Each month I offer you something to think about to get the brain working. This month …
Does thought require language?
Monthly Quotes for April
Welcome to this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes!
Understand this, you can sound confident & have anxiety. You can look healthy but feel bad. You can look happy & be miserable. You can be good looking & feel ugly. So be kind because every person is fighting a battle you know nothing about.
[unknown]
Women who orgasm from penetration alone carry an older blueprint – a leftover from a time when the body needed the feedback loop of penetration to trigger ovulation.
[Sarah Ward; https://substack.com/home/post/p-190982511]
There is nothing like early promiscuous sex for dispelling life’s bright mysterious expectations.
[Iris Murdoch]
When all seems lost and there is no hope left, remember that this time will pass and, you will look back and see how it made you stronger.
[unknown]
Do not put your work off till to-morrow and the day after; for a sluggish worker does not fill his barn, nor one who puts off his work: industry makes work go well, but a man who puts off work is always at hand-grips with ruin.
[Hesiod]
Where do bad rainbows go?
To prism. It’s a light sentence, but it gives them time to reflect.
[unknown]
Forgetting is not a flaw. It is a function. It allows movement. It allows redefinition.
[Kamila Murkowska]
Man’s a kind of missing link, fondly thinking he can think.
[Piet Hein]
Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
[Robert Hanlon]
The Shepherds Delight. Both by Day and by Night. Describing the Shepherds simplicity; And their Felicity: their birth, and their mirth: their lives, and their wives: their health and their wealth: their ways, and their plays: their diet, and quiet. And how with their Dam’sels they laugh and lye down, And to each pretty Virgin, they give a green gown.
[English 17th-century Broadside Ballad found in Samuel Pepys Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge]
April Quiz Answers
Here are the answers to this month’s six quiz questions. If in doubt, all should be able to be easily verified online.
Physical Science & Mathematics
- How many faces does a Dodecahedron have? 12
- What is the cube root of 64? 4
- The Sun is (of course) the closest star to Earth. What star is the next closest? Proxima Centauri
- Who discovered that the Earth revolves around the sun? Nicolaus Copernicus
- What is the chemical symbol for the element mercury? Hg
- How is the Earth protected from the effects of Solar Winds from the Sun? By the planet’s magnetic field
Answers were correct when questions were compiled in late 2025.
This Month’s Poem
April Rain (opening)
Mathilde Blind
The April rain, the April rain,
Comes slanting down in fitful showers,
Then from the furrow shoots the grain,
And banks are fledged with nestling flowers;
And in grey shaw and woodland bowers
The cuckoo through the April rain
Calls once again.
Find this poem online at The Other Pages
On Oil and Ethics
“Europe will suffer jet fuel shortages in just three weeks if the Strait of Hormuz does not reopen”, Airports Council International (ACI) Europe has said, “particularly with the approach of the summer tourism season”.
Oh good!
We have to find a way to stop people, and freight, flying. We’ll never get close to Net Zero if we don’t.
Forget all the hype around Aviation Biofuel; opinion suggests that there will be too limited a supply and it will be too expensive (see here, for example).
Flying people and stuff around the world to the unnecessary extent we do is just not sustainable.
Moreover, although it is slowly being cleaned up, shipping is no better, given the bunker fuel most big ships still run on.
No, I’m not saying we have to stop flying (or shipping) entirely, but we need to be much more circumspect and use it only where really necessary. We need to go back to making and growing as much as we can as locally as we can – accepting that there are some (pseudo-)essentials of modern life that we can’t.
As I’ve asked before … Do you really need to fly to Australia, or USA, just for a 2 hour meeting with a client (which could just as easily be done over a video call), because the client says so? That’s a question of skewed business and management ethics.
Why do we ship, for example, wine, apples and lamb from the Antipodes – or airfreight runner beans from Kenya – to UK when we have lots of these commodities on our doorstep in Europe, if not at home. In reverse why do we fly long-haul for a few days break? These are questions of skewed marketing and consumer ethics.
We need to update our ethics – both personal and societal. Maybe an oil crisis will help the paradigm shift.
April Self-Portrait
[Click the image for a larger view]
Ten Things
This year our Ten Things column will present a selection of words (of five or more letters) with a different ending each month. This month …
Words Ending in -lion
- tatterdemalion
- postillion
- perihelion
- dandelion
- battalion
- ganglion
- vermillion
- rapscallion
- stallion
- bullion
So how many of those words did you know? And how many do you use?
This Month’s Quote
I would rather have questions that can’t be answered
than answers that can’t be questioned.
Richard Feynman
April Quiz Questions
Each month we’re posing six pub quiz style questions, with a different subject each month.
As always, they’re designed to be tricky but not impossible, so it’s unlikely everyone will know all the answers – just have a bit of fun.
Physical Science & Mathematics
- How many faces does a Dodecahedron have?
- What is the cube root of 64?
- The Sun is (of course) the closest star to Earth. What star is the next closest?
- Who discovered that the Earth revolves around the sun?
- What is the chemical symbol for the element mercury?
- How is the Earth protected from the effects of Solar Winds from the Sun?
Answers will be posted in 2 weeks time.
April 1926
Our look at some of the significant happenings 100 years ago this month.
1. Birth. Anne McCaffrey, American-born Irish author (d.2011)
2. Birth. Jack Brabham, Australian racing driver (d.2014)
3. Birth. Gus Grissom, American astronaut (d.1967)
6. Birth. Ian Paisley, Northern Irish politician (d.2014)
7. An assassination attempt against Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini fails.
9. Birth. Hugh Hefner, American founder of Playboy magazine (d.2017)
21. Birth. Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom (d.2022)
30. A state of emergency is proclaimed in the United Kingdom under the Emergency Powers Act 1920 on account of the “threat of cessation of work in Coal Mines”.