String and doughnuts

Bl**dy Cozy and his sodding string!

I asked him this morning how much he wanted. You can guess his reply, can't you? "Dunno," he said, "how long's a piece of string? Just get as much as you can." Fine, you might think, only if you do then you are as dim as Cozy! As I had to point out to him, we have no way of CUTTING the string once it leaves the station. It has to be cut in there. You could almost see the light bulb appear above his head! "Oh, about a penguin length should do. OK?"

Now string is one of those things that could only have been invented by people. Without hands and opposable thumbs it's really almost impossible to handle. And cutting it is a nightmare. It took me nearly two hours to get him his sodding string! You can tell I'm a bit miffed, can't you? All I can say is that this had better be worth it!

First I had to find the string. After about ten minutes I found a roll of nylon twine. Good. Then I had to find a length of pipe which I could wedge into a drawer so I could unroll the twine without it going everywhere, including out of the door. Another 15 minutes. Unrolled the length he needs and marked it with some cold black coffee that I sipped from a mug on the desk. Bloody foul tasting stuff! How do you drink that? Worse than excrement fouled snow, that stuff. That's 35 minutes gone. Disassembled the tube and stuff and went off looking for a knife. Another 25 minutes while I attempted to flip the knife out of the drawer with my beak without impaling myself. Go back and wedge knife in drawer, another 15 minutes. Place string over knife blade and using my feet, rock the string back and forth along the blade. Another 15 minutes!

Ah but it's nylon twine, have to seal the ends, otherwise they unravel. 10 minutes to find a candle, another 5 minutes to find matches and another 10 minutes trying to strike the bl**dy things with my beak without setting myself on fire. Light the candle. Then dangle the string over the lighted candle and fuse the ends. After all that, I wasn't going to bother trying to put everything back so just left things lying around. No doubt some newbie will get a lecture tonight about the importance of being 'tidy in the cramped conditions of a research station'.

Waddled out with the string under my wing and found Cozy at the test rig. Gave him the string. Do you know what he said? "What took you so long? You've been gone hours." It's now buried with the flare in the bag.

It was funny today. One of the German newbies had hung some clothes on a line in the bathroom. One was a T shirt with "Icke bin Berliner" on it. (That's Berlinspeak for "I come from/was born in Berlin.") It got me thinking. No matter how you try, you can never know everything. Now for us, 'everything' isn't an enormous amount and you can get quite close to knowing everything you need over the course of your life and there are always penguins like Havelock to fill in the gaps. But with you, there's so much to know, that you are forced to collaborate, forced to rely on experts, advisers, Wikipedia because a single human brain just isn't big enough to hold all that knowledge you have. It surprises me but on the whole it works after a fashion, although it would be nice if you had 'judgement experts' as well who could tell you wise ways to use the knowledge you have rather then just using it to make a fast buck! Still, I suppose it's hard to unravel a couple of million years of evolution.

Now, it seems to me that if you are the leader of the most powerful and richest nation on earth, you can afford the best experts money can buy. Although it's always seemed to me that if you can buy them they're probably not the best you could get but that's a different matter. So exactly what was John F Kennedy doing employing someone who would suggest that saying "Ich bin ein Berliner" ("I am a doughnut"), on television, to the massed ranks of West-Berliners was a good idea, instead of "Icke bin Berliner"?

I actually have a theory about that. You see, I think that by the time of that speech, JFK had got so far above himself (well you might, US President AND shagging Marilyn Monroe) that he didn't actually ask anybody. He just thought his high school German was up to it. It wasn't! It is said however that he may have just been making a factual statement. Or even that it was an 'in' joke for Marilyn whose favourite pastime was to curl his flaccid member around on itself and lick cream from the resulting hole in the middle, although I got that snippet from Wikipedia so.........