Martin Fone's Blog, page 277
November 11, 2017
Sculpture Of The Week
It is amazing what you can find when you take a hike in the mountains. A group, including Marika Roth, were approaching the summit of Mount Oetscher in south-western Austria when their attention was grabbed by an enormous (ahem) erection on the summit.
Someone, whose identity is at the time of writing is unknown, had carved and installed a giant phallic sculpture on the mountain top. If the artist’s identity remains shrouded in mystery, the authorities will have no option but to hand it over to the owners of the land – a religious order of monks.
It is a good job the land is not owned by nuns, methinks.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: Marika Roth, Mount Oescher, phallic sculpture on Austrian mountain
November 10, 2017
What Is The Origin Of (153)?…
Peter out
Peter out is another phrase to describe a disappointing outcome after a promising start, the frequency of such phrases is perhaps synonymous with the reality of life. When something peters out it dwindles away to nothing. My sense is that it is slightly more neutral than fizzle out which conveys a hint of annoyance, frustration or despair. But where does our phrase come from and, in particular, what does peter mean?
America in the mid 19th century was a land of opportunity as immigrants began to exploit its vast mineral reserves. In particular, for many the lure of panning for and finding gold proved irresistible. The California gold rush of 1848 is perhaps the most famous but there had been earlier gold rushes – in 1799 at Cabarrus County, North Carolina and in 1829 in Georgia. The problem with small seams of mineral is that they were finite in size and soon exhausted. Peter seems to have been used by miners to describe this phenomenon and the consequent impact on their luck and fortune.
The first recorded use of peter in this context appeared in the Milwaukee Daily Gazette in December 1845 where a miner laments his luck thus, “When my mineral petered why they all Petered me. Now it is dig, dig, dig, drill, drill for nothing. My luck is clean gone – tapered down to nothing.” Peter out seems to have first appeared in 1854 in Puddleford and its People by Henry Hiram Riley and its usage is figurative rather than rooted in prospecting; “he hoped this ‘spectable meeting warn’t going to Peter-out.” By 1873 it was being used again in the context of mining and if the gloss provided by Appleton’s Journal of 18th October 1873 is to be relied upon, it was a piece of miners’ argot. “No mortal forecast can tell whether a good vein will not narrow to nothing (‘peter out,’ as the miners phrase it) in a week; and, on the other hand, it may widen in that time beyond all anticipation.”
From this rather narrow usage, it developed the wider, figurative usage with which we are familiar today. But why peter? The temptation is almost irresistible to associate it with the apostle Peter, who, after all, was the rock. Perhaps it was an example of a minced oath, one of those whose contents are changed to avoid blasphemy and to protect the sensitivities of the religious? Attractive as this may be, I think it unlikely.
The next candidate is the agent with which rocks were dislodged to reveal the minerals – gunpowder, an important component of which is saltpetre. The American spelling, almost certainly due to the strictures of Noah Webster, is saltpeter and peter is found as a slang word used to describe the act of using gunpowder as this example from 1962 shows, “The Dolman boys are going to peter a pawnshop safe tonight.” The problem I have with this usage is that there is no sense of dwindling.
Perhaps a more likely derivation is from the French verb, péter, which means, inevitably, to fart. It is certainly the origin of petard, a medieval military explosive device, and was used in the 18th century to describe a loaded dice. In the 19th century peter appeared as a slang word meaning to stop or cease – the first example is found in 1812 – and this seems to be more apposite to the modern usage.
Which origin, if any, is correct is uncertain and my attempts to go any further petered out.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Cabarrus County gold rush, California Gold Rush, fizzle out, Georgia Gold Rush, minced oath, mining slang, Noah Webster, origin of peter out, péter, saltpetre, the Apostle Peter
November 9, 2017
Our Crime Against Criminals Lies In The Fact That We Treat Them Like Rascals – Part Three
The Antwerp Diamond Heist of 2003
Perhaps I shouldn’t broadcast it but around 80 per cent of the world’s uncut diamonds pass through the Belgian city of Antwerp. Naturally, this fact means that it is a magnet for thieves dreaming of the big one. Very few succeed because the Antwerp World Diamond Centre (AWDC) is heavily protected. The vault which houses the diamonds is situated two floors below ground and has an impressive array of security including a lock with 100 million possible combinations, infrared heat detectors, a seismic sensor, Doppler radar and a magnetic field. If that was not enough, it boasted its own security force.
But on 16th February 2003 the security was breached and the thieves got away with over $100m of diamonds, none of which have ever been recovered. So successful were the gang that they were unable to remove the contents of all of the deposit boxes in the time they had available, leaving 66 of the 189 boxes intact. Opening a deposit box was no mean feat as each was made out of steel and copper and had key and combination locks.
So how was it accomplished? I have always adopted the 6P principle, perfect planning prevents piss-poor performance, and the heist was a masterpiece of planning. It all started three years earlier when an Italian career criminal, Leonardo Notarbartolo, rented a small, sparsely furnished office in the AWDC, paying a rent of around $700 a month for the privilege. And it certainly came with privileges as it gave him and his accomplices – it is thought that there were four members in the gang – an ID card which gave them twenty-four hour access to the building. It also gave them access to the area where the safe deposit boxes were.
Notarbartolo set himself up as a small-time diamond dealer to give credibility to his enterprise, holding meetings and doing small deals. Eventually plans were set and the gang was ready to move. To cover their tracks they substituted their own video film into the security cameras and set to work emptying the boxes, taking as many diamonds as they could physically carry. The police have to this day not been able to work out how the robbery was actually accomplished.
However it was done, it worked like a dream. No alarms were triggered, no problems were encountered and they even had time to take their bogus video tape out of the security cameras. By the time the vault was checked on the Monday morning and the extent of the theft was discovered, the gang were on their way back to Italy with the gems, with the aim of meeting up in Milan to divvy up the spoils.
En route to Milan, Nortarbartolo and one of his accomplices, Speedy – the getaway driver (natch) – stopped off to dispose some of the detritus of the robbery. It was here that Speedy had something akin to a panic attack and hurled the bag into the woods, resulting in videotape hanging from the branches of the trees and a half-eaten salami sandwich nestling in the undergrowth. It was the sandwich that proved Nortarbartolo’s undoing, the police using some traces of DNA found on it together with scenes from the video footage to finger him. He was sentenced to 10 years, proving that in planning a crime it is the little things that count.
Filed under: History Tagged: Antwerp World Diamond Centre, great robberies, Leonardo Notarbartolo, the 6P principle, the Antwerp Diamond heist of 2003
November 8, 2017
The Streets Of London – Part Sixty Six
Catherine Wheel Alley, EC2
If you walk down Middlesex Street in a westerly direction you will come to a bifurcation in the road. The left spur goes by the rather quaint name of Catherine Wheel Alley and narrows into a very tight alley way until it emerges into the hustle-bustle of Bishopsgate. I used the passage to make my way to Dirty Dick’s which is to be found at 202, Bishopsgate, adjacent to the entrance to our alley.
The Dick whose name is celebrated by the pub is Nathaniel Bentley, who was a fashionable man about town until his stag night. Just before he sat down to celebrate his forthcoming nuptials, news reached him that his intended had tragically died. Elsewhere in this blog we have seen that a significant event can be the tipping point into the descent into eccentricity and this was the case with Nathaniel. He became a recluse, wearing patched up clothing and spending a mere pittance on daily necessities. He eschewed personal hygiene, telling anyone that was interested, “if I wash my hands today, they will be dirty again tomorrow.”
His house in Leadenhall Street became neglected and hosted many creepy crawlies, bats, vermin, and, of course, cobwebs. Bentley is said to have been the person from whom Charles Dickens drew his inspiration for Miss Haversham. When Bentley died in 1809, the contents of his house including all the dead and desiccated vermin were bought by a publican and transported to his pub on Bishopsgate, where they have been on display ever since. When I started drinking there, the artefacts were all over the pub but these days, no doubt for ‘elf and safety reasons, they are confined to a glass cabinet near the carsey.
Like many an alley in London, Catherine Wheel Alley took its name from a pub, the Catherine Wheel which stood there for nigh on three hundred years, after the area was demolished following the Great Fire of 1666. If had you popped in for a snifter in the early part of the 18th century, you may have bumped into the highwayman, Dick Turpin, and his motley crew as they used it as a watering hole, when they were at leisure or planning their next attack on some well-to-do person travelling through Epping Forest.
The pub was supposedly the last galleried pub in the area. Alas, it was destroyed by fire in 1895. A large part of the shell of the building survived and it remained there until it was eventually pulled down in 1911. Although we nowadays associate the Catherine wheel with a type of firework, in medieval times it was a fearsome form of torture. The victim was lashed to a wooden wheel and their limbs were beaten with clubs or iron cudgels. Death was not instantaneous – some lingering on for a number of days in excruciating agony. Its use was phased out in the 18th century but the first to be threatened with it was Saint Catherine of Alexandria, although the wheel broke when she touched it. She was beheaded instead!
At some point Puritans objected to the alley bearing the name of a 9th century saint and the alley was renamed the Cat and Wheel Alley. Although this may have placated their religious sensibilities, it was quickly realised that the new name made no sense and the alley reverted back to its original name.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Cat and Wheel Alley, Catherine Wheel Alley, Charles Dickens, Dick Turpin, Dirty Dick, Dirty Dick's pub, Nataniel Dick Bentley, role model for Miss Havisham, St Catherine of Alexandria, the Catherine Wheel pub
November 7, 2017
They Made Their Mark – Part Three
Thomas Bowdler (1754 – 1825)
There is a fine distinction to be drawn between political correctness and censorship. I sometimes find when I am reading literature from a century or so ago, I come across sentiments and expressions of language which make me blanche but I shrug my shoulders, mutter “different times, different strokes” and pass on. Some, though, can’t resist picking up the red crayon and excising the passages that offend. One such was Thomas Bowdler, a doctor, chess player and prison reformer, who gave his name to the curious habit of changing an author’s original intent.
Bowdler’s aim was to protect the sensibilities of women and children from any form of moral turpitude that may be lurking in the mellifluous lines of William Shakespeare. He hacked and edited his way through the Bard’s literary corpus, publishing in 1818 The Family Shakspeare – it was retitled The Family Shakespeare in subsequent editions and I wonder whether the errant e had offended his highly strung sensitivities. It ran to 10 volumes and followed on from an earlier attempt with his sister, Henrietta, in 1807 to straighten out and improve twenty of the Bard’s plays.
An advert announced the publication of the Family Shakespeare and gave a clear statement of Bowdler’s aims and methodology. “My great objects in this undertaking are to remove from the writings of Shakspeare, some defects which diminish their value; and, at the same time, to present to the public an edition of his Plays, which the parent, the guardian, and the instructor of youth, may place without fear in the hands of the pupil; and from which the pupil may derive instruction as well as pleasure; may improve his moral principles, while he refines his taste; and without incurring the danger of being hurt with any indelicacy of expression, may learn in the fate of Macbeth, that even a kingdom is dearly purchased, if virtue be the price of acquisition.”
The 1807 edition saw the removal of about 10% of the text. In the 1820 edition some of the original excisions were restored but also hacked out other passages which had escaped his attention – perhaps he blamed his sister. Some of the changes simply substituted blasphemous language such as God or Jesu with the more anodyne Heavens but some of the alterations were more drastic and had a significant impact on the characters and plot. Ophelia’s suicide in Hamlet became a case of accidental drowning and in Henry II the prostitute, Doll Tearsheet, disappeared completely. Lady Macbeth’s “Out damned spot” became “Out crimson spot” – not quite the same and not something dog haters could ever contemplate saying. Measure for Measure and Othello were so offensive to Bowdler that they were printed with the warning that they were “unfortunately little suited to family reading.”
What Bowdler didn’t do was add to the Bard’s works, something earlier editors did with gay abandon. Bowdler was the wielder of a black crayon and nothing more. Bowdler’s approach to protecting weaker minds – culminating in Mervyn Griffith-Jones’ rhetorical questions in the Lady Chatterley trial, “Would you approve of your young sons, young daughters – because girls can read as well as boys – reading this book? Is it a book that you would have lying around in your own house? Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” – was taken up with gusto in the 19th century and there were over 50 expurgated editions of Shakespeare. One of the benefits of learning Ancient Greek was to read the bawdy Aristophanes as he wrote it rather than in the rather tame Bowdlerised translations.
Bowdler also had a go at the works of Edward Gibbon, although his version was not published until after his death. The first person to use the verb bowdlerise to describe this curious form of expurgation was the politician, Thomas Perronet Thompson, in an essay in 1836, later published in his 1842 blockbuster, Exercises, political and others.
Bowdler certainly made his mark.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: bowdlerisation of Edward Gibbons, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, motive of Thomas Bowdler, origin of bowdlerise, The Family Shakspeare, Thomas Bowdler, Thomas Perronet Thompson, to bowdlerise
November 6, 2017
Quacks Pretend To Cure Other Men’s Disorders But Rarely Find A Cure For Their Own – Part Sixty Two
James Munroe Munyon (1848 – 1918)
If you have failed to make your mark in the fields of education, law, social work, publishing and song writing, where do you try your hand next? Well, quackery, of course. This was the career path of James M Munyon who founded his homeopathic company, the Homeopathic Home Remedy Company, in the early 1890s in the States. It thrived and in 1897 he was able to open a head office in London and a depot in Liverpool.
Munyon was anything but bashful and many of his remedies were contained in a purpose-built metal counter display case which featured a picture of our hero, holding his right index finger aloft, and a banner which claimed that he “would rather preserve the health of the nation than be its ruler.” Along the side of the display case were slogans which read “The World’s best known remedies for over a quarter of a century” and “A separate Munyon Remedy for each disease.” A typical display case would contain remedies for constipation, hay fever, catarrh, cold and coughs, female problems, general debility, blood and bladder disorders, grippe, problems with the principal organs, neuralgia, headaches, fevers – you get the picture. Whatever problem you had, Munyon had a solution for it.
In Britain Munyon launched a major advertising campaign challenging the Brits to test the efficacy of his remedies and offering free vials of the tinctures to anyone who responded. So successful did Munyon become that the Philadelphia Times wrote that “Professor Munyon is to medicine what Professor Edison is to electricity.” In 1900 Munyon donated two million dollars to establish an industrial school for fatherless girls near his home in Philadelphia and his policy was to donate at least 10 per cent of his profits to charitable good causes each year. He even bought an island, soon to be known as Munyon Island, and built a hotel there named after the Greek goddess of health, Hygeia which opened in 1903 and catered for wealthy Americans who sought some Floridian winter sun. It burnt down in 1917.
Laudable and enterprising as all this was, the main questions to be asked of Munyon were; What was in his remedies? And Did they work? For many a quack the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act in 1906 proved a challenge and the money-making machine that was Munyon soon came under the microscope of the authorities. In 1907 analysis of his Kidney Cure showed that it consisted purely of sugar. The same was true of his Blood Cure and Special Catarrh Cure while the Asthma cure was a mix of sugar and alcohol. Munyon’s Special Liquid Blood Cure was a mix of sugar, potassium iodide and corrosive sublimate whilst the Catarrh Cure was a tasty blend of sodium bicarbonate, salt, borax, phenol and gum. Perhaps more worryingly, the Grippe Remedy contained a heady mix of sugar and arsenic whilst the Pile Ointment was just a farthing’s worth of soft paraffin. Even his best-selling Paw-Paw Elixir turned out to be mainly fermented papaya juice. The high concentration of sugar meant that they must have tasted nice but they wouldn’t cure you.
Munyon was repeatedly hauled up in front of the beak, fined and in 1911 was ordered to remove all reference to curing from his products. But he carried on trading and long after his death – from apoplexy while at lunch –batches of his stuff were still being impounded, as late as the 1940s by which time the Paw-Paw Elixir contained strychnine.
A small footnote – one of the chemists Munyon employed in London was Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen. Now, there’s another story.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Dr Crippen, Homeopathic Home Remedy Company, James Munroe Munyon, Medical quacks, Munyon Island, Munyon's Paw-Paw Elixir, Pure Food and Drug Act
November 5, 2017
Bender Of The Week (5)
What would you do if you found yourself locked in a walk-in beer fridge around midnight? Help yourself to some of the contents, perhaps? Well, this is what Jeremy van Erl did when he found himself locked in at a Kwik Trip convenience store in Marshfield, Wisconsin, I read this week.
Finding himself in this pickle at just before midnight, he made no attempt to summon assistance, eventually being discovered by the staff the following morning, some six hours later. By this time, he had helped himself to a 500 ml Icehouse beer and three cans of Four Loko. On being released van Erl fled the store, knocking over three thirty-packs of Busch beer, before eventually being apprehended and charged with retail theft.
Van Erl may well have been unusually restrained in his drinking in what was far from a Kwik Trip as the convenience store’s fridge probably didn’t contain a convenience. A golden opportunity missed, I feel.
Filed under: Humour, News Tagged: Busch beer, Four Loho beer, Icehouse beer, Jeremy van Erl, Kwik Trip, man locked in beer fridge drinks contents, Marshfield
November 4, 2017
Gig Of The Week (3)
To the Anvil in Basingstoke on 27th October to see Richard Thompson on his Solo Tour. The show was aptly named as it featured just the guitarist, almost lost in the cavernous stage area armed with just a guitar and a table, playing from his vast back catalogue of numbers which, in his own words, span the full range of melancholy. So we were treated to a set ranging from fast rockers such as Valerie to the slower, more thoughtful numbers such as sensitive reading of mental health that is From Galway to Graceland. The set was peppered with his all-time favourites including I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight, the only one of his ditties which troubled the compilers of hit parades.
The evening was a joy for Thompson’s aficionados who were encouraged to let their hair down, if they had any, or else to rattle their jewellery. Celebrating 50 years in the business, Thompson has not lost many of his fans but, perhaps worryingly, not gained many new ones. TOWT and I seemed to be in the younger quartile of his audience.
Inevitably he doffed his beret to the Fairport era but his choice of song, Who Knows Where The Time Goes, was odd as Sandy Denny’s version is peerless and the impressive support act, Josienne Clark and Ben Walker, had already treated us to us to a stunning version of Reynardine. Perhaps, having reunited with some of the old Fairports in the summer, Thompson realised that the other person who made the group what it was in its heyday was Denny and this was his homage.
Josienne Clark has a stunning voice and a personality to match and is one to watch out for, her material outdoing Thompson in the melancholia stakes.
Very few artists can hold the audience for 100 minutes, solely through the power of his material and the virtuosity of his playing. Thompson undoubtedly is one of those.
Filed under: Music Tagged: Ben Walker, Fairport Convention, Josienne Clark, Reynardine, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, the Anvil Basingstoke, The Solo Tour, Who Knows Where The Time Goes
November 3, 2017
What Is The Origin Of (152)?…
Fizzle out
We use this phrase to denote something that has started off promisingly but then has come to a disappointing end. It is analogous to a damp squib. The point of interest in the phrase is the word fizzle and it plays straight into one of this blog’s more regrettable areas of interest, farting.
Farting has given rise to many euphemisms but in modern usage there is no verb to describe what is often the smelliest of all farts, the one that escapes silently and the first that anyone knows about it is the presence of an acrid aroma. In my circles it is known as a SBD, silent but deadly, but it seems our forefathers had a verb to describe this phenomenon. You’ve guessed it – fizzle.
Etymologically speaking it comes from the Middle English verb fisten which meant to break wind. The suffix at the end, -le, is what the grammarians call a frequentative, emphasising frequency or repetition. How apt! Fizzle seems to have entered our language in around 1525 – I hope it crept up on us silently – and was defined as breaking wind without noise. That it was distinctive from a fart can be seen from a passage from Philemon Holland’s 1601 translation of Pliny’s Natural History. There we find “they say if Asses eat thereof, they will fall a fizzling and farting.”
I think we should bring this word back from obsolescence and look forward to dropping into conversation at the pub the phrase, “My word, I’ve just fizzled!” And from the verb we get the nouns, fizzle, which describes the act of breaking wind silently, and a fizzler, someone who perpetrates the act. But how did this meaning fizzle out and be replaced by a much more generic and, frankly, disappointing definition?
The blame, if that is what it is, should be pointed in the direction of American colleges. Fizzling was associated with failing exams and the inability to answer the question(s) posed by a professor. In particular, it seems to have been associated with a bad, possibly inarticulate, recitation. The Yale Banger of 10th November 1846 reports, “This figure of a wounded snake is intended to represent what in technical language is termed a fizzle. The best judges have decided that to get just one third of the meaning right constitutes a perfect fizzle.” A year later, and at Yale too, we find, “My dignity is outraged at beholding those who fizzle and flunk in my presence, tower above me.”
Interestingly, around the same time the meaning of fizzle was escaping the narrow confines of farting and academic failure. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests that by 1859 fizzle could be defined as making “a noise as of liquid or gas forced out of a narrow aperture, usually with special reference to the weakness and sudden diminution or cessation of such sound.” In particular, it was associated with oil drilling and what was quaintly termed as “unambitious rockets.” It is easy, then, to see the move to the modern-day figurative sense of proving a failure after a bright and promising start.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: difference between fizzle and fart, fisten, fizzling in American college slang, grammatical frequentative, meaning of fizzle, origin of fizzle out, origins of a damp squib, Philemon Holland, translation of Pliny's Natural History
November 2, 2017
You’re Having A Laugh – Part Three
The Cardiff Giant, 1869
On 16th October 1869 a group of workmen were digging a well behind a barn on the farm of one William C “Stub” Newell when they made an astonishing discovery. They unearthed the petrified remains of a giant ten-foot tall man. News of the discovery spread like wildfire and crowds soon assembled anxious to view the phenomenon. The enterprising Newell erected a tent over the site and charged a fee of 25 cents for a look. Two days later he upped it to 50 cents – even this did not deter the crowds.
The discovery was opportune as locally there had been an impassioned debate as to whether the Bible should be taken literally. One of the adherents of literalism had claimed that the passage in Genesis 6:4 which states “There were giants in the earth in those days” was a historical fact. The unearthing of the Cardiff Giant, as it was dubbed, seemed to have made his point. A group of businessmen clubbed together to raise $37,500 to buy the giant so that it could be moved to Syracuse to be displayed more prominently.
Of course the discovery was too good to be true because it was all an elaborate hoax, the brainchild of an atheist tobacconist from New York, George Hull – is there any other sort?. In the light of the discussion on giants, he immediately “thought of making a statue, and passing it off as a petrified man.” Not only would it give him the opportunity to pull the legs of the Bible bashers but it might even earn him some money. So the idea of an elaborate hoax was born.
Having secured a 3.2 metre tall block of gypsum he had it carved by a German stonecutter, Edward Burghardt, based in Chicago. To give it the appearance of antiquity, the statue was treated with various stains and acids. It was then transported by rail to the farm owned by Newell – Hull’s cousin. In all Hull spent around $2,600 in setting up the hoax. The two workmen hired to dig the well, Gideon Emmens and Henry Nichols, were also probably in the plot. One of the workers, on discovering the giant, remarked “I declare, some old Indian has been buried here!”
Despite the attempts to age the statue, they were extremely amateurish and didn’t pass the scrutiny of experts who pored over the find in Syracuse. A palaeontologist from Yale University, Othniel C Marsh, declared it to be a fake. Chisel marks were plainly visible which would have worn away had the statue been in the ground for any length of time. Realising that he had had a good run for his money, Hull came clean and confessed that it had all been an elaborate hoax.
But the story of the Cardiff giant didn’t finish there. It seems even then people believed what they wanted to believe. They couldn’t care that it was a hoax – they wanted to see it and kept coming in their droves. The giant was even given an affectionate nickname – Old Hoaxey.
Never one to miss out on a good thing, showman, P T Barnum, offered the owners of the giant $60,000 to lease it for three months. When they refused, he had his own replica made and displayed it in his museum in New York. The owners of the giant sued but the case was dropped because the judge wanted the genuineness of the original to be established. The giant can still be seen today, housed in the Farmer’s Museum in Coopertown.
Filed under: Culture, History Tagged: Cardiff Giant court case, Farmer's Museum in Coopertown, Genesis 6:4, George Hull, Gideon Emmens and Henry Nichols, Old Hoaxey, P T Barnum, The Cardiff giant, William C “Stub” Newell
