Martin Fone's Blog, page 229
May 6, 2019
Double Your Money – Part Forty One
The Civil War gold hoax of 1864
Share prices are, and always have been, sensitive to news, good or bad. One way to make a fortune is to generate stock market panic by issuing a piece of fake news. With the outcome of the Civil War still in the balance, a perfect opportunity presented itself to cause a collapse in share prices and a consequent rise in gold prices, or so two journalists, Joseph Howard Jnr, city editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, and one of his colleagues, Francis A Mallison, thought.
On May 18th 1864 two New York papers, the New York World and the Journal of Commerce, ran a sensational story to the effect that President Lincoln was conscripting an extra 400,000 troops because of “the situation in Virginia, the disaster at Red River, the delay at Charleston, and the general state of the country.” This seemed contrary to the widely held belief that the Union was slowly getting on top of their opponents and that the war would soon be over. If the announcement was to be believed, it looked as though hostilities would drag on for some time and the outcome was still uncertain.
And believed it was.
Panic broke out, share prices plummeted and investors switched to gold, whose price immediately rose by 10%. Howard, who the day before had invested heavily in gold, was able to sell his holding at the top of the market and make his pile. A good morning’s work.
It did not take long for the deception to be revealed. More circumspect investors wondered why only two of New York’s papers had run a story of such import. The Journal of Commerce insisted that they had got the story from their usual source, the Associated Press. The Associated Press issued a denial by 11.00 am that they were the originators of the story and a telegram from William Seward, the Secretary of State, declaring the announcement to be “an absolute forgery”, received at 12.30 that day restored calm.
But the repercussions of the scare rumbled on. Lincoln ordered that the papers that had printed the story be closed down and that their proprietors be arrested, a move on press freedom that was to blight his presidency. Detectives, meanwhile, were on the hunt for the real culprits and on May 21st had enough evidence to arrest Mallison who, in turn, implicated Howard. When arrested at his home in Brooklyn, Howard made a full confession.
How were they able to pull off the hoax and manipulate the market?
As newspapermen, they knew that newspapers were at their most vulnerable at around 3.30 am when the night readers and copyreaders had gone home and the day shift had yet to arrive, leaving just a solitary night foreman to review incoming news items. The story, purporting to have come from the reliable source that was Associated Press, was received by the World and the Journal just at that moment and their foremen fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Other papers were not so gullible. They sent out messengers to their rivals to see whether they too had received the same story. Not all had and smelling a rat, they did not print it. The two papers that did were geographically a bit out on a limb and it may not have been possible for them to verify the story with other papers, even if they had doubted its seemingly impeccable source. But two papers carrying the story was enough for Howard’s purpose.
Howard, whose defendants claimed him to be only guilty of “the hope of making money”, spent less than three months in jail before being released on the orders of the President himself in August 1864. By then, on July 18th, Lincoln had issued a call for more men, half a million rather than the 400,000 that Howard had intimated.
The news was not so fake after all.
If you enjoyed this, check out Fifty Scams and Hoaxes by Martin Fone
https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/business/fifty-scams-and-hoaxes/
May 5, 2019
Joker Of The Week
Heard the one about the tartan sheep?
Well, you can see a couple, named April and Daisy, at the Auchingarrich Wildlife Centre in Comrie in Perthshire, naturally enough up in Scotland. According to the information displayed on their pen, they eat “mainly grass, but are known to enjoy Irn Bru (the Scots’ favourite non-alcoholic beverage) and Scottish Tablet or shortbread”.
When they are born, they are just like normal lambs, but after a year or so their coats change into fully blown tartan, Maxine Scott, the Centre’s owner, claims. Naturally, the wool does not go to waste and is used to make tartan kilts, scarves and blankets. What’s more, the variety of tartan can change, a reason to revisit the Centre.
Pull the other one.
The Scots take a perverse delight in trying to get one over the tourists. Resist an invitation to join a Haggis shoot. And this is another example.
Scott has been dying the coats of her sheep for the ten years that she has run the Centre, using a marker spray that farmers use to identify their animals. She claims that the tourists love it.
As a publicity stunt, it seems to be working.
May 4, 2019
Spoilsports Of The Week (2)
George R R Martin’s potboiler, together with the DUP’s support of the Tories’ ramshackle government, may be propping up Northern Ireland’s economy, but all good things must come to an end. I have been able to withstand the obsession for all things Game of Thrones but, I am reliably informed, the final series (number eight, would you believe?) is rumbling on to a conclusion. This means we will soon find out who wins out and sits on the Iron Throne.
Of course, some people can’t wait that long. A group of technology students at the Technical University of Munich have created an app which uses artificial intelligence to scour the worldwide web for information about the myriad characters in the series and assess their chances of survival.
The algorithm upon which the app is based has already chalked up one success, having predicted, before the start of series six, that Jon Snow would reappear, Bobby Ewing style.
For what it is worth, the students say that the results of their computer’s whirrings show that Daenerys Targaryen, whoever he is, is likely to come up on top.
For those who care, we will soon see if they are right.
May 3, 2019
What Is The Origin Of (229)?…
Namby-pamby
Our wonderful English language is like a sponge, drawing in influences from wherever it can. I suppose it could be considered a feather in one’s cap to have a word or a phrase named after you. I’m not sure that Ambrose Philips saw it that way. The phrase in which he is immortalised is namby-pamby, used pejoratively these days to describe something or someone who is overly sentimental or insipidly pretty.
Shropshire born Ambrose Philips (1674 – 1749) was a pastoral poet and a staunch Whig supporter to boot. A feud developed between him and Alexander Pope, fuelled by articles in the Guardian in 1713 praising Philips’ work and calling him the only extant poet fit to fill the size nines left by Edmund Spenser. What particularly appealed to Philips’ admirers was his simple style and his avoidance of classical mythology.
Pope responded by writing anonymously an article published in the Guardian in which he censured his own pastoral style and lauded the worst passages from Philips’ work. Philips saw through this rather thin satire and threatened to hit Pope on the head with a rod which he kept in Button’s coffee house for that express purpose. These poets! Samuel Johnson described relations between the two poets as “a perpetual reciprocation of malevolence.” He also thought that Philips was hard done by.
Philips did have a certain style and some of his worst excesses, usually prompted by attempts to ingratiate himself with the great and the good by lauding their kiddywinks, opened him up to ridicule. Take this, for example; “thou, thy parents pride and care/ fairest offspring of the fair/…when again the lambkins play/ pretty sportlings, full of May.” In technical terms, his style generally consisted of three trochees, followed by an extra-stressed monosyllabic foot.
And ridiculed Philips was. In 1725 Henry Carey wrote a poem called Namby-Pamby; or a panegyrick on the new versification address’s to A___ P___. It didn’t take a genius to work out that A P was Ambrose Philips and that Namby-Pamby was a play on his Christian name. Carey did not hold back; “All ye poets of the age/ all ye writings of the stage../ Namby-Pamby is your guide/ Albion’s joy, Hibernia’s pride/ Namby-Pamby, pilly-piss/ Rhimy-pim’d on Missy Miss/ Tartaretta Tartaree/ From the navel to the knee;/ That her father’s gracy, grace/ might give him a placy place.”
Philips’ enemies were pleased with the new coinage which, in their eyes, in its childish reduplication, gave vent to their disgust at the excesses of his style. Pope couldn’t resist poking fun at his foe and he duly appears in one of Pope’s greatest works, The Dunciad, published in 1728; “beneath his reign, shall…Namby Pamby be prefer’d for Wit”. Johnathan Swift called Philips’ works “little flams.”
But Johnson stuck up for him, calling Philips’ best works “those which from Pope or Pope’s adherents procured him the name of Namby-Pamby, the poems of short lines by which he paid his court to all ages and characters, from Walpole, the steerer of the realm, to Miss Pulteney in the nursery.” It is all a question of taste, after all.
The phrase namby-pamby was too good to be wasted on the specific and soon moved to a broader application. In 1745, William Ayre in his Memoirs of the life and writings of Alexander Pope, used it to describe an ineffectual form of writing, typified by Philips; “he used to write verses on Infants, in a strange Stile, which Dean Swift calls the Namby Pamby stile.” And by 1774 it became a pejorative term referring to anything weak or ineffectual, the Westmoreland Magazine in that year describing someone as “a namby pamby Duke.”
While Philips and his pastoral poetry have been lost in the mists of time, namby-pamby soon augmented the ranks of words to be used to insult someone.
May 2, 2019
Gin O’Clock – Part Sixty Four
You will be pleased to know that I have got off my soap box, had a lie down, consumed a few stiff G&Ts and am now ready to continue my exploration of the ginaissance.
The budget supermarket, Aldi, is continuing to make inroads into what was once the preserve of the four or five big supermarket chains. What they lack in choice and comfort, they more than make up for in price and when times are hard, every penny counts. They have made a concerted attempt to grab a slice of the growing gin market and one of their range that took my eye and found its way into my shopping trolley was Topaz Blue London Dry Gin. At £13.99 for a 70 cl bottle, it is a snip.
The first thing to say is that the bottle bears some resemblance to that of the more expensive Bombay Sapphire. Surely the use of the name of a precious stone is just too much of a coincidence? The script on the label and the shape of the image at the front of the bottle also look very similar from afar. And then there is the bluish hue to the bottle, given by the blue backing of the labelling in the Aldi product’s case rather than the colour of its glass. But, to be fair, that is where the similarities end.
The bottle is tall and slim and quite tactile. For those of us who are all fingers and thumbs, it is easy to manoeuvre with one hand, something you often cannot say about the fatter, more elaborate bottles used by the more expensive gin makers. The cap is a rather flimsy, foil affair in dark blue.
The labelling is quite informative as to what the gin is all about, boasting that it is the result of “superior small batch distillation.” Comforting to know, I’m sure. It goes on to proclaim that “this superior gin is a testament to the passion and artistry of our distiller, infusing wild botanicals and select fruits for an earthy, spicy, fruit driven, full bodied flavour.” Having blown smoke up the distiller’s posterior, the bottle omits to tell us who it might be. We must rest in the knowledge they know who they are.
The reverse of the bottle helpfully lists the botanicals to be found within, together with a little pictogram of each so you can see what they look like in their natural state. They are juniper, coriander, angelica, almond, lemon peel, cassia, orange peel, liquorice, orris and cinnamon. A solid selection which holds out the promise of a juniper-led, conventional London dry gin.
Unscrewing the top, the aroma is initially of juniper and coriander with spice and citrus elements coming through. Compared with some gins the nose is not as strong as I would have expected. That feeling is compounded when I took a sip. It seemed rather light-bodied, as though something was missing. The initial sensation was of juniper, quite spicy and slightly sour, and then the spices and citrus elements broke through, ending with a spicy aftertaste. Perhaps this is where the liquorice came in to play.
I just felt that it was a little undercooked, promising more than it could actually deliver and one that would probably not be suitable to drink neat. With a decent tonic, I found it much more palatable and at 40% ABV, it made for a pleasant early evening drink.
Of course, that is only my opinion. Better judges than I awarded it a gold medal at the Spirits Business Gin Masters last year, after a blind tasting. Try for yourself.
Until the next time, cheers!
May 1, 2019
Book Corner – May 2019 (1)
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
What makes a piece of literature a classic?
Madame Bovary, serialised in Le Revue de Paris between October 1st and 15th December 1856, got its author, Gustave Flaubert, into hot water as he was prosecuted for obscenity. It is widely regarded as a prime and early example of literary realism. The public prosecutor argued that not only was the subject matter immoral but that realism in literature was an affront against art and decency. Flaubert was acquitted on February 7th 1857 and his book became an instant best-seller when it was published in two volumes on April 1st of that year.
To the modern reader, it is hard to see what all the fuss was about. OK, the story is about a woman’s adventures into adultery but these days it is pretty tame stuff, compared with what you can come across these days. But that is one of the dangers of judging a book written a hundred and sixty years ago by the standards of today. Just as we should be mildly irritated by casual racism and anti-semitism we encounter in Victorian and early 20th century books, we shouldn’t dismiss the book out of hand. Standards have changed but that doesn’t devalue the book per se.
On one level, Emma, the eponymous heroine and the third Mrs Bovary in the story, can be seen as a bit idealistic, if not stupid. Marrying a country doctor, Charles Bovary, she imagines that she will not be in want for anything, whether material or romantic. But tucked away in a sleepy and parochial town near Rouen, Yonville, and after a ground-breaking tendon operation performed by her husband goes disastrously wrong, Emma decides that Charles will never meet up to her expectations, materially or romantically.
She begins her adulterous adventures, initially with a cad called Rodolphe Boulanger, who never quite reciprocates the depth of feeling that Emma has for him, seeing her as little more than another notch on his bedpost. Her other dalliance is with Leon Dupuis, who is more sympathetically drawn, introduces Emma to poetry, and flees Yonville when he is convinced she does not share his feelings. The two are then reconciled later in the book after Emma’s affair with Rodolphe ends.
When Leon gets fed up with Emma’s emotional excesses and she becomes ambivalent towards him, their affair peters out. By this time Emma, who has been masterfully induced to spend far beyond her husband’s means by the grasping and cunning merchant, Monsieur Lheureux, is beset by money troubles and the only way out is to dramatically end her life by taking arsenic. Emma is portrayed as a selfish, self-centred woman, out to get what she wants, irrespective of who gets hurt or what the consequences are.
The suicide scene is vivid and moving. It is highly probable that Flaubert, in his search for realism, sampled arsenic. In a letter dated November 1866 he wrote, “when I wrote the description of the poisoning of Mme Bovary I had the taste of arsenic so much in my mouth, I had taken so much poison that I gave myself two bouts of indigestion one after the other..”
As for Charles, it is hard to feel much sympathy for him. He has had the wool pulled over his eyes for so long that he deserved all he got. Even after Emma’s death, he cannot shake off her hold over him.
Structurally, the book is unusual in that it begins with an account of Charles’ school days, his medical training and his first marriage. Emma only appears well into the book as the daughter of a patient. After Emma’s suicide, the book continues to explore what happened to Charles in the aftermath, their child, Berthe’s, fate and then ends with the chemist, Monsieur Homais, who behind the scenes had sabotaged Charles’ medical practice, attaining his lifelong ambition, the Legion of Honour medal. It is as if Flaubert is saying come what may life goes on. For all her faults trials and tribulations, she is just a bit player in the continuum of life.
For me, great literature escapes the constraints of its time and deals with universal issues. Madame Bovary achieves this and is rightly one of the greatest pieces of literature of all time.
April 30, 2019
Parents Of The Week
We live in the era of boomerang kids. Never breathe a sigh of relief when your offspring leave the family home. As sure as eggs are eggs, they will be back. And the strange thing is that when they decide to move on again, they never seem to take with them everything they brought back.
Some parents take a laid-back attitude to the impedimenta left behind by their sprogs. Others, like this couple from Grand Haven in Michigan, prefer to take a more direct approach.
Their son moved back home after a divorce but after ten months he moved on, leaving a pile of his possessions behind. His parents sent them on to his new address in Indiana.
There was one problem, though. His stash of pornography, some twelve boxes of rare and titillating movies and magazines, some of which were believed to be rare and are now even rarer, and two boxes of sex toys was missing.
After a heated exchange of correspondence in which the son demanded to know the whereabouts of his collection valued at around $29,000, it emerged that the parents may have destroyed the porn for their son’s “own mental and emotional health”. The son went to the police and when the prosecutor in Ottawa County, Michigan, refused to press charges, he, somewhat ungratefully I feel, sued his parents for $87,000.
For this porno stash this Grand Haven failed to live up to its name.
April 29, 2019
There Ain’t ‘Alf Some Clever Bastards – Part Ninety Three
Charles Lindbergh (1902 – 1974)
By any stretch of the imagination Charles Lindbergh was a complex character.
He is best known for his solo, non-stop, trans-Atlantic flight in 1927 from Long Island to Paris in a single-engine plane called Spirit of America. Tragedy befell him in 1932 when his son, Charles Junior, was kidnapped and subsequently murdered in what was described by H L Mencken as “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
Returning from self-imposed exile in Europe in 1935 to the States in 1939 and until the Pearl Harbour attack took a prominent anti-interventionist stance, attracting a public rebuke from President Roosevelt and allegations of fascist sympathies. Once he engaged with the war effort he put his undoubted aviatic acumen to good use, flying over fifty combat missions during the war against Japan in the Pacific region. For the rest of his life he was dogged by allegations of being a eugenist and a philanderer.
But the reason why Lindbergh is nominated for our illustrious Hall of Fame is for his now little-remembered involvement in the development of heart surgery and, in particular, the perfusion pump.
Our story begins in 1930 when Lindbergh’s sister-in-law developed a heart condition which proved to be fatal. It set him wondering why it was not possible to repair defects in the body’s major organ surgically. He was introduced to the Nobel Prize winning surgeon, Alexis Carrell, who was working on methods to keep organs alive outside of the body. In fact, Carrell had developed a nutrient-rich fluid that did the trick but lacked the technological know-how to ensure that the organ was continuously exposed to oxygenated blood, a process known as perfusion.
This is where Lindbergh came in.
By May 1931 he had advanced sufficiently to publish in one of the shortest ever articles to appear in the journal, Science, details of a device which circulated fluid constantly through a closed system. It created little attention.
By 1935 Lindbergh had come up with a solution to Carrell’s problem, a glass pump, consisting of three chambers or, to use his own words, “an apparatus, which maintains, under controllable conditions, a pulsating circulation of sterile fluid through organs for a length of time limited only by the changes in the organs and in the perfusion fluid.”
The use of glass was critical and Lindbergh used a form of pyrex, as other materials were found to cause blood clots and other complications. The heart was placed in a slanting tube and the carotid artery was connected to a second, small glass tube. Air pressure would force Carrell’s nutritious fluid from a lower chamber through the tube and artery to the heart, gravity then taking over and forcing it back down to the lower chamber. There were no moving parts.
There was one problem; the absence of a filter, an ersatz kidney, meant that the organ’s secretion mixed with the fluid from the perfusion pump, requiring it to be changed frequently. Nonetheless, the duo carried out a public demonstration of their pump on 5th April 1935, perfusing a cat’s thyroid gland which, after eighteen days, was still healthy and, more importantly, alive and replicating.
The public response to this breakthrough was phenomenal. It was described as “the fountain of old age” and some speculated that Lindbergh’s contribution would earn him more fame than his aeronautical achievements. They even graced the cover of Time magazine in July 1935. The press hysteria forced him to flee to Europe.
Over the next four years nearly a thousand trials of the pump were carried out and it never malfunctioned, although the absence of a filter continued to pose the threat of contamination. It was a star exhibit of the World Fair in New York in 1939.
But only around twenty of the pumps were ever produced. What went wrong?
It was tricky to use and attaching the artery to the glass tube was difficult. It was too easy to tear or damage the artery, making the organ to which it was attached unusable. By 1940 it was abandoned.
But it became the forerunner of surgical devices such as the heart-lung machine and gave surgeons a methodology to work on to stop the heart during an operation.
But Lindbergh is best known these days for other things.
If you enjoyed this, why not check out Fifty Clever Bastards by Martin Fone
April 28, 2019
Sporting Event Of The Week (22)
For those of us looking for an unusual feat of endurance, the West Yorkshire village of Gawthorpe was the place to be on Easter Monday, the venue of the 56th World Coal Carrying Championship.
Competitors are required to lug a bag of coal – 50kg for men, 25kg for women – along the 1,108 uphill course which runs from Owl Lane, outside the Royal Oak, to the maypole on the village green, where the sacks are deposited.
The record time was set by David Jones in 1991 and again in 1995, completing the course in 4 minutes and six seconds. The record for the women’s event, set by Catherine Foley, stands at 4 minutes 25 seconds. Perhaps appropriately, the event is sponsored by a local firm of funeral directors.
This year the conditions were against the competitors with temperatures soaring to 20 degrees centigrade, in contrast to last year when heavy snow threatened the event.
The origins of the event began, like many a good idea, in a pub, the Beehive, in 1963, when Reggie Sedgwick, a stalwart of the village’s Maypole Committee, issued a challenge to Lewis Hartley, who had had the temerity to cast aspersions on his fitness. Rather than it being just a personal duel and looking for something to fill a hole in the calendar on Easter Monday, the secretary, Fred Hirst, hit upon the idea of the race.
The rest is history and long may the race for the title of King of the Coil Humpers and the £750 cash prize continue.
April 27, 2019
Remorse Of The Week
Leaving the polling booth, I am often filled with voter’s remorse. The candidates are invariably a poor lot and it is always a bit of a toss up as to whom to vote for. Still, it soon passes as almost without exception whoever I vote for fails to win. I have done my democratic duty but am relieved of the responsibility of electing the chump who wins.
We have become a bit blasé about the right to vote, a hard-fought right which we abuse at our peril. In India, they take things more seriously as the astonishing case of Pawan Kumar from Uttar Pradesh shows.
Once the vote is cast, the voter’s finger is marked with indelible ink to prevent them voting again, in order to reduce election fraud. Pawan Kumar wanted to cast his vote for the Bahujan Samaj Party whose symbol is an elephant. But he got confused in the voting booth and mistakenly pressed the button bearing the symbol of the lotus, giving his vote instead to the ruling Hindu party, the Bharatiya Janata Party.
So mortified was poor Pawan Kumar at what he had done that he could not bear the sight of his marked finger. Taking to heart the wise words of the Roman Stoic philosopher, Seneca; “there is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse”, there was only one thing to do.
Naturally, he chopped his finger off.
The perils of democracy.
