Fact Number 349 About The Glen Of Insanity
Before I embark on Tormod’s story I’d better describe in a few short posts a bit more about the Glen of Insanity; its denizens; its geographical curiosities; its surprising chaises-longues.
We’ll start right at the top, high in the air. With the seagulls. Everybody knows seagulls are madder than March eclairs. Why else do they go out on Saturday nights, eat 40 proof vomit and chips from the pavement and then vomit that back down their own babies throats? More cracked than a builder’s bum, are seagulls.
Because:
Seagulls brainwaves are out-of-phase with Reason’s sine waves, which are the kind of waves which keep our ordinary lives together and normal – the waves that make snot green, not blue, and foxes cunning not ice-skating. As Reason’s waves peak and trough, seagulls’ brainwaves are a 1/4 of a wavelength behind, rendering them out of concert, discordant with reason, and thus bonkers.
However.
A strange thing happens to reason’s sane-sine-waves in the Glen of Insanity. Even inexperienced glen-watchers can see that the air in and over the valley shimmers slightly like a road on a hot day. The insane-sine-waves have a different amplitude and length to the sane-sine waves, and – madly – a different frequency too, which plays merry hell with the telly for people in Horgabost. In short, The Glen Of Insanity has a refactive index.
So.
What happens when a seagull’s mad brain-waves fly over the glen is that they are modified in such a way as to come into phase with the Reason sane-sine waves in the world outside the glen. The insane waves cancel each other out and seagulls emerge from the other side of the Glen of Insanity completely sane! They also come out flying at a slightly different angle to the angle at which the entered the glen. Like in a prism. With bending light and
stuff. And they’re red too.
Anyway.
It doesn’t work with crows who are only made more mad, or sparrows, or any other kind of bird. Scientists A scientist* has noticed that seagulls are the only birds to fly out of the Glen of Insanity saner than they flew in. The scientist also speculates that in people brainwaves may act as particles as well as waves cos of us being cleverer and more quantum. So predictions for humans based on the seagull model might well be moot as an irrelevant coot. Or they may be as correct as a right carrot. We just don’t know.
So there.
But what happens to these sane seagulls? Well, there aren’t many of them but sadly they are shunned by their mostly loony seagull feathren and sent to St. Kilda where they can’t shame their families. On St. Kilda, they enjoy quiet board games and Isles FM until they are insane enough to rejoin their loved ones and to eat vomit once again. It’s all part of Nature’s cycle. And so the wheel turns…
* 12-year-old “Specky” Becky MacLean who won the West of Scotland Young Scientists Fair with her essay entitled The Natural History Of The Greater Berneray Cleg.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:20 am
Am I first?
Am I?
Oh it’s very exciting.
Also the whole Gull thing makes perfect sense now.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Tell me, are they less gullible after on overflight.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
Interesting thoughts about waves. But doesn’t quantum mechanics tell us that they’re particles, too? Or, are those particles merely an aerosol of seagull vomit?
I’m lost now, because I last took physics in high school, circa 1978.
Sorry.
Cheers.
November 15th, 2007 at 1:39 pm
There is a mad logic to this bird-brained theory. But what it really proves is that Sam must have enjoyed physics at school and been good at it too.
Did the other girls hate you for that, Sam? How I wish I could have been your big hairy physics teacher!
November 15th, 2007 at 1:59 pm
Ipso facto.
I wonder if they travel at a different velocity too. A glen with a refractive index would suggest so, that would mean the waves would indeed phase up as you suggest although turning birds red is outwith my experience.
I LOVE THIS GLEN
I think I feel at home here.
Good on yer Sam.
November 15th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
birchee, gulls are not only mad but bad. Inside their loathsome little crania all manner of anti-social thoughts are whirling. Eating vomit is only the start. Their greatest pleasure is to poo on people’s ice-cream cones and/or their fringes. But for day to day badness they just like pecking the eyes out of new born lambs. Monstrous birds.
Conan, snarf. But gulls aren’t mad in some gentle Oh, I left my specs in the fridge type way and Is that true about aliens behind the grassy knoll? Gullible is too mild a word for what seagulls are. They are homicidal maniacs. They would dive-bomb your granny and pierce her heart with their cruel beaks as soon as say How-de-do.
Rand’, seagulls only have brainwaves but, in people, Reason can also behave as a particle, all quantumly-like. I expect that’s what gave the human race, Margot Fonteyn and Pol Pot. The potential for anomaly is enormous – almost to the point where anomaly is the norm. Norm still prefers to be called Norm though, rather than Anomaly which sounds too girlie.
Nanas, if you had been my physics teacher at school I would have made sure to fail Oscillation and Acceleration just to get extra lessons. I would have turned up at your house at all hours with a pocketful of iron filings and a head full of ideas.
Doccy, there is a chaise longue in there with your name on it and a magazine rack full of back copies of Enormous Ship Engineering Fortnightly. Kir is served with your morning kippers and porridge and holograms of fatmammycat dance and twirl around your chaise in the manner of Barbarella with groove in her boots. Who said insanity couldn’t be fun? Oh, wait! That’s gooood – I’ll put that in the summer brochure for distribution round Scotland’s morgues. Which brings me to my next point. You might have to die to get in because it’s primarily a last resting glen for the souls of the mad. If you can prove yourself sufficiently crazy whilst alive, of course, you might be allowed to use it as a weekend retreat to recharge the insane batteries for another busy week. We all need a break from the world now and again.
November 15th, 2007 at 10:12 pm
When I was at high school I had a special calculator that could draw sine curves, and the like.
You could also put games on it (true! you could!).
This is why I went on to do Social Sciences at university, not mathsy sciences type things.
You’re able to explain all of this much better than poor Ms Ruwoldt ever could. Ever thought of becoming a teacher?
November 15th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Fecking hate gulls, ship them all off to the Glen of Insanity I say.
My Dad tells stories about the Gleann Na Meamhair, (that spelling is so off I’m in trouble if an Irish speaker reads this). Apparently it was a Glen on the Dingle peninsula where the mad people were sent to live. Must be a Celtic thing. The Anglos send ‘em all off to asylums, we a were always much nicer. We reserve an entire Glen for them. Or we used to, so rumor, (at least my auld fella), has it.
November 15th, 2007 at 11:27 pm
If Randall is lost what hope for moi! Remind me no matter how famished I get not to eat seagull. I remember prisms and Boyle’s Law – I wasn’t bad at it.
Not like chemistry which hung over me like a black cloud. But I got a pass in school cert.
BTW Norm is still with Zoe Ball I believe.
November 16th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Carolyn, I remember those graphic calculators. We had a brilliant maths teacher called Curly Brackets (Esq). He had this bald head with two black tufts of hair on each side – hence the name. He was lovely. I can’t imagine another teaching me quadratic functions quite the way he did. No, not like that. He was quite old and cute and had a lovely giggle.
Teaching is a noble profession. It’s not for the likes of me.
John, are you back from Tokyo yet? There’s a mad glen in Dingle too? Tell me, what are the berries in Dingle called, and is there much jam-making there? Off to google the mad glen – very very cool.
Pat, I liked chemistry better than physics. i thought i might do it at uni for a while but inorganic chemistry was just too stinky. I did a lot of biochemistry though which was OK. The trouble was the experiments. I loved the theory but I realised the life of a bench scientist mostly involves footery procedures, long hours beside the vending machines eating Twixes and drinking bad coffee waiting for your experiment to incubate or work. It drove me almost demented with the inertia of it. All fits and starts like American football, you couldn’t get into anything. In 3rd year we were spending whole days in the lab. There was a brief flurry of activity in the morning and a few hours later some more, and then you’d spill your reagent and have to make more doing Godawful tedious calculations. You’d be too hot (labs in Glasgow uni are way too hot) and at the end of it all, your bacteria wouldn’t grow, just because they couldn’t be arsed. I did a project on bee venom for my final year thesis which was quite interesting but the whole thing just left me cold. And too hot. At the same time.
November 16th, 2007 at 8:14 am
In Brixham, South Devon, where I used to live, and, in fact, my brother, sister, nephew and assorted nieces still do, they have signs saying do not feed the seagulls chips and 40 proof vomit. Well, they don’t actually mention the chips and 40proof vomit, but it’s a given really as seagulls are the same all over the world.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:12 am
The Irish expression for a person being insane (to the best of my recollection) is: T? s?/s? as a mheabhair – literally translates as he/she is out of their brain. Meabhair generally means the physical head/mind/brain, while ‘intinn’ is more often used for ‘mind’ in the sense of thinking or consciousness. The Glen of Insanity would translate roughly as Gleann na Mheabhair-Ghalar.
My guess is Sommerled/Somhairle drove the demented up there and they turned into seagulls to escape their torment.
November 16th, 2007 at 11:35 am
…em, that should be Somerled…
November 16th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Kim, they are, the nasty, filthy abominations.
Conan, how would “out of his tree” or “several chips short of a supper” translate into Irish Gaelic?
Cheers for the proper translation. I wanna, I must find that Dingly glen now. With any luck I’ll be coming over to Ireland next year sometime, and if I can find it beforehand, Gleann na Mheabhair-Ghalar might have to go on my list of must-sees.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:39 pm
MTL read chemistry at Oxford. You can see why we’re soul mates. He and I drove round the Dingle peninsula during a great two weeks in Ireland. Thought you’d like to know that.
November 17th, 2007 at 12:45 pm
Not only are seagulls mad, but they are also violent and a menace. They’re all over this city, drawn by the great lake. I’ve witnessed them outright attack people for their food. Winged gangsters.
November 17th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
I want the mad gulls to eat the fecking clegs, given I have the scars to propove they aare blood suckers.
And magpies eat dog poo -blech. Now I feel sick……….
November 17th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Peeps, with Conan’s and John’s tips I have located Gleann-na-nGealt, The Valley Of The Mad here, here, and here. (Scroll down to page 186 for the Gleann na nGealt bit. It’s very cool stuff, definitely worth a look.
November 17th, 2007 at 4:42 pm
Pat, I wanna do that.
Medbh, they’re packing, too. Poo bombs, rapid-fire poo – they have it all in their arsenal. Ho ho.
Apprentice, magpies eat dog-poo? I wish I did not know that.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
We had a place a bit like that, so we hired a 45 horsepower Laplace Transformer and set it up in parallel with an extrapolated power series driven by a second-hand diesel-powered Difference Engine from an old Ford Lagrangian.
We all hid in an old disused Hilbert Space and waited, but nothing happened, apart from the singing of the bats. In the end the whole thing only made us tensor.
November 17th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Sam: Not sure about “several chips short of a supper”, but “out of his tree” would translate literally as “as a chrann”.
November 18th, 2007 at 12:08 am
Another marvelous chapter, but I had trouble following this after your all-too-vivid description of what seagulls eat. I have seen them eating that — and worse — and yet it is the thought of them pushing it into their little babies’ beaks that really gets me.
And my kids complain about Brussels’ sprouts.
November 18th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
Anyone who’s watched seagulls fighting over the remains of a smashed tomato sandwich should have intimated the sanity thing without, perhaps, understanding the convergence of waveforms you’ve revealed here.
Is it possible there are zones of insanity in other districts which might affect them in similar fashion? There was a time when I came upon a gull acting sanely in a mall parking-lot and assumed a gastronomical malady.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:49 am
BOCK!
well done.
Here’s one for you.
Why is it dangerous to fly to Warsaw?
Because the Poles are on the lefthand side of the plane!
November 19th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
Gulls regurgitate to feed their young – most pelagic birds do so since they often source food at some distance from their nests. What else is a gullet for.
Btw, gulls are also very fond of flying (mating) ants.
November 19th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
Seagulls are actually flying dogs. I know this because I was once shat on by one one fine Sunday morning in Galway.
November 19th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
So, seagulls are barmy? You think so? When was the last time you saw a seagull watching a ‘Police Academy’ movie? So who’s barmy now, eh?
November 19th, 2007 at 7:59 pm
Well feck me. Good research Sam. We actually spend a lot of time in Camp (the townland in which Glean na Geallt is situated). When my family are all their at one time, mad would definitely be a good word for it!
Actually, I was familiar with the Mad Sweeney story. Macnas the Galway theater company (whom I played drums with for one of their street theater events, in a faraway land, a long long time ago), did a production of it. I saw it in San Francisco about 10 years back when they were touring the U.S.
Ps back from Tokyo a few weeks back, still posting photo’s though…
November 19th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
BTW. Let me know when you are going to the Dingle peninsula. I know a lot of the nooks and crannies, not all, mind you, way too many crannies to know in one life time.
November 19th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
Bock, I didn’t understand a word past Laplace Transformer. You and Maroon make me feel like I’m 7 again and standing with my dad and uncles while they go all gooey over a tractor engine for several hours. Meanwhile I just kick a bit of sheep poo around the place and need to piddle.
Mary, it’s the combination of saturated fat and hard liquor early in life that make seagulls so mean. Teenage type 2 diabetes has become a big problem for some flocks.
SafeT, mall parking-lots are outwith earthly control. Outer Spaceian Aliens come and move your car when you’re sh opping so that you have to spend 15 minutes looking for it when you return. We all go mad but the seagulls, who are employed by the aliens as watch-gulls, grow ever more chillingly sane and evil. I blame the INS for letting the aliens in in the first place.
Docs, see reply to Bock’s comment.
Conan, I am at a total loss as to what your last sentence there means. Total. Ants – that’s the puzzling part. Call me Thicko McThicko and substitute me in DIY projects for two short planks but I dinnie ken yer meanin’, Drummy. I just dinny.
Caro, bet many a fine Sunday in Galway has ended thus. Sundays are the worst, after their Saturday night vindaloos. Is it Galway you’re from then?
Asym42, are you kidding? It was from Police Acadame that they learnt ballistics, their deadly aim (see Caro) and the hard-wearing nature of polyester trousers.
John, cool! I’m hoping to get over early next year sometime and to spend a week exploring, then I’m picking up my mother in Glasgow and taking her over here for a holiday – she’s afeared of flying alone, see. I’ll quiz you nearer the time about nooks and crannies. Cheers!
November 20th, 2007 at 1:08 am
Hey Sam, it’s just one of those lame math-pun things. I must try harder.
November 20th, 2007 at 1:23 am
No Bock, m’darlin’, I fear it is I who must try harder. The hilbert Space rings a bell somewhere but you’ve got me with the laplace transformer. I wasn’t that good at Physics.
November 20th, 2007 at 11:37 am
Oh, I meant fond as in they’re an edible delicacy. ‘Yum’, say the Gulls, swooping on the ants.
November 22nd, 2007 at 11:56 pm
That’s cos it’s not physics. Your memory doesn’t play you as wrong as you feared. It’s actually an old Jedi trick for solving differential equations.
I use it all the time when surviving in the Arctic.