Hard boiled

I quite like the so-called hard boiled fiction of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and so on.

Very often, a young male character is referred to as a “gunsel”. In one book, it is explained that this means a young man carrying a gun.

However, it’s not correct. As far as I understand it, a gunsel is a young man kept by an elder as a homosexual partner. You can see it in The Maltese Falcon.

Wilmer is the gunsel. It’s used as a person with a gun,which he does have, but I always assumed it was (also) meant as a secret reference to homosexuality.

The Wizard Of Oz

A friend of mine says her favourite film is The Wizard Of Oz.

She was telling me the other day that the Tarkovsky film Stalker mirrors TWOZ, even down to the black and white bits at the beginning and end.

Oddly though, there are no black and white bits. It is a colour film all the way through, glorious Technicolour, or Technicolor.

The aspect ratio of this picture is wrong, but you can see clearly that it is monochrome, but it’s sepia. It is the colour you associate with old and faded photographs, it’s the colour of nostalgia (also a Tarkovsky film).

I get very cross sometimes when people continue to make stupid mistakes, even when they know they are wrong. Here are just a few:

“Princess Diana”

Diana Spencer died at the age of 36. At no time in her life was she ever “Princess Diana”.

She was “Lady Diana Spencer” for a time before she married, then became “Her Royal Highness Diana, Princess of Wales”. After she died, as a courtesy title only, she was known as just “Diana, Princess of Wales”.

When the UK lottery started, in, what 1994, it was a novelty. You picked 6 numbers, from 49, and bet £1. If you got 3 numbers you won £10, and the prizes went up from there. Get all 6 numbers and you won lots of millions.

We did it for a bit, a few pounds a week, because we could afford it and it was fun and we did have some winnings, the largest being just over £100 I believe. But if we didn’t do it, we didn’t much care, and if we didn’t win, which mostly we didn’t, it was not the end of the world.

I was a Maths teacher then, and there was a lot of useful material you could get out of it. What are your chances of winning? Well, of winning the jackpot, one in just less than fourteen million. It has changed now, I believe, more expensive, more numbers and smaller prizes.

People had many interesting ideas about the lottery. “Well, someone has to win and it could be me” was one. Well, of course, no-one has to win the jackpot, which is why you get rollovers.

“There’s no way to guarantee a win” was another. This is actually not true. If you bought every possible different ticket, all nearly 14 million of them, you would be guaranteed to get the jackpot, and every other minor prize several times over. The prize money would have to be over about £14m to make a profit, and goodness knows where you could find a machine to process that many tickets. Plus, if someone else chooses the winning numbers, you have to share.

“All combinations are equal, so I use my family’s birthdays”. Yes, lots of people do this, meaning numbers up to 31. Actually, if you go for higher numbers, you will still have the same chance of winning, but a reduced chance of having to share.

The best way to win is open a savings account at your bank.