Articles - Miscellaneous

St Ed’s Web Watch

A year or so ago the magazine contained a regular column featuring the interesting and/or unusual web sites discovered by our readers. I the hope that this column might be resurrected and I have been persuaded by the editor to describe one or two of the web sites I have come across recently.

Do you ever wonder how much your pocket money would be worth in today’s money? That pint you enjoyed as a student, was it good value compared to a pint from the Roundhay Fox? If these questions keep you awake at night visit Economic History Resources on www.eh.net/ehresources/howmuch/poundq.php. All you need to do to answer similar questions to mine is to enter the amount and year and then press submit and the answer appears (unfortunately for 2002 and not 2003).

Of course many sites on the web are not nearly as useful as this one. Try www.extremeironing.info/index.html for more information than you ever needed about this new sport including details of the 1^st World Championships held in Munich last year.

Anyone with an interest in pubs might like the guide to British pub etiquette produced by the Social Issues Research Centre in Oxford (www.sirc.org/publik/pub.html). Written with tourists and aliens in mind as the introduction says ‘Experienced native pubgoers obey the unspoken rules, but without being conscious of doing so. Regulars will mutter and grumble when an uninitiated tourist commits a breach of pub etiquette, but may well be unable to tell him exactly what rule he has broken. Just as native speakers can rarely explain the grammatical rules of their own language, those who are most fluent in particular rituals, customs and traditions generally lack the detachment necessary to explain the ‘grammar’ of these practices in an intelligible manner. This is why we have anthropologists.’ The anthropologists from SIRC have studied and interviewed hundreds of natives, tourists and publicans to create this site. Well worth a look even for non-aliens.

And finally, offered without comment, is www.jnd.org/dn.mss/ToiletPaperAlgorithms.html .

I am sure you know of some even more unusual sites. The editor will be pleased to hear from you.

29 June, 2003