Finger counting
HOW HIGH CAN YOU COUNT on your fingers? 10? Pah. I can count up to 1,023. Here’s how it’s done. It’s useful if you want to count the number of people…
Author: Steve Caplin
6 billion names
I CALCULATED RECENTLY that 267 (in other words, 26 multiplied by itself seven times) is 8,031,810,176. Which means that, as there are 26 letters in the alphabet, there would be enough…
Music notation
THOSE UNFAMILIAR WITH WRITTEN MUSIC tend to regard scores as an impenetrable mass of dots and lines. But it’s really quite straightforward: it’s just a graph of time (on the horizontal…
Six chord trick
WHILE YOU CAN PLAY MOST SONGS with just three chords, you get a lot more flavour if you add the relative minors of each of these chords. These are chords three…
Three chord trick
EVEN IF YOU’RE NOT MUSICAL you’ll have heard people pouring scorn on bands like Status Quo, who appear to know only three chords. But why those three chords? What’s special about…
That’ll do nicely
ONE OF THE MOST MEMORABLE television commercial series of the 1970s was for American Express, created by Ogilvy & Mather. In the first commercial, first aired in 1975, a businessman rushes…
Advertising slogans
IN MORE GENTLE TIMES, slogans always included the name of the product. Guinness is good for you. Ah, Bisto! All because the lady loves Milk Tray. Happiness is a cigar…
Spear carrying
THERE ARE MANY WALK-ON PARTS in Shakespeare’s plays, especially those produced with a budget large enough to pay for the actors. Watching a production of Julius Caesar, I was distracted by…
The ballet problem
SOME YEARS AGO I was taken to a production of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Albert Hall. The performers managed a laudable interpretation of the fight scene in which…
On the horizon
ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKES many people make when creating a scene is incorrectly placing people at a variety of sizes. Sure, people further away appear smaller, but how do you…