Things to do with 30 spare hours . . .

. . .  and 600 metres of tinfoil:

The art of procrastination has taken on new meaning with students at an Otago flat spending 30 hours tinfoiling a friend’s entire room, just days out from exams. 

Hamish Chang, a third year accounting student, was the unlucky victim of the time-consuming prank, which used 600m of tinfoil and took several days.

Word of the day

Farctate – crammed or stuffed (as distinct from hollow or tubular); the state of being stuffed with food/ having overeaten.

Monday’s quiz

1. What does Labour Day commemorate?

2. Who was the London-born, Petone carpenter credited with what Labour Day commemorates?

3. Who said: “ Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice and need“?

4. Labour Weekend is traditionally when vegetable gardens are planted – did you do that and if so what did you plant?

5. What was your job, how old were you when you started it and can you remember how much it paid?

Change the culture not the law

Let’s start with a confession – I drank more than I should have then drove twice.

Both times was when I was a student, once at 19, the second time at 21.

I don’t know how much I’d drunk but it was probably no more than four glasses of wine. Both times the drinking was with a meal over at least three hours so I may not have been over the legal limit. Everyone else had drunk more and they nominated me as driver but all these years later I remember thinking I’d had too much to drive safely.

Luck was our side, other road users, my passengers and I all got home safely.

I have no idea why we didn’t get a taxi, although drinking and driving wasn’t unusual back then, long before the campaigns and culture change which have made our roads safer – although still not safe enough.

Twice was two times too many. I’ve rarely drunk that much at a time again and never if I’ve been driving.

Living in the country requires a lot of driving and I’m happy be the sober driver for several reasons:  I’d rather eat kilojoules than drink them; I’m quite capable of having fun – and being silly – when I’m sober; and I don’t want to deal with a hangover when I’m expected to function effectively next day.

I sometimes choose not to have any alcohol and if I do drink it would never be more than two glasses of wine, with food over several hours if I’ll be driving.

Because of that I wouldn’t have a problem signing up to the NZ Herald’s Two Drinks Max campaign to never drink more than two standard drinks.

But like Macdoctor I think the paper would be better to campaign to change the culture rather than the law.

A massive campaign to get people to pledge to less alcohol would probably do far more good than dropping the limit. New Zealanders are far too apt to wink at excessive drinking and condone it as laddish behaviour. . .  Most of these people are responsible and would never dream of driving home in that state – but they give legitimacy to it, encouraging less responsible people to drink excessively. These few then go on to create our appalling drink-driving stats. “Two Drinks Max” might go some small way towards mitigating that culture of drunkenness.

Both Macdoctor and Kiwiblog question the case for lowering the legal breath alcohol limit.

I don’t know if they’re right, but there are mixed messages in campaigns which say if you drink and drive you’re a bloody idiot. The clear inference in that is that it’s okay to drink too much if you’re not driving.

There is plenty of evidence in not only the road carnage but in statistics on violence and other alcohol related harm to make the case against drinking to excess, whether or not you’re driving.

We need a culture change rather than a law change if we’re to address the attitude towards problem drinking and a two drinks max might help do that.

SFF looking desperate

Silver Fern Farms had a half-page advertisement in Saturday’s ODT and Southland Times.

It was an open letter to Alliance Group and SFF shareholders promoting a meger of the two companies:

Dear Shareholder

Notwithstanding the impact the recent weather has had on livestock numbers and the potential further exodus from the sheep and beef sector, Silver Fern Farms remains convinced a strategic direction and supporting structure needs to be advanced for our industry.

Our recent $67m commitment to Farm IQ Systems Limited is evidence of our commitment to make a difference by achieving superior market place returns that are transparently linked back inside the farm gate. We believe that a different ownership structure, and consolidation within the industry, is important to capitalise on a strategy that is market focussed.

It is our view that putting our two co-operatives together as a first stage will create scale and financial strength to under-pin such a strategy. If shareholders of the co-operatives have commitment to support that merged business, then further consolidation can follow.

However, a lead needs to be taken. It should not be a lead about self preservation but a lead about creating a “NZ Inc” strategic approach to the marketing of New Zealand red meat and associated products.

We have exhausted direct attempts to achieve such an objective and now look to the shareholders of our two NZ farmer controlled co-operatives to have a direct say and to give direction as to how they would like their industry and co-operative to advance.

This is not a vote, nor a mandate, but an opportunity for you as shareholders to give your view. It is then over to the respective boards to accept or ignore your view.

It was signed by SFF’s directors.

Shareholders are then asked to tick yes or no to the following proposition:

I support the Alliance Group Limited and Silver Fern Farms Limited to:

Appoint an independent facilitator to Chair a joint evaluation committee to: Create a strategic plan for the future of NZ meat products and by products. Agree on the appropriate governance structure to support that strategic plan. Oversee the independent analysis of the financial outcomes of an amalgamation of the two companies Publish a report on these matters to be distributed to shareholders, excluding confidential and commercially sensitive details.

It is only two years since Alliance shareholders turned down an attempt by the Meat Industry Action Group to merge the two co-operatives.

In those two years SFF”s market share has declined and Alliance’s has increased making it even less likely Alliance shareholders would entertain a merger now.

Any chances of shareholders showing any interest in the proposition aren’t helped by the unusual method SFF has chosen to get its message across.

Why use an open letter in newspapers rather than writing directly to shareholders?

Why advertise in newspapers on the Saturday of a long weekend when there’s no mail delivery? Most farmers won’t get the papers until Tuesday and will pay mroe attention to Monday’s and Tuesday’s than the three-day-old one from the weekend.

Why not speak to Alliance directors before writing the open letter?

Why didn’t SFF accompany the advertisements with media releases?

Why wait until after Alliance has finished its road shows for shareholders at which no-one raised the question of a merger?

Why require the form to be returned by November 8 when the company’s annual report isn’t expected out until the middle of the month?

What has SFF to offer Alliance shareholders when SFF hasn’t paid a dividend or pool payout in the last five years and Alliance has paid both every year?

The outlook for the 2010/11 season was for increasing demand and falling supply before the disastrous losses after last month’s snow in Southland and South Otago which means competition for stock will be even greater.

This letter isn’t going to give farmers any reason to choose SFF over other companies with better balance sheets and more confidence in their own future.

It’s designed to show SFF taking the high ground over a strategy for the whole industry but it looks more like a last ditch attempt to ensure its own survival.

This may be only the opening salvo in SFF’s campaign but it looks more like the prelude to surrender than a winning battle plan.

October 25 in history

On October 25:

1147  The Portuguese, under Afonso I, and Crusaders from England and Flanders conquered Lisbon after a four-month siege.

1147  Seljuk Turks annihilated German crusaders under Conrad III at the Battle of Dorylaeum.

1415 The army of Henry V of England defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt.

1616  Dutch sea-captain Dirk Hartog made second recorded landfall by a European on Australian soil, at Dirk Hartog Island off the Western Australian coast.

 

1747  British fleet under Admiral Sir Edward Hawke defeats the French at the second battle of Cape Finisterre.

1760 George III became King of Great Britain.

1813  War of 1812: Canadians and Mohawks defeated the Americans in the Battle of Chateauguay.

1825  Johann Strauss II, Austrian composer, was born (d. 1899).

1828 The St Katharine Docks opened in London.

 

1838 Georges Bizet, French composer, was born (d. 1875).

1854  The Battle of Balaklava during the Crimean War (Charge of the Light Brigade).

1861  The Toronto Stock Exchange was created.

1881 Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter and sculptor, was born (d. 1973).

1888 Richard E. Byrd, American explorer, was born (d. 1957).

1900  The United Kingdom annexed the Transvaal.

1917 Traditionally understood date of the October Revolution, involving the capture of the Winter Palace, Petrograd.

1920  After 74 days on Hunger Strike in Brixton Prison, England, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney died.

1924  The forged Zinoviev Letter was published in the Daily Mail, wrecking the British Labour Party’s hopes of re-election.

1938 The Archbishop of Dubuque, Francis J. L. Beckman, denounced swing music as “a degenerated musical system… turned loose to gnaw away at the moral fibre of young people”, warning that it leads down a “primrose path to hell”.

1941 Helen Reddy, Australian singer was born.

1941 Anne Tyler, American novelist, was born.

1944 Heinrich Himmler ordered a crackdown on the Edelweiss Pirates, a loosely organized youth culture in Nazi Germany that had assisted army deserters and others to hide from the Third Reich.

1944  The USS Tang under Richard O’Kane was sunk by the ship’s own malfunctioning torpedo.

1944  Battle of Leyte Gulf, the largest naval battle in history,  between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the U.S. Third and U.S. Seventh Fleets.

1945 China took over administration of Taiwan following Japan’s surrender to the Allies.

1949 IHC was founded.

1962  Cuban missile crisis: Adlai Stevenson showed photos at the UN proving Soviet missiles were installed in Cuba.

1962   Nelson Mandela  was sentenced to five years in prison.

1971  The Christchurch-Dunedin overnight express, headed by a J^A-class locomotive, ran the last scheduled steam-hauled service on New Zealand Railways (NZR), bringing to an end 108 years of regular steam rail operations in this country.

1977  Digital Equipment Corporation released OpenVMS V1.0.

 

1980  Proceedings on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction concluded.

1983  Operation Urgent Fury: The United States and its Caribbean allies invaded Grenada, six days after Prime Minister Maurice Bishop and several of his supporters were executed in a coup d’état.

1991 Three months after the end of the Ten-Day War, the last soldier of the Yugoslav People’s Army left the Republic of Slovenia.

1995 A commuter train slammed into a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, killing seven students.

1997 Denis Sassou-Nguesso proclaimed himself the President of the Republic of the Congo.

2009 The 25 October 2009 Baghdad bombings killed 155 and wounded at least 721.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Gangrel – lean and awkward; a lanky, loose jointed person; a wandering beggar, vagabond, vagrant.

Sunday’s smiles

Someone asked the other day, ‘What was your favourite ‘fast food’ when you were growing up?

 ’We didn’t have fast food when I was growing up,’ I informed him.  ’All the food was slow.’ 

‘C’mon, seriously.. Where did you eat?’ 

‘It was a place called ‘home,” I explained. ’Mum cooked every day and when Dad got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn’t like what she put on my plate, I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.’
 
By this time, the lad was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn’t tell him the part about how we had to wait until everyone had sat down and we’d said grace before we started to eat. Nor did I say I had to have permission to leave the table.
  
But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I’d figured his system could have handled it:
  
Most parents never wore jeans, set foot on a golf course, travelled out of the country or had a credit card.
  
My parents never drove me to school. I walked a mile there and a mile back from the age of five until I was seven and got a bike for my birthday. It had a bell on the handlebar, a carrier and saddle bags but only one speed -slow.
  
We didn’t have a television in our house until I was 14. It was black and white, and the station went off the air at 10 pm, after playing the national anthem and goodnight kiwi. It came back on the air at about 5pm and there was usually a locally produced news and farm show on, featuring local people….
 
I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn’t know weren’t already using the line.
   
Pizzas were not delivered to our home but milk, bread and meat were.

All newspapers were delivered by children. My brother delivered a newspaper, six days a week and he had to get up a 6 every morning to do it.
  
We had to stand for the Naitonal Anthem before a film started. Film stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the films… There were no movie ratings because all movies were responsibly produced for everyone to enjoy viewing, without profanity or violence or almost anything offensive.
 
Growing up isn’t what it used to be, is it?

How many of these do you remember? 

Headlight dip-switches on the floor of the car.

Trouser leg clips for bicycles without chain guards. 

Soldering irons you heated on a gas burner.

Using hand signals for cars without indicators.

Older Than Dirt Quiz:
 Count all the ones that you remember, not the ones you were told about.
 Ratings at the bottom.
 
 1. Sweet cigarettes
 2. Milk bars with juke boxes 
 3. Home milk delivery in glass bottles 
 4. Party lines on the telephone
 5. Newsreels before the movie 
 6. TV test patterns that came on at night after the last show and were there until TV shows started again in the afternoon – and just one channel to watch.

7.  Peashooters 
 8. 33 rpm records
 9. 45 RPM records
10. Hi-fi’s
11. Metal ice trays with levers
12. Blue flashbulb
13. Cork popguns 
14. Washing machines with wringers 
 
If you remembered 0-3 = You’re still young
If you remembered 3-6 = You are getting older
If you remembered 7-10 = Don’t tell your age
If you remembered 11-14 = You’re positively ancient! 
 
I must be ‘positively ancient’ – I scored 12 and can remember not only 33 & 45 records, we had some 78s  too.

Quote of the week

“I’m not a political blogger and have no intention of getting in to the heated discussions about unions, multi-national big boys, leanings to the left or to the right and who is responsible for swinging dollar and possible tourist industry collapse. There are plenty to follow if you want to read them.

All I know is, I love drawing and creating stuff. I’ve always done it and hope I always will. It is what I trained for at tertiary level and have spent the last 30 years as a freelancer doing. . . The film industry is one area that employs enormous talent in copious quantities when a project of this magnitude comes into town. And as I marched with it last Wednesday, I wondered what we all will do if it comes to an end. After all, there are only so many supermarkets who will employ highly trained artists as shelf stackers isn’t there?”

               From The Misty Mountain of Unemployment by Fifi Colston at Fifi Verses the World

Better time for daylight saving

It’s a month since the clocks went forward for daylight saving but we’re only just getting any benefit from it.

We’re still getting frosts and it’s definitely not summer yet, but most days are more like spring than winter.

The sun’s rising before 6am and it’s still light until after 8pm which gives us more than 14 hours of daylight.

This weekend would be a much better time to start daylight saving than late September when the sun wasn’t rising until around 7am and setting just 12 hours later.

October 24 in history

On October 24:

69  Second Battle of Bedriacum, forces under Antonius Primus, the commander of the Danube armies, loyal to Vespasian, defeated the forces of Emperor Vitellius.

1147  After a siege of 4 months crusader knights led by Afonso Henriques, reconquered Lisbon.

1260  The Cathedral of Chartres was dedicated in the presence of King Louis IX of France.

1260  Saif ad-Din Qutuz, Mamluk sultan of Egypt, was assassinated by Baibars, who seized power for himself.

1360  The Treaty of Brétigny was ratified at Calais, marking the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years’ War.

 

1648  The Peace of Westphalia was signed, marking the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

1795 Partitions of Poland: The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was completely divided among Austria, Prussia, and Russia.

 

1812 Napoleonic Wars: The Battle of Maloyaroslavets.

1857 Sheffield F.C., the world’s first football club, was founded.

1861  The First Transcontinental Telegraph line across the United States was completed, spelling the end for the 18-month-old Pony Express.

 

1882  Dame Sybil Thorndike, British actress, was born (d. 1976).

1892  Goodison Park, the world’s first association football specific stadium was opened.

1901  Annie Edson Taylor became the first person to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

1911 Orville Wright remained in the air 9 minutes and 45 seconds in a Wright Glider at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.

 

1912  First Balkan War: The Battle of Kumanovo concluded with the Serbian victory.

1913 Violent clashes between unionised waterside workers and non-union labour erupted two days after Wellington watersiders held a stopwork meeting in support of a small group of striking shipwrights.

1917 Battle of Caporetto; Italy was defeated by the forces of Austria-Hungary and Germany. (Also called Twelfth Battle of the Isonzo).

1917 The day of the October revolution, The Red Revolution.

1919 South Island explorer Donald Sutherland died.

1926  Harry Houdini‘s last performance.

1929  ”Black Thursday” stock market crash on the New York Stock Exchange.

1930 A bloodless coup d’état in Brazil ousted Washington Luís Pereira de Sousa, the last President of the First Republic. Getúlio Dornelles Vargas was then installed as “provisional president.”

1931  The George Washington Bridge opened to traffic.

1936 Bill Wyman, English musician (The Rolling Stones), was born.

1944  The Japanese aircraft carrier Zuikaku, and the battleship Musashi were sunk in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

1945  Founding of the United Nations.

 

1946 A camera on board the V-2 No. 13 rocket took the first photograph of earth from outer space.

1947  Walt Disney testified to the House Un-American Activities Committee, naming Disney employees he believes to be communists.

1954  Dwight D. Eisenhower pledged United States support to South Vietnam.

1957  The USAF started the X-20 Dyna-Soar programme.

1960  Nedelin catastrophe: An R-16 ballistic missile exploded on the launch pad at the Soviet Union’s Baikonur Cosmodrome space facility, killing over 100.

 

1964 Northern Rhodesia gained independence and became the Republic of Zambia.

1973 Jeff Wilson, New Zealand rugby player and cricketer, was born.

1973 Yom Kippur War ended.

1980 Government of Poland legalised Solidarity trade union.

1986  Nezar Hindawi was sentenced to 45 years in prison, the longest sentence handed down by a British court, for the attempted bombing on an El Al flight at Heathrow. 

1990  Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti revealed to the Italian parliament the existence of Gladio, the Italian “stay-behind” clandestine paramilitary NATO army.

1998  Launch of Deep Space 1 comet/asteroid mission.

2002  Police arrested spree killers John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, ending the Beltway sniper attacks in the area around Washington, DC.

2003  Concorde made its last commercial flight.

2005  Hurricane Wilma made landfall in Florida resulting in 35 direct 26 indirect fatalities and causing $20.6B USD in damage.

2006  Justice Rutherford of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice struck down the “motive clause”, an important part of the Canadian Anti-Terrorism Act.

2008  ”Bloody Friday“: many of the world’s stock exchanges experienced the worst declines in their history, with drops of around 10% in most indices.

 

2009  First International Day of Climate Action, organised with 350.org, a global campaign to address a claimed global warming crisis.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia.

Word of the day

Dastard – a dishonerable or despicable person, villain.

(That is supposed to start with a d not a b).

Rural round up

The subheading on this blog is a rural perspective with a blue tint.

It’s often a lot more blue than rural (though the two aren’t mutually exclusive). I’ve decided to help rebalance that with ocassional posts linking to rural news and views, starting with these:

Sticky milk powder - Marcus Wilson at Sciblogs:

. . .   One of the most enjoyable talks was given by student Timothy Walmsley, concerning a study on the sticking of milk powder in spray dryers. To convert milk into powder form it is sprayed into a dryer; the milk solids remain and fall to the bottom but the water content is removed; the result is something that is easily packaged and transported. . .

Making Milking faster and easier:

DairyNZ has launched a programme for farmers aimed at improving the milk harvesting efficiency on New Zealand dairy farms.

“Milksmart is concerned not only with milking, but with the whole milk harvesting process, from collecting the cows from the paddock and milking, to clean-up and the return of the cows,” says DairyNZ Developer and project leader, Samantha Palmer.

The programme allows a farmer to complete a comprehensive self-assessment of the milk harvesting operation and then compare their performance against other farmers.

“The smallest change in the dairy shed can stack up to important savings in both time and costs over a whole season,” says Samantha.

More on this can be found at Milksmart.

What’s going on at New Zealand’s specialist land based university? – Tony Chaston queries Lincoln’s priorities and future:

High quality agricultural education is  needed to grow the rural economy into the future. In my opinion Lincoln University lost its way over the last 20 years focusing on “buying students” in many areas of education, just to survive, rather than focus on agriculture.

The Rural Recovery Group, set up in after the Canterbury earthquake is finding rural issues are starting to emerge:

Farmers had been downplaying damage, particularly as their counterparts in Southland and the North Island were struggling after recent snowstorms. The Group heard that because of those events, people were holding off on putting claims in. Rural Recovery Group co-ordinator Allan Baird urged them to register damage as soon as possible.

Selwyn District Council Recovery Welfare Manager Diane Chesmar said there had been a small number of Red Cross applications from the Selwyn district and some inquiries about emotional support.

“We understand that in this type of event the bulk of the social needs come three months after the event.”

Zespri lifts forecast payment to growers:

In the latest forecast from kiwifruit marketer ZESPRI, average fruit and service payments for kiwifruit growers are set to increase by $13.7 million or $0.15 per tray on last season.

ZESPRI’s Director of Corporate and Grower Services, Carol Ward, said: “Market returns this season are up on last year and reflect strong consumer demand for ZESPRI Kiwifruit. However we are still facing challenging market conditions as the global economy emerges from the recession, with Japan and East Asia recovering more quickly than Europe and North America.”

2011Nuffield Scholars to investigate Asian markets:

David Campbell is currently Livestock Productivity Manager and Project Leader ‘Special Milks’ for Synlait Farms Limited in Canterbury. . .

Nicola Waugh is another graduate of Massey University. She is currently employed by AgFirst Waikato Ltd as an agricultural consultant. . .

High accolade for high country leader:

John Brakenridge, Chief Executive of The New Zealand Merino Company Limited (NZM) has scooped the coveted ‘outstanding international business leader’ award at the New Zealand International Business Awards. 

Steampunk is coming

Last year’s inaugural steampunk exhibition at Oamaru’s Forrester Gallery was an outstanding success, this year’s promises to be even better.

On Wednesday, a  large crane was involved in preparing for the installation of something big outside:

Inside, the first of the many exhibits were in place, including  Dr Gattling’s Lunar Dismembulator which was photographed by the ODT.

The Victorian League of Imagineers are behind the exhibition, Tomorrow As It Used To Be which opens this morning. They’ll be celebrating with a street party next Saturday from 6.30 to 8pm.

Oamaru is New Zealand’s Steampunk capital but there are enclaves of similar creativity elsewhere.

When we were in Kununura in northern West Australia a couple of months ago we came across this Hardly Davidson.

It’s the work of New Zealand born artist, Al Mason, whom we came across painting a mural.

You can see more examples of his work at the Lovell Gallery.

8/10

8/10 – with some guesses – in the Herald’s weekly news quiz.

Let them pedal and puff

The ink has hardly had time to dry on the papers telling the world that Jim Hopkins is the new deputy mayor of the Waitaki District and already he’s come up with a grand plan to take us forward, backwards and wherever else we might like to drive:

If Wallywood and Auckland don’t want roads, then fine, we’ll have ‘em. What was yours will be ours. They’ll make up for all the ones we haven’t had these many decades past. So any roads you don’t want, just wrap ‘em up, whack a stamp on them and send ‘em to Ethyl, c/o the wop-wops. We’ll look after them, drive on them, start businesses, produce exports and generally have a yabba dabba doo time. While you’re waiting for the train.

‘Cos things are a tad Flintstonial beyond the city limits. In the south, for instance, simple peasant folk have been toiling away for years, handcrafting volts for the national grid, milking sheep, shearing cows and doing their disproportionate bit for the export drive. But do we get flyovers, Ethyl? Like heck! Do we get viaducts, tunnels, six lanes and a median? Has a grateful government said, “Here, have a motorway, on the house”? Absolutely not. The odd passing lane, parsimoniously allocated and that’s it. The big dosh has gone on projects in Auckland and Wellington.

I suspect that if dollars per kilometre per person was calculated the country might find itself more generously roaded than the cities. Although if we throw export earnings into the equation the case for rural roads might be stronger.

But let’s not allow the facts to get in the way of a good column. If people in our northern cities prefer to get on their bikes and into trains, we should leave them to pedal and puff.

 Down here where the population is smaller and more scattered we’ll take all the roads that are going – preferably with tar seal.

October 23 in history

On October 23:

42 BC  Roman Republican civil wars: Second Battle of Philippi – Mark Antony and Octavian decisively defeated Brutus’s army. Brutus committed suicide.

425 Valentinian III became Roman Emperor, at the age of 6.

502 The Synodus Palmaris, called by Gothic king Theodoric the Great, discharged Pope Symmachus of all charges, ending the schism of Antipope Laurentius.

1086 At the Battle of az-Zallaqah, the army of Yusuf ibn Tashfin defeated the forces of Castilian King Alfonso VI.

1157 The Battle of Grathe Heath ended the civil war in Denmark. King Sweyn III was killed and Valdemar I restored the country.

1295 The first treaty forming the Auld Alliance between Scotland and France against England was signed in Paris.

1503  Isabella of Portugal, queen of Spain and empress of Germany (d. 1539)

1641 Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of 1641.

1642  Battle of Edgehill: First major battle of the First English Civil War.

 

1694  British/American colonial forces, led by Sir William Phipps, fail to seize Quebec from the French.

1707 The first Parliament of Great Britain met.

1739 War of Jenkins’ Ear started: British Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, reluctantly declared war on Spain.

1812  Claude François de Malet, a French general, began a conspiracy to overthrow Napoleon Bonaparte, claiming that the Emperor died in Russia and that he was now the commandant of Paris.

 

1844  Robert Bridges, English poet, was born (d. 1930).

1850 The first National Women’s Rights Convention began in Worcester, Massachusetts.

 

1861  U.S. President Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus in Washington, D.C., for all military-related cases.

1864  American Civil War: Battle of Westport – Union forced under General Samuel R. Curtis defeated Confederate troops led by General Sterling Price at Westport, near Kansas City.

1867  72 Senators were summoned by Royal Proclamation to serve as the first members of the Canadian Senate.

1870  Franco-Prussian War: the Siege of Metz concluded with a decisive Prussian victory.

1906 Alberto Santos-Dumont fliew a plane in the first heavier-than-air flight in Europe at Champs de Bagatelle, Paris.

1911  First use of aircraft in war: An Italian pilot took off from Libya to observe Turkish army lines during the Turco-Italian War.

1912  First Balkan War: The Battle of Kumanovo between the Serbian and Ottoman armies began.

1915 Among the fatalities when the transport Marquette sank  in the Aegean Sea were 32 New Zealanders, including ten nurses – making 23 October the deadliest day in the history of this country’s military nursing.

1915  In New York City, 25,000-33,000 women march on Fifth Avenue to advocate their right to vote.

1917  Lenin called for the October Revolution.

1925 Johnny Carson, American television host (d. 2005)

1929 Great Depression: After a steady decline in stock market prices since a peak in September, the New York Stock Exchange began to show signs of panic.

1929 The first North American transcontinental air service began between New York City and Los Angeles, California.

1931 Diana Dors, British actress was bron (d. 1984).

1935 Dutch Schultz, Abe Landau, Otto Berman, and Bernard “Lulu” Rosencrantz were fatally shot at a saloonin Newark, New Jersey in  The Chophouse Massacre.

1940 Pelé, Brazilian footballer, was born.

1941  Field Marshal Georgy Zhukov took command of Red Army operations to prevent the further advance into Russia of German forces and to prevent the Wehrmacht from capturing Moscow.

1942  World War II: Second Battle of El Alamein began.

1942  All 12 passengers and crewmen aboard an American Airlines DC-3 airliner were killed when it is struck by a U.S. Army Air Forces bomber near Palm Springs, California. Amongst the victims was award-winning composer and songwriter Ralph Rainger (“Thanks for the Memory”, “Love in Bloom”, “Blue Hawaii”).

1942   Michael Crichton, American writer, was born (d. 2008).

1942 – Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, was born (d. 2007).

1942   The Battle for Henderson Field began during the Guadalcanal Campaign.

1944  : Battle of Leyte Gulf – The largest naval battle in history begins in the Philippines.

1946  The United Nations General Assembly convened for the first time.

1948 A plane crash on Mt Ruapehu killed 13 people.

1956  Thousands of Hungarians protest against the government and Soviet occupation.

 

1958  The Springhill Mine Bump – An earthquake trapped 174 miners in the No. 2 colliery at Springhill, Nova Scotia, the deepest coal mine in North America at the time.

 

1958  The Smurfs, a fictional race of blue dwarves, appeared for the first time in the story Le flute à six schtroumpfs, a Johan and Peewit adventure by Peyo which was serialized in the weekly comics magazine Spirou.

1972   Operation Linebacker, a US bombing campaign against North Vietnam ended after five months.

1973  A United Nations sanctioned cease-fire officially ended the Yom Kippur War between Israel and Syria.

1983  Lebanon Civil War: The U.S. Marines barracks in Beirut was hit by a truck bomb, killing 241 U.S. Marines. A French army barracks in Lebanon was also hit, killing 58 troops.

1989  The Hungarian Republic was officially declared by president Mátyás Szűrös, replacing the communist Hungarian People’s Republic.

1989  Phillips Disaster in Pasadena, Texas killed 23 and injured 314.

 

1992  Emperor Akihito became the first Emperor of Japan to stand on Chinese soil.

1993  Shankill Road bombing: A Provisional IRA bomb prematurely detonates in the Shankill area of Belfast, killing the bomber and nine civilians.

1998  Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Chairman Yasser Arafat reached a “land for peace” agreement.

 

2001 The Provisional IRA began disarmament after peace talks.

2001  Apple released the iPod.

2002  Moscow Theatre Siege began: Chechen terrorists seized the House of Culture theater in Moscow and took approximately 700 theatre-goers hostage.

2004 A powerful earthquake and its aftershocks hit Niigata prefecture, northern Japan, killing 35 people, injuring 2,200, and leaving 85,000 homeless or evacuated.

 

2007 A powerful cold front in the Bay of Campeche caused the Usumacinta Jackup rig to collide with Kab 101, leading to the death and drowning of 22 people during rescue operations after evacuation of the rig.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Bebother -  bring extreme trouble upon.

“Confusticate and bebother these dwarfs!” he said aloud – The Hobbit.

Let the punishment fit the crime

The problem of freedom campers in vehicles without loos isn’t confined to rural areas.

A friend in Wanaka noticed something smelly on his shoe after he’d been out to pick up his paper early one morning.

When he went out later to check where it came from he found it wasn’t dog pooh but human. He’d seen a van parked outside his property earlier but it was long gone when he realised what the occupants had left behind.

He said on another occasion he’d seen a station wagon parked opposite his home one evening, next morning he saw a young woman wander out of the nieghbouring property, pulling up her trousers.

 Fortunately not everyone gets away with fouling public property:

Three Spanish tourists spent three hours in Te Anau yesterday picking up human waste after being caught by police for defecating on the grass verge at the end of a residential street.

The trio “volunteered” for community work as an alternative to a court appearance, Sergeant Tod Hollebon, of Te Anau, said in a statement yesterday.

Acting on a complaint from a member of the public, police found two women and a man near a rental van, which was not equipped with a toilet.

“There was washing drying on a fence and clearly the group had made themselves at home.”

After initially denying their activities, they admitted they had been using an “outside toilet”. . .

Generations of New Zealanders have been travelling round Europe in vans which aren’t self-contained but Europe doesn’t usually have the vast distances between settlements that we do here.

You might have some understanding for people caught short in the middle of nowhere because the distance between facilities was greater than expected but not for setting up camp at the end of a residential street.

As an alternative to a court appearance, the three tourists volunteered for community service.

They spent three hours “picking up exactly what they and others had deposited” around Te Anau roadside rest areas.

“All parties found this to be a positive outcome,” Sgt Hollebon said.

How good it is to see that police still have the ability to ensure the punishment fits the crime.

8/10

I’d never claim to know anything more than a few words in te reo but I managed 8/10 in the Dominion Post’s te reo quiz.

Although, as Deborah points out it’s more a vocabulary test than a language one.