Saturday 29 October 2011

Eat More Chips

Next door to one of my stone-supplier's yards is a company which - I guess - transports and deals in potatoes. This is not the only truck container they have, so I would imagine business is good. I ought to say that in England, 'chips' are French fries, and not what we call 'crisps'.

An average sized potato sells in Waitrose for about 60p these days, but if you buy them by the cwt (112 pounds) they are a lot cheaper. If you buy them by the ton, then they are fantastically cheap, and once sliced up into slivers and plunged into hot fat, the packaging must cost about 1000 times more than the product itself. Now I am talking 'crisps'.

Sir Walter Raleigh (if you believe the propaganda) turned the English staple food from wheat bread to these tubers when he returned home from the Americas with a ship-load of them. He also came back with a leaf which you dried out, stuck in your mouth and set fire to in order to breathe in the smoke (if you believe Bob Newhart), so you can blame him for both obesity and nicotine addiction (if you believe the Beatles).

Somebody sent me a long and rambling email the other day which explained why the size of the rocket-burners on the NASA Space Shuttle are directly related to the size of a horse's arse.

It is all down to the gauge of a railway line, apparently, which is four feet, eight and a half inches. This set the size of railway tunnels across the US, and the size of the tunnels governed the size of the burners which had to be transported through them. These dimensions were brought over from England about 150 years ago, and they were determined by the width of the wheels of a Roman chariot, which was set by the distance between two horse's arses, and all chariots had to be the same width so they could run -in the ruts of other chariots without either losing a wheel or getting stuck in the mud of occupied England.

I have explained all this the wrong way round, but it goes to show how difficult it is to come up with new thinking when designing modern objects, and it also explains why all Dyson products are so efficient - if a little on the expensive side, due to research investment.

From a potato to high-tech via a horses arse. I should be on the design team, with clear-sky thinking like that. I can't help wondering if I missed a bit out somewhere in the middle, though.

10 comments:

  1. I think you should be a 'government consultant'. Pick any subject... they all earn a bloody fortune!

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  2. I think you missed out a whole lot in the middle Tom, which was about where you lost me - deep down in that horsee's arse so to speak.

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  3. Yes but Dyson vacuum's are shit. They are made from recycled wafers and brandy snaps - bits just break off they are so brittle. After the third one I gave up on 'em.

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  4. Did you eat each one as it was discarded?

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  5. I've just read that Dyson employ a team of women whose sole job it is to knock over or drop the products. After 200 knock-overs by hand, they photograph the damage and note which parts broke so that they can be improved on, then knock them over another 200 times to make sure. You must have a very heavy handed household, Chris. I've had a Dyson cleaner for years, and my only beef with it is that it is bloody noisy, but I think they have quietened them down since.

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  6. I'm with Chris.....I've had three Dyson's....all different ones, yellow, purple and green and all were brilliant to start with for about a week and then rubbish. It's really badly designed for when you are doing the stairs....the hose thingy bends and cuts off the suction. I'm getting a Henry next....and, we are not heavy handed, as the majority of our house is floorboards.
    Oh dear.....it's come to something when I'm discussing the merits of a vacuum cleaner on a Saturday afternoon !!

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  7. I've had my dyson for lots of years, it's still going strong, even with trillions of cat hairs to suck up.

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  8. I have trillions of H.I. hairs to suck up. I am amazed she is not bald, frankly.

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  9. Hair! Now it is getting interesting. Horses arses and the Romans ...pfft!
    I've got ex girlfriends of ex boyfriends who still complain about my hair in their beds.

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  10. You look like you have long and curlies, as well as the short ones, Sarah. (sounds like you have also has some very slovenly boyfriends too).

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