going on until they eventually do hit something. That might not happen for a couple of centuries, and in another part of the galaxy entirely.

That doesn’t seem to worry them at all, though it would worry me that a missed shot today could, in a hundred or a thousand years’ time, hit a ship or a planet belonging to a culture that didn’t even exist at the time that I fired the shot, and that a future war could come from that – the culture would probably blame its neighbours rather than someone from ancient times half a galaxy away.

I mean, you could put a “stop” on a photon torpedo – if it don’t hit anything within a set time, it deactivates or (since the mass of the torpedo itself, travelling at speed, would be enough to severely damage anything it collided with) self-destructs into sufficiently tiny safe fragments.

But how do you set a self-destruct on a beam of light?

Flushed with irritation

I’m pretty easy-going, but I do have one absolute house-rule: in fact I feel so strongly about it that I have a sign on my bathroom wall: “Please close the toilet lid before you flush”.

It may seem petty or overly fussy for me to ask people to do this, and especially to go to the lengths of actually typing out and printing a notice, then sticking it to the wall above the tank, but consider this ….

When water splashes down into water, other water is thrown up in reaction. Everyone must have experienced this for themselves, or at least seen this effect in those amazing pictures where water is captured falling into water, and throwing up a beautiful crown of water in response. (Found one such and added it: it's not what I was actually looking for, but it's what I actually found.)

This reaction also applies to toilets. When you flush the toilet, water falls into water, and tiny droplets of water are thrown up from the bowl and get into the air – which you then breathe in.

This also applies to anything that you’ve just put into the toilet.

And, in my house, it’s not just you that would breathe in these tiny airborne droplets of your urine, fæces or vomit! If you really want to inhale microscopic fragments of your own bodily wastes, do it in your own home, not mine.


And it’s not just an inhalation hazard. Eventually the droplets would settle out of the air – onto everything within range.

I read somewhere that one’s toothbrush should be stored at least six feet away from the toilet. This seems to indicate that six feet is the radius of the “fallout zone”. Which means that not only my toothbrush should be six feet away from the toilet: also my face flannel, body scrubs, towels …

Just think of it: you could be brushing your teeth, or washing and drying your face or body with something that holds microscopic fragments of your own piss – or even worse, someone else’s!

The moving pendulum

“The moving pendulum swings, and having swung, swings back”

I can’t remember when this idea or concept first occurred to me, but it’s been unconsciously building and developing, until I think I can now express it (fairly!) coherently.

The “moving pendulum” seems to be a natural consequence of Newton’s “equal and opposite reaction” – and it applies to other than pendula, too.

It also applies to people, on national, cultural, social, group and individual levels.

A repressive culture holds the pendulum unnaturally far to one side; the longer and higher it’s held back, the more extreme the release reaction will be. when that pressure is eventually (and usually suddenly) released. (I can remember watching the Berlin Wall come down, and hoping that the newly-united Germany wouldn’t let the pendulum swing too far in the opposite direction – so I was sort of thinking about this at least twenty years ago!)

A culture of repression suddenly fails, and the pendulum, having been held back so far and for so long, swings to the opposite extreme: this provokes a reactionary backlash, which provokes a counter-backlash, and so on, and on, and on …

Each time the pendulum swings, it will move almost as far in the opposite direction, and almost as far as that back again – and the higher and the longer the pendulum is held to one side, the more violent the reaction will be when it’s finally released.

Note “almost as far”. As the pendulum continues to swing, the wild oscillations will gradually lose momentum and settle down into a regular rhythm. If given the chance!

The counter-reaction will want to hold the pendulum back: maybe not quite as high as it was before, but in the same general area of its previous locked-down position.

And the people who enjoy the free-swinging will oppose that and, in the joy of being able to move at last, will move too far the other way.

And so we proceed by a series of wild oscillations: first too far in one direction, then too far in the other.
The pendulum isn’t given the time to settle down to a regular rhythm; it keeps getting bumped and jolted.

Swinging 60s from post-war austerity …
Edwardian extravagance from Victorian prudery …
Convent girls becoming sex kittens …
Poor people winning the lottery and becoming spend-a-holics ….
Laddish yobbism from the backlash to New Men which waas itself a backlash from Macho Men …
And laddette yobbism, too …
Russians harking back wistfully to the Communist regime, because the system collapsed rather than slowly dissolving, and capitalism came as one hell of a culture shock to most of them …

People can’t really handle too much change too quickly; we want stability, even if it’s a stability of repression: we might not have liked it, but at least we knew where we were then.


As I’ve said elsewhere, I have no formal science education (we did a year of basic science at my grammar school, then a year of separate biology, chemistry and physics, but girls weren’t exactly encouraged to pursue these classes after that – we were girls, what did we need to know about science other than the “domestic” variety? [This has to be a topic for a future rant!])

Wilful misuse of words

I’m fed up with hearing that something or someone is “almost unique”.

“Unique” does not mean “very special” or “very unusual”.

It means “one of a kind, with nothing else exactly like it anywhere in the world”.

The word is not a qualifier, it is an absolute. There are no grades or shades of uniqueness: a person or a thing is unique, or it is not.


And I’m equally fed up with hearing something described as the “ultimate” book, music CD, or hair preparation.

“Ultimate” does not mean “latest” or “best”.

It means “last, final, utmost” – “the ultimate deterrent”,
“our ultimate destiny” – though people don’t usually say, “The ultimate bus stop on the route”!

Mind you, I wouldn’t mind an “ultimate diet book” if it really WAS going to be the last diet book ever!


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Note: I’m rather freely defining the words whose common usage I’m having a go at, cos my dictionaries are packed for a house move!

You can go into Google [other search options are available!] and type “define: unique” [without the quotes] if you don’t own a dictionary yourself or can’t be bothered to find it and look up the words – though most of the “define: ultimate” hits seem to confirm the common misuse of the word.