I bet you didnt know that

cdeb

Trying to think of something with four Ms and now I've got that Crash Test Dummies song stuck in my head...

(And now you do too )

sbsquarepants

mzungu wrote: »

The M&M in M&M’s stands for “Mars & Murrie’s” after Forrest E. Mars Sr. and William F. R. Murrie, the candy’s founders.

And Eminems stage name is a play on the similarity between the sweets and his initials M.M (Real name Marshall Mathers)

Gwynplaine

A baby's eyeballs are the same size as an adult's.

Baggly

There is a single men's toilet in Holles St Hospital. Queues are not uncommon.

New Home

Is that a single men's toilet or a single men's toilet?

wally79

Pter wrote: »

There is a single men's toilet in Holles St Hospital. Queues are not uncommon.

There are 2 actually. There's one next to the cafe and one on the corridor between there and the entrance.

The one beside the cafe is generally cleaner and since I think I am finished with my visits there (famous last words) I dont mind sharing the info

Baggly

wally79 wrote: »

There are 2 actually. There's one next to the cafe and one on the corridor between there and the entrance.

The one beside the cafe is generally cleaner and since I think I am finished with my visits there (famous last words) I dont mind sharing the info

Things have really gotten better since i was last there so

Gloomtastic!

Pter wrote: »

There is a single men's toilet in Holles St Hospital. Queues are not uncommon.

Things haven’t changed then. Disgraceful place, they treat men with utter contempt.

Baggly

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

Things haven’t changed then. Disgraceful place, they treat men with utter contempt.

In the grand scheme of things, its hard to argue a little discomfort for men is unacceptable, given the level of discomfort being felt elsewhere in the building, imo.

Gloomtastic!

Pter wrote: »

In the grand scheme of things, its hard to argue a little discomfort for men is unacceptable, given the level of discomfort being felt elsewhere in the building, imo.

Being on the labour ward was like being on a porno movie set, the amount of moaning and groaning going on.....:rolleyes:

Baggly

Gloomtastic! wrote: »

Being on the labour ward was like being on a porno movie set, the amount of moaning and groaning going on.....:rolleyes:

Mrs. Pter only had 1 stay in the labour ward. We had a bit of an emergency and while the people in Holles St were figuring it out, Mrs. Pter proceeded to punch a hole in (well really just break the plywood in the side of) the bedside locker. So yeah......childbirth is painful. Who knew.

It is a shockingly unfit for purpose facility though. The sooner they move to Vincents the better imo. The new part of the hospital with the ultrasounds and stuff is great, but they just dont have the space for the facilities needed.

Actually, tacking on to my original fact, there was an additional mens toilet on the 3rd floor in the newer ultrasound dept, but they changed it to a womens toilet approx 4 months after opening it. Too many men were using it and it was causing queues in the corridor which blocked nurses moving equipment around

py2006

Pter wrote: »

Actually, tacking on to my original fact, there was an additional mens toilet on the 3rd floor in the newer ultrasound dept, but they changed it to a womens toilet approx 4 months after opening it. Too many men were using it and it was causing queues in the corridor which blocked nurses moving equipment around

Lies. There has never been a queue to a mans toilet.

Baggly

py2006 wrote: »

Lies. There has never been a queue to a mans toilet.

Lol this is the only reason this fact is, imo, worthy of mention.

sbsquarepants

py2006 wrote: »

Lies. There has never been a queue to a mans toilet.

I don't know. Cubicles seem to very much in demand in all the pubs in town at the weekends:eek:

Kat1170

mzungu wrote: »

The M&M in M&M’s stands for “Mars & Murrie’s” after Forrest E. Mars Sr. and William F. R. Murrie, the candy’s founders.

What about the ones with W on them ????:D:D

mzungu

The World Toilet Organisation was founded on the 19th November 2001, hence this when World Toilet Day is celebrated.

NASA recently spent $23.4 million for designing a suction toilet, which could be used in the International Space Station.

The TV remote in a hotel contains mote bacteria than a toilet seat.

The chopping board in the average kitchen has roughly about 200% more fecal bacteria on it than a toilet seat.

Bon appétit everybody!!

Baggly

I really didnt see the thread going this way when i posted.

New Home

mzungu wrote: »

The World Toilet Organisation was founded on the 19th November 2001, hence this when World Toilet Day is celebrated.

NASA recently spent $23.4 million for designing a suction toilet, which could be used in the International Space Station.

The TV remote in a hotel contains mote bacteria than a toilet seat.

The chopping board in the average kitchen has roughly about 200% more fecal bacteria on it than a toilet seat.

Bon appétit everybody!!

"This post was sponsored by Dettox".

py2006

A child's got more bones than a grown ups got.


NOW, EVERYBODY JOIN IN WITH ME...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ygf0gRQsUb4

Fourier

mzungu wrote: »

The TV remote in a hotel contains mote bacteria than a toilet seat.

The chopping board in the average kitchen has roughly about 200% more fecal bacteria on it than a toilet seat.

Bon appétit everybody!!

Are the bacteria on toilet seats "worse" than the ones on remotes and chopping boards on average?

Otherwise, this would imply that if we are willing to eat something with our hands after touching a remote, then for rational consistency we should be willing to give a toilet seat a wee lick.

All committed rationalists have your tongues ready for mzungu's next reply.

Baggly

Fourier wrote: »

Are the bacteria on toilet seats "worse" than the ones on remotes and chopping boards on average?

Otherwise, this would imply that if we are willing to eat something with our hands after touching a remote, then for rational consistency we should be willing to give a toilet seat a wee lick.

All committed rationalists have your tongues ready for mzungu's next reply.

Fourier

Fourier wrote: »

Are the bacteria on toilet seats "worse" than the ones on remotes and chopping boards on average?

Otherwise, this would imply that if we are willing to eat something with our hands after touching a remote, then for rational consistency we should be willing to give a toilet seat a wee lick.

All committed rationalists have your tongues ready for mzungu's next reply.

/puts down toast.


Mzungu's post is the reason I travel with antibac wipes.

mzungu

Fourier wrote: »

Are the bacteria on toilet seats "worse" than the ones on remotes and chopping boards on average?

Not sure about worse, but there are high chances of picking up infection (assuming the last user had an infection) after using the remote as people would not tend to wash their hands afterwards, whereas they would after using the toilet, even though it contains roughly 1/8 of the bacteria (the vast majority of which are harmless). The fecal bacteria contained in chopping boards can be attributed to raw meat (fecal bacteria originates in the animals internal organs) and can in a lot of case be the reason behind food poisoning in the home and in sometimes in restaurants (E.coli, salmonella etc ). To be sure of getting rid of it all, dishwasher or disinfectant spray is the way to go.

Fourier wrote: »

Otherwise, this would imply that if we are willing to eat something with our hands after touching a remote, then for rational consistency we should be willing to give a toilet seat a wee lick.

Not so much a "lick" , but if we do not wash our hands after using the remote or a chopping board one might aswell have gone for a trip to the toilet and ate with their bare hands having not given their hands a good wash.

So if you want to be consistent, wash your hands after the remote and the chopping board if you wash them after the toilet. If you only wash them after the toilet then its time to get your consistency on people!!! :pac:


I'm off to make my lunch now. I have included a picture of my new kitchen setup for everybody to enjoy......

Fourier

My last words on the matter, since I am dealing with people who will use any justification to avoid licking the toilet.

Pter wrote: »

Opposite of rationalist

Wouldn't an empiricist try both and see what the results are?

mzungu wrote:

So if you want to be consistent, wash your hands after the remote and the chopping board if you wash them after the toilet. If you only wash them after the toilet then its time to get your consistency on people!!!

So be equally safe with both rather than equally risk taking. Equally consistent, but the cowards option.

RIGOLO

After the recent discussion I bet you dont WANT to know about your toothbrush and toilet bacteria.
Back on topic. 
Everest is not the highest point on earth.
Everest is the highest point above sea level, but the highest point on earth as defined by the furthest point from the centre of the earth is in fact Chimborazo.

Realt Dearg Sec

Fourier wrote: »

What was Joyce's main insight here, in your opinion?

Sorry to be dragging up an old conversation, but this was one I promised to come back to and didn't. My original point was that Virginia Woolf, although she had been dismissive of Joyce's vulgarity, had huge admiration for how his work changed the way we think about the representation of human consciousness. Fourier rightly asked what his main insight is into that issue.

Before I begin: TL;DR: Joyce creates a greater sense of empathy than his literary precursors through his development of a stream-of-consciousness style. Apologies for the length of this post!

It's a perfectly simple question that's been bugging me ever since and the more I think about it the less clear the answer becomes. Obviously, any brief intro to Ulysses will mention that one of its defining features is "stream-of-consciousness" narration, the direct, supposedly unmediated thoughts of the character in a kind of continuous, real-time present.

And when you read Ulysses it is one of the really arresting things about it. It takes some getting used to the sort of "flow" of direct thought as a way of narrating what's going on.

But the mistake that many people make is to say that Joyce "invented" the stream of consciousness technique, in fact it's probably the one-line answer if someone asks you "what's the big deal about Joyce anyway?" Joyce himself suggested that he had borrowed the technique from Edouard Dujardin, a French writer of the late nineteenth century. The name-drop actually brought Dujardin back into public consciousness as he had largely been forgotten by Joyce's era and he enjoyed renewed fame because of the association. But it's always possible to find earlier literary precursors. Obvious ones that occur to me off the top of my head would include underground Man in Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, and some sections of Tristram Shandy. I'm sure lots of people could add lots of examples.

So he didn't invent it. It's worth looking at Joyce's own career as a writer, though, because really it's not just some technique that emerged fully formed as a gimmick in Ulysses, but rather a logical extension of techniques he'd been using continuously. In "The Dead" the first sentence is "Lily the caretaker's daughter was literally run off her feet". Hugh Kenner made a lot of this sentence, arguing it's typical of Joyce's technique of writing in the third person about someone, using turns of phrase that would be typical OF that person (Lily is uneducated and thus would use the word "literally" as an emphasis, in other words she is figuratively, not literally run off her feet). Kenner called this "free indirect discourse", third person narration that is not objective, but reflects the subjective consciousness of the person described.

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man this is used extensively, where each successive chapter, representing Stephen Dedalus as he gets older, adopts an increasingly complex vocabulary and way of understanding the world while remaining technically third person (except the diary at the end).

In that context, the shift to "stream-of-consciousness" is just a logical next step to take.

But obviously there is a difference between stream-of-consciousness and things like the diary of underground man in Dostoevsky, because the latter is supposed to be understood as having been written, whereas the words that are to be the thoughts of, say, Bloom, are ephemeral, existing only within his consciousness to which we have been temporarily given access. We are to make believe that we are getting the unmediated thoughts of a man who never expects anyone but himself to hear those thoughts: they are also thoughts over which he has no control, things that occur to him, and are thus to be read as utterly unguarded.

But of course by virtue of the fact that they were written down by Joyce that idea is just a conceit into which we enter as readers. The thoughts of Bloom and other characters are not unmediated. And this is a problem in terms of answering Fourier's question, because it means that, for all that it is striking to first encounter the style, and the feeling of being taken into someone's head that it creates, we are not actually IN someone's consciousness, so it's hard to see how it provides any kind of new insight into human nature that earlier writers couldn't provide.

We can also note that the belief that there is a sort of internal narrative going on in our heads, that constitutes consciousness, is itself just a convention, and one that can be harmful in understanding how the human mind works, and how we produce and process language and the world around us. This is complicated, but Noam Chomsky, for instance, has talked a lot about how the things we tell ourselves when sort of thinking to ourselves, are themselves pretty much random, that there is much more going on in terms of our "thoughts" that often occur to us without us ever becoming conscious of them, that the things that "surface" are only a small fraction of the things we "think". I dunno if I'm explaining this well but it's easy to see how the idea of a single linear narrative of one's thoughts is a very poor approximation of the complex interplay and flow of thoughts both conscious and unconscious that go through our mind every day.

That's why, when asked about what Joyce's main insight is on this topic, my first response was, in terms of really understanding human psychology, nothing whatsoever.

But still, even as a convention, it is undeniably a striking one that resonates with us as readers, feels closer to the experience of thinking. Writers like Woolf and Joyce deployed this in very different ways to one another, but plenty of critics have argued that the tendency to do it at all was a response to the challenges of representing modernity itself. Again, this is complicated and subjective, but things like an increasingly individualised modern society, the rise of psychology as a way of understanding human behaviour (although Joyce was actually very dismissive of Freud and Jung (the latter psychoanalysed his daughter Lucia)), and so on, seemed to necessitate an increasing focus on individual psychology as a way of understanding people. Some have argued (wrongly, I think, at least in relation to Joyce) that this represents a kind of turn away from "social realism" which focuses on the social totality, towards a kind of psychological literature of the individual consciousness.

What's often overlooked in terms of discussing this in relation to Joyce, I think, is just how different are his representations of the stream-of-consciousness of his characters. The three main people whose unmediated thoughts we see are Stephen, Leopold Bloom, and Molly. The latter, in the final episode of the book, is the classic example of SOC narration, where Molly's thoughts meander without any interruption by punctuation or real-world stimuli, ideas and thoughts and images blending together and wandering around and so on. This, some feiminst critics argue, represents a kind of woman's writing (ecriture feminine, as the French feminists would say), establishing connections through image and thought rather than logic and the grammatical structures that help define it. Others argue that it may represent the way that Molly, rather than women generally, think. Others note that it may reflect the fact that she is falling asleep and is thus not subject to external stimuli at the time (or is briefly, like when Bloom noisily climbs into bed).

But then again the SOC narration of Stephen is much, much different. His thought processes are dominated by literary allusions, that punctuate the narration of the early episodes of the novel, are often only briefly interspersed in what is otherwise fairly traditional third person narrative. So for example when a milkwoman comes to the Martello tower she chats away to Buck Mulligan and we get this passage, a mixture of narration and his thoughts:

"He watched her pour into the measure and thence into the jug rich white milk, not hers. Old shrunken paps. She poured again a measureful and a tilly. Old and secret she has entered from a morning world, maybe a messenger. She praised the goodness of the milk pouring it out. Crouching by a patient cow at daybreak in the lush field, a witch on her toadstool, her wrinkled fingers quick at the squirting dugs. They lowed about her whom they knew, dewsilky cattle. Silk of the kine and poor old woman, names given her in old times. A wandering crone, lowly form of an immortal serving her conqueror and her gay betrayer, their common cuckquean, a messenger from the secret morning. To serve or to upbraid, whether he could not tell: but scorned to beg her favor."

It's possible to draw lines between which parts are regular narration and which parts are his thoughts. "Old shrunken paps" is an SOC observation, while "She poured again a measureful and a tilly" is traditional third person narration. The tense changes and especially the syntax is changed. The syntax of his SOC parts lurches from brief, ungrammatical but comprehensible observations, to meandering literary allusion ("Silk of the kine and poor old woman"). There's a lot going on in this passage in terms of Stephen's relationship with Ireland, his reduction of the woman to a kind of broken down version of Kathleen Ni Houlihan, and so on. But there is an interplay between his consciousness and the world around him, that allows us to see how Stephen mediates the world through literature and language. He is much more capable of subjecting the real world to his way of thinking than is Bloom, later on, in episode 3 he imagines the possibility that if he closes his eyes the world might temporarily cease to exist.

In contrast with that, episode 4 introduces Leopold Bloom, whose thoughts are entirely bound up with the material, the worldly.

"Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and
fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart,
liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked
grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented
urine.

Kidneys were in his mind as he moved about the kitchen softly,
righting her breakfast things on the humpy tray. Gelid light and air were in
the kitchen but out of doors gentle summer morning everywhere. Made him
feel a bit peckish.

The coals were reddening.

Another slice of bread and butter: three, four: right. She didn't like
her plate full. Right. He turned from the tray, lifted the kettle off the hob
and set it sideways on the fire. It sat there, dull and squat, its spout stuck
out. Cup of tea soon. Good. Mouth dry. "

Obviously we can still see a difference between his thoughts and the third person, but there's not much mediation going on. He thinks in terms off the immediate world around him. His thoughts are sensory in nature ("She didn't like her plate full. Right" is an exception in that he is giving consideration to his wife's preferences), he is a simple man of simple pleasures.

This is all very cursory and generalising, but my sense is that what Joyce recognised in the SOC technique was that it had a capacity for representing subjective consciousness that other forms of narration didn't attain. But while is doesn't actually help us understand human consciousness much better, it allows him to establish very quickly, strikingly, and effectively, the personality of his character. I would also go further, that in giving the unguarded thoughts of a character like Bloom, we also see him at a level of vulnerability that a defensive, barbed character like Underground Man doesn't allow us to do. In brief, it is a style through which we both get a feeling of intimate knowledge of these people, and deep, deep empathy for them. In a sense that is what literature very often does, but SOC just deepens this, plumbs new depths of possibility for doing this.

That's my answer to Fourier's question, because I think that while others use SOC for various reasons, Joyce has done more to create an intimate bond of understanding between reader and character than, say, Woolf, or Dujardin. Beyond his stylistic innovations, or his encyclopaedic knowledge of Dublin, or whatever else, Joyce had a remarkable capacity to make us feel empathy for people profoundly different from ourselves, to understand them to an extent that is probably otherwise impossible. So that, while his style may still be a STYLE, it is one that allows us, to a degree I haven't seen before or really since, to KNOW someone else, or at least to feel we do. It's not so much about understanding human psychology or human nature, as understanding a person, why they do the things they do, to share briefly in their feelings.

It's easy to wonder why Bloom, who knows his wife is cheating on him that day, doesn't just go home and confront her. But when you are in his thoughts and see how tenderly he feels for her, and the sense of loss of love that permeates their marriage since the death of their son, the profoundly broken man that he is, a father without a son, at sea in a world where he is almost always an outsider and a figure of ridicule, when we share his perspective while people make bawdy jokes about his wife and the man who is with her and he delicately examines his fingernails, to me that is a profound moment of empathy. It's similarly easy to dislike Molly for cheating on him, but her episode reveals to us her complex personal history, the feeling of powerlessness and loss that has shaped her too. I don't know that these things, and the ability to empathise with both these people at once, is really possible without using the technique of SOC that Joyce used. But it is a remarkable feat in that it changes OUR perspective, makes it more difficult to think purely from one's OWN point of view.

Greybottle

I just thanked that post to make myself look more intelligent than I actually am.

Now ye know that too.

Realt Dearg Sec

Greybottle wrote: »

I just thanked that post to make myself look more intelligent than I actually am.

Now ye know that too.

I do that every time Fourier posts.

New Home

I'm just impressed by the fact that Realt Dearg Sec managed to write all that on a post without it failing to post at the end of it, deleting all his efforts!

Realt Dearg Sec

New Home wrote: »

I'm just impressed by the fact that Realt Dearg Sec managed to write all that on a post without it failing to post at the end of it, deleting all his efforts!

Might have led to a more practical lesson in stream of consciousness narration.