Hailstones on a sunny day! Safe splashing. Interesting words. Gardeners.

I woke up quite early this morning to the sound of heavy rain on the skylight windows. So I switched off the alarm, turned over and went back to sleep to the sound of the rain. No run round the village this morning. Mid-morning the sun came out. Maybe the day was shaping up quite nicely after all. Later as I contemplated popping into the village for a couple of items, walking the long way round to make up for not running earlier, I realised that the sun had disappeared and we had hailstones! All seasons in one day!

I see that Artemis II has splashed down safely, which is good, but I still don’t know quite what the purpose of the mission was. I am not one to denigrate scientific endeavour but I do wonder quite what they found out that we did not know before. So it goes. 

I’ve come across a new expression: “friction-maxxing”. I have already commented some time ago on “looks-maxxing”, used about young men “maximising their physical attractiveness”, and supposedly about young women too. According to my research “maxxing is an internet slang suffix meaning to optimize or maximize a particular quality or activity. The suffix originated in game theory and role-playing game terminology before being adopted by incel communities in the 2010s, where looksmaxxing referred to maximizing one's physical attractiveness. It entered mainstream usage through TikTok and social media in the 2020s, often applied humorously to everyday activities.”

Hmm, maybe “looksmaxxing” only applies to young men after all.

“Maxxing”, by the way, is not accepted as a real word by the spellcheck programme, which wants to correct it to “maxing” or even “Maxine”!

Anyway, it seems that “friction-maxxing” is all about doing things the more difficult way, maybe the old-fashioned way. This includes cooking a meal from scratch rather than using ready meals, or one of those deliver services which sends you all the ingredients ready prepared, or, heaven forfend, UberEats. And of course, there’s writing your own reports and essays and dissertations instead of instructing AI to do so. You can even take it so far as to mend your own clothes, or even make them yourself in the first place. Living at a slower pace seems to be the thing, along with the satisfaction that comes with achievement. Here’s a link to an article about it. 

Still thinking of words, here’s a new example of turning nouns into verbs: suddenly there is a verb ‘to sauna”.

And here is some fun with words by Lemn Sissay:

'Is it a homophone or a homonym?'

They row as they row the lake

The morning is to her a hymn

To him it is a wake

Here is an interesting take on Claude Monet’s garden at Giverny.

David Beckham, by the way, has been signed up to co-design a garden for the Chelsea Flower Show, working with Alan Titchmarsh, who does know a thing or two about gardens. He has apparently been given a garden gnome to paint, presumably as well as other garden-related tasks. Gnomes used to be frowned upon, definitely not the thing (except possibly for a few gardens near ours which really do favour gnomes and pot toadstools and all sorts of garden ornamentation) and banned from the Chelsea Flower Show for years. A special dispensarion has been granted for this year and gnomes painted by famous folk such as David Beckham, Cate Blanchett and mary Berry will be auctioned to raise money for gardening projects in schools. There you go!

Life goes on. Stay safe and well, everyone!