Month: September 2012

A few weeks ago, Luke MacGregor of Reuters captured a series of fabulous photographs of Tower Bridge, seen from the South Bank of the Thames, with a full moon behind it. My personal favourite is shown below; you can see the whole set here.

 

 

Can you imagine looking through your hotel window and seeing that? An amazing view, one of my all-time London favourites. You would expect a view like that to come with a price tag.

In a month’s time, on 5th October 2012, I shall be staying in a hotel for the night, on the south bank of the Thames, with that precise view. It won’t quite be a full moon, though — that particular event would have taken place five days earlier, on 30th September.

The hotel I’ll be staying at is somewhat unusual. The bedrooms don’t have any minibars or TVs. No attached baths or showers either. No beds. No walls. An unusual hotel indeed.

The hotel does have some attractive features, nevertheless. Ceilings that look amazingly like the sky at night. Very realistic. Because they are the sky at night.

It’s a hotel where the homeless stay. In the open air. On the banks of the Thames. With no mattress in sight. And traditional English weather. In October.

I’ve been going to this hotel once a year for some years now, with a bunch of good friends. We spend one night every year underneath the stars, whatever the weather, to raise funds for Action For Children, and more particularly in their drive to help homeless youth. It’s easy for us, because we only do it for one night. And we all know we have warm beds to go to later, hot food, running water and the company of family and friends.

We’re trying to make it a little bit easier for those kids who leave home, often without choice, and suddenly have to fend for themselves in an alien and usually hostile environment.

 

The event is called Byte Night, and it’s been happening for fifteen years or so now. I’ve had the privilege of meeting some of the people who’ve been helped by the charity over the years, and each one of them had an incredible story to tell.

As a whole we in the IT community have done well out of being part of the community, and events like this give us the opportunity to give something back.

So if you’re reading this, and you feel the urge to help, we’ve made it very simple.

Just follow this link. And donate whatever you can. Give, and give generously. Please.

Since it began, Byte Night has raised over £4.3m, and it is our collective goal to hit the £5m mark this year. You know what the economic environment has been like these past years, and you know the likely impact on youth homeless.

So give. Give as much as you can. Please.

Thank you.

 

Music has its mondegreens, something I wrote about here and here. Now radio jingles may not be universally accepted as music, and for good reason. Nevertheless, they too can be misheard, misunderstood, mangled.

We never had a television set at home. I left India in 1980, around the time that TV was beginning to enter the household; my formative years were therefore spent listening to the radio, and to the gramophone.

Until about 1970, the only radios I’d seen and heard were valve radios. Main-operated, unlike the portable “transistor” radios that were just beginning to make an impact.

So the first sensation I associate with radio is the ceiling fan, signalling the presence of mains electricity, something that I could not take for granted as a child. “Load-shedding” was rampant.

If we had power, then we could switch these things on, and bring about the second sensation of radio: the orange-red filaments of the valves. That was soon followed by sensation number three, that of smell. It was a wonderful aroma, the heating up of the valves.

We were usually incredibly eager to switch the radio on, usually for something like Musical Band Box (on Sundays) or Lunchtime Variety (on all other days). Sometimes the station was just coming on stream then, so the first thing we would hear was the All India Radio Signature tune.

Seems like such a long time ago. But I digress.

Jingle Mondegreens. They do exist.

For example, every child in our family grew up believing that “S-O Simon means happy motoring”, and we would sing it at the top of our voice. We never cared what it meant. Standard Oil, on the other hand, were trying to tell us this.

 

That was fifty years ago, and I have no difficulty figuring out why we thought the song went S-O Simon. Easily done.

Some ad or the other appeared to use the old Scouting song “It isn’t any trouble just to S-M-I-L-E”. How that became S-L-Om-Buddy I have no idea. But it did.

Sometimes the jingles had other unintended consequences. For example, throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s Beiersdorf used to advertise in Indian cinema with a clip that started “Winter’s here”; it then went on to show you the ravages that your skin would face in the cold, and how all that could be avoided “thanks to Nivea creme”. Most of us just cut the middle bits out, and every time it felt cold, we would say “Winter’s here….. thanks to Nivea Creme”.

Did you have radio jingle mondegreens in your childhood? What were they?