What I Learnt Today

Today we were guests at a delightful wedding on the beach at Byron Bay.

The first reading was from the Gospel according to Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin was a prolific journal keeper – the prototypical blogger! His complete works are available online at http://darwin-online.org.uk/. His private papers are held by Cambridge University, and amongst these is Darwin’s methodical anaylsis of the benefits of marriage.

In July 1838, aged 29, he had returned from his 5 year voyage on the HMS Beagle and had spent 2 years back in London living in grand batchelor style. A decision had to made. In his journal, he  weighed up the Pros and Cons of marriage using a scientific approach.

This is the Question

Marry

• Children (if it Please God)
• Constant companion (and friend in old age) who will feel interested in one
• Object to be beloved and played with. Better than a dog anyhow
• Home, & someone to take care of house
• Charms of music and female chit-chat
• These things good for one’s health—but terrible loss of time
• My God, it is intolerable to think of spending one’s whole life, like a neuter bee, working, working, and nothing after all—No, no, won’t do
• Imagine living all one’s day solitary in smoky dirty London House
• Only picture to yourself a nice soft wife on a sofa with good fire and books and music perhaps
• Compare this vision with the dingy reality of Great Marlboro Street, London

 

Not Marry

• Freedom to go where one liked
• Choice of Society and little of it
• Conversation of clever men at clubs
• Not forced to visit relatives and bend in every trifle
• Expense and anxiety of children
• Perhaps quarrelling
• Loss of Time
• Cannot read in the evenings
• Fatness and idleness
• Anxiety and responsibility
• Less money for books etc.
• If many children forced to gain one’s bread (But then it is very bad for one’s health to work too much)
• Perhaps my wife won’t like London; then the sentence is banishment and degradation into indolent, idle fool

 

Marry, Marry, Marry Q.E.D.

 

Having come to this decision, he wasted no time. To be his ‘nice soft wife on the sofa’, he chose his first cousin Emma Wedgewood, one year older than he was. Darwin wrote to her about his expectations. “I think you will humanize me, & soon teach me there is greater happiness than building theories, & accumulating facts in silence & solitude.” How could she resist?

He had known Emma since childhood. Her grandfather, Joshua Wedgewood, had earned a fortune in the ceramics and pottery business. They were married in January 1839 after a three month engagement. Charles suffered with frequent illness, and Emma cared for him and their 10 children till his death aged 73. It appears his analysis of the pros and cons of marriage was confirmed!

However, history does not tell us the reckoning from Emma’s point of view!

 

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In all likelihood, you will have seen the Old Spice Guy ad. Some of you may have studied It in some detail. Isaiah Mustafa has it all – romance, diamonds, yachts, horse-riding on the beach, muscles. If your man can’t look like him, at least he could smell like him if he stopped using those lady-scented body washes.

Here’s a reminder;

But did it work – did it sell more Old Spice? And has the company followed up on all the attention?

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For the household manager, having to decide every day what to cook for the family, and then doing the shopping to make sure you’ve got the ingredients, and then actually cooking, is a drag (or so I’m told by those who would know).

So my colleague Paul’s present to his wife Lesley seems like a pretty good one.

Paul undertook to cook dinner – every night – for 2 months! 

(Mind you, I suspect that Lesley has cooked dinner – every night – for the previous 30 years)

What’s more, each night would be a different creation – working systematically through the CSIRO Total Wellbeing Diet Book One and Book Two page by page. This is a pretty big ask for someone whose previous speciality was Tomato on Toast.

Apparently the experiment, now some weeks in, has been going very well. A Masterchef is born!

The CSIRO Total Well Being Diet is a high protein, low carbohydrate diet. 

This is based on research showing that a high protein diet was more effective than a high carbohydrate diet for weight loss, and for improvement in blood lipids, and appeared to have lower drop-out rates.

The CSIRO suggest it is especially suitable for women.

(it worries me a little bit that a diet suggesting we should eat more red meat was sponsored by Meat and Livestock Australia.

Unfortunately, studies done by the CSIRO suggest that although you can lose weight on any diet, long term adherence is poor.

Here is some examples of the high protein and high carbohydrate diets.

Some sample shopping lists are here. Luckilly for Paul, no beetroot or cucumber.

PS Paul has been kicked out of the husband’s club for raising the bar too high.

 

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The best book available for Kindle or iBooks is Jerome K Jerome’s ‘Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)‘. 

And it is free!

Project Gutenberg is an open source project that aims to make out-of-copyright texts available freely to all. 33,000 books have been digitised by volunteers. It is a magnificent source of reading- just about every book you have ever heard of published more than 50 years ago is available free of charge for reading via plain text, html, kindle or ePub (iBook) format.

Three Men in A Boat was published in 1889 – but the humour remains entirely fresh. It tells the story of a boating trip on the Thames undertaken by three friends – J, George and Harris, and J’s dog Montmercy.

Here is a snippet from Chapter Three,

So, on the following evening, we again assembled, to discuss and arrange our plans.  Harris said:

“Now, the first thing to settle is what to take with us.  Now, you get a bit of paper and write down, J., and you get the grocery catalogue, George, and somebody give me a bit of pencil, and then I’ll make out a list.”

That’s Harris all over—so ready to take the burden of everything himself, and put it on the backs of other people.

He always reminds me of my poor Uncle Podger.  You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job.  A picture would have come home from the frame-maker’s, and be standing in the dining-room, waiting to be put up; and Aunt Podger would ask what was to be done with it, and Uncle Podger would say:

“Oh, you leave that to me.  Don’t you, any of you, worry yourselves about that.  I’ll do all that.”

And then he would take off his coat, and begin.  He would send the girl out for sixpen’orth of nails, and then one of the boys after her to tell her what size to get; and, from that, he would gradually work down, and start the whole house.

 “Now you go and get me my hammer, Will,” he would shout; “and you bring me the rule, Tom; and I shall want the step-ladder, and I had better have a kitchen-chair, too; and, Jim! you run round to Mr. Goggles, and tell him, ‘Pa’s kind regards, and hopes his leg’s better; and will he lend him his spirit-level?’  And don’t you go, Maria, because I shall want somebody to hold me the light; and when the girl comes back, she must go out again for a bit of picture-cord; and Tom!—where’s Tom?—Tom, you come here; I shall want you to hand me up the picture.”

And then he would lift up the picture, and drop it, and it would come out of the frame, and he would try to save the glass, and cut himself; and then he would spring round the room, looking for his handkerchief.  He could not find his handkerchief, because it was in the pocket of the coat he had taken off, and he did not know where he had put the coat, and all the house had to leave off looking for his tools, and start looking for his coat; while he would dance round and hinder them.

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How can you get your masterwork published?

Step One  – Write It

When that minor detail has been dealt with……..

Step Two – Publish It with Blurb Books

While you are waiting for the editor of Penguin Books to give you a call, you can arrange to have your book professionally printed. 

The barrier to this used to be the large print run that was required to make it worthwhile. You don’t always want a palette load of books (first up, anyway).

There are a number of services that will publish photo books, including the ‘keepsake’ function built in to iPhoto on the Mac. A quick google search shows a number of options. 

These cost in the order of $50, which is OK for a one-off special occasion. But what about short stories, plays, novels, letters, memoirs,family history, your political expose or a HSC English major work?

The solution we used was Blurb: Make Your Own Book. Make it Great  (thanks to Cathy M for the tip).

After registering with Blurb, you download the ‘BookSmart’ software (or ‘Bookify’ is you are after a photobook). This application is used to design your book – choose a photo for the cover, import your text from a Word document, choose a template, change your fonts, create a title page, etc. The application is a little clunky, but more than adequate for the task. When you are happy, it is a simple process to upload your creation to the blurb site. So far, all free.

Step Three – Buy It

Once your book is uploaded, you can buy copies. Books are printed on demand – you only need to order one, if that’s all you want.

Alex’s paperback 44 page book was available for $US 3.99 a copy. As a hardcover, $US 18.95. That seems like good value. Naturally, the more pages, the higher the charge.

Caution – as with many things ordered from the US, postage is the killer. It can more than double the price of an order! Ordering a number at a time can make that a bit better.

The quality of the printing in the books we received was excellent

Step Four – Sell It

Blurb also has its own bookstore – which means you can make your book available for other people to buy – just like Amazon. You can set the profit you’d like to receive for each book sold through the Blurb bookstore. They take care of the printing and postage. Your book may become a bestseller. Alex’s book with a preview of selected pages is now viewable in the blurb bookstore.

Watch out JK Rowlings!

 

 

 

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