Tag Archives: facebook

Cheese is nice … a true story

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A POST ON FACEBOOK reminded me of something that happened about 27 years ago in a country east of France.

We were staying with a German lady, who used to become easily stressed. One day I was sitting in her living room whilst she was preparing a meal in the kitchen nearby. Something must have been going wrong because I heard her shouting “cheese is nice” in an angry voice. She repeated these words over and over again.

I like cheese, but could not understand why she was expressing a liking for cheese so angrily. And then the penny dropped. It dawned on me that she was not talking about cheese, but about Jesus Christ. In her perfect but Germanically pronounced English she was saying what sounded like “cheese is nice” but in reality she was cursing by saying “Cheesus Christ”

The posting on Facebook showed Joseph and Mary looking at Ababa doll in an opened Amazon delivery package. The caption to the picture was “Bloody hell, Alexa, I ordered baby cheeses”.

A cavity in a Cambridge College

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DURING A RECENT visit to Cambridge, I noticed a hemispherical cavity into which an electric doorbell push button had been fitted. it was at Peterhouse College. I posted a picture of it on Facebook and received the following range of replies and reactions to it. Here they are in the order they appeared:

“My guess is there used to be a handle in there to operate a mechanical bell. There would have been a brass escutcheon plate, dished like the hole to accommodate the clenched hand grasping the handle. There seems to be a void behind the current bell button, the linkage probably went through there. You can see a shadow either side, rather like a bow tie, where the escutcheon was.”

“.. pull a cord or chain?”

“That will summon David Jason.”

“A square bell in a round hole”

“This was my husband’s college (about 45 years ago). I’m sure he’ll remember this well.”

“Yes, but I would expect the bar or chain operating the original to come straight out of the back of the cone, and there’s no hint of that.”

The range of comments was from frivolous to informative. I find that posting interesting items on Facebook often elicits useful information about them. By judicious posting and cross-checking information provided, Facebook can become a useful research tool.

Approaching infinity?

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Have you ever wondered how many photographs are being, or have been, taken on digital cameras?

Apparently, to date over 50 billion photos have been posted on Instagram, well over 250 billion on Facebook, about 30 to 40 million images PER DAY on Twitter (that is  at least 10,950,000,000 per year), over 175 billion on Pinterest.  On New Years Eve 2017,  Whatsapp users posted 13 billion images plus 5 billion videos. This adds up to a huge number of pictures. But, not everyone uploads their digital pictures and videos to social media, or at least not every picture they have taken. So, this means that in addition to those which are uploaded, many, many digital images are being created every microsecond.

If they are not shared via the internet, what happens to the galaxy of photos and videos being created? Some are briefly looked at and then deleted. Others are kept to show selected acquaintances. A few are used to illustrate books and articles and some are printed on photographic paper.

One of the joys of old-fashioned film photography was the excitement of waiting to see how your photos or videos looked after the film was developed. Digital photography reduces the delay between snapping and seeing the result from several hours to a week (as it used to be) to a very few seconds. Yet, even with this almost instantaneous result, there is excitement to see what the image looks like. 

The ease of use of cameras installed in mobile ‘phones has resulted in the huge numbers of pictures and videos being made. The numbers of images taken already and those yet to be taken must surely reaching that impossible to reach number, namely infinity!