Nativity of Erwin Schrödinger / Glad to be Grey

A very complicated end to the day, Dear Readers, but I had such fun for most of it. It being the Nativity of Erwin Schrödinger, we Beaker People have spent most of the day jumping in and out of boxes in the great Liturgy of Doubtful Wave Forms. Thankfully, since Archdruid Eileen is away, we weren't playing with real geiger counters or dangerous chemicals this year.

For those of you who aren't up on these things, Schrödinger is famous for many things. One is his famous "Cat". Which he didn't have. As the Archdruid has pointed out in the past, it wasn't a real cat. No cats were harmed in the course of Schrödinger's experiment. For good legal reasons, I have to stress the paucity of cats in the experiment. Except imaginary cats. And if a cat is multiplied by the square root of -1 does it have a wave function at all?

But in going into the details of Herr Schrödinger, I realise I have forgotten what I really wanted to share with you.

I was wandering back from the Moot House, wiping the Wave Forms from my brow, when a snatch of Tangerine Dream told me that someone was calling my mobile telephonic apparatus. The trouble with using Phaedra as a ringtone, of course, is that it's 17 minutes until you can actually answer the phone. But when I eventually answered it, it turned out to be my charge card company.

I say "my". It actually says "Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley" on the card. But Eileen insists that it's registered in my name, and I then claim expenses. She says she prefers the indirectness of the attribution of purchases. It does causes me problems occasionally - although Eileen tells me that credit card records do have a habit of spontaneously combusting like that.

When I was told that an order had been placed for 75,000 T-shirts, naturally I phoned up the producers of T-shirts. Of course, if Hnaef (who is officially in charge) is ordering so many T-shirts, then who am I to argue with him? But still, I reckoned the motif on the shirts was a mistake. "Some People are Beaker. This Should not Present You with a Problem." There aren't that many Beaker People, and I wouldn't like to scare anyone. And Hnaef's always wanted to be part of a minority. So I thought it would be best to tweak the message - and a visit to the Asda next to Ikea yesterday gave me some inspiration. Based on the title of one of their checkouts, I revised the message to "1 in a million people or less are Beaker. This should not Present You with a Problem". And I tweaked the pink colour to something more grey - less likely to encourage outbreaks of  creativity. I'm sure Hnaef will approve all round.