How many typewriters does it take to .... ?

.... change a light bulb?  Recite the complete works of Shakespeare? Do the gardening?

If you think you know the answer, then call 0419-419419 (calls route through to Nigeria - so have your bank details ready) - and you may win a pot plant.  Just don't tell the drug squad.

Amongst evolutionary biologists and geneticists, typewriters are the 2nd most studied subjects (after identical twins ) - ever ; and recently published articles now conclusively show that the QWERTY gene was simply an advantageous mutation that conferred on typewriter demonstrators the symbiotic ability to tap out TYPEWRITER along the top row without the keys jamming up.

Yes - the inevitable explosion in typewriters (and jammed up lower keys)  did lead to beneficial spin-offs (alphabet spaghetti) but also trade-offs (jam rationing).


However - only now coming to light are the more complex side affects of the QWERTY mutation. Did you know that pessimistic words tend to contain more letters typed with the left hand - whereas right hand letters are favoured when tapping out growing and gardening terms?


The illustration shows what can happen when only the right hand is used for extended periods of typing.

Impressive eh? And also a wonderful antidote to left hand induced negativity.

But - on  International Bagpipe Day - what does all this have to do with the price of mustard seed?

You may well ask.

Well - think about it.  

We're clearly on the brink of a new green revolution. 

90% of the population is right-handed. 

These people all pick up their smartphones and tablet devices with their left hand - and then type exclusively with their right.  

The affects - when they hit -  will be blooming dramatic, and "Green fingers" will take on an entirely new meaning. 

Yep - it's Apples & Blackberries going bananas on Orange.

So we need to  - Be Prepared - as Baden-Powell would have said at this point.. 

And that's where the Mustard Seed comes in.  It's a testament to right thinking optimists, and a panacea to left behinders . It's just bursting with tools for transforming and tending the garden of life; for nurturing the new shoots of optimism and new growth:

Tools (set of three)  -  Gardening hat (one)  - Garden storage tins (set of two) 

Garden Pouch   -   Garden Wall Planter   -   Garden Apron

Gardeners' Hand Salve -  Garden Twine Pack (three)  - Gardening Gloves

So - all together now: 

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow

On a blooming android smart phone?

We'll tell you now of some that we know

Those we miss you'll surely pardon

Daffodils, heart's ease and phlox

Meadowsweet and lady smocks

Gentian, lupin and tall hollyhocks

Roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, forget-me-nots

On a blooming android smart phone.

 Finally - while we're still on the green fingers theme :  a customer (called Hector) came into the Mustard Seed yesterday and was clearly impressed by the range of gardening goods.   "Man, you're really green!" he exclaimed.

Manure is actually brown -  but I think I know what he meant.

P.S.  In the video above, the toy accordion on the left is played by Hector. The bigger accordion on the right is played by Hector. There is only one Hector.  

A blonde walks into a bookshop....

A blonde man (yes - men can be blonde as well you know)  walked into the Mustard Seed, where there was an author (a very famous one of course)  signing copies of her new book.

In response to the mumbled request from the blonde, the author opened the nearest  front book cover and wrote the dedication "to Omar Chisitt",  before handing the book to the blonde.

"But I was only asking how much is it? " responded the blonde.  

---*---

Ah - the joys of the little misunderstandings that take place between  real people in real bookshops. Such joys will sadly never again warm the cockles of the White Horse EX-Bookshop,  that had to recently close its doors to the public; a public that's going increasingly virtual and online.  Real bookshops must absolutely loathe the words Amazon and eBay.

So - the Mustard Seed will now do its best - as the only remaining real bookshop in town -  to continue to sow misunderstanding and confusion be a valuable resource in the community .

We do have to ensure that shoppers can easily navigate their way round the aisles, so that they can see exactly where all the books are.

If you look at the Shop layout (see sketch on the right) , then you can see that all the Books are straight ahead of you as you come in the door: in Bay E , and also in the Zone on the right hand side.

To improve navigation, here's what we're going to do.

In deference to the very popular film streaming site (LoveFilm) we're now going to call that right hand side of the shop The Zone you Love .  Hang on. That doesn't sound quite right. How about adding some Latin: that's always a good ploy if you want to add a bit of gravitas. Yes, I think that should work.  "You Love" in Latin is AMAS isn't it? Amo, Amas, Amat...  So  - we get AMAS-ZONE.  Yes - that has a good ring to it.

And Bay-E (or maybe E-Bay sounds better?) is pretty good as it stands. Amaszone & E-Bay.  Hmmm - I like it.

So - DO come to Amaszone & E-Bay to have a good nose-pick up the new 2012 Lent/Easter Catalogue at the same time. (Sorry - maybe a full stop would have worked better than a dash there ).

 Or browse through the catalogue online.

Below is a mini digital version of the magazine. Click on the image below to view it in full.

Click to launch the full edition in a new window  

Yes, you CAN then order simply by emailing shop@mustardseed.org.uk ,  but remember: you may then just miss out on a good misunderstanding. 

And remember - Confucius say....   If you can't find the book you want then you're probably shopping at the

Dickens in Wonderland

It's the 29th February; the March hares are leaping a day early, and we need your help. There's not a second to waste.

Because the earth is slowing down as it whizzes round the sun, every few years astronomers very sensibly add an extra second to our clocks, just to make sure that Universal Time is in synch with Solar time and International Atomic Time.  They're called "leap seconds" and the next one will be added at the end of June 30, 2012 . 


But - Hang on a minute?!  With a Leap Second you add a second - right?  Then - how long exactly do you add in a Leap Year?  Ouch. No wonder I feel old, and the policemen keep getting younger. 


Anyway - the point is this.  There are moves afoot (30.48cm) to abolish the leap second. 


This cannot be allowed to happen. It's absolutely vital to the success of the Mustard Seed that you have that extra second to be able to do your important fairtrade shopping & book browsing - especially now that the brilliant  new Traidcraft Spring catalogue is out, just waiting for you to come in and pick up your copy. 

So - here's the plan. The Mustard Seed will be introducing its own leap second,  and it will be applied every time you come into the shop. And to differentiate it from GMT, we'll call it MSMT.  

This is fantastic news. Not only will you have more shopping time, but if you come into the shop often enough, you'll also significantly slow down your own personal time continuum. 

That's not all. By holding Zumba classes in the Mustard Seed entrance porch, the leaping ladies will be lapping up leap seconds like leap hares as if there's no tomorrow. Well - exactly. There won't be a tomorrow, will there?

Yep. Concorde used to be able to get you to New York before you'd even set off from London.  Well, the Mustard Seed will be the new Concorde - only slightly cheaper.  OK - you might miss the odd bus as a result, but at least the policemen will be behaving themselves again. 

The point is well illustrated when Dickens found himself in Wonderland. There was the white coney lapin' along  "I'm late, I'm late....  "  when he  hared past Oliver Twist. But Oliver knew the importance of taking time, of slowing down. He simply replied:


"Can I have seconds please?"  


So - come to the Mustard Seed (You may have to squeeze past the Zumba class in the porch) if you want more time to appreciate the good things in life. 


P.S.  I've been testing out MSMT & leap seconds - and our personal time continua are therefore possibly no longer in alignment.  So -  IF you haven't been receiving Mustard Seed emails for a while, then that shows that MSMT really works. 

Throat Singing?

Having a frog in your throat presumably means that you're good at French, or good at catching flies maybe?  I'm not sure. Anyway - I don't think anyone ever croaked from it.

I only mention this because of what happened yesterday. I mean - how would you react if you clearly heard Charles Aznavour being brutally strangled  - and it was all happening in someone else's backpack?

The shapely blond  teenager sitting next to me on the bus quickly admitted to the crime. "That's my ringtone" he owned up sheepishly.

Well, I'd hardly even had time to mentally digest our favourite french crooner's lucky escape, when an eerie voice coming out of my own left trouser pocket dragged me into the next phase of this bizarre saga.

"Tuvan Throat Singing" I heard the voice cry out from my trouser pocket - inappropriately clearly. You'd at least have expected it to be a two-tone froglike gravelly grunt. But - putting aside the tonal quality - what in blazes was going on??

I took out my mobile which also happened to be in the same trouser pocket.  And there it was on the screen: the answer was quite simple really. The red Record button said it all. I'd inadvertently opened up an App that automatically records and then sorts music into appropriate genres,  and it had decided that a strangled Aznavour best fits into the Tuvan Throat Singing genre. It even gave me a sample video so that I could judge for myself.

That gave me an idea.  Could the App also sort out background sounds into musical genres - I wondered?

I started with the Hairdressers up London St.

First I recorded a couple of minutes of general chatter and ambient noise before asking the App to put it into the right category.

Well well. Barbershop - it declared confidently. Made sense I suppose.

Next came the piano shop. Honky Tonk according to my trusty App. The Crown went into Scrumpy & Western; the sweet shop was Acid Rock; the Pet Shop got Jitterbug; the charity shop went into Ragtime; and the Catholic Church was categorised as New Age Soul.  

But - where would it put the Mustard Seed?  I waited as it processed.  It was thinking. Glam Punk perhaps? Or Hip Hop? Fandango would be fun. I was just hoping it wouldn't be Doom Metal ... 


Nope - there it was.  Rhapsody .  Interesting choice.  I asked it to define Rhapsody.  "A form coming out of spontaneous inspiration and sense of freestyle improvisation producing something that is episodic yet integrated, free-flowing in structure, and featuring a range of highly contrasted moods, colour and tonality".


Sounded to me like the Mustard Seed all over - but then who am I to judge? If it's not Nana Mouskouri then it's all Greek to me.

P.S. Have you signed up yet for the Anniversary Celebration Party in the Corn Exchange on the 11th June? 
Come for all of it - or part of it! 
And why not bring the whole family to the Shared Lunch?
Everyone warmly welcome - to a Special event to celebrate a Special shop!
Sign up by emailing karen@vogt.org.uk 

Singee Songee Sick a Pence

A funny Sandwich walked into the Mustard Seed yesterday - and asked for some honey. "Sorry - we don't serve food here" the shop person replied crustily.

It's been happening all week - because it's http://www.britishsandwichweek.com/ .

Most people think they know the origin of the Sandwich ( the Sand Wich Project being the prequel to the Blair Wich Project etc etc ) - but this is incorrect. Sandwiches go back much further in time. I found a very old pastrami sandwich at Stonehenge. Very old.

Most sandwiches are also tone deaf apparently - but the one that came in ear on Monday  was clearly kind of musical - in a sandwichy kind of way.

The sandwich song it was singing didn't make much sense to me - but this is what my pink-pidgin-english recorder app made of it:  

Singee songee sick-a-pense
Pockee muchee lye.
Dozen two-times brackee-birdy
Cook him inee Pye.

When him cut-ee topside
birdy-bobbee sing.
Himee tinkee nice-ee dishy
set-ee fore-ee king.

Gerry inee tower loom
countee much-ee money.
Robbie inee Mustee See
chow-chee bready-honey

Girly in-ee Markee plays
hang-ee out-ee crose
Down come-ee brackee-birdy
nipee offee nose!

Who are Robbie & Gerry I wonder? A boy band probably. 


Anyway - just to clarify.  We DO serve food in the Mustard Seed. Lots of it.  So - if you're a sarnie looking for a spread, then we'll be more than happy to serve you.  

Diet of Worms

I'm not normally prone to conspiracy theories (the Sunday Sport DID get it right about Elvis now being a poodle on the moon however. The headline was "Ain't Nothin' but a Moon Dog" - which I didn't get) -  but I did stumble across something really very sinister earlier this week that I thought you should  know about. I must stress that this is FOR REAL, and I urge you to email this on to as many friends as possible.

I was on the way down to the Corn Exchange to vote when I heard it.  Perfectly innocent - or so it may have seemed to the less perceptive. A girl in hoptails wearing a pinnaforte and playing bobscotch - and singing to herself. I could only  make out some of the words - but it was enough:

...think I'll go and eat worms               ... fat ones, thin ones
                          ... bite off the heads, and suck out the juice
.                  ...  throw the skins away
                                                    ....On worms three times a day 

THAT's when it hit me  - clear as criers' bell.  THEY (you know who I mean)... THEY are trying to foist a foreign (probably vegetarian ) voting system on us - supperifically surreptitiously - or whatever the word is.

I'm not stupid you know.  I've heard of the Diet of Worms. That was when the Bundestag ordered the Bundespost to put worm powder on the back of stamps so that when you licked the stamp you started speaking Slytherin (worm language that sounds like German I think) rather than good old English. (and sometimes your legs and arms dropped off - although I'm not sure about that bit - maybe they were chopped off) .

That was the start of the slippery slope - and we DON'T want the same to happen here.

You think I'm over-reacting?  Not so.

I arrived at the polling station - and there it was  - in your face. A big sign.  LOW-CAL ELECTIONS HERE.  They weren't even trying to hide it. They might as well have put DIET ELECTIONS HERE .

And that wasn't all.  When I came up to the desk, the polling lady (she looked shifty) whispered (I had to lip-read) that our local MP (yes - this goes right to the top) was also on THE DIET (good thing too) and had first passed a post. (Ouch - worse than kidney stones probably).

It's bad enough finding ylang ylang and jojoba in your cornflakes (hey - what's wrong with ingredients that you can at least pronounce?) - and that we now need hair straighteners to deal with the dizzy affros (or is it affro dizzies ?) -  but this latest foreign invasion regarding THE DIET is beyond the bucket.

It gets worse. There I was in the polling booth about to put pen to paper - when my finely tuned auditory canals  picked up a female mumble from a fellow voter through the hardboard partition - through the grille of the confessional so-to-speak. "These Candy Dates all need to be thrown out!" - I heard clearly .  I was outraged! Foreigners trying to abolish our sweet tooth? Obviously part of THE DIET plan. I felt like confronting the infidel in question with "Unhand me you Heathen - the Game is Up! " But I didn't  - because the mumble continued.  "These candy dates ...  all just ham actors in a Pub .... " .  That one took me a couple of seconds to work out.  Ah yes - it clicked.  Bar Skit Cases - she must have meant.

So - HOW can we protect the British Bonbon  from THE DIET and the Slytherin invasion?

Luckily - there IS an answer.

1. Only use self-adhesive stamps
2. Buy LOTS of lovely Candies and delicious Dates  from the Mustard Seed
3. AND Beautiful Bar Skits (apologies for the "basket" typo in the catalog) to put them in

And I'm now going to forward all of this on to the Sunday Sport.

P.S. Vegetarians... They DO eat worms don't they? 

Palace Needs Poop

According to Wikileaks, there's Panic at the Palace.

A crinkle in Kate's crinolene?  Willie got the wobblies?

No - much worse.

They're short on the kopi luwak for the after-dinner coffee & choccies.

Those of us with a passing interest in coprology will know that kopi luwak gets its rich mellow flavours from its brave journey  through the stomach acids and digestive tract of the  Asian palm civet.

And that's the guts of the problem. Civets don't have opposable thumbs - so they can't build bulldozer busters - so they can't prevent rainforest destruction - so there's less of them - so there's a shortage of civet poop. You get the picture.  Less poop = less kopi luwak.

At £40 a bean (and in the current economic climate),  it's definitely worth trying to fake it.

The Palace have certainly tried.  All night long, the corgis were turning somersaults and yapping at imaginary caffeine-induced cats, and the queen now has big bags under her eyes (but that's because she's actually quite old).

It was also Wikileaks that let the civet cat out of the bag about the secret memo received by all six million Civil Servants earlier this week. For one night only they were all to become Civet Servants.  I don't need to spell out what they were asked to do: you can read this for yourself on the Wikileaks website.

But what has this got to do with the Mustard Seed - you may ask?

No idea.

Ask me again after I've had my morning cup of delicious traidcraft medium roast while watching the Royal Wedding....