Martin Fone's Blog, page 224
June 25, 2019
Valete, Nuntii Latini
I can’t understand Finnish but one programme that the country’s public broadcaster, YLE, puts out that I could (just about) understand is Nuntii Latini, the news in Latin. It was a must listen for those of us who were keen to hear the language come to life but, alas, no more.
Despite broadcasting a five-minute bulletin telling its audience news not ancient history since September 1, 1989 and winning a reprieve when it was first threatened with closure in December 2017, the brain child of Professor Tuomo Pekkanen and lecturer, Virpi Seppala-Pekkanen, has been forced to submit to the barbarians at the gates.
It is a sad day and the Finnish contribution to demonstrating that there is a place for the language in the modern age has finished. It was worth a shot and to all those involved I say, “gratias ago maximas vobis qui nuntios Latinos tot annos tanta sedulitate editis”.
June 24, 2019
The Streets Of London – Part Ninety
Ivybridge Lane, WC2
The building of the Thames Embankment from 1862 following the design of Sir Joseph Bazalgette changed the width and course of the river, leaving a number of streets which once led down to the northern banks of London’s principal river high and dry. One such street to suffer this fate was Ivybridge Lane which, if you walk down the Strand in a westerly direction, is to be found on the left-hand side, between Carting Lane and Adam Street.
These days it leads into Savoy Place and the Embankment Gardens but in the days before the riparian transformation it ran right to the river’s edge and the Ivy Bridge or Pier, from which it derived its name. It was in existence in the 16th century, appearing in the Agas map which showed London in the 1560s. The Lane goes straight down to the river, with a set of steps immediately to its western end. It warranted a mention in John Stow’s A Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, published in 1598. Stow noted that the lane “parted the Liberty of the Duchy of Lancaster and the city of Westminster on the south side” and so was an important demarcation line between the self-regulating liberty and Westminster.
John Strype, an ecclesiastical historian, expanded and updated Stow’s masterpiece in 1720, publishing a two volume Survey of London. In it Strype describes the road that made up Ivybridge Lane as bad and almost impassable. Later Victorian depictions of the lane show it as steep, narrow and overhung by housing. Today it is still narrow, penned in by tall buildings, but the incline has been reduced. It attracts little footfall and is just one of those anonymous streets off the Strand.
Until the development of the underground system one of the quickest ways to move around London was by boat. To feed this demand for a speedy, by Victorian standards, and cheap means of getting from A to B three steamboats, named Ant, Bee and Cricket, chugged up and down the Thames from the Strand to London Bridge, charging the princely sum of a halfpenny a person. More specifically, they started off from the Adelphi Pier down to which Ivybridge Lane ran. It was here at around 3 o’clock on 27th August, 1847 that one of the worst peacetime explosions in the history of London’s West End occurred.
The Cricket was preparing to set off, a head of steam was developing in its boilers and over a hundred passengers crowded on its decks. It soon became apparent, however, that something was amiss. One of the boilers over-pressurised, probably because, to increase efficiency albeit at the expense of safety, the engineer had tied down the safety valves. A noise like a volcano erupting was heard as the boiler exploded.
The scene was one of carnage. “To the horror of beholders”, ran one account published in the newspapers, “fragments of the vessel and human beings were seen scattered in the air in every direction”. The screams of the onlookers were “of the most heart-rending character”.
Thanks to the prompt actions of a group of coal heavers, principally James Dodd, Jeremiah Leary, John Connor and Joseph Taylor, the number of casualties was not as great as it might have been. The death toll has never been established conclusively, not least because the strong tide at the time would have washed many bodies away from the scene. Readers of Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend will know that fishing out bodies from the Thames was a daily and sometimes lucrative occupation. Estimates vary from five to sixty although the consensus seems to be around thirty.
The immediate aftermath of the tragedy was that the steamboat service was discontinued. However, there is no plaque or other form of commemoration to mark the tragedy. Life was cheap in Victorian London.
June 23, 2019
Bender Of The Week (10)
When you have had a few sherbets some things can prove irresistible. Take this case of a 49-year-old man from Pajeczno in Poland.
He was responsible for loading a vintage Soviet T55 tank, the property of the Polish military, on to a transporter lorry but the ramp broke. So, he decided that he would take it for a ride through the streets of the town, much to the consternation of the locals who feared this was the vanguard of a Russian attack. The old Bill were called.
By the time the officers caught up with the miscreant, they found the tank parked on the side of a road and the man, drunk as a skunk, standing beside it. He had his collar felt for driving whilst drunk, for being uninsured, and “for bringing direct danger of catastrophe to land, water and air traffic”. In all, he could face up to ten years in jail.
As for the tank, it would not start again and had to be towed away.
June 22, 2019
Robbery Of The Week (3)
I love an avocado. It is something to do with that rich, creamy, velvety texture and mild flavour. A chicken and avocado sandwich is one of my all-time favourites and, I’m told, there are some health benefits t be gained from eating the fruit.
The classic shape of an avocado is what the botanists call obovate, round and tapering at the base. When held, I suppose, it could look like a grenade, particularly when you are flustered. At least, that is what a couple of unfortunate cashiers at banks in the southern Israeli city of Beersheba thought.
In two separate incidents five days apart, a man walked into a bank holding an avocado, painted black for the occasion. Claiming that it was a grenade, he threatened to blow the bank up unless the cashier handed over what cash was in the drawer of the counter. He got away with around £6,500 but was eventually tracked down by police using data from his mobile phone. Perhaps he should have carried a painted banana instead of a smartphone.
Anyway, there’s another benefit to be had from an avocado. In certain circumstances, it can secure you free board and lodging, albeit for a limited time.
June 21, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (236)?…
Dandiprat
One of the great strengths of the English language is that it is dynamic and constantly evolving, acting like a sponge to absorb influences and words from other cultures and tongues. Even the most ardent logophile would be hard pressed to keep track on every word let alone find the opportunity to use them all. Inevitably, some words fall out of fashion and languish in ill-deserved obscurity. I see it as part of my mission to resurrect some of them and get them in front of a twenty-first century audience.
Take dandiprat. It is defined in Samuel Johnson’s magnificent but unreliable Dictionary of the English Language, published in 1755, as “a little fellow; an urchin: a word used sometimes in fondness, sometimes in contempt”. He even ventures a derivation of the term, from the French dandin. Randle Cotgrave in his bilingual dictionary of 1611, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, defined dandin as “a noddie or a ninnie; a hoydon, sot, lobcocke; one that knows not how to looke, and gapes at everything he knows not.” In defining the French noun nambot, he wrote, “a dwarf, elfe, a dandiprat”. There is some circularity here, but Johnson does seem to have got the meaning of dandiprat right and possibly even the derivation.
But the word may have an earlier provenance, from the world of numismatics. The English economy hit hard times in the late 15th century to such an extent that the treasury was depleted, the church coffers had been empties and the poor workers and serfs were on their uppers. The king at the time, Henry VII, hit on the bright idea of adding a new silver coin to the coinage in circulation to the value of three halfpennies. The antiquarian, William Camden, noted in his Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britain, published in 1605, that “K. Henry the Seuenth stamped a small coin called dandyprats”.
The coin barely lasted his reign but its more lasting legacy is to provide a word for something slight, insignificant and insubstantial. As a word, its hey day was the seventeenth century, appearing in Anthony Brewer’s Lingua or The Combat of the Five Senses for Superiority, from 1607: “the vile dandiprat will overlook the proudest of his acquaintances”; and in the Jacobean tragedy, The Virgin Martyr, written by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger in 1622, a play seen by Samuel Pepys in 1668; “the smug dandiparat smells us out, whatsoever we are doing”.
In 1650, the English physician, John Bulwer, used it in his Anthropometamorphosis; or The Artificial Changeling in a context that is suggestive of something slight and slender; “sometimes with lacings and with swaiths so straight./ for want of space we have a Dandiprat”. William Beloe’s Anecdotes of Literature and Scarce Books, published in 1814, it has the meaning of something with no value or consequence; “beware a rolling ey, which wayerynge thought make that,/ and for such stuffe passe not a Dandy Pratt”.
However, it is clear from a letter written by the Irish novelist, Maria Edgeworth, in April 1795 that Beloe’s usage was that of an antiquarian. Commenting on a book she had recently read, Edgeworth noted, “it is a scarce and very ingenious book; some of the phraseology is so much out of the present fashion, that it would make you smile: such as the synonym for a little man, a Dandiprat”.
Alas, dandiprat has never returned to present fashion but from starting out as the name of a small coin, it had a century in the sun, a useful portmanteau word to describe something small and insignificant. Time for a revival, methinks.
June 20, 2019
Motivated By Curiosity And A Desire For The Truth – Part Thirty Seven
How is a hailstone formed?
Here in Britain we are often accused of being obsessed with the weather. It is not surprising. As well as being the perfect ice-breaker to get a conversation going, we can often get all four seasons in a day. Take a day in early April this year (2019). I woke up to mist, then the sun came out in the late morning almost enticing me to take a stroll, until, suddenly, the skies darkened and we had one of the sharpest hail storms I have known for ages. As I dived for cover and watched pellets of ice bounce on the patio and my verdant lawn turn white before my eyes, I realised I knew very little about this meteorological phenomenon.
The first thing to get straight is that although the end result of a hailstorm is a ball of ice, it is not necessarily a winter phenomenon. They can happen at any time of the year and are particularly frequent in the summer months.
The harbinger of an impending storm is the presence of cumulonimbus clouds in the sky. These are the tall, vertical clouds that seem to lower menacingly in the skyline and the only ones that can produce hail, lightning and tornadoes. When a storm is brewing the top of the cloud flattens to make an anvil like shape, sometimes known as a thunderhead. As the cloud grows, it stores more and more energy until it effectively bursts.
At the base of the cloud is warm air but the temperature is below freezing in the upper reaches. Strong winds carry rain drops from the lower level to the upper, where they freeze, and then they are carried back to the lower level where they begin to thaw and collect more rain droplets. The process is repeated several times until the frozen raindrop is too heavy for the wind to carry it and it falls to the ground as a hailstone.
A new layer of ice is added to the droplet each time it shuttles up and down between the lower and upper levels of the cloud. If you were to dissect a hailstone, I have never tried it myself, you will find it has rings, just like a tree, and you could work out how many times it had been trapped in its celestial lift until it finally broke free.
Snow, on the other hand, can be formed in any rain-bearing cloud when water vapour cools rapidly and turns to ice crystals. There are up to eighty different forms of ice crystal that make up snow but that’s another story.
The enquiring mind, though, is not just content to leave matters at that. Other questions spring to mind; How big do they get, how fast do they travel, and what are the chances of being killed by one?
The accepted way to think about the size of a hailstone is by considering its diameter and relating it to an everyday object. A hailstone with a diameter of around a quarter of an inch is called a pea while a marble is twice the size. A golf ball would describe a stone of around an inch and a half while a grapefruit would be a whopping four inches in diameter. All very imprecise but I’m sure you get the picture.
But these all pale into insignificance when compared with a hailstone with an eight-inch diameter found by Lee Scott, following a storm in Vivian, South Dakota on July 23, 2010 and one with a circumference of 18.75 inches which fell on a roof in Aurora in Nebraska on June 22, 2003. The heaviest hailstone, though, fell in the Gopalgani district of Bangladesh on April 14, 1986, weighing an astonishing one kilogram.
As to speed, there are a couple of rules of thumb which you should bear in mind. The bigger the stones, the faster they are likely to fall and some will travel at a rate of up to 50 metres per second or over 100 mph. On the other hand, the larger the stones, the fewer there are likely to be. The prevailing winds will play an important factor, either slowing their progress or accelerating them down to earth. The shape of the stone will also have an effect, some being more aerodynamic than others.
Hailstorms usually last a few minutes at most but the one that hit Seldon in Kansas on June 3, 1959 deposited a layer of hail some 45 centimetres thick across an area of 140 kilometres.
As to the risk of injury, those cheery people at the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association calculate that 24 people in the United States are hospitalised each year from injuries sustained from hailstones. But, according to the World Meteorological Organisation, the highest death toll from a hailstorm is 248, after hailstones, described as large as “goose eggs and oranges and cricket balls” struck Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh in India on April 30, 1888.
My advice. Next time you see a cumulonimbus, take yourself indoors.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Curious Questions by Martin Fone
June 19, 2019
Book Corner – June 2019 (3)
The Danger Tree – Olivia Manning
Published in 1977 this is the first of the Levant trilogy and the fourth book in which Manning follows the war fortunes of Harriet and Guy Pringle, her fictional incarnations of herself and her hubby, Reggie. The Pringles have arrived in Cairo but are not out of the soup as the Germans are making a steady advance through the North African desert. Their next obvious port of call, Palestine and Syria, is also under threat from the Germans.
In a narrative twist from that we saw in the Balkan Trilogy the narrative entwines the exploits of the Pringles with that of Simon Boulderstone, very much an innocent abroad who seems to wander around in a trance. It is through his eyes that we see the brutal realities of war and the fact that he seems so other-worldly heightens the sense of horror he, and by extension we should, feels about his experiences.
Boulderstone is haunted by what seems an incidental and mildly humorous episode which is described in the first chapter of the book. He hooks up with a party, which includes Harriet, which are having a conducted tour of the pyramids, conducted by the self-proclaimed Egyptologist, Sir Clifford. They drop in at the Hooper’s when a woman bursts into the room, cradling the dead body of a child. He had picked up what we would call an IED which went off, blowing half his face away. The Hoopers are in shock and, bizarrely, try to feed the boy, obviously dead, with soup through the hole in the side of his face. This becomes a standing joke amongst the ex-pats holed up in Cairo.
But it has greater significance and is a leitmotif that Manning returns to throughout the book. In particular, it comes to Simon when out in the desert and warned to be on the lookout for unexploded bombs “like a returning dream”. It also introduces to Angela Hooper who, after the tragedy, leaves her husband and throws herself into the Cairo set with gusto. She will have a more important role as the trilogy develops, I’m sure.
Guy continues to be the insufferable prig that he always was and it is a miracle that Harriet is still with him. He is sidelined in Cairo and sent out to Alexandria. Harriet worries about him as he is nearer to the front but Guy being Guy won’t leave his beloved students and throws himself into his work. Desperate to be liked and gathering hangers-on by the dozen. Guy continues to ignore his wife, treating her just as an extension of himself rather than a person in her own right. Harriet, feels increasingly isolated and fearful for her marriage, particularly when Guy’s luck changes, landing him a top job in Cairo and she sees him in close quarters with girl about town, Edwina Little who was the girlfriend of Simon’s brother.
The sense of impending doom is presaged by the book’s title. The Danger Tree is the mango tree which dominates the skyline outside the Pringle’s Cairo flat. Guy hates it but Harriet loves it. Its roots are poisonous to humans and it is a haunting image of a relationship on the rocks, a feeling of doom and hopelessness emphasised by the protagonists’ reaction to it.
As before, we are in Anthony Powell territory. Many of the old faces from the Balkan Trilogy reappear, perhaps unsurprisingly as Manning describes Cairo as “the clearinghouse of Eastern Europe.” Life settles down to the same routine of drinks and parties, a sense of impermanence heightened by the ebbs and flows of the fortunes of war. First impressions of characters we have met before change as we get to know them and new players thrown into the mix are likely to develop and move the story on as the trilogy continues.
The ending I found a little disappointing, leaving too many loose ends dangling to be, presumably, explored further in The Battle Lost and Won, which I will have to read. A minor quibble, for sure, about what is otherwise an entertaining read.
June 18, 2019
A Measure Of Things – Part Thirteen
I always find that the pages of that wonderful organ, Case Reports in Urology, have the salutary effect of cheering me up. At first blush, an article entitled Superselective Embolisation with Microcoil and Gelfoam for High-Flow Priapism Secondary to Bilateral Cavernous Fistulae: A Case Study, published a couple of months ago, wouldn’t set the juices to flow. But there are some hidden gems inside, not just for practising urologists.
The case study, reported by Sarah Prattley, Timothy Bryant and Rowland Rees of the University Hospital in Southampton, tells of the misfortune that befell an unnamed 35-year-old man when he fell off his moped. Instead of the usual cuts and grazes, the poor man had bruised his perineum, the area between the anus and the genitals. More concerning, though, was that he had developed an erection that just would not go down, as if he had had an overdose of Viagra. Some reports suggest it lasted as long as nine days. The permanent erection was not painful, just causing him “mild discomfort when walking”.
There are two causes of long-lasting erections, low flow priapism, where the blood doesn’t flow away from the penis as it should, and high-flow priapism, where too much blood rushes into the organ and won’t stop. Our friend had the latter and instead of adopting the usual method to deal with an unwanted erection, ice packs, the medics deployed a catheter to block the arteries feeding the erection and then diverted blood away using a gel-like foam and a microfoil. Happily, after a few weeks of soreness, the man’s organ was performing satisfactorily and his erection lasted just long enough to disappoint his wife.
But the takeaway for me from this story is that there is a medical scale for measuring the hardness of an erection. And not just one, but two. The medics reported that the subject of their case study had an erection that was 4 on the Erection Hardness Score (EHS). I had to find out more.
Well, the EHS is one of these scales where you are asked a question and you have to give a number as a response. An example would be on a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you? Psychologists call these things Likert scales. The question germane to the EHS is “how would you rate the harness of your erection?” Respondents use a scale running from 0 to 4, 0 being the penis does not enlarge, 1 being the penis is larger, but not hard, 2 being the penis is hard, but not hard enough for penetration, 3 being the penis is hard enough for penetration, but not completely hard while 4 is the penis is completely hard and fully rigid.
The benefit of the EHS, created in 1998, the po-faced description of the scale states, is that men can use it on their own and report back to their doctor with their findings. But the dog’s bollocks of erection scales, or as we like to call it the gold standard, is the International Index of Erectile Function (IIEF). This is a questionnaire consisting of fifteen sections, requiring the respondent to mark their experience over the last four weeks, a score between 0 and five given to each response. The scores are added up to give a cumulative reading across five categories – erectile function, orgasmic function, sexual desire, intercourse satisfaction, and overall satisfaction. The results will determine what action is taken.
Comparative tests have shown that there is little variance in outcome and diagnosis whether the EHS or IIEF methodology has been used.
Where would we be without a bit of precision in our lives. I will never look at moped riders in the same way after this.
June 17, 2019
Double Your Money – Part Forty Three
William Belknap and the Indian Ring Scandal, 1876
Supplying troops who are on the front-line is a logistical nightmare for even the most well-oiled military machine. Not unsurprisingly, the focus of the army’s supply strategy will be on goods and equipment which are required to keep the troops in prime fighting condition. For those necessities of life which make bearable, a secondary supply chain developed.
Non-military goods and commodities such as tobacco, coffee, and sugar, were often supplied in the United States were provided by sutlers, a word derived from the Dutch zoetelaar, meaning one who does dirty work, a drudge. During the French and Indian War, the Civil War and the military push to secure the western lands of America for the white man, sutlers would follow the troops, often setting up shop close to or on the front line.
Welcome as these shops were, they came at a price to the soldiers. As the only game in town, the sutlers could charge whatever they liked and often prices were considerably higher than would otherwise have been the case. Even a shortage of official coinage didn’t worry them. Soldiers, during the Civil War, could, during the Civil War, use a token known as a sutler token to purchase their goods. After the Civil War was over, sutlers’ establishments diversified and offered their clientele, military or civilian alike, the opportunity to drink, gamble and whore.
The upshot of all this was that licences to trade as a sutler were much sought after. Up until July 1870, the power to grant licences to these lucrative tradeships vested with the Commanding General of the Army, General Sherman at the time, but the then War Secretary, William Belknap, wanted a piece of the action. Belknap successfully lobbied Congress on July 15, 1870 to give him control. He then decreed that forts and other military establishments which had Belknap-appointed sutlers could only buy supplies from them, creating an even more lucrative monopoly.
That year, Belknap’s wife, Carita, persuaded him to award a New York trader, Caleb Marsh, the licence for the trading post at Fort Sill, in what is now Oklahoma but then was in the heart of the Indian Territory. There was a problem, though. John Evans already had a licence for the Fort. In return for keeping his lucrative position, a deal was cooked up whereby Evans agreed to pay Marsh $12,000 a year from the profits. Marsh, in turn, was required to pay half of his share to Belknap’s wife, Carita.
Despite the death of Carita in 1870 from tuberculosis, Marsh continued to make the payments to Belknap, ostensibly to support his child. The payments continued, however, even after the poor girl’s death in 1871 and Belknap’s subsequent remarriage to Carita’s sister, Amanda. It is likely that this sort of arrangement was replicated at other trading posts across the western frontier.
It was not until 1876 that the fraud was rumbled, partly through the efforts of one General Custer who is thought to have been behind some anonymous articles that appeared in the New York Herald, exposing the corruption involved with trading posts and implicating Belknap. The Congress launched an investigation on February 29, 1876 and in his testimony, Custer suggested that the President’s brother, Orvil Grant, was also involved in the corrupt practices.
Belknap resigned on March 2nd but Congress decided that he should be made an example of and he was impeached. The hearing in the Senate in May of that year failed to secure the necessary two-thirds majority and so Belknap was acquitted, perhaps because many Senators thought that they had no authority to prosecute a private citizen, as Belknap now was.
As for Custer, he had so pissed off President Ulysses Grant that he was stripped of his military command. He did manage to get a gig to sort out the Sioux in South Dakota which ended disastrously, for him at least, at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Ironically, it is highly likely that the Sioux’s superior firepower had been supplied by Belknap-controlled trading posts and that the US Army had provided Custer and his men with defective weapons.
Authority to grant trading licences to sutlers was given to fort commanders by the new War Secretary, Alphonso Taft.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
June 16, 2019
Tree Of The Week
One of the (many) oddities about state visits is the custom of exchanging gifts. You can imagine the hours of earnest diplomatic debate before the right gift, conveying the appropriate sentiments and symbolism, is selected. But even then things can go wrong.
News has reached me that the young oak tree that President Macron gave Trump on his visit to Washington last year has died. Coming from Belleau Wood in northern France where two thousand American soldiers died in June 1918, it was planted with all due ceremony, the two leaders deploying golden shovels for the purpose.
The tree, though, was soon uprooted, falling foul of regulations that all living things imported into the USA need to go into quarantine. And there, according to diplomatic sources, it died. Hélas.
You would have thought that with all the planning that allegedly goes into these state visits, someone would have had the wit to put the tree through quarantine before the ceremony. But perhaps there is a deeper symbolism here, reflecting the worsening relationship between the two countries and what can happen to you if you get into the hands of the US authorities.
Who knows?
Later in the week it was announced that Macron would send another one.
