The Astounding Circus of Dr Tourette

Five days late but worth the wait – this week’s Tuesday’s Poem is The Astounding Circus of Dr Tourette  by Heather Davis.

Among the links to other Tuesday poets in the side bar is Tortellini by Clare Beynon. It isn’t poetry but did make me giggle.

Quote of the week

No crisis should ever be allowed to slip by without calls for greater public expenditure of doubtful worth, and the Gulf oil spill crisis is no exception to this golden rule of bureaucratic opportunism. . .

and

 They want to build coping skills, as I built model cranes with engineering sets when I was a little boy. Another thing they want to build is community resilience. One might have supposed that resilience isn’t the kind of thing that is built. I think it is time a sense of humor, or at least of the ridiculous, was built. . .

Theodore Dalrypmle writing on how the gulf oil crisis spill meets news-speak dictionary in Pajamas Media.

Loser but no winner

Australia may have its first hung parliament in decades after election night results gave neither Labor nor the Liberals a majority.

Julia Gillard refused to concede last night and it’s possible she may be able to cobble together a coalition once preferences are counted. But coming second on election night was a loss for Labor and its very new leader.

However, being ahead by a nose but without a clear majority can’t be counted as a win for Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party either.

One of the criticisms of MMP is that it doesn’t necessarily give a conclusive election night result. But Britain’s election under First Past the Post earlier this year and Australia’s preferential system have both given indecisive results.

August 22 in history

On August 22:

565  St. Columba reported seeing a monster in Loch Ness.

1138 Battle of the Standard between Scotland and England.

 

1485  The Battle of Bosworth Field, the death of Richard III and the end of the House of Plantagenet.

1559 Bartolomé Carranza, Spanish archbishop, was arrested for heresy.

 

1642 Charles I called the English Parliament traitors. The English Civil War began.

 

1654 Jacob Barsimson arrives in New Amsterdam - the first known Jewish immigrant to America.

1770  James Cook‘s expedition landed on the east coast of Australia.

1780 James Cook‘s ship HMS Resolution returned to England after Cook was killed in Hawaii.

 

1791  Beginning of the Haitian Slave Revolution in Saint-Domingue.

1798 French troops landed in Kilcummin harbour, County Mayo to aid Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen’s Irish Rebellion.

1827 José de La Mar becomes President of Peru.

1831  Nat Turner’s slave rebellion commenced leading to the deaths of more than 50 whites and several hundred African Americans who are killed in retaliation for the uprising.

 

1849 The first air raid in history. Austria launched pilotless balloons against the Italian city of Venice.

1851 The first America’s Cup was won by the yacht America.

1862 Claude Debussy, French composer, was born (d. 1918).

 

1864  Twelve nations signed the First Geneva Convention. The Red Cross was formed.

1875 The Treaty of Saint Petersburg between Japan and Russia was ratified, providing for the exchange of Sakhalin for the Kuril Islands.

1893 Dorothy Parker, American writer, was born (d. 1967).

1901 Cadillac Motor Company was founded.

1902  Theodore Roosevelt became the first President of the United States to ride in an automobile.

1909 Julius J. Epstein, American screenwriter, was born (d. 2000).

1915 James Hillier, Co-inventor of the electron microscope, was born (d. 2007).

1922  Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army was shot dead during an Anti-Treaty ambush at Béal na mBláth, County Cork, during the Irish Civil War.

1925 Honor Blackman, English actress, was born.

1926  Gold was discovered in Johannesburg.

1932 The BBC first experimented with television broadcasting.

1934  Bill Woodfull of Australia became the only cricket captain to twice regain The Ashes.

 1934 – Norman Schwarzkopf, U.S. general, was born.

1934 – Sir Donald McIntyre, English bass-baritone, was born.

1935 E. Annie Proulx, American author, was born. 

1939  Valerie Harper, American actress, was born.

1941 World War II: German troops reached Leningrad, leading to the siege of Leningrad.

1942  World War II: Brazil declared war on Germany and Italy.

1944 World War II: Romania wascaptured by the Soviet Union.

1949  Queen Charlotte earthquake: Canada’s largest earthquake since 1700.

1950  Althea Gibson became the first black competitor in international tennis.

1952 The penal colony on Devil’s Island was permanently closed.

1961  Roland Orzabal, British musician (Tears for Fears), was born.

1962 An attempt to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle failed.

196  The NS Savannah, the world’s first nuclear-powered cargo ship, completed its maiden voyage.

1963  Joe Walker in an X-15 test plane reached an altitude of 106 km (66 mi).

 

1968 Pope Paul VI arrived in Bogotá -  the first visit of a pope to Latin America.

1969 The first Young Farmer of the Year contest was won by Gary Frazer.

1972 Rhodesia was expelled by the IOC for its racist policies.

1973 Howie Dorough, American singer (Backstreet Boys), was born.

1978 The Frente Sandinista de Liberacion – FSLN - occupied national palace in Nicaragua.

1989 The first ring of Neptune was discovered.

 

1996  Bill Clinton signed welfare reform into law, representing major shift in US welfare policy

2003  Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore was suspended after refusing to comply with a federal court order to remove a rock inscribed with the Ten Commandments from the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building.

2004   The Scream and Madonna, two paintings by Edvard Munch, were stolen at gunpoint from a museum in Oslo.

2007 – The Storm botnet, a botnet created by the Storm Worm, sent out a record 57 million e-mails in one day.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & WIkipedia

Basie Boogie

Count Basie would have been 106 today.

Word of the day

Wibble – the trembling of the lower lip just shy of crying.

Saturday smiles

Apropos of the Australian election today:

A politician and a couple of her friends were fishing when their boat capsised. Shirl and Sue started to panic because they’d seen sharks in the area.

“No worries, mates,” said the politician and she started to swim towards land to get help.

As she swam, Shirl and Sue spotted the dorsal fins of two great white sharks heading straight toward the politician. Befores they could yell a warning, the politician took hold of their fins and the sharks escorted her safely to shore.

When the politician returned with help, Shirl and Sue asked her how she had managed such an amazing feat. The politician answered, “Professional courtesy.”

Carbon better than stock on marginal hill country

Subsidies encouraged farmers to develop marginal hill country land which would have been better nor cleared for both economic and environmental reasons.

Now there’s an opportunity to plant the land in trees and earn more per hectare from carbon credits than would be possible from sheep and beef.

 Bloomberg interviewed Wairarapa farmer Edwyn Kight who has planted  600 hectares of forest since carbon trading began and plans 800 more, keeping 1,000 hectares for livestock.

Carbon has the “potential to markedly alter the profitability of New Zealand’s hill country,” he said. “That land is not marginally economic to farm for sheep and cattle, it’s totally uneconomic. There’s a real opportunity for land use change here.”

He also counters the suggestion that carbon farming will add to depopulation of rural areas.

“It hasn’t happened because of forestry, it’s happened because of economics,” said Kight, who is a member of Federated Farmers.

For farmers like Kight, whose sheep and cattle are part of the exports Key wants to protect, the trading scheme is a means to stay in business.

“You don’t want it to be a call for the last one around to turn out the lights,” he said. “That’s what it was coming to.”

He’s right, there simply isn’t enough money to be made from running sheep and cattle on marginal hill country. But planting trees will not only be better for erosion control, thanks to the ETS, it will also provide cash flow for farmers.

Milk payout holding up

Fonterra shareholders received a welcome email from the co-operative’s chair Henry van der Heyden yesterday – the forecast milk payout is staying at $6.90 – $7.10.

That is based on the expectation dairy prices will strengthen as the season progresses.

The payout will be confirmed after the board’s meeting on September 23.

Sir Henry also complimented the response by farmers, the company’s service centre and tanker drivers to last weekend’s floods in the Bay of Plenty.

The flooding put 75 farms and 500,000 litres of milk at risk but Fonterra was able to pick up all the milk.

August 21 in history

On August 21:

1192  Minamoto Yoritomo became Seii Tai Shōgun and the de facto ruler of Japan.

 

1680  Pueblo Indians captured Santa Fe from Spanish during the Pueblo Revolt.

1689  The Battle of Dunkeld in Scotland.

1770  James Cook formally claimed eastern Australia for Great Britain, naming it New South Wales.

1772 King Gustav III completed his coup d’état by adopting a new Constitution, ending half a century of parliamentary rule in Sweden and installing himself as an enlightened despot.

1808 Battle of Vimeiro: British and Portuguese forces led by General Arthur Wellesley defeated French force under Major-General Jean-Andoche Junot.

1810  Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, Marshal of France, was elected Crown Prince of Sweden by the Swedish Riksdag of the Estates.

1821  Jarvis Island was discovered by the crew of the ship, Eliza Frances.

1831  Nat Turner led black slaves and free blacks in a rebellion.

1863  Lawrence, Kansas was destroyed by Confederate guerrillas Quantrill’s Raiders in the Lawrence Massacre.

1878  The American Bar Association was founded.

1888  The first successful adding machine in the United States was patented by William Seward Burroughs.

 

1904  William “Count” Basie, American bandleader, was born  (d. 1984).

1911 Mona Lisa was stolen by a Louvre employee.

1918   The Second Battle of the Somme began.

1920 Christopher Robin Milne, inspiration for the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, was born (d. 1996).

 

1930 Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, was born  (d. 2002).

 

1942  Allied forces defeated an attack by Japanese Army soldiers in the Battle of the Tenaru.

1944  Dumbarton Oaks Conference, prelude to the United Nations, began.

1945  Physicist Harry K. Daghlian, Jr. was fatally irradiated during an experiment with the Demon core at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

1952 Glenn Hughes, British bassist and vocalist (Finders Keepers/Trapeze/Deep Purple), was born.

1952  Joe Strummer, British musician and singer (The Clash), was born  (d. 2002).

1958  Auckland became the first city in New Zealand to introduce the ‘Barnes Dance’ street-crossing system, which stopped all traffic and allowed pedestrians to cross intersections in every direction at the same time.

1959  President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed an executive order proclaiming Hawaii the 50th state of the union - now commemorated by Hawaii Admission Day.

1963  Xa Loi Pagoda raids: the Army of the Republic of Vietnam Special Forces vandalised Buddhist pagodas across the country, arresting thousands and leaving an estimated hundreds dead.

1968  Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, crushing the Prague Spring and Nicolae Ceauşescu, leader of Communist Romania, publicly condemned the Soviet maneuver, encouraging the Romanian population to arm itself against possible Soviet reprisals.

 

1968  James Anderson, Jr. posthumously received the first Medal of Honor to be awarded to an African American U.S. Marine.

  

1969 Michael Dennis Rohan, an Australian, sets the Al-Aqsa Mosque on fire.

1971  A bomb exploded in the Liberal Party campaign rally in Plaza Miranda, Manila, with several anti-Marcos political candidates injured.

1976  Operation Paul Bunyan at Panmunjeom, Korea.

1983  Philippine opposition leader Benigno Aquino, Jr. was assassinated at the Manila International Airport.

1986 Carbon dioxide gas erupted from volcanic Lake Nyos in Cameroon, killing up to 1,800 people within a 20-kilometer range.

 

1991  Latvia declared renewal of its full independence after the occupation of Soviet Union.

1991  Coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev collapsed.

 

1993  NASA lost contact with the Mars Observer spacecraft.

2007   Hurricane Dean made its first landfall in Costa Maya, Mexico with winds at 165 mph (266 km/h).

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

1812 Overture

 Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture debuted in Moscow 128 years ago today.

I first heard this during a cocnert in London’s Royal Albert Hall which included this in 1982. IRA bombings were common at the time and when the cannons went off I wasn’t sure if it was part of the performance or an attack.

Word of the day

Locavor – a person who tries to eat only locally grown or produced food

NZ’s Buchenwald hero

It wasn’t until I was compiling today’s history post that I learned a New Zealander was one of the heroes of Buchenwald concentration camp.

Phil Lamason, a Dannervirke farmer, was the senior officer among 168 allied airmen taken to Buchenwald.

Classified as Terrorflieger” (terror flier) they were treated not as Prisoners of War but as criminals and spies.

WIkipedia has the story here and there’s a video interview with him here.

7/10

7/10 in this week’s NZ History Online weekly quiz.

Public revulsion is the answer to alcohol problems

He is only 14 and admits he’s already on the edge of alcoholism”.

That was the opening line on a feature about a young drunk which I wrote for an alcohol awareness week nearly 30 years ago when the purchase age was 20.

The theory behind lowering the age to 18 was that it would reduce the scarcity excitement about drinking and result in a better attitude towards it.

It hasn’t worked and in response to growing public concern it is possible that the law will change again.

Raising the off-licence purchase age for alcohol to 20 while keeping the on-licence age at 18 may do a little to reduce the problem of  people who are younger than 18 getting access to alcohol.

But it won’t solve the real problem because it’s addressing a symptom not the cause.

The immature attitude too many have to alcohol and binge drinking is the real problem and changing that requires a change in culture.

We’re not the only country with an alcohol problem. Theodore Dalrymple writes in The Express:

. . .there is little doubt that public drunkenness in Britain now reduces the quality of life of millions of its citizens. Something that is tolerable in a few becomes intolerable and tiresome as a mass phenomenon. . . There is hardly the centre of a town or city in the country in which scenes of drunken debauchery are not enacted at the weekends, imposing a virtual curfew on those who wish  neither to participate in nor witness them (and this includes drinkers like me). . .

. . . In many European countries the British are now known mainly for the vileness of their drunken  behaviour. They are, in my view justifiably, held in hatred and contempt. . .

People in Britain often describe the night before as having been a really good one, the chief evidence for which is that they drank so much that they can remember nothing about it. But such brutish drunkenness is not a sign of people having enjoyed themselves, it is a sign that they do not know how to enjoy themselves, which is very sad. . .

The column is worth reading in full because it could just as easily have been written about New Zealanders and because Dalrymple has a lesson from history which could help us now.

He makes the point that in the second half of the 19th century drunkenness declined, not because of any action by government but because of public revulsion towards it.

It’s no longer socially acceptable to smoke in enclosed public spaces – and many private ones - nor to drive drunk. There is still a long way to go with both of these but a change in attitude towards both smoking and driving drunk is changing behaviour for the better. It could work for drunkenness and all the problems associated with it too.

Regardless of what changes are made to the purchase age, we won’t have a real improvement until we make it socially unacceptable to binge drink and indulge in other anti-social alcohol-fuelled behaviour.

The law change might address one or two symptoms but  it will take public revulsion to change the attitude and thereby address the cause.

August 20 in history

On August 20:

636  Battle of Yarmouk: Arab forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid took control of Syria and Palestine , marking the first great wave of Muslim conquests and the rapid advance of Islam outside Arabia.

917  Battle of Acheloos: Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria decisively defeated a Byzantine army.

 

1000  The foundation of the Hungarian state by Saint Stephen.

1083  Canonization of the first King of Hungary, Saint Stephen and his son Saint Emeric.

1391 Konrad von Wallenrode became the 24th Hochmeister of the Teutonic Order.

 

1672  Former Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis were murdered by an angry mob in The Hague.

 

1778 Bernardo O’Higgins, South American revolutionary, was born  (d. 1842).

1794  Battle of Fallen Timbers – American troops forced a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi warriors into a disorganised retreat.

1804  Lewis and Clark Expedition: the “Corps of Discovery”, exploring the Louisiana Purchase, suffered its only death when sergeant Charles Floyd died, apparently from acute appendicitis.

 

1858 Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace’s same theory.

1866 President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War over.

1882 Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture debuted in Moscow.

 

1888  Mutineers imprisoned Emin Pasha at Dufile.

 

1900 Japan’s primary school law was amended to provide for four years of mandatory schooling.

1923  Jim Reeves, US country music singer, was born  (d.1964).

1926 Japan’s public broadcasting company, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) was established.

1927 Yootha Joyce, English actress, was born  (d. 1980).

1940 The New Zealand Shipping Company freighter Turakina was sunk by the Orion 260 nautical miles west of Taranaki, following a brief gun battle – the first ever fought in the Tasman Sea. Thirty-six members (some sources say 35) of its largely British crew were killed. Twenty survivors, many of them wounded, were rescued from the sea and taken prisoner. 

1940 In Mexico City exiled Leon Trotsky was fatally wounded with an ice axe by Ramon Mercader.

1941 Dave Brock, British musician and founder of Hawkwind, was born.

1941 Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia and of Yugoslavia (d. 2006).

1944 Rajiv Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, was born (d. 1991).

1944  - 168 captured allied airmen, accused of being “terror fliers”, arrive at Buchenwald concentration camp. The senior officer was Phil Lamason of the RNZAF.

1944 The Battle of Romania began with a major Soviet offensive.

1948 Robert Plant, British Musician (Led Zeppelin), was born.

1955 In Morocco, a force of Berbers  raided two rural settlements and killed 77 French nationals.

1960 Senegal broke from the Mali federation, declaring its independence.

 

1974 Amy Adams, American actress, was born.

Adams at the 81st Academy Awards in February 2009

1975  NASA launched the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.

1977 NASA launched Voyager 2.

1979  The East Coast Main Line rail route between England and Scotland was restored when the Penmanshiel Diversion opens.

1982 Lebanese Civil War: a multinational force landed in Beirut to oversee the PLO’s withdrawal from Lebanon.

1988  ”Black Saturday” of the Yellowstone fire in Yellowstone National Park.

 

1988 – Iran–Iraq War: a cease-fire was agreed after almost eight years of war.

1989 The pleasure boat Marchioness sank on the River Thames following a collision, 51 people were killed.

1989 The O-Bahn in Adelaide, the world’s longest guided busway, opened.

 

1991  August Coup: more than 100,000 people rallied outside the Soviet Union’ss parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev.

1991 Estonia seceded from the Soviet Union.

1993 The Oslo Peace Accords were signed.

1997  Souhane massacre in Algeria; more than 60 people were killed and 15 kidnapped.

1998 The Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Quebec couldn’t legally secede from Canada without the federal government’s approval.

1998 The United States military launched cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

2008 – Spanair Flight 5022, from Madrid to Gran Canaria, skids off the runway and crashes at Barajas Airport. 146 people are killed in the crash, 8 more died afterwards. Only 18 people survived.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Just a little euphorious

Ogden Nash was born 108 years ago today.

A friends grandfather taught me to recite: I eat my peas with honey/I’ve done it all my live/ It makes the peas taste funny/ but it sticks them to my knife.

I thought that it was one of Nash’s witty pieces but if Google is to be believed, it’s attributed to him in error.

There is a website devoted to poems he really did write, I particularly enjoyed No Doctors Today Thanks

They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful, well, today I feel euphorian, . . .

. . .  Kind people, don’t think me purse-proud, don’t set me down as vainglorious,/I’m just a little euphorious.

Word of the day

Prospagnosia – the inability to recognise familiar faces.

Have you noticed . . .

Have you noticed that when signs tell you something’s for your convenience, it almost always isn’t?

9/15

Oh dear – can I blame 9/15 in the Dominion Post political triva quiz on having been away?