Martin Fone's Blog, page 225
June 15, 2019
Lucky Strike Of The Week
Is there an art to cracking a safe or is it just luck?
One of the attractions of the Heritage Museum in Vermilion in Alberta, Canada, is a safe, dating from 1907, from the town’s Brunswick Hotel. When the hotel was renovated in 1992, the safe was donated to the museum. There was one problem though – no one knew the code to the safe’s combination lock.
The museum had tried various methods to get the safe open, ranging from trying default combinations, bringing in experts and contacting former employees of the hotel, all to no avail. The safe door, which had last opened in 1977, remained resolutely shut, which, I suppose, is what you want with a safe.
Then along came Stephen Mills. He and his family paid a visit to the museum and after hearing the saga of the safe decided to have a go at opening it. Noticing that the combination lock’s numbers ran from 0 to 60, he entered the sequence 20-40-60 and turned the knob. Hey, presto the door sprang open.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a pile of cash inside, just an old pay sheet and a restaurant order pad, including receipts for a mushroom burger (C$0.59) and a packet of fags (C$1.00). But at least the mystery is over and with it, possibly, the museum’s only claim to fame.
I wonder if Stephen bought a lottery ticket when he left the museum.
June 14, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (235)?
Darby and Joan
There are some benefits to growing old. Admittedly, the limbs are not as supple as they once were, there are more aches and pains and the faculties are not as sharp, but it is a pleasure to be able to do what I want at a pace of my choosing. My wife and I are in danger of becoming that archetypal elderly couple, Darby and Joan, spending our final years, decades I trust, in contentment. Where does the phrase come from and who were Darby and Joan, if anyone?
There is a tendency, as we have seen, in etymological researches to seek to identify a phrase with real people, often erroneously. That may be the case here. The starting point is a reference that the eccentric lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, in the Literary Magazine in 1756 to a ballad about Darby and Joan. Johnson may have had in mind an anonymous poem, printed in the weekly journal, the Gentleman’s Magazine, in March 1735, entitled The Joys of Love never forgot. It contains these lines; “Old Darby, with Joan by his side,/ You’ve often regarded with wonder:/ He’s dropsical, she is sore-eyed,/ Yet they’re never happy asunder.”
The devoted couple are thought to have been John Darby and his wife, Joan, a printer who lived and worked in Bartholomew Close in London. The poem is ascribed to Henry Woodfall who worked for him. However, in The Literary Janus, edited by J Wilson and published in the early part of the nineteenth century, there is a similar poem by the title of The Happy Couple. The only difference in the text is you’ve is replaced by I’ve in the second line and in the fourth line reads “and yet they are never asunder.” The couple are supposed to be long-standing residents of a Yorkshire village, three miles from Tadcaster, called Healaugh, and the poem is attributed to Lord Wharton, who was Lord of the Manor of the village.
It is difficult to know what to make of this. A reason to doubt the Woodfall story is that Darby the printer is thought to have died in 1704. Is it likely that he would have waited thirty years to laud his master and his devoted wife? The Yorkshire Darby and Joan seemed to have lived an idyllic life, Darby smoking his pipe and quaffing his ale while Joan “in all the garrulity of age, relating tales of days long passed away” and going to church on Sundays. Are these the prototypical happy, contented couple? I’m not sure it matters.
What is clear is that by the beginning of the nineteenth century the phrase was well established. The Times noted in its edition of May 26, 1801 that a new dance by the title of Darby and Joan was being “received with loud and general plaudits” and in June there was a ballet of the same name doing the rounds. On February 1, 1802 the Thunderer announced that what it termed as a “comic divertissement” was being performed at London’s Royalty Theatre by the name of Darby and Joan; or The Dwarf.
By the middle of the century Darby and Joan was being used to describe a seemingly devoted couple. In He Knew He Was Right, published in 1869, Anthony Trollope wrote, “when we travel together, we must go Darby and Joan fashion.” The verbose Henry James, writing in The Golden Bowl, published in 1904, described a couple thus; “their silence eked out for her by his giving her his arm and their then crawling up their steps quite mildly and contentedly, like some old Darby and Joan…” Darby and Joan were the names given to the devoted couple who provide hospitality in Herman Melville’s Omoo from 1847.
There was a popular song in the 1890s, written by Frederic Weatherly, entitled Darby in Joan in which Joan serenades her hubby with these words; “Darby dear we are old and grey,/ Fifty years since our wedding day./ Shadow and sun for every one,/ as the years roll by.” The couple also made an appearance in Hammerstein and Kern’s 1937 classic song, The Folks Who Live on the Hill.
Whoever they were, they have been an enduring symbol of a long and happy marriage and long may it continue.
June 13, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Sixty Seven
The ginaissance is so competitive these days that any gin hoping to make a splash must have a back story. Some seem to be the real McCoy but others have more than a little hint of the fevered brain of a marketing wallah about them. It’s probably best to take them with a pinch of salt or perhaps a slice of lemon and a dash of tonic. But one that seems to be the real deal is the one relating to Xoriguer Mahón Gin, a bottle of which I picked up in Alicante airport’s duty-free shop, as you do.
From 1708 to 1802 the island of Menorca, one of the Balearics in the western Mediterranean, and, specifically, its capital, Mahón was a regular stopping off point for British soldiers and sailors as they moved from Blighty to one of the far-flung parts of the Empire or vice versa. The troops and matelots, after being cooped up in confined quarters for so long, liked to stretch their legs and quench their thirst. One of the tipples that they kept asking for was gin. Rather than go to the cost and trouble of importing gins, the locals decided to have a go at distilling their own. The result was this gin, which was so popular, that when the military disappeared the locals continued distilling it for their own use.
What first caught my eye was the bottle. It is a bottle-green colour and shaped like a wine bottle with a dinky handle at the base of the neck. The top is a red screw ap. The front of the label has a picture, more accurately a drawing, of a windmill behind some agricultural buildings and the rear bears a description in Spanish which roughly translates as “made by complete distillation with juniper berries and wine alcohol, it offers a pleasant taste and represents the pride of an ancient tradition.” I may be doing the marketese an injustice, my Spanish is not that good, but I think you get the drift.
The two points to note are that it is juniper led, always a firm tick in the box for me, and that the base spirit is distilled from grapes, not so much of a tick from me but it seems to be the way with gins distilled in foreign parts. That, it seems, is a peculiarity of Xoriguer because to qualify as Mahón Gin any form of alcohol base, be it from grape, potato, sugar beet or wheat, will do. The next essential ingredient is juniper berries which must have an oil by weight content of between seven and nine per cent. The third component is distilled drinking water. And that’s it. No other aromas or extracts can be added.
What is absolutely essential, and a point the locals get steamed up about, is that the spirit together with the junipers are distilled in a copper still over a wood fire. Once distillation has been completed to their satisfaction, the hooch is filtered off. At an ABV of 38% it is at the lighter end of the gin strength spectrum but what it lacks in punch it makes up for in taste.
To the nose it is juniper heavy and there is very little else coming through, perhaps unsurprisingly given the proscriptions on the ingredients. To the taste it is incredibly thick and luscious, you almost get a juniper rush but there are some elements of citrus in there, admittedly faint but even these jaundiced taste buds detected it. The aftertaste is long and dry, peppery and a lingering taste of juniper.
If you love a juniper-heavy gin, and I do, check this one out. Ditch the stuffed donkey and sombrero and get yourself a bottle.
Until the next time, cheers!
June 12, 2019
Book Corner – June 2019 (2)
Riotous Assembly – Tom Sharpe
Published in 1971, this is Sharpe’s first novel in which he takes up, aims and fires a large elephant gun at the apartheid system that blighted South Africa at the time. His bullets are his excoriating wit, a far more effective weapon than a dry treatise on the evils that were bedevilling the country. As a Brit, he gives an outsider’s perspective.
The action is based in a sleepy South African town called Piemburg which Sharpe describes as “half the size of New York Cemetery and twice as dead.” But scratch beneath the surface and it is a microcosm of the pre-Mandela South Africa. The police, bumbling and inefficient, have developed a nice line of torture techniques which they are more than willing to try out, perfect and extend on any person of colour who is unfortunate enough to get in their way.
The action starts when a respected member of the community, of British stock, Miss Hazelstone rings the police station to demand that someone comes around to arrest her as she has just shot and killed her Zulu cook. It transpires that she shot him out in the garden. The Chief of Police, Kommandant van Heerden, vainly tries to persuade her to move the body indoors but she will have none of it. This simple exchange kickstarts a series of events which soon spiral out of control into a series of mind-bogglingly ridiculous and funny set pieces.
The fall guy in the whole shebang is Miss Hazelstone’s brother, Jonathan, the Bishop of Barotseland. Through a series of twists and turns in the plotting, he is marched out to the gallows to be hung, simply so that van Heerden get his hands on his heart which he wants to transplant for his own. Things don’t quite go to plan and the Bishop, who is the only sympathetic character in the book, lives to tell another tale.
As investigations into the murder progress, it becomes obvious that the cook and Miss Hazelstone were having intimate relations, miscegenation being illegal at the time, and their perversions included rubber wear and an innovative use of novocaine.
Had van Heerden just done what Miss Hazelstone had requested, arrested her for killing the cook, then the peace and quiet of Piemburg would not have been disturbed. But Hazelstone’s actions and attitudes were an affront to any right-thinking Boer.
It was perfectly acceptable, as the laws stood, for her to kill her cook indoors but not outside, hence the request that the body be removed from the garden. Her sexual perversions and passion for her Zulu cook were not only illegal but so shocking to van Heerden that he could envisage that were they to come out into the open, the fabric of South African society would be irreparably damage and a cloud of shame would descend on Piemburg. The South African police and secret service, BOSS, were notorious for their indiscriminate use of violence and torture against the people. By focusing on and magnifying these stupidities Sharpe, as well as creating an entertaining and comic read, makes his points with deadly precision.
As a book, though, I found it a little patchy. The first half was well plotted, gripping and funny but by the second half the plotting got more laboured and it seemed to wheeze and pant as it struggled to get to the finishing line. Perhaps it is difficult to maintain something where the dial is set perpetually at eleven. However, if you are looking for an absurd, bawdy, comedic novel, this is as good as any you will find.
June 11, 2019
Mores Romani
I’m not normally one for fancy dress but I was looking forward to a trip to Rome as an excuse to liberate my leather centurion’s breastplate and toga from the stygian depths of our attic. But it seems I have missed my chance.
The authorities in Rome have just issued a slew of rules aimed at clamping down on what they consider to be uncouth behaviour. Dressing up as a Roman (ancient, that is) is now verboten as is what they term as messy eating in front of historic sites. Whether you will get a spell in what the Italians call al fresco or just a flea in your ear for eating a pizza or ice cream in the open outside some pile or other is not clear.
Other infractions on Roman sensibilities that are now beyond the pale include dragging wheeled suitcases and buggies up and down historic staircases, walking around bare-chested (all sexes, I assume), singing on public transport, and wrapping your mouth around the nozzles of the city’s drinking fountains. And if you must do your laundry, don’t hang it out in the space between buildings.
I suppose, as St Augustine wrote in around 390 CE to Januarius, it is a case of “Romanum venio, ieiuno Sabbato; hic sum, non ieiuno” which has been (very) loosely translated as when in Rome, do as the Romans do. Or perhaps the Stooges got it right; “No fun, babe, no fun”.
June 10, 2019
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Ninety Five
Angela Ruiz Robles (1895 – 1975)
Books do furnish a room.
You can tell a lot about a person by the presence or absence of books in their house. When I encounter a bookshelf, I feel drawn towards it, as if I am answering the siren call. There is something magical about the physical properties of a book, the feel, its weight, the cover, the spine, its illustrations, the layout of the text, even the type selected.
Beautiful as they undoubtedly are, they are heavy and take up a lot of room.
I’m a voracious reader and get through books by the dozen. I have a few favourites, which I return to from time-to-time, but most of my reading matter is engorged once and once only. And one of my personal nightmares is being away from home, travelling or on holiday, and running out of reading material.
To me and, I’m sure, many others, the e-reader is a Godsend, allowing me to have almost instantaneous access to hundreds of books in a portable rectangular device. Aesthetically pleasing it is not and unlikely to revolutionise the way books are delivered as the format’s early evangelists once claimed, but it is convenient and, for bookworms like me, an invaluable support prop.
The concept of an automated reading device dates back to the 1940s, the brainchild of the director of the Instituto Ibanez Martin in Ferrol in Spain, Angela Ruiz Robles. Her vision was to make teaching easier and to enable her students to maximise their knowledge with the minimum of effort.
Fundamental to achieving this aim would be the development of a mechanical book, which contained all the texts that a student would need. Instead of volumes of battered text books, all their satchels would contain would be a light-weight, portable, easy-to-use mechanical reader.
Angela worked away on her idea and by 1949 had come up with a pastel-green coloured metal box which she called, snappily, I feel, Procedimiento mecánico, eléctrico y a presión de aire para lectura de libros or, in English translation, “a mechanical, electrical and air pressure procedure for reading books”.
Inside were a series of tapes on interchangeable spools, some containing text and others illustrations, all protected by a transparent and unbreakable sheet. It came with a magnifying lens and a light so that it could be used in the dark. The mechanical encyclopedia even had an audio component, which brought the text to life.
Angela had considered a wider application for her book than just Spain, proposing alphabets and texts in a number of languages. Content could be read from start to finish or the reader could skip to a new chapter by pressing a button. She even envisaged an interactive index and a list of installed works, which the student could move between by pressing one or more buttons.
To entice the publishers, Angela proposed a standard size for cartridges and, of course, some of the production costs associated with book production, such as pasting and binding, would be eliminated.
What was there not to like?
Satisfied with her prototype, Angela applied for a patent. On December 7, 1949 she was awarded Spanish patent 190,698 for what was described as a mechanical encyclopedia. She paid the annual renewal fee up until 1961 but was unable to attract sufficient funding or interest from publishers to make her vision of an alternative to a book a commercial reality.
Undaunted, on April 10, 1962, Angela applied for and received a patent (No 276,346) for an “apparatus for diverse readings and exercises”. Although it contained many of the components of the original mechanical encyclopedia, it had a slightly more streamlined design. Be that as it may, it still met the same fate as Angela’s original machine. No manufacturers or publishers would back it with cash to bring it into production.
And, so, the idea of a mechanised book or reader as we would now call it withered and died, only to be picked up again by Michael Hart in 1971 with the prototype of a truly electronic reader.
Belatedly, Angela’s contribution to the development of e-reader has begun to be recognised but she missed out on the commercial gains of her brainwave. A version of her early prototype, a splendid affair made from bronze, wood, zinc, and paper can be seen to this day at the Science and Technology Museum of La Coruna.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone
June 9, 2019
Burglar Of The Week
It is not a very nice feeling, discovering that your house has been broken into. Still if you do suffer this misfortune, just pray that the intruder is the same as the one who entered Nate Roman’s home in Marlborough, Massachusetts.
Arriving home from work, Nate immediately realised something was amiss. But instead of the usual scene of turmoil, ransacked drawers, overturned furniture, smashed objects and the like that normally greets a victim of a burglary, he was confronted with the sight of beds that had been made, carpets which had been swept, toilets that had been cleaned and the pièce de résistance, origami roses on the end of the toilet roll.
Somewhat baffled, Nate called the old bill who were equally perplexed, no other similar incidents having been reported in the area. The only thought they had was that the door may have been unlocked and a cleaning company had come into the wrong house and given it a spruce up. The alternative doesn’t bear thinking about, the robbers thought the house was such a mess that they gave it a spring clean rather relieving the owners of their possessions. How would that make you feel?
My theory is that it was a dove on its way back from Germany.
June 8, 2019
Bird Of The Week (2)
It may be the anarchic side of me coming out but I love it when the long arm of the law is frustrated by a freak of nature.
A motorist was caught on a speed camera in Viersen in Germany doing 54 km/ph in a 30 km/ph limit. Germany, it seems, is still able to afford to run its cameras unlike austerity Britain. Anyway, the driver should have earned themselves a €105 fine for their indiscretion but for one thing.
At the very moment the photo was taken a dove flew across the windscreen with wings outstretched, obscuring the face of the driver from the beady eye of the lens.
There but for the grace of God, you might say.
June 7, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (234)?…
A wild goose chase
I have been on many a metaphorical wild goose chase in my life but have never attempted to catch a goose, tame or otherwise, for real. I assume, like any sensible creature, it is reluctant to give up its liberty but why do we use this phrase to describe a futile exercise?
The starting point for our investigation is William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet, written between 1592 and 1594 and first published in an unauthorised quarto in 1597, and in particular Act 2 scene 4. As a schoolboy I read the play in an unbowdlerised edition and well remember the scene for containing one of the Bard’s bawdiest jokes.
More germane to our enquiries, though, is the battle of wits between Mercutio and Romeo. Coming off second-best, Mercutio threatens to call upon Benvolio for assistance. Romeo responds by saying that he will declare himself the winner, “switch and spurs, switch and spurs; or I’ll cry a match.” The beaten Mercutio responds, “nay, if thy wits run the wild-goose chase, I have done, for thou hast more of the wild-goose in one of thy wits than, I am sure, I have in my whole five.”
Whilst generally accepted as being the first usage of the phrase, does it really refer to chasing a wild goose? That it may refer to something else can be seen from the context in which the Bard uses it. Romeo opens the exchange with an equestrian term, switch and spur, which meant at full speed, the switch being a type of whip and, along with spurs attached to the rider’s boots, was used to goad the horse into moving more quickly. As Mercutio was in a battle of wits, it would be reasonable to assume that he would respond with a reference to the world of horses.
That this is the case is confirmed by a passage from Nicholas Breton’s poem of 1602, The Mother’s Blessing; “esteeme a horse, according to his pace/ but loose no wagers on a wilde goose chase.” Indeed, it was a type of horse race, described in some detail by Nicholas Cox in The Hunter: A Discourse of Horsemanship, published in 1685. Two or more horses set off side by side for the first “twelvescore yards”, at which point, they were then free to jockey for the lead. The horses behind were obliged to follow as closely the route taken by the leader and to stay within “a certain distance agreed by Articles” of the leader. When the leading horse had outpaced the others by more than the distance stipulated in Articles, it was declared the winner. As a result, the race’s length and duration was uncertain.
Helpfully, Cox gave a derivation of the race’s name; “the wildgoose chase received its Name from the manner of the flight which is made by Wildgeese, which is generally one after another.”
In his Sporting Dictionary of 1803, William Taplin was astute enough to recognise that the term, wild-goose chase, had equestrian origins, he was a sportsman, after all, but, interestingly, he didn’t attribute its name to the flight of wild geese as Cox had. Instead, he saw it as a reference to the uncertainty, both of duration and distance of the event; “wild-goose chase – is neither more or less than a metaphorical allusion to the uncertainty of its termination. This originated in a kind of chase (more properly a match)…”
But others were not as perceptive as Taplin. During the seventeenth century, the phrase was being used figuratively to describe erratic behaviour, particularly where one follows their own impulses. In the tragicomedy, The Spanish Gipsie, first performed in 1623 and written by Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, Diego tells Lewys, “I have had a fine fegary,/ the rarest, wild-goose chase,” fegary being a version of vagary. By the time that the great but eccentric lexicographer, Samuel Johnson, came to compile his Dictionary of the English Language in the mid-eighteenth century, it had lost its associations with horse racing and we were stuck geese; “a pursuit of something as unlikely to be caught as a wildgoose,” and have been ever since.
Going back to Shakespeare’s use of wild goose in Romeo and Juliet, it is possible to detect both senses in play, not surprisingly as Mercutio is trying to demonstrate the sharpness of his wits. The first almost certainly refers to the horse race but the second may relate to the characteristics of the wild goose. Whatever the case, the racing connotation was lost to the mists of time and we are left with the image of someone vainly trying to grasp a goose.
June 6, 2019
A Measure Of Things – Part Twelve
A hangover is nature’s way of telling you that you have overdone the electric sauce. Seasoned topers will have their own tried and tested antidote to a hangover, some more effective than others, but the sobering fact is that that feeling of being under par will remain with you for some hours once your blood alcohol concentration gets down to zero or as close to zero as its ever going to get. The American humourist, Robert Benchley, probably got it spot on when he opined that “the only cure for a real hangover is death.”
When drinkers reconvene after a heavy session, the subject of the intensity of their respective hangovers will tend to crop up, once a refreshing drink or three has sufficiently lubricated the brain to allow the faculty of cogent speech to return. The problem is, though, that descriptions tend to be subjective and for anyone who is looking for objective metrics, they are too vague to be of any use. Would that there was a scale by which the intensity of hangovers could be measured and compared.
One of my favourite comic writers, P G Wodehouse, plied his mind to the subject in The Mating Season, published in 1949. He wrote “I am told by those who know that there are six varieties of hangover—the Broken Compass, the Sewing Machine, the Comet, the Atomic, the Cement Mixer and the Gremlin Boogie, and his manner suggested that he had got them all.” We can understand where he is coming from but for the seeker of exactitude, they are too woolly to be of much use.
Where there is a gap in human knowledge, it is good to know that there are some wonderful men and women in white coats, scientists, working away to plug it. I rarely glance at the pages of Psychopharmacology, my loss I’m sure, but my attention was directed to a paper, published in September 2012, in which six academics, four from Utrecht University and the other two from the Universities of Ulster and Groningen, in which they proposed an Alcohol Hangover Severity Scale, or AHSS as we like to call it.
I don’t know about you but I often find academic papers to be a mélange of the blindingly obvious and the incomprehensible and this one is no different. The introduction opens with a sentence, complete with references (natch), of the most mind-numbing banality; “alcohol hangover is the most commonly reported consequence of heavy drinking.” But after what can only be described as an early stumble, the paper became quite interesting.
A group of 214 social drinkers, drawn from university workers and students from Utrecht University, were asked to complete an online survey the morning after a night of heavy drinking, I can’t imagine they had a shortage of volunteers, and a night of abstinence. There was no restriction on how much they consumed or where or what they did whilst drinking, for example dancing or smoking, but they were disqualified if they had taken recreational drugs. It was the Netherlands, after all.
The volunteers marked the severity of their hangover against a number of criteria using a ten-point scale and then marked those symptoms on the morning after night without a sip of the electric sauce. The mean results of the group were that they had 2.5 hangovers a month and that their latest hangover saw them consume 10.6 alcoholic beverages and had 6.4 hours of shut-eye. The results were then put through a series of analyses.
The upshot was that there were twelve factors that significantly predicted the severity of a hangover. For the record, they are, all painfully familiar, fatigue, clumsiness, dizziness, apathy, sweating, shivering, confusion, stomach pain, nausea, concentration problems, heart pounding and thirst. Interestingly, they found that a headache, the usual sign that you have a hangover, was not a factor in establishing the intensity of a hangover.
Their conclusion was that you could construct a scale, the AHSS, using these twelve criteria and a ten-point scoring system. Simply add up the scores you have allocated to each criterion and divide by twelve to give you your metric. Armed with this you can compare and contrast the intensity of your hangover with fellow topers.
I will give it a try, all in the name of science, you understand.
