The Crazy Frog and Other Lessons in Modern Awareness

As the years advance and the brain seems to be begging for “early retirement”, so the need to stay mentally alert and in touch with modern trends becomes more imperative. “How can they afford to advertise like that?” demands the wife (bless her) as the hugely irritating Crazy Frog does its “beh-ding ding ding” ring-tone thing on TV.

It had me a bit foxed for a while until the Sunday newspapers pointed out that people buy the froggy ring-tone for the sheer, irritating awfulness of it and that “froggy turnover in the UK alone has reached £10million and is still rising”. The beauty of the operation is that there are no middle men - your Asdas, Tescos and Amazons don’t get a look in – you just download the “beh-ding ding ding” to your handset and you pay your money via your mobile phone bill. Fortunately for the wife and I, we have a suitably irritating ring-tone response. The Ranting Nappa’s multi-decibel snoring is being recorded – not just for posterity, but for conversion into an even more irritating ring-tone than the Crazy Frog and will be marketed for SMS download in the near future.

Keeping the brain active depends also (as has already been noted) on doing mental puzzles like Sudoku. The numbers game craze has gone completely loony however with this weekend’s Telegraph answering last week’s Daily Mail’s twelve-face Sudoku with a multi-dimensional “Rubik’s Cube” Sudoku puzzle involving no less than nine interlocking layers.

Accordingly I’m back to crosswords and was embarrassed to find a word – DECALOGUE – which was the only possible answer and yet I had to go to a dictionary to find what it meant. As you know, gentle reader, it is a term used to describe the Ten Commandments and I shuddered to think what my Mum (bless her) would think of me for not knowing that. On Saturday evening I met up with her at a family gathering and was much relieved to find out that not only was she unsure of the word, but mercifully her elder sister - my Great Aunt Chelmsford (bless her) - was equally puzzled by “Decalogue” as well.

Other recent findings have been a wine-making expression “Green Harvesting” which is sorting out the men from the boys with the 2004 Bordeaux vintage. Weather conditions in the year perversely meant that although huge quantities of grapes were harvested, these included a lot of poor quality fruit which needed to be thinned out by expensive student labour which not all vineyard owners were prepared to employ.

And then there are “Scovilles” – the units to measure the “heat” of a chilli. The index was pioneered in 1912 by Wilbur Scoville and this is mentioned in a pleasing Spectator piece about different chilli pepper types by Aidan Hartley who is considering turning his Kenyan farm over to chilli growing. He concludes that a good thing about chillis “is that elephants – which routinely raid our vegetables – fear and loathe them”.