January 19 in history

On January 19:

1419 – Hundred Years’ War: Rouen surrendered to Henry V of England completing his reconquest of Normandy.

1511 – Mirandola surrendered to the French.

1520  – Sten Sture the Younger, the Regent of Sweden, was mortally wounded at the Battle of Bogesund.

1607 San Agustin Church in Manila, now the oldest church in the Philippines, was officially completed.

1736 James Watt, Scottish inventor, was born (d. 1819).

1764  John Wilkes was expelled from the British House of Commons for seditious libel.

1788  Second group of ships of the First Fleet arrived at Botany Bay.

1795  Batavian Republic was proclaimed in the Netherlands. End of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands.

   

1806 – The United Kingdom occupied the Cape of Good Hope.

1807  Robert E. Lee, American Confederate general, was born  (d. 1870).

1809 Edgar Allan Poe, American writer and poet, was born (d. 1849).

1817 An army of 5,423 soldiers, led by General José de San Martín, crossed the Andes from Argentina to liberate Chile and then Peru.

1829 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s Faust Part 1 premiered.

1839  Paul Cézanne, French painter, was born (d. 1906).

1839 The British East India Company captured Aden.

  

 

 

 1840 Captain Charles Wilkes circumnavigated Antarctica, claiming what became known as Wilkes Land for the United States.

1845 Hone Heke cut down the British flag pole for the third time.

1848 Matthew Webb, English swimmer/diver  first man to swim English Channel without artifical aids, was born (d. 1883).

 

1853 – Giuseppe Verdi‘s opera Il Trovatore premiered in Rome.

1883  The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires, built by Thomas Edison, began service at Roselle, New Jersey.

1893 Henrik Ibsen‘s play The Master Builder premiered in Berlin.

1899 – Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was formed.

1915  Georges Claude patented the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.

1915  German zeppelins bombed the cities of Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn killing more than 20, in the first major aerial bombardment of a civilian target.

1917 German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann sent the Zimmermann Telegram to Mexico, proposing a German-Mexican alliance against the United States.

1917 – Silvertown explosion: 73 killed and 400 injured in an explosion in a munitions plant in London.

1918 Finnish Civil War: The first serious battles between the Red Guards and the White Guard.

1923 Jean Stapleton, American actress, was born.

1935 Coopers Inc.  sold the world’s first briefs.

1935  Johnny O’Keefe, Australian singer, was born (d. 1978).

1937 Howard Hughes set a new air record by flying from Los Angeles, California to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes, 25 seconds.

1939 Phil Everly, American musician, was born.

1942  Michael Crawford, British singer and actor, was born.

1943 Janis Joplin, American singer, was born (d. 1970).

1943  Princess Margriet of the Netherlands, was born.

1945  Soviet forces liberated the Łódź ghetto. Out more than 200,000 inhabitants in 1940, less than 900 had survived the Nazi occupation.

1946  Dolly Parton, American singer and actress, was born.

1946 General Douglas MacArthur established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo to try Japanese war criminals.

1947 Rod Evans, British musician (Deep Purple), was born.

1951  Dewey Bunnell, American singer and songwriter (America), was born.

1953 68% of all television sets in the United States were tuned in to I Love Lucy to watch Lucy give birth to Desi Arnaz, Jr., American actor.

1966 Indira Gandhi was elected Prime Minister of India.

1972 – Princess Kalina of Bulgaria, was born.

1977 – Snow fell in Miami, Florida for the only time time in the history of the city.

1978  The last Volkswagen Beetle made in Germany left VW’s plant in Emden.

1981 United States and Iranian officials signed an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity.

1983  Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie was arrested in Bolivia.

1983 – The Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple Inc. to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, was announced.

1996  The barge North Cape oil spill occurred as an engine fire forced the tugboat Scandia ashore on Moonstone Beach in South Kingstown, Rhode Island.

 Tug Scandia and tank barge North Cape

1997 Yasser Arafat returned to Hebron after more than 30 years and joined celebrations over the handover of the last Israeli-controlled West Bank city.

2006 – The New Horizons probe was launched by NASA on the first mission to Pluto.

2007– Armenian Journalist Hrant Dink was assassinated in front of his newspaper’s office by 17 year old Turkish ultranationalist Ogün Samast.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Inchworm

Danny Kaye would have been 99 today.

He was one of my first loves – in an entirely innocent and I didn’t want to miss his show on TV kind of way.

Word of the day

Hangry – feeling of frustration and/or irritability resulting from lack of food.

Hat Tip: Dim Post.

Did you see the one about . . .

Eat up those carrots - Michael Edwards at Molecular Matters (via Sci Blogs) – on the beauty benefits of caretenoids.

Wednesday whimsy Larvatus Prodeo has found the Cake Wreck Blog.

Judges rule on on landmark case of Sod’s Law vs Parkinson’s Law – News Biscuit reports from the court.

Politics is a poor process for resolving issues – Eye to the Long Run show how the market can be bettter than politics.

The crash from an Austrian perspective – Anti Dismal has six good points.

Tall toilet tales – Around the World  across the spectrum from low hygiene loos to high tech ones.

Gosh – look at the price of fresh veg

Vegetables were the key contributer to the fall in food prices last month:

Food prices fell 0.8 percent in the December 2010 month, Statistics New Zealand said today. This follows a 0.6 percent decrease in November 2010. Seasonal falls in vegetable prices were the key contributor to lower food prices in November and December 2010.

Vegetable prices fell 7.9 percent in December with lower prices for tomato, lettuce, capsicum, cabbage, and broccoli. This decrease follows a 9.9 percent fall in November. “Prices for green vegetables were affected by unseasonal weather in September and October, and prices in November and December 2010 were still well above usual levels,” Statistics New Zealand prices manager Chris Pike said.

Wonder if Labour still thinks its a good idea to remove GST from fresh fruit and vegetables when once more we see that weather and seasons have a far greater impact on price?

.

Recipe to make Adam Smith weep

Take a  house once lived in by one of Scotland’s great thinkers, Adam Smith.

Set aside to deteriorate.

Throw in a rescue plan and the money to carry it out.

Beat with assorted regulations and bureaucracies.

Leave to stew.

The whole story is in The Scotsman, but it couldn’t happen here, could it?

Hat Tip: Anti-Dismal

Logical consequences work – where else could they be employed?

A positive parenting course advised us to use natural consequences where possible.

That means do nothing and let the child face the consequences of his/her wrong doing.

If however, the natural consequences were either too pleasurable, too dangerous, too expensive or had a negative impact on someone else or their property, the parent should intervene and impose a logical consequence.

An example given was the natural consequence for the bike left in the driveway when the child had been told to put it away is that it gets run over. That’s expensive so the logical consequence is for the parent to put it away where the child couldn’t get it for a specified length of time.

I saw a policeman use logical consequences to great effect when he noticed a boy riding a bike without wearing a helmet. The cop called the boy over, asked if there was a good reason he wasn’t wearing and helmet when it was illegal to bike without one. The boy said no. The cop let the air out of  his tyres.

Judith Collins has applied logical consequences to boy racers with the law enabling authorities to crush their cars.

She was criticised for introducing the legislation but it’s worked:

Government measures to stop boy-racers from cruising neighbourhoods and doing burnouts brought an 18 per cent drop in street-racing offences last year compared with the year before. . .

. . . Police report not only a fall in the number of boy-racer offences, but boy-racers have been congregating on the streets far less than they did a year ago.

The number of calls to police about boy-racers peaked at 1023 for February last year, but has since nearly halved to 519 in October.

Logical consequences are leading to behaviour changes with boy racrers just as they do with most children.

Where else could  they be employed to good effect to counter anti-social behaviour?

January 18 in history

On January 18:

532 – Nika riots in Constantinople failed.

1126 – Emperor Huizong abdicated the Chinese throne in favour of his son Emperor Qinzong.

1486 – King Henry VII of England married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV.

1520 – King Christian II of Denmark and Norway defeated the Swedes at Lake Åsunden.

1535  Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro founded Lima, the capital of Peru.

1591 King Naresuan of Siam killed Crown Prince Minchit Sra of Burma in single combat,  this date is now observed marked as Royal Thai Armed Forces day.

1670  Henry Morgan captured Panama.

1778 James Cook was the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he named the “Sandwich Islands“.

1779 Peter Mark Roget, British lexicographer, was born  (d. 1869).

1788 The first elements of the First Fleet carrying 736 convicts from England to Australa arrived at Botany Bay.

The Charlotte at Portsmouth before departure in May 1787

1813 Joseph Glidden, American farmer who patented barbed wire, was born (d. 1906).

1849  Sir Edmund Barton, 1st Prime Minister of Australia, was born (d. 1920).

1854 Thomas Watson, American telephone pioneer, was born (d. 1934).

1871 – Wilhelm I of Germany was proclaimed the first German Emperor in the ‘Hall of Mirrors’ of the Palace of Versailles.

1882 A. A. Milne, English author, was born (d. 1956).

1884 Dr. William Price attempted to cremate the body of his infant son, Jesus Christ Price, setting a legal precedent for cremation in the United Kingdom.

1886 Modern field hockey was born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England.

1889 Thomas Sopwith, British aviation pioneer, was born  (d. 1989).

1892  Oliver Hardy, American comedian and actor, was born (d. 1957).

1896 The X-ray machine was exhibited for the first time.

1903  President Theodore Roosevelt sent a radio message to King Edward VII: the first transatlantic radio transmission originating in the United States.

1904 Cary Grant, English actor, was born (d. 1986).

1911 Eugene B. Ely landed on the deck of the USS Pennsylvania stationed in San Francisco harbor, the first time an aircraft landed on a ship.

1913  Danny Kaye, American actor, was born (d. 1987).

1916  A 611 gram chondrite type meteorite struck a house near the village of Baxter in Stone County, Missouri.

1919  The Paris Peace Conference opened in Versailles.

“The Big Four” during the Paris Peace Conference (from left to right, David Lloyd George, Vittorio Orlando, Georges Clemenceau, Woodrow Wilson)

1919  Ignacy Jan Paderewski became Prime Minister of the newly independent Poland.

1919 Bentley Motors Limited was founded.

1933 Ray Dolby, American inventor (Dolby noise reduction system), was born .

Dolby (left)  inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

1943  Warsaw Ghetto Uprising: The first uprising of Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.

A group of SS men on the street of Warsaw Ghetto during the uprising

1944 Paul Keating, twenty-fourth Prime Minister of Australia, was born.

1944 The Metropolitan Opera House in New York City hosted a jazz concert for the first time. The performers were Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Artie Shaw, Roy Eldridge and Jack Teagarden.

1944 – Soviet forces liberate Leningrad, effectively ending a three year Nazi siege, known as the Siege of Leningrad.

Diorama of the Siege of Leningrad, in the Museum of the Great Patriotic War, in Moscow

1945 Liberation of the Budapest ghetto by the Red Army.

1954  Tom Bailey, English musician (Thompson Twins), was born.

1955  Battle of Yijiangshan.

1958 – Willie O’Ree, the first African Canadian National Hockey League player, made his NHL debut.

1969  United Airlines Flight 266 crashed into Santa Monica Bay resulting in the loss of all 32 passengers and six crew members.

1974 A Disengagement of Forces agreement was signed between the Israei and Egyptian governments, ending conflict on the Egyptian front of the Yom Kippur War.

1977  Scientists identified a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires’ disease.

1977 – Australia’s worst rail disaster at Granville, Sydney killed 83.

1978  The European Court of Human Rights found the United Kingdom government guilty of mistreating prisoners in Northern Ireland, but not guilty of torture.

1980 Upper Hutt’s Jon Stevens made it back-to-back No.1 singles when ‘Montego Bay’ bumped ‘Jezebel’ from the top of the New Zealand charts.

1994 The Cando event, a possible bolide impact in Cando, Spain. Witnesses claimed to have seen a fireball in the sky lasting for almost one minute.

1997  Boerge Ousland of Norway becomes the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unaided.

1998 Lewinsky scandal: Matt Drudge broke the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair story on his website The Drudge Report.

2000 The Tagish Lake meteorite hit the Earth.

A 159 gram fragment of the Tagish Lake meteorite

2002 Sierra Leone Civil War declared over.

2003 A bushfire killed 4 people and destroyed more than 500 homes in Canberra.

2005 The Airbus A380,, the world’s largest commercial jet, was unveiled at a ceremony in Toulouse.

2007 The strongest storm in the United Kingdom in 17 years killed 14 people, Germany’s worst storm since 1999 with 13 deaths. Hurricane Kyrill, caused at least 44 deaths across 20 countries in Western Europe. Other losses included the Container Ship MSC Napoli destroyed by the storm off the coast of Devon.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Edippol – a mild oath.

Cunning plan could save farms and camping grounds

A new pressure group Save the Camping Grounds is hoping to enlist the support of Save the Farms to save both.

SCG spokesperson Roland Canvas said the suggestion that Department of Conservation camping grounds be handed over to private companies was an outrage.

“A private company will want to make a profit which is completely unfair to those of us who’ve been enjoying camping sites for as little as $6 a night,” Mr Canvas said.

“Camping is a New Zealand birth right and the idea that anyone should make money from running camping grounds; providing, maintaining and cleaning facilities; and supervising campers is ridiculous.”

Mr Canvas said concerns over taxpayers subsidising campers’ holidays was a red herring.

“Have you seen all those flash camper vans and caravans spreading like slow moving lice across the land? There’s not many of us old fashioned campers left prepared to spend a night on a stretcher under canvas anymore. We’re an endangered species, looking after them is core business for DoC.  If they can save the kakapo they can look after campers.”

Mr Canvas said no tent would remain unpitched in their attempts to keep the camping grounds as they were.

“We’ve come up with a plan so cunning you could pin a guy rope on it and call it a tent,” he said.

“We’ve approached Save The Farms, the group which wants to prevent the sale of private land to foreigners, and proposed they join our campaign then all the farms they save could be turned into camping grounds.

“They save the farms, we not only save the camping grounds we’ve got, we get more of them. They’ll be happy, we’ll be happy, DoC can chalk up another rare species out of danger and who cares about the deficit when you’re on holiday anyway?” Mr Canvas said.

Voters not parties determine who wins electorates

Most voters don’t want the National Party to stand aside in Epsom and Ohariu to help coalition partners if a Horizon poll conducted for the Sunday Star Times (not online) can be believed.

In Epsom, only 16% think National should stand aside, with 55% saying it shouldn’t. The bulk of Act (53%) want National to stay out of the electorate.

In Dunne’s Ohariu electorate, 48% want National to field a candidate, 16% want it to stand aside and 36% don’t know. Of National’s 2008 voters, 54% oppose the party standing aside for United Future.

This is a sorry reflection on the respondents’ understanding of MMP and recent history.

It’s the voters in the electorate who’ll determine who wins the seat not National.

National fielded candidates in both seats in 2008,  and previous elections, it was the people in those electorates who voted tactically who gave the seats to Rodney Hide and Peter Dunne.

Having Act in this parliament gives National the ability to govern with its support although at times it has turned to its other coalition partner, the Maori Party, to pass legislation Act didn’t favour.

It’s debatable whether there is any advantage to National in having Dunne in parliament.

If around half those who voted for the Green candidate had voted for the Labour one in Ohariu in 2008 Dunne would have lost his seat and United Future would have gone with him. The votes which that party received would have been distributed among the other parties in parliament and National would have got another MP.

From 1999 – 2005 votes for Dunne enabled him to prop up the Labour-led government.

Dunne’s hold on the seat was strongest in 2002 when National was at its weakest, since then his majority has slipped and the electorate could now be regarded as marginal.

Hide had a bad year as party leader last year, although he performed well as a minister. If he’s worked hard in his electorate the people of Epsom might overlook his use of the perks he’d campaigned against and return him to parliament.

As in previous elections they’ll work out what to do themselves regardless of any nods or winks from National.

Someone had to say it

Someone had to say the chances of finidng the remains of the men who were killed in the Pike River mine  are almost impossible and someone has:

The ferocity of the fire in the Pike River mine could make it almost impossible to find any human remains should recovery teams ever make it underground, a forensics expert says.

Phil Glover, a forensic fire investigator with nearly 40 years’ experience in New Zealand and Australia, said the harsh reality was that the intensity of the fire in the confined spaces of the West Coast mine made it unlikely there were any bodies left to recover.

“There wouldn’t be much left of them – you might find small fragments of bone and ash but that’s probably about it,” said Glover. “As hard as it is . . . I would not be putting people in there under any circumstances.”

Glover said if a retrieval team did make it underground, the dark, cramped and volatile conditions they would have to work under would make the task of finding human remains virtually impossible.

“I don’t know how I would feel if it was one of my family down there, but the practical side of me would be saying that this is their last resting place.”

If there is are grounds for criticism of how the recovery has been handled it could be that families might have been given false hope that if a recovery crew could get to where the men were there would be anything left to bring out.

Shortly after the second explosion there was talk about the need to use DNA for identification but the implications of that might not have been clear to everyone.

It’s human to hope even when it seems hopeless. While some of the families accepted the sad reality that they’d not see the men they’d lost again others kept hoping that first rescue and then recovery was possible.

Their anger at the end of the recovery efforts is understandable but for their own sakes they need to take a lead from those who have faced the facts and start looking forward.

January 17 in history

On January 17:

1287– King Alfonso III of Aragon invaded Minorca.

 

1377 Pope Gregory XI moved the Papacy back to Rome from Avignon.

1524 Beginning of Giovanni da Verrazzano‘s voyage to find a passage to China.

1608 Emperor Susenyos of Ethiopia surprised an Oromo army at Ebenat; his army reportedly killed 12,000 Oromo at the cost of 400 men.

1648 England’s Long Parliament passed the Vote of No Addresses, breaking off negotiations with King Charles I and thereby setting the scene for the second phase of the English Civil War.

1773 Captain James Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to sail below the Antarctic Circle.

1820  Anne Brontë, British author, was born  (d. 1849).

1852 The United Kingdom recognised the independence of the Boer colonies of the Transvaal.

1853 The New Zealand Constitution Act (UK) of 1852, which established a system of representative government for New Zealand, was declared operative by Governor Sir George Grey.

1863  David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister, was born  (d. 1945).

1865 Charles Fergusson, Governor-General of New Zealand, was born (d. 1951).

1877  May Gibbs, Australian children’s author, was born.

 A “Banksia Man” abducting Little Ragged Blossom, from Snugglepot and Cuddlepie.

1899 Al Capone, American gangster, was born  (d. 1947) .

 

1899 Nevil Shute, English author, was born (d. 1960).

1904 Anton Chekhov‘s The Cherry Orchard received its premiere performance at the Moscow Art Theatre.

1905  Peggy Gilbert, American jazz saxophonist and bandleader, was born (d. 2007).

1912 Sir Robert Falcon Scott (Scott of the Antarctic) reached the South Pole, one month after Roald Amundsen.

 Scott’s group took this photograph of themselves using string to operate the shutter on 17 January 1912, the day after they discovered Amundsen had reached the pole first.

1917 The United States paid Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands.

  

1927 – Norman Kaye, Australian actor and musician, was born (d. 2007)

1928 Vidal Sassoon, English cosmetologist, was born .

Sassoon (left) with Figaro Claus Niedermaier

1929 Popeye the Sailor Man, a cartoon character created by Elzie Crisler Segar, first appeared in the Thimble Theatre comic strip.

1933  Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan, French-born Pakistani diplomat (UN High Commissioner for Refugees), was born (d. 2003).

1933  Shari Lewis, American ventriloquist, was born(d. 1998).

 Shari’s daughter,Mallory Lewis with Lamb Chop

1941 Dame Gillian Weir, New Zealand organist, was born.

1942 Muhammad Ali, American boxer, was born.

1942 Ita Buttrose, Australian journalist and businesswoman, was born.

1945  Soviet forces capture the almost completely destroyed Polish city of Warsaw.

1945 – The Nazis began the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp as Soviet forces closed in.

1946 The UN Security Council held its first session.

1949 Mick Taylor, British musician (The Rolling Stones), was born.

1949 The Goldbergs, the first sitcom on American television, first aired.

1950 The Great Brinks Robbery – 11 thieves stolel more than $2 million from an armored car Company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts.

1956 Paul Young, English musician, was born.

1961 President Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered a televised farewell address to the nation three days before leaving office, in which he warned against the accumulation of power by the “military-industrial complex“.

1962 Jim Carrey, Canadian actor and comedian, was born.

1964  Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States, was born.

1966 A B-52 bomber collided with a KC-135 Stratotanker over Spain, dropping three 70-kiloton nuclear bombs near the town of Palomares and another one into the sea in the Palomares incident.

 The B28RI nuclear bomb, recovered from 2,850 feet (869 m) of water, on the deck of the USS Petrel.

1973 Ferdinand Marcos became “President for Life” of the Philippines.

1982 “Cold Sunday” in the United States  -temperatures fell to their lowest levels in over 100 years in numerous cities.

 National Weather Service surface weather map from January 17, 1982.

1983 The tallest department store in the world, Hudson’s, flagship store in downtown Detroit closed due to high cost of operating.

1989 Stockton massacre: Patrick Purdy opened fire with an assault rifle at the Cleveland Elementary School playground, killing five children and wounding 29 others and one teacher before taking his own life.

1991  Gulf War: Operation Desert Storm began early in the morning.

1991 – Harald V became King of Norway on the death of his father, Olav V.

1995 The Great Hanshin earthquake: A magnitude 7.3 earthquake near Kobe, Japan, caused extensive property damage and killed 6,434 people.

2002 Mount Nyiragongo erupted in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, displacing an estimated 400,000 people.

2007 The Doomsday Clock was set to five minutes to midnight in response to North Korea nuclear testing.

2008 – British Airways Flight 38 crash landed just short of London Heathrow Airport with no fatalities.

2010 – Rioting began between Muslim and Christian groups in Jos, Nigeria, resulting in at least 200 deaths.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia.

Word of the day

Sanguisugent -blood sucking, blood thirsty.

Hot blogger

Sunday (the Sunday Star Times’ magazine which isn’t  online) doesn’t have a very high opinion of bloggers.

Its Hot List  includes a Hot Blogger and says:

It’s hard work finding a New Zealand blogger who isn’t boring or scary or just so relentlessly right wing we’d rather go baby seel seal shootin’ with Sarah Palin than read another post.

Where would you start in countering all that?

But one slow afternoon we happened upon Ally Mullord. She’s in a brass bad. She’s also in advertising. Her best (and original) blog, at terriblyexciting.blogspot.com, is snappy, and smart and covers things relevant to our interests, such as silly games to play in the car and how mess-up it is that strawberries aren’t technically berries. Last year she was  nominated for a Bloggie, which is a very big deal – an Oscar for bloggers. Mullord’s second-best blog lives on the 3News site and is much more suitable for reading at work. . .

Catherine Woulfe, who award the hot spot to the blog, which might be better known as Today is My Birthday,   also gave honourable mentions to Ben Gracewood at ben.geek.nz, Hussein Moses at theconrner.co.nz and Stephen Stratford for Quote Unquote.

What sort of freedom do we want?

It is a mistake, in my view, to assume that all people want to be free, in the sense of the American pioneers.

I think they much prefer to be comfortable; as the establishment of welfare states almost everywhere as the political summun bonum has shown, the greatest of all freedoms, the one that more people want more than any other, is the freedom from responsibility and consequences. - Theodore Dalrymple.

There are many problems associated with this sort of freedom though.

It leaves people beholden to the state.

It comes at too great an economic cost.

It is also insecure because goverments which give can also take away.

Freedom campers freedom dumpers

What’s one of the last things you do before going to bed and one of the first things you do when you get up?

Where do you do it when you’re travelling in a car or van which doesn’t have an on-board loo and sleeping on a suburban street?

This one was parked about a kilometre from public loos so it’s possible its occupants used them. That can’t be said for the people who set up camp miles from anywhere.

 Hawea people blocked off several wayside stopping places last year and are justifiably angry at the filth they’ve found since they’ve been re-opened.

Freedom campers have been blamed by the Hawea Community Association (HCA) for an “appalling and disgusting” repeat of the sight and smell of excrement, toilet paper, and rubbish at the reserves.

A huge local effort was made to clean up areas at Craigburn, Deep Creek, and by the Lake Hawea lookout in October when boulder blockades stopping access to the site were removed.

HCA president Rachel Brown has called for a culture change in New Zealand tourism in the wake of a sickening return to form by freedom campers.

“It’s the No 1 way of visiting New Zealand – just hire a van and drive around the country and [defecate] anywhere you want,” she said.

As freedom camping  becomes increasingly popular with tourists the problem of freedom dumping will grow.

Councils will soon have the legal right to fine anyone found guilty of what used to be – and maybe still is – on the statute book as casting offensive matter. But first they have to catch them in the act and given the many isolated spots along our lakes, rivers and roads that won’t be easy.

January 16 in history

On January 16:

27 BC  The title Augustus was bestowed upon Gaius Julius Caesar Octavian by the Roman Senate.

 1120 The Council of Nablus was held, establishing the earliest surviving written laws of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem.

 Coat of arms of the Kingdom of Jeruslaem

1362 A storm tide in the North Sea destroyed the German city of Rungholt on the island of Strand.

1412 The Medici family was appointed official banker of the Papacy.

1492 The first grammar of the Spanish language, was presented to Queen Isabella I.

1547  Ivan IV of Russia (Ivan the Terrible) became Tsar of Russia.

 

1556  Philip II became King of Spain.

1581 The English Parliament outlawed Roman Catholicism.

1605 The first edition of El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (Book One of Don Quixote) by Miguel de Cervantes was published in Madrid.

Bronze statues of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, at the Plaza de España in Madrid

1707  The Scottish Parliament ratified the Act of Union, paving the way for the creation of Great Britain.

1853 – Andre Michelin, French industrialist, was born (d. 1931).

1853  Gen Sir Ian Hamilton, British military commander, was born  (d. 1947).

1874  Robert W. Service, Canadian poet, was born (d. 1958).

  

1883 The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, establishing the United States Civil Service, was passed.

1896  Defeat of Cymru Fydd at South Wales Liberal Federation AGM, Newport, Monmouthshire.

1900 The United States Senate accepted the Anglo-German treaty of 1899 in which the United Kingdom renounced its claims to the Samoan islands.

1901 Frank Zamboni, American inventor, was born (d. 1988).

1902 – Eric Liddell, Scottish runner, was born (d. 1945).

1903 William Grover-Williams, English-French racing driver and WWII resistance fighter, was born  (d. 1945).

 William Grover-Williams at the 1929 Monaco Grand Prix

1906  Diana Wynyard, British actress, was born (d. 1964).

1908 – Ethel Merman, American actress and singer, was born (d. 1984).

1909 Ernest Shackleton‘s expedition found the magnetic South Pole.

 Nimrod Expedition South Pole Party (left to right): Wild, Shackleton, Marshall and Adams

1919  The United States ratified the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, authorising Prohibition in the United States one year after ratification.

1941 The War Cabinet approved the formation of the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) to enable the Royal New Zealand Air Force to release more men for service overseas. Within 18 months a Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and Women’s Royal Naval Service had been created.

 1942  Crash of TWA Flight 3, killing all 22 aboard, including film star Carole Lombard.

1944 Jim Stafford, American singer and songwriter, was born.

1948 Dalvanius Prime, New Zealand entertainer, was born (d. 2002).

1952 – King Fuad II of Egypt, was born.

1959 Sade, Nigerian-born singer, was born.

1970  Buckminster Fuller received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects.

1979 The Shah of Iran fled Iran with his family and relocated in Egypt.

1986 First meeting of the Internet Engineering Task Force.

1991  The United States went to war with Iraq, beginning the Gulf War (U.S. Time).

1992 El Salvador officials and rebel leaders signed the Chapultepec Peace Accords in Mexico City ending a 12-year civil war that claimed at least 75,000.

2001 – The First surviving wikipedia edit was made: UuU

2001  Congolese President Laurent-Désiré Kabila was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards.

2001  US President Bill Clinton awarded former President Theodore Roosevelt a posthumous Medal of Honor for his service in the Spanish-American War.

2002 The UN Security Council unanimously established an arms embargo and the freezing of assets of Osama bin Laden, Al-Qaida, and the remaining members of the Taliban.

2003  The Space Shuttle Columbia t00k off for mission STS-107 which would be its final one. Columbia disintegrated 16 days later on re-entry.

2006 Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf was sworn in as Liberia’s new presiden becoming Africa’s first female elected head of state.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Gallimaufry – odds and ends, mottley assortment of things, hodge-podge, jumble; stew made from meat scraps.

We could learn from the Aussies

Sometimes I wish we were a bit more like the Aussies.

They could teach us how to celebrate our national day (that’s if we had one we could agree on) and how to promote our lamb at the same time:

You’ll find more in a similar vein from Sam Kekovich here.