The Chartered Accountant Dance

Happy birthday Tim Brooke Taylor, 70 today.

Saturday’s smiles

Why isn’t an unripe orange called a green?

If vegetarians eat vegetables, what do humanitarians eat?

If corn oil comes from corn, what does baby oil come from?

If a man is alone in the garden and speaks and there is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong?

Trying to do the green thing but . . . #2

What’s the point of notices in hotel bathrooms asking you to hang your towel up if you’re happy to re-use it if the cleaning staff give you a clean one anyway?

Are they deliberately sabotaging the hotel’s attempts to be green or is the notice just feel-good greenwash?

Party (conference) central

Well, here we are at Party C0nference Central in central Auckland, the city whose new motto is, the decision’s maybe and that’s final.

Candidates College met yesterday morning - and if that’s the face of National’s future, the outlook for the parliamentary wing of the party is bright.

Pre-conference entertainment last night was a debate with the moot that women MPs deserve more.

The affirmative team, Nikki Kaye, Denise  L’Estrange Corbet and Amy Adams argued that women MPs deserve more and that men MPs already had more than enough.

The negative team, Maurice Williamson, Robbie Rakete and Todd McLay argued that women already had too much.

The judge, David Farrar, had been bribed with champagne and chocolate and declared the women’s team the winners.

He declared Maurice best speaker. With lines like, why is there only one Monopolies Commission? he deserved it.

5/10

Not paying attention this week – only 5/10 in the NZ Herald news quiz.

July 17 in history

On July 17

180 Twelve inhabitants of Scillium in North Africa  were executed for being Christians. This was the earliest record of Christianity in that part of the world.

1203 The Fourth Crusade captured Constantinople by assault. The Byzantine emperor Alexius III Angelus fled into exile.

1402  Zhu Di, better known by his era name as the Yongle Emperor, assumed the throne over the Ming Dynasty of China.

1453  Hundred Years’ War:  Battle of Castillon: The French under Jean Bureau defeated the English under the Earl of Shrewsbury, who was killed in the battle in Gascony.

1586 A meeting took place at Lüneburg between several Protestant powers to discuss the formation of an ‘evangelical’ league of defence, called the ‘Confederatio Militiae Evangelicae’, against the Catholic League.

1674 Isaac Watts, English hymnwriter, was born (d. 1748).

 

1717  King George I  sailed down the River Thames with a barge of 50 musicians, where George Frideric Handel’s Water Music was premiered.

1762  Catherine II became tsar of Russia on the murder of Peter III.

Empress and Autocrat of All the Russias

1771  Bloody Falls Massacre: Chipewyan chief Matonabbee, travelling as the guide to Samuel Hearne on his Arctic overland journey, massacred a group of unsuspecting Inuit.

1791 Members of the French National Guard under the command of General Lafayette opened fire on a crowd of radical Jacobins at the Champ de Mars, Paris, during the French Revolution, killing as many as 50 people.

1794  The sixteen Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne were executed 10 days prior to the end of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror.

1815  Napoleonic Wars: In France, Napoleon surrenders at Rochefort, Charente-Maritime to British forces.

1856  The Great Train Wreck of 1856 in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania killed over 60 people.

1863 The British invasion force led by General Duncan Cameron had its first significant encounter with Waikato Maori at Koheroa, near Mercer.

 1867  Harvard School of Dental Medicine, the first dental school in the US, was established in Boston.

1870 Charles Davidson Dunbar, British military piper, was born (d. 1939).

1889 Erle Stanley Gardner, American lawyer and author (Perry Mason), was born  (d. 1970).

1899 James Cagney, American actor, was born  (d. 1986).

1899  NEC Corporation was organised as the first Japanese joint venture with foreign capital.

1902 Christina Stead, Australian novelist, was born  (d. 1983).

1912 Art Linkletter, Canadian television host, was born  (d. 2010).

1917 Phyllis Diller, American comedienne, was born.

1917  King George V of the United Kingdom issues a Proclamation stating that the male line descendants of the British royal family will bear the surname Windsor.

 “A Good Riddance”. Propaganda cartoon from Punch, Vol. 152, 27 June 1917, commenting on the King having ordered the relinquishing of the German titles held by members of His Majesty’s family.

1918  The RMS Carpathia, the ship that rescued the 705 survivors from the RMS Titanic, was sunk off Ireland by the German SM U-55; 5 lives were lost.

1920 Juan Antonio Samaranch, Spanish chairman of the International Olympic Committee, was born (d. 2010).

1920 Gordon Gould, inventor of the laser , was born (d. 2005).

1933 After successfully crossing the Atlantic Ocean, the Lithuanian research aircraft Lituanica crashed in Europe.

 

1935 Donald Sutherland, Canadian actor, was born.

 

1936 Spanish Civil War: An Armed Forces rebellion against the recently-elected leftist Popular Front government of Spain started the civil war.

1938  Douglas Corrigan took off from Brooklyn to fly the “wrong way” to Ireland and becames known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan.

 

1939 Paddy, a ginger and brown Airedale terrier, which achieved national celebrity status due to his exploits on the Wellington waterfront (and beyond)., died.

 1939  Spencer Davis, British singer and guitarist (Spencer Davis Group), was born.

1940  Tim Brooke-Taylor, English comedian, was born.

1942  World War II: The Battle of Stalingrad started.

1944 Port Chicago disaster: Two ships laden with ammunition for the war exploded in Port Chicago, California, killing 320.

1944  World War II: Napalm incendiary bombs were dropped for the first time by American P-38 pilots on a fuel depot at Coutances, near St. Lô, France.

1945 World War II: Potsdam Conference – U.S. President Harry Truman, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the three main Allied leaders, began their final summit of the war.

 

1947 Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, was born.

1948  The South Korean constitution was proclaimed.

1954 Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, was born.

1955  Disneyland televised its grand opening in Anaheim, California.

1962  Nuclear weapons testing: The “Small Boy” test shot Little Feller I becomes the last atmospheric test detonation at the Nevada Test Site.

1968   Abdul Rahman Arif was overthrown and the Ba’ath Party installed as the governing power in Iraq with Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr as the new Iraqi President.

1973  King Mohammed Zahir Shah of Afghanistan was deposed by his cousin Mohammed Daoud Khan while in Italy undergoing eye surgery.

1975 Andre Adams, New Zealand Cricketer, was born.

1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project: An American Apollo and a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft dock edwith each other in orbit marking the first such link-up between spacecraft from the two nations.

 

1976  East Timor was annexed, and becomes the 27th province of Indonesia.

1976  The opening of the Summer Olympics in Montreal was marred by 25 African teams boycotting the New Zealand team.

1979  Nicaraguan president General Anastasio Somoza Debayle resigned and fled to Miami.

1981 The opening of the Humber Bridge.

1981  Structural failure led to the collapse of a walkway at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri killing 114 people and injuring more than 200.

 

1989  First flight of the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.

1996  TWA Flight 800: Off the coast of Long Island, New York, a Paris-bound TWA Boeing 747 exploded, killing all 230 on board.

1997  The F.W. Woolworth Company closed after 117 years in business.

1998 Papua New Guinea earthquake: A tsunami triggered by an undersea earthquake destroyed 10 villages in Papua New Guinea killing an estimated 3,183, leaving 2,000 more unaccounted for and thousands more homeless.

 

1998  A diplomatic conference adopted the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, establishing a permanent international court to prosecute individuals for genocide, crime against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression.

1999 The animated television show Spongebob Squarepants made its official series premiere on Nickelodeon.

2002 Apple Inc. premiered iCal at Macworld Expo, this date appears default on Dock.

2007  TAM Airlines (TAM Linhas Aéreas) Flight 3054 crashed on landing during rain in São Paulo with an estimated 199 deaths.

2007 – Trans-Neptunian Object 2007 OR10 is discovered.

2009   Jakarta double bombings at the JW Marriott and Ritz-Carlton Hotels killed 9 people including 4 foreigners.

Sourced from NZ History Online & WIkipedia

I’ll Be Watching You

Happy birthday Stewart Copeland, 58 today.

Dancing Cheek To Cheek

Ginger Rogers would have been 99 today.

I write like . . .

I write like
James Joyce

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

 

 

Hmmm. Ulysses is on my never-read-and-unlikely-to list so I’m not sure that’s what I wanted to find out.

I tried another piece of prose and found out:

 

I write like
Stephenie Meyer

I recognise the name but haven’t read any of her books.

I tried again and found:

 

I write like

 David Foster Wallace

 

Who?

I gave up.

P.S. If you’re more technically able than I am you’ll be able to do something with the code and get a badge for your blog instead of copying and pasting as I did.

Hat Tip: The Fundy Post.

Trying to do the green thing but . . .

 Are buses always the greener option?

With plenty of time, and a Presbyterian reluctance to fork out $60 plus on a taxi, I decided to take the bus from Auckland airport to the city yesterday.

There was just one other passenger on it.

Buses running full will reduce traffic congestion and use less fuel than lots of smaller vehicles, but  smaller buses or cars must be better than running big buses with few passengers.

But it’s difficult to be flexible with buses. They have to have to have timetables and stick to them regardless of whether or not people are using them.

I suppose two of us in a bus that would be doing the journey anyway was better than us taking a taxi each and the bus running empty and it did save me about $50.

Woman as meat

Montreal has banned a billboard showing actress Pamela Anderson in a bikini with her body marked as meat cuts.

The ad for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) says: “All animals have the same parts. Have a heart. Go vegetarian.”

The overt message is clever. But the subliminal message of woman as meat isn”t.

Would it be any better if it was a bloke?

Clayton’s concern

Labour were concerned by jobless figures in one breath yet in the next they don’t want the 90-day trial period extended to all work places.

Any concern about jobless figures is Clayton’s concern if they’re not prepared to support measures which encourage employers to take on new staff and make the workplace better for those already employed.

The 90 day trial period makes it easier for people with questions over their work history to get jobs because it reduces the risk that employers will have to keep someone who doesn’t have the skills or personality for the position.

It also makes work places better for other employees because they don’t have to carry non-performing co-workers or put up with ones who are difficult to work with.

The 90-day trial period has been operating for small businesses long enough to show up any flaws. Opposition parties and unions which made a fuss about its introduction and said they’d publicise any problems with it, have been strangely silent.

That must mean there has been little trouble with it.

The risk that employers will exploit the 90-day clause is small. The recrutiment, initiation and training process is sufficiently time and energy consuming that employers won’t let go of reasonable workers lightly.

The gains for employers, employees and the wider economy from having a happy workforce are more taking that risk. It’s worked well for smaller businesses, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be extended to all businesses.

July 16 in history

On July 16:

622 The beginning of the Islamic calendar.

1054 Three Roman legates fracture relations between Western and Eastern Christian Churches through the act of placing an invalidly-issued Papal Bull of Excommunication on the altar of Hagia Sophia during Saturday afternoon divine liturgy. Historians frequently describe the event as starting the East-West Schism.

 

1194 Saint Clare of Assisi, Italian follower of Francis of Assisi, was born (d. 1253).

 

1212  Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa: Forces of Kings Alfonso VIII of Castile, Sancho VII of Navarre, Pedro II of Aragon and Afonso II of Portugal defeated those of the Berber Muslim leader Almohad, thus marking a significant turning point in the Reconquista and medieval history of Spain.

1377  Coronation of Richard II of England.

1661 The first banknotes in Europe were issued by the Swedish bank Stockholms Banco.

1683 Manchu Qing Dynasty naval forces under traitorous commander Shi Lang defeated the Kingdom of Tungning  in the Battle of Penghu near the Pescadores Islands.

1769  Father Junipero Serra founded California’s first mission, Mission San Diego de Alcalá.

1779 American Revolutionary War: Light infantry of the Continental Army seized a fortified British Army position in a midnight bayonet attack at the Battle of Stony Point.

1782  First performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart‘s opera The Abduction from the Seraglio.

1809  The city of La Paz  declared its independence from the Spanish Crown during the La Paz revolution and formed the Junta Tuitiva, the first independent government in Spanish America, led by Pedro Domingo Murillo.

 

1862 American Civil War: David Farragut was promoted to rear admiral, becoming the first officer in United States Navy to hold an admiral rank.

1872 Roald Amundsen, Norwegian polar explorer, was born (d. 1928).

 

1880 Emily Stowe became the first female physician licensed to practice medicine in Canada.

 

1911 Ginger Rogers, American actress and dancer, was born (d. 1995).

1915  Henry James became a British citizen, to dramatise his commitment to England during the first World War.

1918  Czar Nicholas II, his family, the family doctor, their servants and their pet dog were shot by the Bolsheviks, who had held them captive for 2 months in the basement of a house in Ekaterinberg, Russia.

 

1928 Anita Brookner, English novelist, was born.

1931 Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia signsedthe first constitution of Ethiopia.

1935 The world’s first parking meter was installed in the Oklahoma capital, Oklahoma City.

1941 Joe DiMaggio hit safely for the 56th consecutive game.

1942 Holocaust: Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv): the government of Vichy France orderswsthe mass arrest of 13,152 Jews who were held at the Winter Velodrome in Paris before deportation to Auschwitz.

 

1945 World War II: The leaders of the three Allied nations, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Harry S Truman and leader of the Soviet Union Josef Stalin, met in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany.

1945  Manhattan Project: The Atomic Age began when the United States successfully detonated a plutonium-based test nuclear weapon.

1948 Following token resistance, the city of Nazareth, capitulated to Israeli troops during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War’s Operation Dekel.

1948 – The storming of the cockpit of the Miss Macao passenger seaplane, operated by a subsidiary of the Cathay Pacific Airways, markedthe first aircraft hijacking of a commercial plane.

1951 King Léopold III of Belgium abdicated in favor of his son, Baudouin I of Belgium.

1951  J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye was published by Little, Brown and Company.

1952 Stewart Copeland, American drummer (The Police, was born.

1957  United States Marine major John Glenn flew a F8U Crusader supersonic jet from California to New York in 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds, setting a new transcontinental speed record.

 

1960  USS George Washington (SSBN-598) a modified Skipjack class submarine successfully test fired the first Ballistic missile while submerged.

1965 New Zealand’s 161 Battery, stationed at Bien Hoa air base near Saigon, opened fire on a Viet Cong position in support of the American 173rd Airborne Brigade.

1965 The Mont Blanc Tunnel linking France and Italy opened.

 

1969 Apollo program: Apollo 11, the first manned space mission to land on the Moon was launched from the Kennedy Space Center.

 

1973 Watergate Scandal: Former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield informed the United States Senate that President Richard Nixon had secretly recorded potentially incriminating conversations.

1979 Iraqi President Hasan al-Bakr resigns and was replaced by Saddam Hussein.

1981 Mahathir bin Mohamad became Malaysia’s 4th Prime Minister; his 22 years in office, ending with retirement on 31 October 2003, made him Asia’s longest-serving political leader.

1983 Sikorsky S-61 disaster: A helicopter crashed off the Isles of Scilly, causing 20 fatalities.

1990  Luzon Earthquake struck in Benguet, Pangasinan, Nueva Ecija, La Union, Aurora, Bataan, Zambales and Tarlac, Philippines with an intensity of 7.7.

1994 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 collided with Jupiter.

1999  John F. Kennedy, Jr., piloting a Piper Saratoga aircraft, died in a plane mishap, with his wife Carolyn Bessette Kennedy and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette.

2004  Millennium Park, considered Chicago’s first and most ambitious early 21st century architectural project, was opened to the public by Mayor Richard M. Daley.

2007  2007 Chūetsu offshore earthquake: an earthquake 6.8 in magnitude and aftershock of 6.6  off Japan’s Niigata coast, killed 8 people, with at least 800 injured, and damaged a nuclear power plant.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Silver Threads & Golden Needles

Happy birthday Linda Ronstadt, 64 today.

Wild(e) card for Auckland mayor?

Trans Tasman has heard a whisper that former MP & Wellington mayor Fran Wilde may stand for the Auckland mayoralty.

TT has several ears close to the ground and the whispers it writes about are usually pretty reliable.

On The Sunny Side Of The Street

Librettist and lyricist, Dorothy Fields was born 105 years ago today.

Incentives work – but not in eyes of unions

Nick Smith’s contention that experience rating will improve work place safety may seem optimistic, but I think it’s right.

Businesses will receive discounts and loadings on their ACC workplace levies from 1 April next year to provide stronger incentives to improve workplace safety and to make ACC’s levies fairer, ACC Minister Dr Nick Smith announced today.

“New Zealand’s workplace safety does not compare well internationally with more than one worker killed and another 600 injured each week,” Dr Smith said. “The averaged levy system means businesses with good workplace safety are carrying the cost of others that are less safe. This detracts from the incentives for improving safety. The new system of accident experience rating will reward those businesses that have safer work and return to work practices.

No sane employer would have an unsafe workplace because ACC levies those with high and low accident rates the same but employers with good safety records do resent paying to cover those with bad ones.

Incentives work. If employers and employees know that levies will be lower for safer workplaces and those which help injured staff return to work, and higher for those with bad records, they are likely to do more for accident prevention and rehabilitation.

“The proposal is that employers paying more than $10,000 a year in ACC workplace levies will be subject to a discount or loading of up to 50% based on their claims history. This approach will apply to the approximately 5000 employers who employ more than 30 people and involves approximately 690,000 employees or more than 30% of the workforce.

“Experience rating is more difficult for smaller employers so a simple system of no-claims bonuses and high-claim loadings will apply. The proposal is that if no weekly compensation claim has been lodged in the preceding three years, the employer will receive a 10% no-claim bonus on their ACC levies. Penalties will apply where there has been more than four weekly compensation claims in the last three years. An expected 220,000 small businesses will receive a discount under the proposed policy and approximately 1000 will pay a high-claim loading.

You would think unions and the Labour Party, which are supposed to work for workers’ interests, would be pleased with the proposed changes, but no, such is their jaundiced view of employers they think they’ll lead to accident cover-ups.

Macdoctor points out that this is tosh.

Employers are required to report an injury accident within 24 hours. You’d be really stupid to try and cover one up because health professionals also alert ACC when someone comes to them after an accident.

You’d be even stupider to keep a staff member from seeking medical assistance after an accident and if anyone that stupid is probably not adhering to a lot of other workplace regulations.

But ACC charges and employment regulations shouldn’t be based on the tiny minority of bad employers who ignore them anyway.

They should be clear and simple for the majority of employers who know that a safe and happy workplace is good for employees and business.

The proposed changes will give them even more incentive for ensuring staff have a safe environment and follow safe practices and that anyone who is injured is helped back to work as soon as possible.

Auntie Talking To Her Niece

But is it poetry? is a question often asked of modern poems from those who lament the lack of rhythm and rhyme.

They might also think that prose poem is an oxymoron.

But that’s the offering on this Tuesday’s Poem Auntie Talking to Her Niece by Joan Flemming.

Stop them starting

Smoking used to be socially acceptable almost anywhere.

Forty years ago it was rare for people to ask if others minded if they smoked, even in the homes of non-smokers.

Gradually that changed and people started asking, though at first it was a token gesture in the expectation that no-one would say no.

Then as legal restrictions on smoking in enclosed public places increased it became socially unacceptable elsewhere. Now it’s rare for a smoker to ask if anyone minds if they smoke, they don’t expect to smoke inside.

There’s nothing glamorous about standing outside in all weathers getting your tobacco fix and I’ve wondered why that, combined  with steep increases in prices, hasn’t led to a decrease in people who start smoking. At last it has.

The Action on Smoking and Health (ASH) survey which has been run yearly since 1999, showed 5.6 percent of students aged 14 to 15 (year 10) smoked daily, compared to 15.6 percent when the survey started.

The survey also revealed 64 percent of students had not taken a single puff of tobacco, compared to 31.6 percent in 1999.

An encouraging trend revealed in the survey was the reduction in smoking across different ethnicities, the report’s author Janine Paynter said.

“We’re seeing that some of the inequalities in tobacco use are closing and it is particularly encouraging to see a decent reduction in the daily smoking rate for Pacific girls,” Dr Paynter said.

The easiest place to stop smoking is before you start and it is very unusual for adults to start.

A drop in the number of young people starting is an encouraging sign that smoking may at last be a dying habit.

6/10

6/10 in NZ History Online’s weekly quiz.

Could blame it on yesterday’s long day and late night, but honesty compels me to admit that a shorter day and earlier night wouldn’t have helped.