Who wears short pants?

According to the Oxford Dictionary of English the word "pants" means "underpants" in England, but where I come from, south west Lancashire, it has, or at least had, the North American meaning, namely "trousers". We also had the concept of "short pants" which most young lads wore and which reached down to about knee level. Nowadays however, "short pants" seem to have disappeared and most kids apparently wear "trousers".

It was something which took place at around year three in the boys' grammar school in the 1960s, when it became apparent that more and more of one's class mates were coming into school wearing long pants, stretching all the way to the feet, which were apparently called trousers. One felt under significant social and psychological pressure to go along with this trend, as short pants were now labeling one as childish and a bit daft. I remember feeling quite reluctant to undergo this transformation, viewing long pants as somehow a conformist affectation, not to mention cissy looking. So I felt a right twerp and extraordinarily conspicuous when one day I travelled in on the no. 96 bus and traipsed into school, wearing long pants.

Of course, one soon acclimatized to this new way of being and the thought of wearing short pants became utterly ludicrous. It shows how malleable the human mind is and how conformity within one's own particular niche is such an all powerful aspect of our psychology.

The traumatic short-to-long-pants transition seems in retrospect to have been a right of passage, a symbolic acknowledgement of leaving behind childhood and shuffling on uncertainly into the dismal and scary world of adults.

Sneaky Sunset

In the mid-summer of 2013 at Uigshader, near Portree, which is at the same latitude as the southern suburbs of Gothenburg, I watched the sun setting over the Outer Hebrides, leaving a pink glow as I went to bed about midnight. For some unknown reason I got up and looked out through the window at about 2 a.m. and noticed that the pink glow hadn't disappeared below the horizon but was still there, only it had moved so that it was silhouetting the Trotternish Hills to the north. The sunset hadn't set; it was journeying eastwards, via the north. It seemed as if the sunset was hiding behind the hills and sneeking towards the east where it intended to ambush and disable the sunrise before it rose, and to take its place, fulfilling a lifelong ambition of becoming a rising star and monopolizing the entire sun setting-rising market.

Dream Talking

I'd always assumed that the characters in one's dreams talk as in normal life but I recently discovered that this isn't actually so, at least not in my dreams. One needs some degree of lucidity in dreams in order to have any objective awareness of what is actually going on at that moment in time and last year it did slowly come to my notice that the "dream characters" didn't really seem to be saying anything. And I remember that on one occasion I went so far as to confront one of these characters with a direct question and awaited a response. He or she seemed to make a significant effort to speak but all that came out was mumbles, grunts, and a few distorted words in no meaningful order. What I concluded was that the brain isn't capable of giving independent speech to dream characters and that any sort of "speech" that one appears to encounter in dreams, probably including one's own utterances, is just made up of thoughts, in the same way as thoughts in the form of mental verbalizations seem to accompany most of our waking hours.

I can, of course, only speak for my own brain and I've since come across the idea that Wernicke's area in the brain may not be functioning in dreams. Damage to this part of the brain can produce the speech disorder Wernicke's aphasia.

The Little Bang

Although 2 days ago scientists announced the first evidence supporting the expansion of the Universe from less than the size of a sub-atomic particle to the size of a grapefruit very, very shortly (10^-32 seconds) after the Big Bang, a recent Horizon programme on BBC Four suggested that the generally held opinion now is that the Big Bang was preceded by something else. The idea I found most interesting was put forward by Roger Penrose. My understanding of what he said may be wrong but this is how I saw it. The Universe currently appears to be expanding at an increasing rate and if this continues for, I'm not sure how long but let us say, many trillions of years, then eventually all matter will disappear and only photons of light will remain. In the absence of matter, space and time can no longer exist, which means that all the energy in the Universe will be contained in an infinitely small space (i.e., no space) and outside of time. Well, that seems rather a high concentration of energy and it wouldn't be surprising if at some point out of time it went pop, in a tiny little bang that actually turned out to be rather big. However, it appears that the first particles of matter, quarks (and antiquarks), were only formed after the Universe had reached the size of a grapefruit which would mean that time and space were created in the absence of, and therefore existed in the absence of, matter and that appears to contradict what happens at the "end" of the Universe. So I've probably gone down the wrong mind corridor somewhere. I'm only doing this to exercise the old neurons in the hope that while they're buzzing the Alzheimer's plaques will have less chance of getting a hold.