Martin Fone's Blog, page 249
September 16, 2018
Robbery Of The Week (2)
To pull off a successful robbery, so I’m told, requires meticulous attention to detail. One little slip can lead to your undoing.
It is a pity that Matthew Bloomquist from Hawick in Minnesota didn’t follow this advice. He, and probably an accomplice, thought it would be a good idea to relieve a farm in Maine Prairie of its timber stock and other items. They loaded their pick-up truck with the loot but whilst trying to make their escape, drove into a big pile of farm manure.
They spent the rest of the night trying to get the vehicle free and whilst his accomplice ran off, Bloomquist was found by the Stearns County police standing by his vehicle, smoking a cigarette and covered from his waist down in manure. Not exactly caught red-handed but very much in the brown and nasty.
The (very) long arm of the law carted him away.
Still a vigorous shower would have put Bloomquist to rights. It will take a little longer for John Casford to recover from his theft that went wrong. His brain wave was to steal a squirrel monkey from New Zealand’s Wellington zoo.
To effect the robbery, he climbed into the enclosure. But the animals, who must be feisty creatures, were having none of it and in the ensuing melee Casford sustained a broken leg, a broken tooth and some bruising to his back.
He has two years in chokey to recover from his ordeal.
September 15, 2018
Cat Of The Week
What do we know about cats? By repute they have nine lives and always land on their feet after a fall. But when you weigh in at around 6 kilograms, I imagine you are not too agile on your feet.
In July of last year a 56-year-old man was minding his own business, taking a stroll on his way to the Santa Rita market in Turin. Suddenly, he was struck on the head by an overweight moggy which had slipped from the terrace of its owner’s eighth storey apartment. The force of the fall was such that the unfortunate victim sustained serious injuries to his head and vertebrae.
The man is taking the cat’s owner to court for compensation, I read this week.
The cat, alas, didn’t survive the ordeal. It must have used up its ninth life!
September 14, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (197)?…
To be in someone’s bad books
To be in someone’s bad books is to be in disgrace or out of favour. It is not a situation many of us would choose to be in but on occasions it happens. Often it is a phrase used to chide a child but what are these books and why are they bad?
In times of strife and civil turmoil it is not uncommon for one side or the other to draw up lists of people they would like to get out-of-the-way. The Roman dictator, Sulla, compiled a list of what were known as proscriptions in 82 BCE and around forty years later the ill-starred triumvirate of Octavian, later to become Augustus, Mark Antony, and Lepidus also drew up their lists. Cicero was unfortunate enough to find himself on one of these scrolls and that was the end of him.
Given the influence of the Roman way of doing things on Western thought, culture and language our phrase could be a throwback to this way of identifying and eliminating your opponents. Mercifully, these days anyone who finds themselves in someone’s bad book is unlikely to be killed but they face some form of social ostracism, albeit temporary.
Whether this is the origin of our phrase is speculation but what is clear is that the noun book was used in the early 16th century for certain, and probably earlier, to indicate the extent of one’s interest and concern. In the poetic tract, The Parlyament of Deuylles (Devils), printed by W de Worde in 1509, we find the passage, “he is out of our bokes and we out of his.” It is perhaps an early example of if you are not on the list, you can’t come in.
Soon book gathered an adjective to accompany a possessive pronoun. The first such adjective seems to have been black. Robert Greene wrote Black Book’s Messenger, published just before his death in 1592, in which he layed “open the life and death of Ned Browne, one of the most notable cutpurses, cross-biters and cony-catchers that ever lived in England.” Greene was not as exhaustive in his listing of Browne’s felony as his preamble led the reader to believe because he then noted that “Ned Browne’s villanies..are too many to be described in my Blacke Book.”
By 1771, though, books, black in colour, were being used to record the indiscretions of those in the armed forces and supposedly studying at universities. It was defined thus; “a book kept for the purpose of registering the names of persons liable to censure or punishment, as in the English universities, or the English armies.” But by that time it was also being used in a figurative sense. The inestimable Francis Grose recorded in his Dictionary of the Vulgar the following definition; “He is down in the black book, that is, has a stain in his character.”
Qualitative adjectives were a later development. Charles Dickens, in Nicholas Nickleby, published in 1839, used the figurative good book when Miss La Creevy says to Mr Noggs, “If you want to keep in the good books in that quarter, you had better not call her the old lady.” Wise advice, I’m sure. And its antonym, bad books, made an even later appearance, first used in George Perry’s History of the Church of England, published in 1861; “the Arminians, who at that time were in his bad books.”
Since then, most of us have appeared in figurative books, whether they be black, good or bad.
September 13, 2018
Everything Is Possible For An Eccentric, Especially When He Is English – Part Twenty Five
Benjamin O’Neale Stratford (1808 – 1875)
A man needs a hobby but some take their enthusiasm to extremes. One such was Stratford, the sixth and last Earl of Aldborough – as we will see, he didn’t have time to sire an heir. His passion, nay obsession, was ballooning and his ambition was to build the biggest balloon the world had ever seen.
The starting point was to build somewhere to house it and in the 1830s he had a hangar built in the grounds of his family seat, Stratford Lodge, in Baltinglass in County Wicklow. It was no tin or wooden affair. Standing some 60 feet high and fifty feet wide, it was chiselled out of the Wicklow granite. And it had doors, because Stratford was paranoid that someone would see what he was doing and steal his ideas.
For the next twenty years or so he worked away, designing, building, adjusting, and modifying his meisterwerk. Throughout the time Stratford lived as a recluse, attended by only one servant. He refused to compromise the secrecy of his project by hiring a cook. Instead, he had his meals sent down to him from Dublin on the Baltinglass Royal Mail coach.
Eventually, by the early 1850s our Benjamin believed he had cracked it and started to make plans for its inaugural flight. His intention was to fly initially to England and then transport the balloon to the south coast where he would fly to the ballooning capital of the world, Paris. He had even bought a piece of land by the Seine as a landing strip – a triumph of optimism over reality if there ever was one.
By this time, England was embroiled in the Crimean War and in a fit of patriotic fervour Stratford offered his machine to a doubtless bemused military. There is also evidence that he sought to protect his invention with a patent. Patent number 224, filed in 1854, records “this inventor proposed a man-powered aircraft, either aided in flight by an elongated balloon, or by wings. The wings are intended to act in a manner similar to birds, based on theories of bird flight put forward by the inventor. A tail is described, which may act as a rudder, striking downward when the vessel is rising, thus compressing the air beneath, as the inventor believed birds do, especially pigeons.”
The patent went on; “any number of persons on board may aid propulsion, each having a separate wheel.” Stratford continued modifying his design, filing another patent (no 2062) in 1856, in which “he appears now to suggest an engine to provide propulsive power. There are also improvements to the passenger accommodation and other minor features.” For all his efforts, there still had been no public unveiling.
And then one Sunday morning in 1856, tragedy struck. Fire broke out at Stratford Lodge. Stratford’s only concern was to save his balloon. He organised a human chain from the many onlookers to carry buckets of water to the hanger but to no avail. The balloon went up in flames.
Stratford was devastated, his purpose in life destroyed. He initially moved into what remained of the hangar and, when the family fortune had been all but spent, he moved to Alicante in Spain where he eked out a living breeding dogs and selling patent medicines. When he got bored with that, he became even more reclusive, shutting himself up in hotel rooms, having meals delivered to his door but refusing to allow anyone to collect the dirty crockery. When his room became uninhabitable, he simply moved into another one.
But some good did come of his balloon. Struts from the structure kept the locals in fishing rods for many years and some of the stones from the hangar were used in the Baltinglass’ new catholic church.
September 12, 2018
Book Corner – September 2018 (2)
Brolliology – Marion Rankine
Perhaps because I attempt to write them myself, I have a penchant for off-beat, wacky works of non-fiction and Marion Rankine’s paean to the culture of the umbrella must be right up there amongst the wackiest.
I have never had much of an attachment to the umbrella or, perhaps, it is the other way round. Our acquaintance, sadly brief, comes to an end when I absent-mindedly leave it on a train or forget to pick it up from the restaurant rack. I am not alone – some 35,000 sit in London Transport’s Lost Property Office at any one time. And one of the eeriest and heart-rending parts of Rankine’s book are the photos of discarded, mangled, and broken umbrellas she found while wandering around the streets of London.
Brolliology gives the factoid-junkie their fix. As you breeze through the book you learn that bits of an umbrella were found in a Chinese tomb dating to 25 BCE and that the kasa-obake, in Japanese folklore, were evil, sentient umbrellas. Robinson Crusoe’s one luxury item on his desert island was an umbrella – it was the first thing he made. And that illustrates the dual purpose of the brolly. Whilst in temperate climes we use it to protect ourselves from the rain, in the tropics it is used as a protection against the rays of the sun. The parasol was a symbol of power and prestige in ancient times and the sense of providing shade is retained in the English term from it. The French, perversely, use a term, parapluie, which fixes its use firmly in the wet, dank climes of western Europe.
There is a transient quality about the brolly. Because so many are identical, they are easily swapped inadvertently or by mistake. It was an umbrella, “appalling…all gone at the seams”, that was taken at the Beethoven concert in E M Forster’s Howard’s End which sends Leonard Bast’s life spiralling into tragedy. And a transformative quality. It can be used as a weapon or a source of support or, if you are Mary Poppins, it can be used to transport you up into the skies. P L Travers’ conceit was rooted in fact – in 1779 Joseph-Michel Montgolfier put a sheep in a basket attached to an umbrella-shaped canopy, pushed it off a tower and saw it glide gracefully to the ground.
One of the earliest records of the use of a brolly as a guard against the British rain is Jonathan Swift’s Description of a City Shower, published in 1710. Early British umbrellas were unsatisfactory, leaky and used almost exclusively by the fairer sex. A celebrated wielder of the brolly was Charles Dickens’ wonderful creation, Mrs Gamp. So associated with the Dickensian character was the brolly that they were known in popular idiom as gamps. It was only when the brollies became cheaper and more effective that they were used by chaps – early adopters had to run the gauntlet of the jeering mobs – but in its furled state it soon became an obligatory accessory, along with the bowler, of the well-dressed city chap.
Rankine draws extensively – too extensively for my taste in what smacks as a form of padding – from literature to illustrate her points and is in danger of straying into Pseuds Corner with some of her observations on the social, psychological and cultural significance of this everyday item.
That said, it is an easy read and can be polished off during an extended break for rain at Lords. There is enough to satisfy even the most exacting of reader and when you have done with it, you can put it on your head as protection against the elements!
September 11, 2018
An Eye For An Eye Will Only Make The Whole World Blind – Part Ten
The Iowa-Missouri Boundary dispute, 1839
The limitations of surveying equipment, geographical ignorance and terminological inexactitude can provide no end of opportunities for those intent on picking a quarrel as the rather odd territorial dispute between the nascent Territory of Iowa and the State of Missouri amply illustrates.
It all began in 1816 when John Sullivan was hired to map out the northern border of Missouri. In describing what was later to become known as the Sullivan Line he referred it, rather airily in hindsight, as running “through the rapids of the River Des Moines.” A blazed tree was said to mark the spot. The precise location of the boundary didn’t seem to matter at the time but as more and more settlers moved into north-eastern Missouri and south-western Iowa in the 1830s it became increasingly more important, if only for tax and law enforcement purposes, to determine whether they were in Iowa or Missouri.
The only thing to do was to order a new survey which the Missouri legislature did in 1837. They picked one J.C Brown to carry out the survey to determine the precise boundary. Not realising that the rapids which Sullivan had described were actually the Des Moines Rapids in the Mississippi River. Brown set off looking for a Des Moines River. He came across a bit of a mini-waterfall near what is now the town of Keosauqua. This he concluded was the latitude Sullivan had described and proceeded to conduct his survey from that point going due west. Unfortunately, Brown’s border was some nine and a half miles further north than the original Sullivan line and the result was that Missouri had gained a large strip of new land.
It was only when Congress was constituting the Territory of Iowa that they noticed the discrepancy. Their solution – to order another survey. But before that got underway, the gloriously named Governor of Missouri, Lilburn W Boggs took matters into his own hands by ordering his officials to enforce local laws and collect taxes in the disputed area. The locals objected, claiming they were Iowan and demanded that began to collect taxes in their new area, the locals in the disputed area refused to pay and called upon the Governor of Iowa, Robert Lucas – yes, he of the Toledo War fame – to defend their interests.
In November 1839 a tax inspector from Missouri appeared in the disputed area. Although the Iowans chased him away, he had time to extract partial payment of outstanding taxes, chopping down three trees which contained bees nests chock full of honey, an important mainstay of the local economy.
Boggs was not standing for the insult inflicted on his official and called upon his militia, some 800 men, to assemble near Waterloo. Lucas retaliated by recruiting a rag-tag army, sporting an assortment of rifles, shotguns and swords. Before a shot was fired in what was known as the Honey War, though, some sort of sanity prevailed. Both armies stood down and the matter was referred to the Supreme Court. In the interim, whilst both states laid claim to the disputed area, a sort of uneasy co-existence prevailed.
Eventually, in 1849, the Supreme Court ruled that the original Sullivan Line marked the boundary between Missouri and Iowa and ordered a team of surveyors to make an extensive search to find Sullivan’s blazed tree. After several days of searching, the team found the mark by chopping into a decayed tree. They then ran a line due west to the Missouri River and due east to the Des Moines River, inserted large iron pillars at each end and then ran a series of wooden or iron posts from one end to the other.
Once the work had been completed and the Supreme Court was satisfied with the result, this curious dispute came to an end.
September 10, 2018
Coincidences Are Spiritual Puns – Part Nine
A train in Peru
Travelling by train can be a daunting experience. On commuter services, which increasingly resemble cattle trucks, the primary concern of anyone brave enough to venture into a carriage is to find somewhere to park their posterior. This may require them to engage in a modicum of conversation with a fellow-passenger but once some space has been secured, the convention, at least in the South East of England, is to mind your own business and studiously avoid any contact with anyone in your vicinity.
Out in what we rather pejoratively call the sticks train travel can be a slightly more civilised experience and on longer journeys it is not uncommon to engage with your neighbour in some small talk, perhaps a general enquiry as to where they are going, the weather prospects or an observation on the punctuality of the train.
Travelling on a train service abroad is an entirely different proposition altogether. It can often be a relief, as a foreigner, to find a fellow traveller from your home country and the temptation to strike up conversation is almost impossible to resist. In the 1920s, at least we are led to believe, people were much less self-absorbed and, dare I say it, more polite and better mannered than they are today. So it was not unnatural for three Englishmen who found themselves in the same carriage on a train trundling through darkest Peru – alas, the train did not set out from Paddington – to strike up conversation.
As well-bred Westerners their first task was to introduce themselves, doubtless with the shaking hands and possibly even the proffering of business cards. One of the three announced himself as Mr Bingham. When it was time for the second man to reveal his identity, he told his two travelling companions that he was Mr Powell. The third floored his companions when he told them his name – he was Mr Bingham-Powell, no doubt the engineer, H J Bingham-Powell, who published in 1916 the blockbuster that was Sanitary Progress in Peru and Bolivia.
What are the chances of that?
I suppose we need to recognise that in those days, probably the only way to get around Peru in any sort of comfort and with any degree of speed was to go by train. And Westerners, particularly those on business or well-heeled, would naturally gravitate to the first class carriage, if such a facility was available. So for three Westerners to find themselves in the same first-class carriage on a train in Peru is not that unusual in itself.
But what about the coincidence of the surnames?
In researching this conundrum I came across a rather interesting website, www.sofeminine.co.uk which includes a glossary of most surnames found in the UK. There is no information, at least that I could glean, as to the currency of the data so I think we can only use its data as a general indication of the relative frequency of the given surnames.
Let’s start with Powell. The database reveals that it is the 85th most common British surname with some 76,793 people, give or take, sharing the moniker. Bingham, on the other hand, languishes down at 1,588 with just 6,444 folk bearing that family name. A search for Bingham-Powell took me down a dead-end, returning the less than helpful message that there was insufficient data but there were probably less than 1,300 with that surname.
So even allowing for the likelihood of three Westerners sharing the same carriage on a train in Peru being relatively high, the probability of them sharing the surname combinations that they did is quite low – cleverer mathematicians than I could have a stab at calculating it. After all, it is not like a Smith, Jones and Smith-Jones combination.
A bizarre coincidence, to be sure.
September 9, 2018
City Of The Week
Fancy moving to a city which is expected to double its population in the next few months? If so, Ruso in the McLean County of North Dakota may just suit you fine.
Ruso, in its pomp in the early 20th century, had a population of 141 but since the last business, a grain elevator, shut down in 1956, the number of citizens has dwindled dramatically. The death, in July, of its mayor, 86-year-old Bruce Lorenz, brought the population down to just two, one short of the absolute minimum for a community to be incorporated as a city under the rather liberal North Dakota Century Code.
After a bit of head scratching, the remaining duo have convinced the authorities that Greg Schmaltz, who has a mailbox in Ruso and checks his livestock on land within the city limits every day, qualifies as a resident.
So that’s all right then.
To regularise matters, Greg, who is expected to be appointed the new mayor, and his wife, Michelle, are building a house in the city and expect to move in during the next few months.
But there is plenty of room for others.
September 8, 2018
Sporting Event Of The Week (17)
For food sploshers the world over, the place to go to last week was the Plaza del Pueblo in Bunol, 38 kilometres west of Valencia in Spain. Yes, it was the annual Tomatina festival.
Revellers throw squashed tomatoes at each other for an hour. The fruit is brought in from Extramadura where they are less expensive and at 11 in the morning a water cannon is fired and all hell lets loose. An hour later another water cannon is fired and proceedings come to a halt.
It is then off to the nearby river for the participants to wash themselves whilst the council give the place a scrub down.
No one knows quite how it all started but being Spain, it has been hijacked as a festival in honour of the town’s local saints, Luis Bertran and the Mare de Deu dels Desemparats.
Technically the proceedings should not start until someone has climbed up a tall, greasy, wooden pole to collect a ham placed at the top but it takes so long, no one can be bothered to wait.
Throwing tomatoes is much more fun!
If rolling around in 450 litres of ersatz gravy in fancy dress, grappling an opponent, on a rainy Bank Holiday Monday in darkest Lancashire is more of your bag, then you should have headed to the Rose ‘n Bowl in Stacksteads for the 11th World Gravy Wrestling Championships.
A crowd of around 800 saw Joel Grant win the men’s title for the 5th time, although it was his first since 2015, and Roxy Afzal retain the women’s crown she first won in 2017.
A good time was had by all and no one was browned off.
Tomatoes or gravy, the choice is yours!
September 7, 2018
What Is The Origin Of (196)?…
Get the upper hand
If I was pressed to name my ten favourite tracks of all time, high up there would be Matty Groves from Fairport Convention’s seminal 1969 album, Liege and Lief. The interplay between Richard Thompson’s guitar and Dave Swarbrick’s violin together with Sandy Denny’s majestic vocals meant that folk rock had truly arrived.
The song is a reworking of a traditional ballad, Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, which appeared in Francis Child’s collection of English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in 1882. Childs dated the ballad in question to around 1600. This dating is important in determining the origin of our phrase, get the upper hand, which is used to signify that someone or something has taken a dominant position or gained an advantage.
The ballad, a tragic tale of marital deception and its consequences, contains the following stanza; “A grave, a grave, Lord Barnard cryd/ To put these lovers in;/ But bury my lady on the upper hand,/ For she came of the better kin.” The Fairport’s version has the final couplet as “but bury my lady at the top/ for she was of noble kin.”
If Childs’ dating of the ballad is anywhere near the mark, then we can dispose of some of the more fanciful theories behind the origin of the phrase. One of those is a method used to choose teams for games of playground baseball in the States, a selection process which was always a trial for the unathletic the world over. Apparently one captain would grab the bottom of the handle of a baseball bat and the other captain would hold it immediately above their opponent’s hand and so on until they reached the top. The one whose hand was at the top would have the upper hand and get first pick.
But baseball wasn’t invented until Abner Doubleday had the bright idea in 1839. Its precursor, rounders, is believed to have been played since the 16th century, the first reference to the game, interestingly referred to as baseball, appearing in A Little Pretty Pocketbook, published in 1744. It is highly unlikely that this is the origin.
Nor is it likely to relate to the charming custom of holding hands. Whilst most of us do it automatically, one of the pair’s hand is above the other’s and it may signify some kind of dominance. Thomas Macaulay seems to suggest this sense in his History of England, published in 1848, when discussing some areas of dispute which included “who should take the upper hand in public walks..”
The usage in the Little Musgrave ballad revolves around status. Lady Barnard is to be buried above Musgrave because she had a higher social status. In Roman times a marriage cum manu (literally, with hand) was one where the wife came under the legal control of her hubby, contrasting with a marriage sine manu (without hand) where control remained with the bride’s father. Is Lord Barnard simply exercising his right over his wife in determining where she is buried?
Or, alternatively, is it something to do with wrestling? The term, get the over hand, relating to an opponent taking control of their opponent, has been around since the 14th century and wrestling was an extremely popular pastime in medieval and later times. But this sense doesn’t quite gel with its usage in the Little Musgrave ballad, unless, of course, it is being used in a figurative sense.
It is all a bit puzzling.
Its antonym, get the lower hand, has been around since at least the 1690s, although its usage is very rare.
