#219 Let me bore you to sleep - Jason Newland (18th September 2019)

Hello and welcome to jasonnewland.com, the grooviest website in Colchester. My name is Jason Newland. Please only listen to this when you can safely close your eyes and what is this? Well this is let me bore you to sleep.

It is me sitting in my big black squeaky chair talking and boring you to sleep. So I hope that you're well and as I said my website I've been working on it. I do you know try and do a little bit each day to improve it and there's now testimonials on there so if you would like to write a testimonial just write you know write something about how you've benefited from listening to me or if you like what I do then please go there and you can do that and then I will publish it onto the website for others to look at.

I've got a testimonial box that comes on, it's on the right hand side. If you're looking at it on a laptop or a tablet there's a display, I don't know what they call it, carousel or whatever where different testimonials come up one by you know one after another. What else have I got? I've also added tags to the website.

So I've already got categories, things are in categories and the categories are basically the podcasts but the tags are put on to try and make it a little bit easier to find what people are looking for. So someone's looking for nail biting, a nail biting recording and they can find it there. So there's a cloud, a tag cloud at the top of the website as well as also being on the right hand side.

So someone wants smoking or safety or you know if that's something that people are looking for. Our gratitude you know as an example, they can click on that. I will be adding more tags and tagging more stuff but at the moment I've just stuck to the you know the basic self-development ones and I've not put tags for relaxation because there's so many.

I've got hundreds of relaxation recordings. I've not put tags for chronic pain because I've got lots of chronic pain recordings and I've not put tags for sleep or insomnia because again I've got hundreds and hundreds of recordings for that. So that that's more category situation and everyone, everything is organized quite well I think.

But I will be adding a site map and I will be, I'm going to add more like different ways to search for stuff so that it whatever's, just find it's finding whatever's easiest or more suitable for you personally. And so yeah, so every day if I were to, I'm trying to add a little bit. I'm going on and studying how to use WordPress and finding out what the best plugins are to improve the website experience for you.

So that's what I'm doing there and I hope that it's useful. I'm not sure about the color of the website. I might change it so maybe you can give me a little bit of feedback.

Just use the contact form maybe and just let me know. I didn't want to do a whole special form just to ask you if you like the color but the website as far as I'm concerned now, I'm never ever going to change the website in a sense of rebuilding a new website from scratch for jasonnewland.com. I'll be adding to it. I may change the design.

I may, you know, add bits and change bits but I'm not, I don't intend to take any of the pages off. So any pages that are indexed on Google and other search engines that people don't use will be, you know, usable. They'll be live links because in the past I've just had so many different versions of that website and then the link becomes dead once I change to another host.

So I'm planning to stay where it is and I will be hopefully, not yet, and it might not be till the end of the year, I plan to build, rebuild the other websites that I had. So the letmeboreyoutosleep.com and deepsleepwhisper.com and all those ones. I have to wait for a few months to find out if I can financially afford to do it.

So I'm keeping everything kind of as simple as possible yet putting in the effort and the work to make this one website as good as I can. So I hope that makes sense. And so if you want to visit and have a little look and see all the grooviness.

So what I've thought, I'm just going to get my pen. I've got this book. This is one of my letmeboreyoutosleep library.

I've got five books so far and I'm probably going to get another one June next week. I'm actually thinking about buying the Guinness Book of World Records for 2020. The thing is, because I do want to use it for this, you know, for these podcasts.

At the same time, it looks like it's quite a good present to give myself for Christmas. And I would like to start buying some presents for myself and wrapping them up so that on Christmas day I can open presents up. Because otherwise I won't have anything, won't have any presents to unwrap.

And I actually did that the first Christmas I had Andre, I think it was. I wrapped up loads of presents. There was stuff for me and there was stuff for him.

Just like treats, there was cans of coke for me, maybe some cans of lager, some sweets, like a Mars bar and stuff. And maybe some books. And with Andre, I've got him some toys and stuff like that.

But I've not bothered the last couple of years, just haven't put any effort into it. So I think this year I'm going to, and also I think this year, I'm going to put up Christmas decorations. Because I've never done it before, as far as I remember, not here.

I don't, I might have put Christmas decorations up in one place once that I lived, when I was 17. I might have done. But other than that, I've never, you know, it's a long time ago.

What was that, 17? Yeah, it's over, it's over 16 years, isn't it? So I thought that would be nice to do that and get a Christmas tree. And start to, start to try and, I'm trying to get in touch with more gratitude and appreciation of what I do have. So, you know, I've got my own home.

Yeah, it's rented, it's council, but it's a home for life. And it took me a long, long time to get this. And I've had it for four, be five years in April.

Believe it, it's like, wow, five years in, what's it now, September, October, November, December, January, February, March, April. So in seven months time, I'll have been here for five years. And this month, I've had Andre for four years.

He's lived here for four years. It was in September, four years ago, that little baby first moved into my home and took over. And now he's in the bedroom with his girlfriend.

So it's really, the good thing I mentioned, I probably mentioned about the fleas. We had a bit of an infestation of fleas a few weeks ago. They're all gone.

I managed to get rid of all of them. So that's nice. But I couldn't believe the effort it took.

It cost me a few, quite a few pounds as well. So at least I now know what I need to do to get rid of them. It's just, wow, what a kerfuffle to do it all.

But it's nice. It's nice now because, especially with the winter coming up, I know that the fleas aren't necessarily outside, but with the central heating on, they'd be nice and cosy here. I was even considering, like, getting the carpet up and just getting rid of the carpet if the, those thingies didn't work that I used.

But they did. So I'm going to read, this is basically a book of useless information. And I've read out of it before.

It's over 300 pages. And what I do is I mark off the little mark next to the thing that I mentioned, so that I don't mention it again. I'm just going to have a little drink.

Hmm. Yeah, so these, this is quite interesting. There's, there seems to be inventions, so I thought I'd just open up a random page.

James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes while developing his vacuum cleaner. It seemed more interesting if I said it out loud. Oh, look at this.

The first multi-purpose food processor was invented in 1950 by Ken Wood. Hmm. What's this here? Although the American Wright Brothers were the first people to fly a plane, the wealthy British astro-carat Sir George Cayley is described by aviation experts as the father of aeronautics.

It says here that he designed his first aircraft as long ago as 1799. And by the middle of the 19th century, he was building and flying gliders. But wasn't, um, what's his name? Not Van Gogh.

Leonardo. Leonardo DiCaprio. He, he invented, or he had sketches and stuff of a plane.

Didn't he? Pretty much. It reminds me, I don't know if anyone listening to this, I don't know if anyone is listening to this, but if there is anyone listening to this, there was, there's a man called Michael Crawford, and he's very famous in the UK of England. And I'm just going to cross off the things that I've read.

I've readed that one, readed that one, and I readed that one. I quite like Jason, no, Jason is a nice name. I like James Dyson's, you know those heaters that you have in the, in the box, no, that's right, the, in the toilets, the public toilets, lavatories, and the crapper, they, they have these, not everywhere, I mean most public toilets, they, you know, I mean, I think a lot of the reasons why maybe people perhaps don't wash their hands after going to the toilet in public toilets is because they just want to get out of there as quickly as possible.

But there's some of the, I think, train stations seem to have them, where they, maybe supermarkets as well, have the Dyson dryers, and you put your hand in between two, two blowy things, and I quite like it. If I'm honest, I like it, I do. I'd quite like to have that for when I got out of the bath, to be able to just sort of step sideways, or just step into like a, a fun, a funnel or something that was like the Dyson hand dryer, and it just dried my body, and my hair, and my naughty bits.

I think it'd be quite nice. The only thing that I don't enjoy as much about the Dyson hand dryer in the public toilets is seeing the g-force on my hands, and seeing the skin just wrinkling around. It makes me sometimes wonder if I'm aging, but of course I'm clearly not, because I look as young as I did when I was five.

But just that wrinkly, reminds me a little bit of James Bond, when he was in that g-force machine that they test for, you know, astronauts, and it just spins around really quickly, and the baddie sneaked in there, and he like, oh, he had to look for a little bit, because it was going around quite quickly, so I guess he didn't really get a good look of Mr Bond's face, and I suppose, you know, he had to kind of have a picture, so he could make sure it connected with it, and imagine if he'd took the

wrong picture, it had been Sean Connery, but yeah, anyway, he had him turn around really quickly, and he turned to, he touched the knob, and he turned the knob so that it went around at a more substantial speed, and went around, and the g-force was making James Bond's face go like that, very much like my hand, whence it was in between the the Dyson dryers, after having washed my hands, it's almost an incentive to wash my hands, to then be able to dry them in such a futuristic manner, of course, I don't always use soap,

but who does, no, I'm joking, I don't wash my hands, so what's next, oh yeah, so there is a film called Condor Man, Condor Man, and again, Andre's decided to run around, and see what, how many different sounds he can make, it's a little bit like, I forget what they were called, in the 90s, but probably early, middle 90s, there was a really popular group of people that, they did drumming, but they used all kinds of day-to-day items, like a upturned bin, and a crate, and a ceramic elephant, I don't know, whatever they had, and

I can't remember what they were called themselves, but they travelled the world, they were very popular, and it was drumming, and I forget the name of them, but Andre's a bit like that, except he doesn't do drumming, and he doesn't tour the world, he's quite popular, but he tries, it's as if he's making as many different sounds as he can, but he makes them individually, so I guess it doesn't really work as it could do, unless of course I recorded it, because I could record it, and make it into a song, but it's as if

he's walking around the flat, thinking, if I pulled the kitchen cupboard open, and just let it bang, that'd be another wonderful sound, that I can one day use on my album, but maybe, oh look at this, so this is going on about inventions really, our condor man, so what he did is, it was Frank Spencer from Some Mothers Do Avum, which was a really famous documentary in the 70s, and he's on a tv show, it was on a film called Condor Man, and there was a superhero, and he had these wings, that they weren't, it

didn't actually have wings, but it was like a winged suit, and he, he used it to fly, that's pretty much the whole story, and didn't realize it was gonna be as boring as that, but I think, I don't feel that I've really done the film much justice, because it was a good film, or I liked it, and really that, that's all that ever really matters isn't it, not, not just me, but I mean, you know, personally, if you like something, then you like it, it's according to this, the policeman's whistle was invented by Birmingham toolmaker,

by the way, this is British useless information, so, the policeman's whistle was invented by Birmingham toolmaker, Thomas Hudson in 1883, hmm, it came in response to an advert from the Metro, Metropolitan, that's an ice cream isn't it, the Metropolitan Police, who were looking for a more effort, I need to read ahead before I read this stuff, and I do apologize, I'm trying to, okay, right, okay, I'll start again, I need a drink before I, the policeman's whistle was invented by Birmingham toolmaker, Thomas Hudson in 1883, it came in response to an advert from the Metropolitan

Police, who were looking for a more effective, looking for a more effective replacement for the rattle, which was then in use for communication, which was then in use for communication, Hudson's police whistle could be used hands-free, hands-free, so, basically, that was the first hand, the hands-free set that we had, basically, a little, I guess it was a wooden whistle, they probably didn't have metal whistles back then, but Hudson's police whistle could be used hands-free, and the sound carried for over a mile, the first order from the police was 21,000.

So, let's dissect that one, a rattle is what a baby uses, isn't it, you know, and it rattles around or, you know, and that's what the police were walking around with before, and I guess from what they're saying is the reason they wanted to replace it with the whistle is because the rattle wasn't hands-free, so you needed at least one hand to rattle it, and also the rattle couldn't be heard from very far away, imagine being there, and you're a policeman, and you've got some emergency situation, and you're standing there, and you're rattling, you're rattling

your rattle, but no one's coming to your aid, can't get anyone's attention, because people just can't hear it, because it's too far away, you know, the sound just doesn't travel, I wish I had a whistle, maybe that's what it was, maybe one day someone, you know, a policeman, maybe someone tripped over a squirrel, you know, squirrels getting everywhere, and or maybe the squirrel robbed a bank, so the policeman grabbed hold of the squirrel, grabbed his nuts, and put them on the floor, and then grabbed his hands, and tried to hold on to him, but squirrels,

they're very slippery, you know, very hard to wrestle a squirrel, and and maybe this police person was rattling his rattle, and you know, the first thing is, oh, I wish I had both hands to hold this squirrel down, but I have to use one hand for the rattle, but then the rattle wasn't working, I wish it was hands-free, but it doesn't work, and then what it does is, he whistles with his mouth, like, I'm not going to do a whistle now, but and it managed, he managed to get the attention of somebody, and they came

over, and they helped him, they held his rattle, while he did what he needed to do, you know, to read the rights to the squirrel, and you know, waited for the I don't know, the squirrel van to come and get him, or whatever process it was, and perhaps he was in the canteen, not the squirrel, but the police person, I say police person, but it was a policeman back then, 1883, it was only men that did the job, but you know, I don't want to, you know, that's just the way it was in those days,

but hey, they used rattles, so they're, you know, they're hardly sophisticated, were they, and but how do they come around having a rattle?

Did a policeman go out one day, and he was playing with his kid, before going, and his his wife said, Bobby, you need to get to work, and he said, okay, Sandra, or in those days, it was probably husband, you need to get to work, okay, wife, okay, mother, daddy, you need to get to work, okay, mother, I don't know, it, who knows what they said, they might have had nicknames for each other, Willie and Billy, who knows, don't know, so he goes to work, doesn't realize he's got his child rattle in his pocket, and

then he apprehends somebody, and he's struggling with them, and they're thinking, oh, I wish I could get the attention, because he could see his colleague up the road, eating a doughnut, but he couldn't quite get to him, he couldn't, he shouted, he said, oi, Steve, but Steve couldn't hear him, and he was, you know, trying to, basically trying to multitask, and that was complicated, and they thought, oh, I wish I could get his attention, if I only had something that made a bit more noise, a bit of an unusual sound, and the rattle fell out

of his pocket, and he thought, ah, so he picked it up and started rattling, and his colleague looked over, started laughing, and came over and helped him out, and maybe that's how rattles got into the police system.

I'm sure police used to have whistles when I was young, pretty sure they did, well, maybe not, but that's definitely a bit of trivia to remember.

See, that's a bit of trivia, and the next bit is a bit of the most pointless information, I mean, it doesn't even go together, it's sort of talking about Trevor Bayliss, who is the inventor of the clockwork radio, which is an amazing thing, isn't it, to be able to, I think it's one that you wind up, and it's being used in all over the world, places where there's no electricity, such like, but they're not focusing on the clockwork radio, on what a brilliant invention it was, and how it kept people in contact, and being able

to listen to a human voice wherever they were in the world, without needing to kind of pay, or be connected, or have batteries, and if not that, they're not focusing on that.

What they're focusing on, and is that he once performed with the Berlin State Circus, and also worked as an underwater stuntman. I don't know, I don't know what they were thinking with that one.

So I just found another funny one. The first electric toaster was produced by Crompton and Company in 1893. Unfortunately, it could only toast one side of the bread at a time.

Brilliant. Moreover, electric power was not yet widely available, and then often only at night, as households used electricity almost exclusively for lighting. Consequently, the toaster was not a success.

Eventually it was, wasn't it? But the thing is, my toaster broke. That was my bottle there. My toaster broke.

I don't know if it was to do with the the plug that it plugs into, the whatever, but I've lost two toasters this way, where I would turn it on, and it would short circuit the whole flat. So I just got rid of it, and I've not replaced it yet. So if I want toast, I need to do it under the grill, in the oven, and that is, you know, toasting one side at a time.

And I admit that that story isn't going to win any prizes, but it is relevant to the to the story I was talking about, the electric toaster. So it kind of fits in. Let's see what other things.

Yeah, let's have a look. Did you know the fax machine predates the telephone? It was devised and patented by Scottish clockmaker Alexander Bain in 1843. Wow.

That explains why they were so horrible to use. Never liked fax machines. Oh, I didn't know this.

Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, beat rival inventor Alicia Gray to the patent office by just two hours on the 7th of March 1876. So here's one. I should cross these off as I'm reading it, which I never have to mention.

Never have to mention them again, ever, ever, ever, ever. London office worker Mercedes Glitz proved the reliability of the world's first waterproof watch by wearing one on his wrist while he swam the English Channel in 1927. Oh, that's a... It could have just stuck it in the bath.

Surely. Oh, this is brilliant. I love this.

Robert Yeats, or Yates, invented the can opener in 1855, 45 years after British merchant Peter Durand transformed food preservation with his 1810 patenting of the tin can. So they had tin cans for 45 years without a can opener. It says here, until then, people used a hammer and a chisel to open cans.

After we've all been there. Oh, wow, this is another bit. You're never gonna, you'll never read this or hear about this anywhere else.

The inventor of the lava lamp, Craven Walker, also produced traveling light and the first naturist film to go on general release in Britain. That's a kind of... So here's a question. Do you know what the first Morse code message ever was sent? And that was in 1838 by Samuel Morse.

He sent that Morse code reading a patient waiter is no loser. Is it that the first record audio recording was that Mary had a little lamb or something, wasn't it? Now, this is interesting to me. And the first person to set up a mail order business was Price, Price Jones.

I think they might have made a mistake. I think it had been called Price, Price Jones, maybe, of Newtown in Wales, who began selling local Welsh flannels this way during the 1870s. Flannels.

People would choose what they wanted from leaflets he sent out and the goods would then be dispatched by post and train. By 1880, he had more than 100,000 customers. That's a rich per... He, oh yes, a man, he had more than 100,000 customers.

And that's before the internet. A few years before as well. I mean, to have 100,000 customers for any business would be... You'd be rich, wouldn't you? I used to think about doing mail order businesses whence I was a youngster.

I was sort of 16, 17. And I used to buy, I used to buy a magazine. I used to buy various magazines, but I used to buy a particular magazine called Exchange and Mart.

And it was, it was, a large section of it was selling cars, buying and selling cars. But it also had lots of other things to buy and sell, as well as a big business section, business opportunities. And I used to send off for free information.

So I'd, I'd rip out the piece of paper, because quite often it'd be a form, a bit like, you know, when you go online, do you know the internet? Well, there's these things like websites you can go on to, and they can have a contact box, which is a form that you fill in. You can't literally fill it in with your pen. And well, I suppose in some ways you could if you've got that kind of tablet.

And you type in your name, maybe your email, well, definitely your email address and the message, whatever it might be. And you click send, and it sends it to the, the owner of the website. But what it had here, in the exchange in Mart, would be a form that you could fill in.

So you cut it out of the paper, or the magazine, fill in your name, address and stuff like that. And then just send it in the post. And sometimes it was free post, sometimes it was, it wasn't.

But then they would, and it's all these different business opportunities that send information in the post, lots of different packages and, and it's amazing. You know, the things that I used to get through, things that I could sell, catalogs of things that I could sell to other people, like jewelry and things like that. And there was one that I got, which was perfume.

And I got this big perfume box with, there must have been like 40, 40 different little perfume bottles, which I was going to try and sell, you know, the perfume so that they'd like the smell of it. And then I'd order them a, you know, proper bottle size and make profit off of that. I was really into, jewelry was one that I was into.

I did sell a bit of jewelry. And I went to London and bought some jewelry. It was silver, because I couldn't afford to buy any gold.

So I bought some silver jewelry from Hatton Garden, which was the main place for jewelry. And I bought all these, I didn't buy a lot, but I bought, I don't know, maybe 100 pounds worth of jewelry, rings, basically. And I remember traveling back on the train and just walking up to people randomly on the train.

And trying to, trying to sell my jewelry to them, which was a bit, although it's kind of weird, it's a weird thing to do. There was something really kind of exciting about it. Sort of living, living that kind of lifestyle.

Although it was only a train journey, it wasn't really a lifestyle. But just seeing what that could be like. Because I was a bit of a wheeler dealer for a while.

You know, selling things and buying and selling and that kind of stuff. And I think if I'd have stuck at it, I think I'd have done all right, actually. Because I did have an entrepreneurial spirit about me.

But then I stopped. So hey, I think I've still got that. I think I've still got that.

Actually, I don't think so. I know so. I've still got that part of me that is, yeah, still that part of me that wants to be successful, you know, really successful.

And I'm doing well, as far as the amount of people that listen to me every day. That's growing. But you know, I do wonder if I could have been, could have been a millionaire.

It's still time. It's still time. As long as I've got gas.

As long as I've got gas in me, I'll be fine. Did you know this? Frank Hornby, who patented Meccano, was originally going to call it Mechanics Made Easy. Now Hornby, didn't he make the trains? Like the little trains? So here's one.

Isn't it weird? Some of these inventions. So this is, oh, that was what it was under. So this, this bit is about royalty.

I'm going to leave you on this one. Oh, two actually. Apparently Anne Boleyn had six fingers on her left hand.

And William the Conqueror ordered that everyone, everyone should go to bed at eight o'clock. Now that's someone with control issues. I didn't know this.

Queen Victoria was just eight years old when she became queen. Eight years old. I will leave you on this one.

This is quite a nice little story. At the age of 14, Prince William, our Prince William of today, was one of the top 100 fastest swimmers in the country. Wow, isn't that lovely? And that's it.

Well, so thank you very much for listening. I'll speak to you very soon. Remember to be kind to yourself because you deserve to be happy.

Lots of love. Bye.