My daughter and her 'boyfriend' - they seem to quite like each other but both are past the silly 'falling in love' stage I think. (I hope.) If they decide to marry it will be an economic decision although she is dead keen to have children, which is, nowadays, not an positive economic decision. It is a 'wait and see' situation. He is at present, oddly enough, (Sat 17 Mar) in Texas for a work conference.
Clarissa, the daughter in Australia has been very quiet lately. I know what is going on. She has been hoping for a daughter for the last three births and has gone to ground pending a scan to establish the gender of the foetus. Peculiar, isn't it? I come from a family of three daughters, had only daughters myself, and they in turn have had only sons. David, her husband, comes from a family of four daughters and two sons, so daughters were in the ascendancy there also.
Yes, send me the URL for the book discussion. I very much love books and that extends to other book lovers. There does seem to be a dichotomy between what men and women will read with absorption. Anthony Trollope and Arnold Bennett - and William Thackeray and probably many others - wrote wonderful books from the female perspective. I don't include Flaubert and Tolstoy in this category, because although they wrote about women it was from a male perspective. I don't see any male authors doing even that now and I don't know any males who read such books with an enjoyment similar to that of women. The same goes for female authors like Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters. The hair stands up on my head when I hear such books referred to as 'chick lit'.
In celebration of St Patrick's Day, I am reading a couple of books by Flan O'Brien. Not only are the rich different, the Irish are also.
A couple of earthquakes here this week but not where I live. No damage as is usually the case for New Zealand (nickname 'The Shaky Isles'). We are earthquake aware. When in the most romantic of situations if a Kiwi is asked 'Did the earth move for you?' they will immediately look to see if the centre light is still swinging. No breathy sighs of 'yes'. More likely a leap to stand under a doorway and away from windows. (Doorways are reinforced.) It doesn't matter how much one fears flying, an earthquake can make the most craven anti-flying coward want to take to the air.
A little bit of interest. After the Napier earthquake in the 1930s (can't remember the exact date) the city was largely rebuilt and thanks to some wise city managers, it was re-built in Art Deco style. It is now a pretty city with many historic, artistic buildings. Gisborne, the city in which I was born, is a terrible place for earthquakes. It has a hellish island called White Island offshore which grumbles and spurts volcanically all the time but which is known as a safety valve for the East Coast. A drive along the Desert Road in the middle of the North Island takes you past two active volcanoes. Coming in to Taupo, for miles fissures in the ground have steam coming out of them and Rotorua has hot pools, some of them boiling so you can cook in them, and mud pools burping great hot bubbles. The place stinks of sulphur.
I am still watching everything I eat and yesterday moved the buttons OUT on a favourite jacket of mine. I haven't worn it for months, you know, thinking well, when I lose weight it will fit me again. I have given up on that idea. If I want to wear that jacket, I HAD to make it bigger. How bloody depressing. The thing I need is exercise and I haven't got the energy. You were right Erp, blast it!
Otherwise, a week during which not much happened. The weather is changeable as we slide into winter - and we won't slide out again until the end of the year. Bless my electric blanket, my sheepskin boots and legwarmers, my featherdown duvet, my cossack hat, etc.etc.etc.
From Jude
Friday, March 16, 2007
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Letter to Erp - again
Dear Erp:
The weather has deteriorated here and is now like winter. We had hardly any summer. It has rained heavily the past three days and the termperature is cool but I don't mind. I am a cold weather person.
I have had a problem lately with fatigue which is why I haven't been doing much - I have been either sleeping or resting the better part of twelve hours out of every twenty four. It annoys me. I hate growing old. I went to the doctor and complained but the man has so many genuinely sick people I didn't get much sympathy. It is my heart you see, working too hard now. Childhood illnesses (including rheumatic fever) are creeping back up on me. 'Live with it', he said, 'rest all you want. There is nothing else to be done.' The fatigue is not there all the time, but one day in the future it will be. Just now it is several days on, several days off.
I am wearing out Erp. I just hope I don't outlast my brain.
Did I tell you that my daughter in Australia is expecting another baby? There will be 14 months between Asher and number five. I hope her leg holds up.
About the reading group - I wouldn't mind discussion about a good book, but I really can't be bothered with the male preoccupation with immortality. Ninety nine per cent of them aren't worth it - even if it does exist in the after life. As for living for 200 or more years, I couldn't think of anything worse, unless one could stop ageing. Surely then would begin the battle with boredom. And just think - mothers would be here as well. They are here far too long as it is!
I still haven't got around to putting my photo on the blog - the mere thought of even attempting it the past few days has been enough to send me somewhere warm and soft for a nap.
Have you heard the furore about the film '300'? I got the two books, one is a comic book and one is called 300 the Art of the Film sent to me a couple of months ago to review. I tossed off the review and said they were suitable for 12 - 18 year old males (of the more bloodthirsty type) now I read everywhere how sensitive feelings are being hurt. Is there anything nowadays that doesn't offend somebody? Then it is a three day wonder and something else takes its place. Everybody everywhere is being offended about something all the time it seems.
I have the dentist on Friday.
Some snippets you may enjoy:
Reverend William Spooner. Warden of New College, Oxford University, 1903 - 1924.
His habitual transposition of sounds - metaphasis - made him famous in his own lifetime and gave the world the word - spoonerism.
He was an albino.
Among the more famous utterances attributed to him:
'Which of us has not felt in his heart, a half warmed fish?'
To a delinquent undergraduate:
'You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain.'
PALINDROMES:
The Greeks often put on fountains:
Nispon animimata mi monan opsin - wash the sin as well as the face.
The weather has deteriorated here and is now like winter. We had hardly any summer. It has rained heavily the past three days and the termperature is cool but I don't mind. I am a cold weather person.
I have had a problem lately with fatigue which is why I haven't been doing much - I have been either sleeping or resting the better part of twelve hours out of every twenty four. It annoys me. I hate growing old. I went to the doctor and complained but the man has so many genuinely sick people I didn't get much sympathy. It is my heart you see, working too hard now. Childhood illnesses (including rheumatic fever) are creeping back up on me. 'Live with it', he said, 'rest all you want. There is nothing else to be done.' The fatigue is not there all the time, but one day in the future it will be. Just now it is several days on, several days off.
I am wearing out Erp. I just hope I don't outlast my brain.
Did I tell you that my daughter in Australia is expecting another baby? There will be 14 months between Asher and number five. I hope her leg holds up.
About the reading group - I wouldn't mind discussion about a good book, but I really can't be bothered with the male preoccupation with immortality. Ninety nine per cent of them aren't worth it - even if it does exist in the after life. As for living for 200 or more years, I couldn't think of anything worse, unless one could stop ageing. Surely then would begin the battle with boredom. And just think - mothers would be here as well. They are here far too long as it is!
I still haven't got around to putting my photo on the blog - the mere thought of even attempting it the past few days has been enough to send me somewhere warm and soft for a nap.
Have you heard the furore about the film '300'? I got the two books, one is a comic book and one is called 300 the Art of the Film sent to me a couple of months ago to review. I tossed off the review and said they were suitable for 12 - 18 year old males (of the more bloodthirsty type) now I read everywhere how sensitive feelings are being hurt. Is there anything nowadays that doesn't offend somebody? Then it is a three day wonder and something else takes its place. Everybody everywhere is being offended about something all the time it seems.
I have the dentist on Friday.
Some snippets you may enjoy:
Reverend William Spooner. Warden of New College, Oxford University, 1903 - 1924.
His habitual transposition of sounds - metaphasis - made him famous in his own lifetime and gave the world the word - spoonerism.
He was an albino.
Among the more famous utterances attributed to him:
'Which of us has not felt in his heart, a half warmed fish?'
To a delinquent undergraduate:
'You have hissed my mystery lectures. You have tasted a whole worm. You will leave Oxford on the next town drain.'
PALINDROMES:
The Greeks often put on fountains:
Nispon animimata mi monan opsin - wash the sin as well as the face.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Friday, February 09, 2007
Letter to Erp 3
Dear Erp:
As usual I have been busy with nothing much to show for my industry. I am always up early, about 6am but generally boot up and spend a couple of hours reading the news before breakfast. So there you are, eight ante meridien before I even eat. This morning I made bread. This is an every weekend task, done while I listen to a radio programme which consists of elderly songs, most of which I know so I can sing along and kick out my little feet while kneading. I haven't forgotten about posting a photo on my blog, but have to wait for my daughter to arrive this week and show me what to do. I am not sure I have the thingy on the computer which takes the thingy from the digital camera so need her to show me.
I think I was telling you about my Catholic schooling but did not manage to finish as I had a visitor. Where did I get up to? I think it was about Standard One, as it was called in those days, where the seven years olds went, and this was quite important. Seven was the end of babyhood in a Catholic school. Seven was the attainment of the age of reason, we were told, the age at which we knew the difference between right and wrong, and we agreed, as it seemed to us that we did know the difference. This was the year in which we made our First Confession and celebrated our First Communion. I had difficulty with confession. Finding enough sins was a problem, so I usually ended up confessing to returning library books late or fighting with my sisters. Neither was true.
We girls dressed up in white dresses and veils, white shoes and socks, to make a First Communion, and afterwards there was a feast. Just as well. We had been fasting since 6pm the night before (not even a glass of water) and after the main even it was getting on for 11am. I took religion very seriously up until I was about sixteen. I believed everything I was told. I really quite enjoyed going to the Basilica and enjoyed being pious and pure but I had a nervous condition about going to hell (which we had described to us in detail by each teacher we had), and it led me to have nightmares from which I awoke screaming, although the tense situation at home could have contributed. My father was a drunkard and subject to uncontrollable rages from which we often had to run out of the house. As I was the eldest, my stupid mother would often confide to me her fears of what he would do, and this, combined with hell, at times became unbearable.
After dear old Sister Hoffbar I can remember only three nuns who taught me. Sister Borgia (yes, indeed, believe it or not), Sister Ambrose, and Sister Gertrude. Fine women every one of them, and also the women who sowed the seeds of feminism in my soul. I would stand in front of god and argue that these women genuinely loved children and had not a scrap of envy (no matter what men say) for women who married. They had made a choice and to my eyes they never regretted it.
The priests, now there was a different story. There were four in St Mary's parish, all Irishmen. One of them, Father Keyes, who was a young man when I left school, is still tottering down to the hospital to give Extreme Unction to the dying. Father Gaffey was a wild one, eventually sent back to Ireland for re-programming. Father Mee was a fat, dark haired and dark eyed little man who made no impression on me at all, but Father McCarthy was a priest who was of equal value to the nuns. He drove a Volkswagon van and on most occasions this was full of 11, 12 and 13 year old girls as we tore away for an afternoon of tennis or to netball at another school. This man spent most of his free time as a coach for tennis and netball for the whole girls' school. His behaviour with the girls was beyond reproach. Father McCarthy was a stocky, sandy haired, sportsman type, no drinking or smoking, just mad about sports, sort of stern in his manner (I never heard him laugh and his smile was brief), a moral man who gave real hellfire and brimstone sermons where he turned almost purple with rage in the pulpit. Then he would turn up for tennis or netball coaching and we girls would run to meet him so pleased to see him and he seemed pleased to see us as well. As a coach he never criticised and only praised, he had no favourites, and he worked as we did, running up and down the court as referee, and swinging the tennis racquet although he would have been pushing fifty at that time. I have a pretty good serve and backhand thanks to him.
Now the funny thing is, this very good, this excellent man, was given a trip to Japan as the Catholic Church sometimes does to reward its hard working members. While he was there, Father McCarthy was involved in a traffic accident in which he received head injuries. The head injuries affected his behaviour and he was, as they say 'never the same again'. He became bad tempered, critical and unapproachable and died an unhappy and angry man.
Why do you do these sorts of things god?
Father Gaffey, who smoked, drank, and gambled on the horses, and who liked women too much is also dead but was not really missed by anyone except perhaps Sister Ambrose, who, poor woman, blushed bright red whenever he came into the classroom and we horrible girls sniggered and had no pity for her. Sister Ambrose had three classes in one room for two years. It was really too much for her. When her father died she spent short periods during the day for about three days in the stationery room crying. Us horrible girls got annoyed about that. She showed her feet of clay and we didn't like it, but only because we had thought she was perfect.
By the time I was in my last year at Primary School I was twelve years of age and in Standard 6. I was a clever girl and had been designated for the teaching profession. In those days streaming was usual, with the dumb girls going into Home Economics, where they spent a lot of time doing art, crafts, cooking, dressmaking, and a minimum of lower level English and maths. Thus they were prepared for the factories and shops and eventually, for marriage. Commercial was the middle stream and the girls did shorthand, typing, book keeping, and middle level English and maths. Thus they were prepared for the office and eventually, for marriage. Academic was the top stream and the girls did languages, maths and science. Thus we were prepared for teaching and eventually for the Dominican Order. Unfortunately, towards the end of the year it appeared there was trouble at home. My father's drinking had reached epic proportions, my mother had got somehow into debt, she left the city taking the two younger girls and I was put with people I had never met before, to stay and complete the end of year scholarship examinations. The man of the house where I had been dumped told his wife (in front of me) to get rid of me. I went to another family. I would not do the exams but sat at the desk staring at the papers. I was eventually put on an aeroplane (a DC3) for a seven hour flight to Gisborne. I vomited all the way and eventually had to be carried off as I could not walk. I was totally deaf for three days after the flight. I stayed with four different families for the five weeks we were there. At one I had tonsillitis, at another I had sunstroke. Later I had septicaemia. During the six weeks school holidays I had stayed with six different families. When we returned home I was in a health decline which eventually led to being bedridden for three months and which ruined my education.
I was one of those children who generally do not survive a working class upbringing. I had pneumonia when I was 8 years of age because I was a child who needed warmth and comfort at night and my grandmother had been taken away. By the time I was twelve I had dysmenorrhoea from a lack of calcium, nightmares, bitten fingernails, and was descending into a state of nervousness which has remained with me all my life. I could hardly be taken anywhere as I got motion sickness. (Not that this stopped my parents, who would push me into the back of the car and carry me into the house and put me on the bed to recover when we got home.)
My father died in 1992. The minister called to gather information about his life for his sermon. I could not think of one good thing to say so stayed quiet. So did my mother and my then husband. "Surely," expostulated the minister, "the man can't have been so bad that nobody can think of one good thing to say about him!" Well, maybe the minister was asking the wrong people. I don't know. All I can say is that men need to consider such things as it is a terrible indictment on one to have those nearest you feel only relief at your death.
As usual I have been busy with nothing much to show for my industry. I am always up early, about 6am but generally boot up and spend a couple of hours reading the news before breakfast. So there you are, eight ante meridien before I even eat. This morning I made bread. This is an every weekend task, done while I listen to a radio programme which consists of elderly songs, most of which I know so I can sing along and kick out my little feet while kneading. I haven't forgotten about posting a photo on my blog, but have to wait for my daughter to arrive this week and show me what to do. I am not sure I have the thingy on the computer which takes the thingy from the digital camera so need her to show me.
I think I was telling you about my Catholic schooling but did not manage to finish as I had a visitor. Where did I get up to? I think it was about Standard One, as it was called in those days, where the seven years olds went, and this was quite important. Seven was the end of babyhood in a Catholic school. Seven was the attainment of the age of reason, we were told, the age at which we knew the difference between right and wrong, and we agreed, as it seemed to us that we did know the difference. This was the year in which we made our First Confession and celebrated our First Communion. I had difficulty with confession. Finding enough sins was a problem, so I usually ended up confessing to returning library books late or fighting with my sisters. Neither was true.
We girls dressed up in white dresses and veils, white shoes and socks, to make a First Communion, and afterwards there was a feast. Just as well. We had been fasting since 6pm the night before (not even a glass of water) and after the main even it was getting on for 11am. I took religion very seriously up until I was about sixteen. I believed everything I was told. I really quite enjoyed going to the Basilica and enjoyed being pious and pure but I had a nervous condition about going to hell (which we had described to us in detail by each teacher we had), and it led me to have nightmares from which I awoke screaming, although the tense situation at home could have contributed. My father was a drunkard and subject to uncontrollable rages from which we often had to run out of the house. As I was the eldest, my stupid mother would often confide to me her fears of what he would do, and this, combined with hell, at times became unbearable.
After dear old Sister Hoffbar I can remember only three nuns who taught me. Sister Borgia (yes, indeed, believe it or not), Sister Ambrose, and Sister Gertrude. Fine women every one of them, and also the women who sowed the seeds of feminism in my soul. I would stand in front of god and argue that these women genuinely loved children and had not a scrap of envy (no matter what men say) for women who married. They had made a choice and to my eyes they never regretted it.
The priests, now there was a different story. There were four in St Mary's parish, all Irishmen. One of them, Father Keyes, who was a young man when I left school, is still tottering down to the hospital to give Extreme Unction to the dying. Father Gaffey was a wild one, eventually sent back to Ireland for re-programming. Father Mee was a fat, dark haired and dark eyed little man who made no impression on me at all, but Father McCarthy was a priest who was of equal value to the nuns. He drove a Volkswagon van and on most occasions this was full of 11, 12 and 13 year old girls as we tore away for an afternoon of tennis or to netball at another school. This man spent most of his free time as a coach for tennis and netball for the whole girls' school. His behaviour with the girls was beyond reproach. Father McCarthy was a stocky, sandy haired, sportsman type, no drinking or smoking, just mad about sports, sort of stern in his manner (I never heard him laugh and his smile was brief), a moral man who gave real hellfire and brimstone sermons where he turned almost purple with rage in the pulpit. Then he would turn up for tennis or netball coaching and we girls would run to meet him so pleased to see him and he seemed pleased to see us as well. As a coach he never criticised and only praised, he had no favourites, and he worked as we did, running up and down the court as referee, and swinging the tennis racquet although he would have been pushing fifty at that time. I have a pretty good serve and backhand thanks to him.
Now the funny thing is, this very good, this excellent man, was given a trip to Japan as the Catholic Church sometimes does to reward its hard working members. While he was there, Father McCarthy was involved in a traffic accident in which he received head injuries. The head injuries affected his behaviour and he was, as they say 'never the same again'. He became bad tempered, critical and unapproachable and died an unhappy and angry man.
Why do you do these sorts of things god?
Father Gaffey, who smoked, drank, and gambled on the horses, and who liked women too much is also dead but was not really missed by anyone except perhaps Sister Ambrose, who, poor woman, blushed bright red whenever he came into the classroom and we horrible girls sniggered and had no pity for her. Sister Ambrose had three classes in one room for two years. It was really too much for her. When her father died she spent short periods during the day for about three days in the stationery room crying. Us horrible girls got annoyed about that. She showed her feet of clay and we didn't like it, but only because we had thought she was perfect.
By the time I was in my last year at Primary School I was twelve years of age and in Standard 6. I was a clever girl and had been designated for the teaching profession. In those days streaming was usual, with the dumb girls going into Home Economics, where they spent a lot of time doing art, crafts, cooking, dressmaking, and a minimum of lower level English and maths. Thus they were prepared for the factories and shops and eventually, for marriage. Commercial was the middle stream and the girls did shorthand, typing, book keeping, and middle level English and maths. Thus they were prepared for the office and eventually, for marriage. Academic was the top stream and the girls did languages, maths and science. Thus we were prepared for teaching and eventually for the Dominican Order. Unfortunately, towards the end of the year it appeared there was trouble at home. My father's drinking had reached epic proportions, my mother had got somehow into debt, she left the city taking the two younger girls and I was put with people I had never met before, to stay and complete the end of year scholarship examinations. The man of the house where I had been dumped told his wife (in front of me) to get rid of me. I went to another family. I would not do the exams but sat at the desk staring at the papers. I was eventually put on an aeroplane (a DC3) for a seven hour flight to Gisborne. I vomited all the way and eventually had to be carried off as I could not walk. I was totally deaf for three days after the flight. I stayed with four different families for the five weeks we were there. At one I had tonsillitis, at another I had sunstroke. Later I had septicaemia. During the six weeks school holidays I had stayed with six different families. When we returned home I was in a health decline which eventually led to being bedridden for three months and which ruined my education.
I was one of those children who generally do not survive a working class upbringing. I had pneumonia when I was 8 years of age because I was a child who needed warmth and comfort at night and my grandmother had been taken away. By the time I was twelve I had dysmenorrhoea from a lack of calcium, nightmares, bitten fingernails, and was descending into a state of nervousness which has remained with me all my life. I could hardly be taken anywhere as I got motion sickness. (Not that this stopped my parents, who would push me into the back of the car and carry me into the house and put me on the bed to recover when we got home.)
My father died in 1992. The minister called to gather information about his life for his sermon. I could not think of one good thing to say so stayed quiet. So did my mother and my then husband. "Surely," expostulated the minister, "the man can't have been so bad that nobody can think of one good thing to say about him!" Well, maybe the minister was asking the wrong people. I don't know. All I can say is that men need to consider such things as it is a terrible indictment on one to have those nearest you feel only relief at your death.
Snippets 2
Kingsley William Amis (1922-1995)
(One of the 'Angry Young Men' Amis was a working class only child smart enough to get a university education.)
However bright, the Lefty as defined by Amis was moved primarily not by ideas but by feelings and emotions. He or she typically started out as a young person who had an 'unfocussed dissatisfaction with the way things are', that is, with the way authority in the shape of employers or parents seemed to stand in the way his or her freedom just for the sake of being obstructive.
In stage two of the Lefty's development, the young man finds himself not getting on very far in a competitive world and when he asks himself why, he finds a blissfully satisfying answer. Which is that it's not his fault for being lazy or stupid or anything else - it's all the fault of the system that holds him back. So from now on the system must be opposed.
Amis knew all about his version of the Lefty from having been one himself.
...soon after his novel The Anti-Death League was published in 1966, Amis described its theme as being that 'what causes most unhappiness and feelings of revolt is the inescapable condition of human life...'
He had used to think, Amis went on, 'that human beings could be made significantly happier by transforming their outward lives'. Now he thought differently. 'Their real enemies are not
capitalism but death, not landlords but cancer, not warmingering but the power to kill people.'
p 281
In November it was the Observer's turn to be berated for implying that the Isralis had carried out the massacres of the Palestinians in Beirut and quoting two sources to back their case - 'Yassar Arafat and the PLO's man in New York.' The next year Amis invented a name for this kind of thinking: seditious neutrality'.
p 345
(from Kingsley Amis a Biography by Eric Jacobs)
Sport, as I have discovered, fosters international hostility and leads the audience, no doubt from boredom, to assault and do grevious bodily harm while watching it. The fact that audiences at the National Theatre rarely break bottles over one another's heads, and that Opera fans seldom knee one another in the groin during long intervals at Convent Garden, convinces me that the theatre is safer than sport. p 21 Clinging to the Wreckage by John Mortimer
(One of the 'Angry Young Men' Amis was a working class only child smart enough to get a university education.)
However bright, the Lefty as defined by Amis was moved primarily not by ideas but by feelings and emotions. He or she typically started out as a young person who had an 'unfocussed dissatisfaction with the way things are', that is, with the way authority in the shape of employers or parents seemed to stand in the way his or her freedom just for the sake of being obstructive.
In stage two of the Lefty's development, the young man finds himself not getting on very far in a competitive world and when he asks himself why, he finds a blissfully satisfying answer. Which is that it's not his fault for being lazy or stupid or anything else - it's all the fault of the system that holds him back. So from now on the system must be opposed.
Amis knew all about his version of the Lefty from having been one himself.
...soon after his novel The Anti-Death League was published in 1966, Amis described its theme as being that 'what causes most unhappiness and feelings of revolt is the inescapable condition of human life...'
He had used to think, Amis went on, 'that human beings could be made significantly happier by transforming their outward lives'. Now he thought differently. 'Their real enemies are not
capitalism but death, not landlords but cancer, not warmingering but the power to kill people.'
p 281
In November it was the Observer's turn to be berated for implying that the Isralis had carried out the massacres of the Palestinians in Beirut and quoting two sources to back their case - 'Yassar Arafat and the PLO's man in New York.' The next year Amis invented a name for this kind of thinking: seditious neutrality'.
p 345
(from Kingsley Amis a Biography by Eric Jacobs)
Sport, as I have discovered, fosters international hostility and leads the audience, no doubt from boredom, to assault and do grevious bodily harm while watching it. The fact that audiences at the National Theatre rarely break bottles over one another's heads, and that Opera fans seldom knee one another in the groin during long intervals at Convent Garden, convinces me that the theatre is safer than sport. p 21 Clinging to the Wreckage by John Mortimer
Friday, February 02, 2007
Snippets
It seems strange to relate now, but in 1960 Lady Chatterley's Lover (D H Lawrence) was a book at the centre of an indecency trial at the Old Bailey in London.
Gerald Gardiner (Harrow, Magdalene College Oxford, later Lord Chancellor in a Labour Government was the Defence. Mervyn Griffith-Jones (Eton, Trinity Hall Cambridge, later a judge) was for the Prosecution.
Gardiner examined a long string of witnesses, comparatively few of whom were re-examined by Griffith-Jones & etc.
Quite early on in the proceedings Griffith-Jones asked his now famous question: 'Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?' The enquiry has now passed into history together with the equally well remembered comment (attributed to a peer during the subsequent debate in the House of Lords): 'I should not object to my wife or my daughter reading the book, but I have the strongest objection to it being read by my gamekeeper.'
_______________________________________________________________
Some 2006 news headlines:
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
Is There a Ring of Debris Around Uranus?
Miners Refuse to Work After Death
War Dims Hope for Peace
Red Tape Holds up New Bridges
____________________________________________________________
Palindrome:
The noon sex alert relaxes no one. HT.
(James Thurber)
_____________________________________________________________
During the 1930s Thurber was somewhat alienated from several of his writer friends who were adopting extremely left-wing views. Thurber grasped at once the fear and hatred of humour felt by Marxists as perhaps their ideology's greatest enemy. He expresses an aspect of what was happening round him in one of his letters to his friend and collaborator E B White:
This is one of the greatest menaces there is: people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grim grey and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It's a form of egotism, a supreme form. I've toyed with it myself and understand it a little. It's as dangerous as toying with a drug.
______________________________________________________________
When in 1861 Isaac Singer, inventor of the Singer sewing machine came to Paris, he was in several respects the prototype of the Henry James American exploring Europe - many times a millionaire, interested in the arts, anxious to widen his horizons.
In one point, however, Singer was very unlike a Jamesian hero. So far from being an innocent, corrupted by the bad Old World, he had fathered sixteen illegitimate children back home, and soon after arrival in Paris he seduced an upper-middle-class French girl thirty years his junior, whom he subsequently married, producing six more, legitimate children.
____________________________________________________________
'Of that Ilk' simply means that the surname is the same as that of the estate. For example - Sir Iain Moncrieffe of that Ilk.
______________________________________________________________________
careen - to lay a ship on its side.
career - a path through life.
_____________________________________________________________________
Maundy Gregory (1877-1941) was one of the touts used as a go-between for those who wished to purchase an honour and swell the Liberal (or rather the Lloyd George) Party fund.
There can be no doubt whatever, that the methods employed by Lloyd George when Prime Minister, passed all bounds in the scandalous and utterly cynical manner in which honours (ranging from viscounties downwards) were hawked round literally for sale: sometimes to men of the most dubious reputation.
___________________________________________________________________
Gerald Gardiner (Harrow, Magdalene College Oxford, later Lord Chancellor in a Labour Government was the Defence. Mervyn Griffith-Jones (Eton, Trinity Hall Cambridge, later a judge) was for the Prosecution.
Gardiner examined a long string of witnesses, comparatively few of whom were re-examined by Griffith-Jones & etc.
Quite early on in the proceedings Griffith-Jones asked his now famous question: 'Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?' The enquiry has now passed into history together with the equally well remembered comment (attributed to a peer during the subsequent debate in the House of Lords): 'I should not object to my wife or my daughter reading the book, but I have the strongest objection to it being read by my gamekeeper.'
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Some 2006 news headlines:
Something Went Wrong in Jet Crash, Expert Says
Is There a Ring of Debris Around Uranus?
Miners Refuse to Work After Death
War Dims Hope for Peace
Red Tape Holds up New Bridges
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Palindrome:
The noon sex alert relaxes no one. HT.
(James Thurber)
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During the 1930s Thurber was somewhat alienated from several of his writer friends who were adopting extremely left-wing views. Thurber grasped at once the fear and hatred of humour felt by Marxists as perhaps their ideology's greatest enemy. He expresses an aspect of what was happening round him in one of his letters to his friend and collaborator E B White:
This is one of the greatest menaces there is: people with intelligence deciding that the point is to become grim grey and intense and unhappy and tiresome because the world and many of its people are in a bad way. It's a form of egotism, a supreme form. I've toyed with it myself and understand it a little. It's as dangerous as toying with a drug.
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When in 1861 Isaac Singer, inventor of the Singer sewing machine came to Paris, he was in several respects the prototype of the Henry James American exploring Europe - many times a millionaire, interested in the arts, anxious to widen his horizons.
In one point, however, Singer was very unlike a Jamesian hero. So far from being an innocent, corrupted by the bad Old World, he had fathered sixteen illegitimate children back home, and soon after arrival in Paris he seduced an upper-middle-class French girl thirty years his junior, whom he subsequently married, producing six more, legitimate children.
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'Of that Ilk' simply means that the surname is the same as that of the estate. For example - Sir Iain Moncrieffe of that Ilk.
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careen - to lay a ship on its side.
career - a path through life.
_____________________________________________________________________
Maundy Gregory (1877-1941) was one of the touts used as a go-between for those who wished to purchase an honour and swell the Liberal (or rather the Lloyd George) Party fund.
There can be no doubt whatever, that the methods employed by Lloyd George when Prime Minister, passed all bounds in the scandalous and utterly cynical manner in which honours (ranging from viscounties downwards) were hawked round literally for sale: sometimes to men of the most dubious reputation.
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Sunday, January 21, 2007
Letter to Erp. Going to the Convent.
It has finally stopped raining. Sod's Law has prevailed. When people have time off from school and work on Saturday and Sunday, it rains. Then the weather clears up for a sunny, warm week. I don't remember this happening when I was a child. Perhaps it doesn't matter to children anyway. Playing in the rain and splashing in puddles can be as much fun as skipping in the sun.
In 1951, when we finally settled into a permanent home, I started at the nearest school which was St Joseph's Catholic School, a primary school for children aged from five years to twelve or thirteen, from whence they moved to St Catherine's College next door, a secondary school, both institutions run by the Dominican nuns. The huge basilica overshadowed both schools - we all spent a lot of time in the basilica - singing and praying. The nuns lived in the adjacent convent and there were about thirty of them. Boys went to St Joseph's until they turned seven, then they went to the Marist Brothers' School, boys only. St Joseph's was ten minutes walk (or half an hour's dawdle) from home and all children walked to school. As we left our respective homes in a trickle, so as we got closer to the school the trickle turned into a stream of children, then a flood, then a veritable deluge. Four extra classrooms were built whilst I was there which now are unused, as is the whole primary school. St Catherine's has been turned into both primary and secondary and caters for both boys and girls. The school I attended for seven years is now derelict. The Marist Brothers' school disappeared twenty years ago.
The street we lived in had thirty houses with ten of them holding forty children. At least ten houses were inhabited by older people whose children had grown up and moved away. The other ten I cannot remember. Possibly they held some more children but older, in their teens and of no interest to me at six. Now I live in a street of thirty houses where there are six children. Three of these children belong to a single mother and this little family arrived lately, so they could move on again at any time. This is population control observed in microcosm, a phenomenon I can see and measure within my own little area. I am not saying it is a bad thing, this not having too many children. Being Catholic and having witnessed the end result of uninterrupted breeding by order of the Pope and his 'celibate' minions and also being a woman, I am wholeheartedly in favour of a woman deciding how many children her health (mental and physical) can bear. I went to school with children who had built up boots, leg irons, health problems from a bread and jam diet, cleft palates and hare lips, sickly (or dead) mothers, children who slept three to a bed, who coughed throughout the year, (as I did), and children who, when I look back with the knowledge, were obviously suffering from sheer neglect, having been lost in the crowd of other siblings.
Nevertheless, the Dominican nuns did their best. They were wonderful women. They wore the same garments they had worn in the 18th century. A starched head dress with flaring wings each side of their faces, a veil attached which flowed down past their shoulders, a full length habit with sleeves loose enough at the wrists to put their hands into, and a huge set of rosary beads attached to a broad leather belt at their waists. They were immaculate and smelt always of soap. The classrooms were always polished and clean with flowers in vases (you could always get a smile and genuine pleasure by taking a bunch of flowers to the teacher, at the risk of the other kids nudging each other and hissing at you) and all children at the convent changed from street shoes into slippers for wear in the classrooms. This was quite a good idea - it made the place quieter.
My first teacher when I was six was a fat old nun named Sister Hoffbar. I thought she was about a hundred, but she was probably just on the right side of sixty. She had the five and six year olds (the primers) and taught the alphabet and printing. We had to come out literate but not much else as the real hard grind would begin at seven years of age. Anyway, there was an enormous amount of religion to be got through in the form of stories, praying (prayers to be learned) and attendance at the basilica which we could all see out the window - the House of God! In the middle of the classroom was a huge potbellied oven with a square fire guard around it and every morning when we arrived this was red hot. This was the only classroom to be so equipped, but primers were considered just out of babyhood and were a privileged little lot. We put on our slippers and warmed ourselves as we wished. Sister Hoffbar was rather like a black and white version of Mrs Santa and the children were cuddled and smiled at quite a lot. Every one of us was made to feel we were her special little child, no mean feat when there must have been thirty of us. There was never a raised voice, never impatience, never anger from her. The end result was that we were all, without exception, happier to be at school than to be at home and this delight lasted most of us until puberty.
But, ah well, we must all grow older and at seven years of age we moved into a more academic environment. The boys disappeared thank goodness. They were inclined to be loose cannons on the deck. Colin Klein wet his pants one day and disgusted and horrified all the little girls. Simon and Richmond Low were Chinese brothers. Simon was the older but a bit slow, and he had been kept back a year. They sat together. Simon always had the runny nose, (two great, thick candles which stopped at his upper lip and which he never seemed to notice, not even to sniff them back in) and Richmond always had the handkerchief. John Horan showing off got stuck in the lift up seat of the double desk and Sister Hoffbar had to call in Old Frank to unscrew the seat. Old Frank was the handyman around the school, a somewhat daft old pensioner but still capable of doing little jobs, including lighting the big fat stove in the primers room every morning at about seven a.m. I can still see him in my mind's eye, as I saw him when I was six and seven, and I remember how I dismissed him completely as being anything other than - well - something like a slave. What little autocrats small children can be. Old Frank moved like a ghost around and through the school doing the menial tasks until he disappears from my memory when I was about ten.
Now the nuns did something which most pupils in schools will not see. I have heard of 'Renaissance Men', but every one of my teachers was a'Renaissance Woman'. They were educated (some of them had two degrees and a vocational qualification), spoke Latin as a matter of course, possibly French, knew about diet, art, literature, current affairs, music, and handcrafts - most of them embroidered, gardened, or sang.
In 1951, when we finally settled into a permanent home, I started at the nearest school which was St Joseph's Catholic School, a primary school for children aged from five years to twelve or thirteen, from whence they moved to St Catherine's College next door, a secondary school, both institutions run by the Dominican nuns. The huge basilica overshadowed both schools - we all spent a lot of time in the basilica - singing and praying. The nuns lived in the adjacent convent and there were about thirty of them. Boys went to St Joseph's until they turned seven, then they went to the Marist Brothers' School, boys only. St Joseph's was ten minutes walk (or half an hour's dawdle) from home and all children walked to school. As we left our respective homes in a trickle, so as we got closer to the school the trickle turned into a stream of children, then a flood, then a veritable deluge. Four extra classrooms were built whilst I was there which now are unused, as is the whole primary school. St Catherine's has been turned into both primary and secondary and caters for both boys and girls. The school I attended for seven years is now derelict. The Marist Brothers' school disappeared twenty years ago.
The street we lived in had thirty houses with ten of them holding forty children. At least ten houses were inhabited by older people whose children had grown up and moved away. The other ten I cannot remember. Possibly they held some more children but older, in their teens and of no interest to me at six. Now I live in a street of thirty houses where there are six children. Three of these children belong to a single mother and this little family arrived lately, so they could move on again at any time. This is population control observed in microcosm, a phenomenon I can see and measure within my own little area. I am not saying it is a bad thing, this not having too many children. Being Catholic and having witnessed the end result of uninterrupted breeding by order of the Pope and his 'celibate' minions and also being a woman, I am wholeheartedly in favour of a woman deciding how many children her health (mental and physical) can bear. I went to school with children who had built up boots, leg irons, health problems from a bread and jam diet, cleft palates and hare lips, sickly (or dead) mothers, children who slept three to a bed, who coughed throughout the year, (as I did), and children who, when I look back with the knowledge, were obviously suffering from sheer neglect, having been lost in the crowd of other siblings.
Nevertheless, the Dominican nuns did their best. They were wonderful women. They wore the same garments they had worn in the 18th century. A starched head dress with flaring wings each side of their faces, a veil attached which flowed down past their shoulders, a full length habit with sleeves loose enough at the wrists to put their hands into, and a huge set of rosary beads attached to a broad leather belt at their waists. They were immaculate and smelt always of soap. The classrooms were always polished and clean with flowers in vases (you could always get a smile and genuine pleasure by taking a bunch of flowers to the teacher, at the risk of the other kids nudging each other and hissing at you) and all children at the convent changed from street shoes into slippers for wear in the classrooms. This was quite a good idea - it made the place quieter.
My first teacher when I was six was a fat old nun named Sister Hoffbar. I thought she was about a hundred, but she was probably just on the right side of sixty. She had the five and six year olds (the primers) and taught the alphabet and printing. We had to come out literate but not much else as the real hard grind would begin at seven years of age. Anyway, there was an enormous amount of religion to be got through in the form of stories, praying (prayers to be learned) and attendance at the basilica which we could all see out the window - the House of God! In the middle of the classroom was a huge potbellied oven with a square fire guard around it and every morning when we arrived this was red hot. This was the only classroom to be so equipped, but primers were considered just out of babyhood and were a privileged little lot. We put on our slippers and warmed ourselves as we wished. Sister Hoffbar was rather like a black and white version of Mrs Santa and the children were cuddled and smiled at quite a lot. Every one of us was made to feel we were her special little child, no mean feat when there must have been thirty of us. There was never a raised voice, never impatience, never anger from her. The end result was that we were all, without exception, happier to be at school than to be at home and this delight lasted most of us until puberty.
But, ah well, we must all grow older and at seven years of age we moved into a more academic environment. The boys disappeared thank goodness. They were inclined to be loose cannons on the deck. Colin Klein wet his pants one day and disgusted and horrified all the little girls. Simon and Richmond Low were Chinese brothers. Simon was the older but a bit slow, and he had been kept back a year. They sat together. Simon always had the runny nose, (two great, thick candles which stopped at his upper lip and which he never seemed to notice, not even to sniff them back in) and Richmond always had the handkerchief. John Horan showing off got stuck in the lift up seat of the double desk and Sister Hoffbar had to call in Old Frank to unscrew the seat. Old Frank was the handyman around the school, a somewhat daft old pensioner but still capable of doing little jobs, including lighting the big fat stove in the primers room every morning at about seven a.m. I can still see him in my mind's eye, as I saw him when I was six and seven, and I remember how I dismissed him completely as being anything other than - well - something like a slave. What little autocrats small children can be. Old Frank moved like a ghost around and through the school doing the menial tasks until he disappears from my memory when I was about ten.
Now the nuns did something which most pupils in schools will not see. I have heard of 'Renaissance Men', but every one of my teachers was a'Renaissance Woman'. They were educated (some of them had two degrees and a vocational qualification), spoke Latin as a matter of course, possibly French, knew about diet, art, literature, current affairs, music, and handcrafts - most of them embroidered, gardened, or sang.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Letter to Erp - Timmy the Pony
Dear Erp:
It is still raining here, but warm and still. The garden is like a tropical forest. I would dearly have loved to see the comet in the southern skies this week, but the clouds have prevented this. Never mind, let me go back in time and see if I can amuse you with more prosaic and earthly things, like the story of Timmy the Pony.
In 1951, when I was six years of age, my parents finally stopped their peripatetic wanderings and settled in a villa in Invercargill, a town of about 40,000 souls. My two sisters had been born by then, and the family was complete.
Somewhere along the line a Shetland pony named Timmy arrived in town with us. I think he may have been my pony whilst my father worked on a farm but cannot remember. All I can remember is that Tim lived in a paddock about five minutes bike ride from our house, and it was my job to visit him every day after school to check on him, give him water, and have a ride - if I could ever get the bridle and pony pad on him. He was a pony with all the vices a Shetland (a notoriously cunning equine breed) could possibly have. He bucked, bit, threw his head up hoping to connect with mine if I was leaning forward trying to urge the lazy little sod into a trot,(or down, if there was a chance I was standing underneath him trying to haul his hoof off my foot) and kicked. Tim was one of those ponies which come with a warning - DO NOT WALK BEHIND ME! My father must have got him for free because I can't imagine anyone paying good money for such a shaggy little menace. He wasn't even good company, as some horses are, coming up to rest their head on one's shoulder and blowing sweet air out of their nostrils, nickering with pleasure to see their little owner arrive to give some company - not Tim! He looked at me with Scottish disdain and went back to eating. I got my exercise in vain attempts to get near enough to him with the bridle. Taking a piece of carrot or apple was pointless. Tim would eat it then present his hind quarters to me, a warning that I should skip smartly out of kicking range. Around the paddock we went several times, Tim keeping about one yard away from me at all times. If I did catch him and bridle him, it was only because he was bored with the paddock and wanted to get out to cause somebody grief.
He must have let me catch him at least once. I remember riding him home and letting one little girl about my age from down the street hop up on his back. Tim, of course, bucked, she wasn't ready, came off, and went home crying with a broken arm. Her mother came down and had a talk with my mother, who had a talk with my father, and Tim quickly and mysteriously disappeared after that. I made a couple of enquiries about him next day and was told he had been sold to another family who wanted a pony for their little girl and this had been agreed to as I had not been looking after him well enough. I believed my parents and felt bad for a couple of hours about my neglect of Tim, but not bad enough to regret his disappearance, then forgot all about him during a skipping contest.
I suppose the hairy little menace had somewhat of a conscience because he could easily have killed me with a kick, but they always seemed to miss. His bites, although immediately painful, did not leave bruises. He helped me strengthen my upper arms for a later first class serve in tennis with much fruitless hauling of his foreleg when he stood on my foot - that never really hurt either. He didn't care though that I could have broken something important when I got bucked off - although that never happened either and I can only think that, being a Shetland, Tim was so close to the ground there wasn't far enough to fall. I don't know how the little girl from down the road broke her arm. Not used to it I suppose. The most hurt I suffered through visiting Tim was when I trod on a nail sticking up out of a piece of wood lying in the long grass in the pony paddock. I had to pull my foot off the nail and by the time I got home my canvas shoe was red with blood. New Zealand is rich in tetanus, especially around horses, so my mother put a bread poultice on the wound but I expect the copious bleeding had flushed out any germs because I didn't get tetanus.
When I look back, I guess I lived pretty dangerously for a six year old. My mode of transport, my bike, was full sized - I had to reach up to grasp the handlebars, and my father had put wooden blocks on the pedals and lowered the seat as far as it would go so it was a bit like an aeroplane where the most dicey part was the take-off. Getting off was no problem to someone who had been thrown by Tim as often as I had. Until I got bigger I would brake to almost stopping point then jump, leaving the bike to fall where it would - something a pilot would recognise as bailing out (without a parachute). I didn't ride the bike to school but I went everywhere else within a half mile or so on it and remember distinctly practising riding with no hands, a skill much admired in those balmy days. After regular run-ins with Tim a bike was my preferred mode of transport - no feeding, no watering, no curry combs, no tack, no hurtie bits, just the beginning of my affection for a technological form of transport over the organic and I don't care how romantic some people find horses - I think they are expensive, time consuming, and dangerous.
Yours unrepentedly,
Jude
It is still raining here, but warm and still. The garden is like a tropical forest. I would dearly have loved to see the comet in the southern skies this week, but the clouds have prevented this. Never mind, let me go back in time and see if I can amuse you with more prosaic and earthly things, like the story of Timmy the Pony.
In 1951, when I was six years of age, my parents finally stopped their peripatetic wanderings and settled in a villa in Invercargill, a town of about 40,000 souls. My two sisters had been born by then, and the family was complete.
Somewhere along the line a Shetland pony named Timmy arrived in town with us. I think he may have been my pony whilst my father worked on a farm but cannot remember. All I can remember is that Tim lived in a paddock about five minutes bike ride from our house, and it was my job to visit him every day after school to check on him, give him water, and have a ride - if I could ever get the bridle and pony pad on him. He was a pony with all the vices a Shetland (a notoriously cunning equine breed) could possibly have. He bucked, bit, threw his head up hoping to connect with mine if I was leaning forward trying to urge the lazy little sod into a trot,(or down, if there was a chance I was standing underneath him trying to haul his hoof off my foot) and kicked. Tim was one of those ponies which come with a warning - DO NOT WALK BEHIND ME! My father must have got him for free because I can't imagine anyone paying good money for such a shaggy little menace. He wasn't even good company, as some horses are, coming up to rest their head on one's shoulder and blowing sweet air out of their nostrils, nickering with pleasure to see their little owner arrive to give some company - not Tim! He looked at me with Scottish disdain and went back to eating. I got my exercise in vain attempts to get near enough to him with the bridle. Taking a piece of carrot or apple was pointless. Tim would eat it then present his hind quarters to me, a warning that I should skip smartly out of kicking range. Around the paddock we went several times, Tim keeping about one yard away from me at all times. If I did catch him and bridle him, it was only because he was bored with the paddock and wanted to get out to cause somebody grief.
He must have let me catch him at least once. I remember riding him home and letting one little girl about my age from down the street hop up on his back. Tim, of course, bucked, she wasn't ready, came off, and went home crying with a broken arm. Her mother came down and had a talk with my mother, who had a talk with my father, and Tim quickly and mysteriously disappeared after that. I made a couple of enquiries about him next day and was told he had been sold to another family who wanted a pony for their little girl and this had been agreed to as I had not been looking after him well enough. I believed my parents and felt bad for a couple of hours about my neglect of Tim, but not bad enough to regret his disappearance, then forgot all about him during a skipping contest.
I suppose the hairy little menace had somewhat of a conscience because he could easily have killed me with a kick, but they always seemed to miss. His bites, although immediately painful, did not leave bruises. He helped me strengthen my upper arms for a later first class serve in tennis with much fruitless hauling of his foreleg when he stood on my foot - that never really hurt either. He didn't care though that I could have broken something important when I got bucked off - although that never happened either and I can only think that, being a Shetland, Tim was so close to the ground there wasn't far enough to fall. I don't know how the little girl from down the road broke her arm. Not used to it I suppose. The most hurt I suffered through visiting Tim was when I trod on a nail sticking up out of a piece of wood lying in the long grass in the pony paddock. I had to pull my foot off the nail and by the time I got home my canvas shoe was red with blood. New Zealand is rich in tetanus, especially around horses, so my mother put a bread poultice on the wound but I expect the copious bleeding had flushed out any germs because I didn't get tetanus.
When I look back, I guess I lived pretty dangerously for a six year old. My mode of transport, my bike, was full sized - I had to reach up to grasp the handlebars, and my father had put wooden blocks on the pedals and lowered the seat as far as it would go so it was a bit like an aeroplane where the most dicey part was the take-off. Getting off was no problem to someone who had been thrown by Tim as often as I had. Until I got bigger I would brake to almost stopping point then jump, leaving the bike to fall where it would - something a pilot would recognise as bailing out (without a parachute). I didn't ride the bike to school but I went everywhere else within a half mile or so on it and remember distinctly practising riding with no hands, a skill much admired in those balmy days. After regular run-ins with Tim a bike was my preferred mode of transport - no feeding, no watering, no curry combs, no tack, no hurtie bits, just the beginning of my affection for a technological form of transport over the organic and I don't care how romantic some people find horses - I think they are expensive, time consuming, and dangerous.
Yours unrepentedly,
Jude
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Letter to Erp
Dear Erp:
It is raining here today, but humid. I knew it would rain. I watered my garden yesterday.
I have just returned from the library. I am a member of eight libraries - i.e. Invercargill, Gore, Dunedin, Otago University, Chinchilla (Aust), Brisbane, Lane Cove (Sydney) and Toowoomba (Aust). When I was seven years of age, my old Scottish grandmother took me to the library (she was on her way to the pub where she spent her Friday afternoons drinking gin and water) and enrolled me. After that I went three times a week and got three books each time until I turned twelve, when I moved to the adult library and began to step up my reading. I don't know what I would do without a public library. It is my first port of call wherever I am in the English speaking world. Today I got The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, (recommended by yourself, Erp), The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I have read before but need to re-read) plus three videos - Finian's Rainbow, I Claudius, and Agnes Browne.
My old Scottish grandmother therefore has a lot to answer for if it is true, as my father said many times, that sitting on one's backside reading is sheer laziness. My grandmother's name was Martha and her parents owned a dairy farm in the days when cows were milked by hand and Martha had worked hard until the time she was sent at 18 to look after her recently dead elder sister's six children. (She married her brother-in-law and eventually had six children to him herself.) She brought up 12 children, working on the farm as well, then eventually bought and ran a hotel, which hotel catered for up to forty paying guests. She nursed her husband, a daughter-in-law who died, a grandaughter who also died (aged eight), and then, old and useless, came to live with my family. She had the front room and I promptly assumed proprietal rights and moved in with her. She stayed two years, when I was aged seven and eight. Then she moved out again and went to look after her widowed son and Faye, his fourteen year old daughter. I was furious and performed beautifully, crying and screaming for her until threats of 'getting something to really cry for' quietened me. I never really liked my parents after that.
Grandma seemed to have two sets of everything. One set for around home, and one set for going out. That included teeth and rings. She was never idle. She knitted her skirts and tops, and made rag rugs. She smoked Capstan Cork tipped cigarettes until she died at 84. She drank gin and water and got very merry every Friday afternoon with about half a dozen other old pensioners, but the rest of the week she made herself useful (particularly to me, I made sure of that), and taught me to knit and let me play her 78 records on her wind up gramophone and rifle through her belongings. Every night she made Milo for us both (with two malt biscuits) then we climbed into bed together. This was a feather bed, by the way, a rarity today. The only demands she made on me were that I was quiet (I was, sitting there reading) and that I did not move around in the bed (which I did not, knowing I was onto a good thing). I thought I was set for life.
Grandma never seemed to mind my watching her, (with fascination as she prepared to go out on Friday afternoon - first her corsets, then seamed stockings, a knitted suit, going out jewellery. black wide fit shoes, a fur coat, hat, gloves and handbag, and going out teeth) but I watched with admiration, never with a critical eye. I never thought one day she wouldn't come back.
I look at old women today with their grey hair and comfortable clothes - my grandmother was never like that. She had her hair dyed jet black until her final stay in hospital. She was short and broad and walked with the determination of a sumo wrestler. She rarely smiled (except when not sober after an afternoon on gin and water) because everything in life was serious for her. She had a doggedness, a sort of slogging on or battling against the odds, an air of never giving in or giving up, a sort of understanding that no-one wins, death waits for all, but in the meantime you must do the right thing, and keep up standards.
I think living with my grandmother for those two years set the pattern for my old fashioned behaviour, that is to say my love of routine and peace and quiet, from then on. I always think of her when I hear 'Lily of Laguna' or 'At the Balalaika' (big hits in her youth and often played by me on her wind up gramophone), when I see laxative chocolate (I ate a whole block found whilst rifling through her drawers thinking it was real chocolate and it tasted okay as well), when I see a fox fur draped over a woman's shoulder in an old film, when I knit (it wasn't easy for her, me being left handed and her being right handed, she had to reverse things to teach me), and many other things when my grandmother lives again - in my memory. I wish I had her back just long enough to tell her even after over fifty years, I still miss her.
With nostalgia,
Jude
It is raining here today, but humid. I knew it would rain. I watered my garden yesterday.
I have just returned from the library. I am a member of eight libraries - i.e. Invercargill, Gore, Dunedin, Otago University, Chinchilla (Aust), Brisbane, Lane Cove (Sydney) and Toowoomba (Aust). When I was seven years of age, my old Scottish grandmother took me to the library (she was on her way to the pub where she spent her Friday afternoons drinking gin and water) and enrolled me. After that I went three times a week and got three books each time until I turned twelve, when I moved to the adult library and began to step up my reading. I don't know what I would do without a public library. It is my first port of call wherever I am in the English speaking world. Today I got The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, (recommended by yourself, Erp), The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I have read before but need to re-read) plus three videos - Finian's Rainbow, I Claudius, and Agnes Browne.
My old Scottish grandmother therefore has a lot to answer for if it is true, as my father said many times, that sitting on one's backside reading is sheer laziness. My grandmother's name was Martha and her parents owned a dairy farm in the days when cows were milked by hand and Martha had worked hard until the time she was sent at 18 to look after her recently dead elder sister's six children. (She married her brother-in-law and eventually had six children to him herself.) She brought up 12 children, working on the farm as well, then eventually bought and ran a hotel, which hotel catered for up to forty paying guests. She nursed her husband, a daughter-in-law who died, a grandaughter who also died (aged eight), and then, old and useless, came to live with my family. She had the front room and I promptly assumed proprietal rights and moved in with her. She stayed two years, when I was aged seven and eight. Then she moved out again and went to look after her widowed son and Faye, his fourteen year old daughter. I was furious and performed beautifully, crying and screaming for her until threats of 'getting something to really cry for' quietened me. I never really liked my parents after that.
Grandma seemed to have two sets of everything. One set for around home, and one set for going out. That included teeth and rings. She was never idle. She knitted her skirts and tops, and made rag rugs. She smoked Capstan Cork tipped cigarettes until she died at 84. She drank gin and water and got very merry every Friday afternoon with about half a dozen other old pensioners, but the rest of the week she made herself useful (particularly to me, I made sure of that), and taught me to knit and let me play her 78 records on her wind up gramophone and rifle through her belongings. Every night she made Milo for us both (with two malt biscuits) then we climbed into bed together. This was a feather bed, by the way, a rarity today. The only demands she made on me were that I was quiet (I was, sitting there reading) and that I did not move around in the bed (which I did not, knowing I was onto a good thing). I thought I was set for life.
Grandma never seemed to mind my watching her, (with fascination as she prepared to go out on Friday afternoon - first her corsets, then seamed stockings, a knitted suit, going out jewellery. black wide fit shoes, a fur coat, hat, gloves and handbag, and going out teeth) but I watched with admiration, never with a critical eye. I never thought one day she wouldn't come back.
I look at old women today with their grey hair and comfortable clothes - my grandmother was never like that. She had her hair dyed jet black until her final stay in hospital. She was short and broad and walked with the determination of a sumo wrestler. She rarely smiled (except when not sober after an afternoon on gin and water) because everything in life was serious for her. She had a doggedness, a sort of slogging on or battling against the odds, an air of never giving in or giving up, a sort of understanding that no-one wins, death waits for all, but in the meantime you must do the right thing, and keep up standards.
I think living with my grandmother for those two years set the pattern for my old fashioned behaviour, that is to say my love of routine and peace and quiet, from then on. I always think of her when I hear 'Lily of Laguna' or 'At the Balalaika' (big hits in her youth and often played by me on her wind up gramophone), when I see laxative chocolate (I ate a whole block found whilst rifling through her drawers thinking it was real chocolate and it tasted okay as well), when I see a fox fur draped over a woman's shoulder in an old film, when I knit (it wasn't easy for her, me being left handed and her being right handed, she had to reverse things to teach me), and many other things when my grandmother lives again - in my memory. I wish I had her back just long enough to tell her even after over fifty years, I still miss her.
With nostalgia,
Jude
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
The Eastern Bloc Countries
Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski are identical twin brothers. They are running Poland. They are hugely popular ultranationalists and they are running all the communists out of the country - not just card carrying communists are for the chop, but collaborators and quislings also.
Although Poland was a member of the Soviet Bloc, Poles are ardent Catholics and they never took to communism. (Read The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz.)
Poland now, Czechoslovakia and Hungary next? It's a Brussels' nightmare.
Jaroslaw and Lech Kaczynski are identical twin brothers. They are running Poland. They are hugely popular ultranationalists and they are running all the communists out of the country - not just card carrying communists are for the chop, but collaborators and quislings also.
Although Poland was a member of the Soviet Bloc, Poles are ardent Catholics and they never took to communism. (Read The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz.)
Poland now, Czechoslovakia and Hungary next? It's a Brussels' nightmare.
Monday, July 24, 2006
My New Grandson
Asher Benjamin Ghannoum aged two days.
What happened? I come from a family of girls, I had only daughters, and this daughter has now had four sons.
My eldest daughter had two sons.
What happened? I come from a family of girls, I had only daughters, and this daughter has now had four sons.My eldest daughter had two sons.
Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Marshall McLuhan
Also from The Mid-Atlantic Man
For many years I have observed that the moralist typically substitutes anger for perception. He hopes that many people will take his irritation for insight...The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about 'values' then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming?
Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity. (p 161)
For many years I have observed that the moralist typically substitutes anger for perception. He hopes that many people will take his irritation for insight...The mere moralistic expression of approval or disapproval, preference or detestation, is currently being used in our world as a substitute for observation and a substitute for study. People hope that if they scream loudly enough about 'values' then others will mistake them for serious, sensitive souls who have higher and nobler perceptions than ordinary people. Otherwise, why would they be screaming?
Moral bitterness is a basic technique for endowing the idiot with dignity. (p 161)
The Behavioural Sink
...all animals, including birds, seem to have a built-in, inherited requirement to have a certain amount of territory, space, to lead their lives in. Even if they have all the food they need, and there are no predatory animals threatening them, they cannot tolerate overcrowding beyond a certain point. No more than two hundred wild Norway rats can survive on a quarter acre of ground, for example, even when they are given all the food they can eat. They just die off.
But why? To find out, ethologists have run experiments on all sorts of animals, from stickleback crabs to Sika deer. In one major experiement, an ethologist named John Calhoun put some domesticated white Norway rats in a pen with four sections to it, connected by ramps. Calhoun knew from previous experiments that the rats tend to split up into groups of ten to twelve and that the pen, therefore, would hold forty to forty eight rats comfortably, assuming they formed four equal groups. He allowed them to reproduce until there were eighty rats, balanced between male and female, but did not let it get any more crowded. He kept them supplied with plenty of food, water and nesting materials. To the human eye the pen did not even look especially crowded, but to the rats, it was crowded beyond endurance.
The entire colony was soon pluged into a profound behavioural sink. "The sink." said Calhoun, "is the outcome of any behavioural process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers. The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental; a behavioural sink does act to aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group."
For a start, long before the rat population reached eighty, a status hierarchy had developed in the pen. Two dominant male rats took over the two end sections, acquired harems of eight to ten females each, and forced the rest of the rats into two middle pens. All the overcrowding took place in the middle pens. That was where the 'sink' hit. The aristocratic rats at the ends grew bigger, sleeker, healthier and more secure all the time.
In the 'sink' meanwhile, nest building, courting, sex behaviour, reproduction, social organisation, health, all of it went to pieces...
No more than three males - the dominant males in the 'sink' - kept up the old customs. The rest tried everything from satyrism to homosexuality or else gave up on sex altogether. Three or four might chase one female at the same time and...
Homosexuality rose sharply. So did bi-sexuality. Some males would mount anything, males, females, babies, senescent rats, anything...
Females in the 'sink' were ravaged physically and psychologically. Pregnant rats had trouble continuing a pregnancy. The rate of miscarriages increased significantly and females started dying from tumours and other disorders of the mammary glands, sex organs, uterus, ovaries and Fallopian tubes.
Child rearing became totally disorganised. The females lost the interest or the stamina to build nests and did not keep them up if they did build them. In the general filth and confusion they would not put themselves out to save offspring they were momentarily separated from. Frantic, even sadistic competitionn was going on all round them and rendering their lives chaotic.
from The Mid-Atlantic Man by Tom Wolfe pp 297 - 300
(condensed somewhat by me.)
Get the book and read the rest yourself.
But why? To find out, ethologists have run experiments on all sorts of animals, from stickleback crabs to Sika deer. In one major experiement, an ethologist named John Calhoun put some domesticated white Norway rats in a pen with four sections to it, connected by ramps. Calhoun knew from previous experiments that the rats tend to split up into groups of ten to twelve and that the pen, therefore, would hold forty to forty eight rats comfortably, assuming they formed four equal groups. He allowed them to reproduce until there were eighty rats, balanced between male and female, but did not let it get any more crowded. He kept them supplied with plenty of food, water and nesting materials. To the human eye the pen did not even look especially crowded, but to the rats, it was crowded beyond endurance.
The entire colony was soon pluged into a profound behavioural sink. "The sink." said Calhoun, "is the outcome of any behavioural process that collects animals together in unusually great numbers. The unhealthy connotations of the term are not accidental; a behavioural sink does act to aggravate all forms of pathology that can be found within a group."
For a start, long before the rat population reached eighty, a status hierarchy had developed in the pen. Two dominant male rats took over the two end sections, acquired harems of eight to ten females each, and forced the rest of the rats into two middle pens. All the overcrowding took place in the middle pens. That was where the 'sink' hit. The aristocratic rats at the ends grew bigger, sleeker, healthier and more secure all the time.
In the 'sink' meanwhile, nest building, courting, sex behaviour, reproduction, social organisation, health, all of it went to pieces...
No more than three males - the dominant males in the 'sink' - kept up the old customs. The rest tried everything from satyrism to homosexuality or else gave up on sex altogether. Three or four might chase one female at the same time and...
Homosexuality rose sharply. So did bi-sexuality. Some males would mount anything, males, females, babies, senescent rats, anything...
Females in the 'sink' were ravaged physically and psychologically. Pregnant rats had trouble continuing a pregnancy. The rate of miscarriages increased significantly and females started dying from tumours and other disorders of the mammary glands, sex organs, uterus, ovaries and Fallopian tubes.
Child rearing became totally disorganised. The females lost the interest or the stamina to build nests and did not keep them up if they did build them. In the general filth and confusion they would not put themselves out to save offspring they were momentarily separated from. Frantic, even sadistic competitionn was going on all round them and rendering their lives chaotic.
from The Mid-Atlantic Man by Tom Wolfe pp 297 - 300
(condensed somewhat by me.)
Get the book and read the rest yourself.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
From Political Correctness to Dialectics
Dialectic (n) Art of investigating the truth of opinions. Testing of truth by discussion, logical disputation.
Dialectician (n) A person skilled in critical enquiry by discussion.
(Note that a dialectician is skilled in investigating the truth of ‘Opinions’. Not the Truth per se.)
For a description of how dialecticians work I will now lean heavily on the writings of Nobel Prize winner and Polish intellectual Vaclav Havel who experienced dialectics first hand when the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) extended the hammer and sickle into Eastern Europe after World War II.
Now that it is becoming clearer (after forty years) that political correctness is a tool of socialistic control, someone like myself might ask – why is it necessary and where is it leading? Haven’t we got a good life now? Ah yes, we in the West have, but what about all those millions of people who have not? They must also be brought into the socialist fold, and you can go out into the fields to grow grain for them also.
Political correctness leads to dispossessed thinking. But since people cannot rid themselves completely of their former beliefs, they become schizophrenic. They try to hold in their minds two opposing ideas as of equal value. The internal dissonance brought about by these two opposing ideas is the field to be sown by dialecticians. The seeds to be sown are those of socialism.
Socialism: Political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange.
(Note also that Socialism is the first stage to Communism and that Communism must be Totalitarian.)
Communism does not advocate that the community as a whole should own anything. Everything is owned by the State. The State is Totalitarian. A Totalitarian State does not permit any opposing party. A Totalitarian State demands complete subserviance of the individual to the State. End of Democracy.
We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought. This common system of thought is what holds families, communities and eventually, nations together. In all people there is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical punishment. Religion, which once provided this sense of harmony has been replaced by dialectics and dialectics has strayed into spheres increasingly less accessible to the layman. Out of this lack arises a painful sense of detachment. A sense of the hopelessness of striving for a better life permeates the mind. Why bother? In a Totalitarian State you will be told what to do at every stage of your life. You will eat a diet considered best for you by the dialecticians. Art and Literature there will be, but it will conform to Socialist Realism which will be defined by the dialecticians. You will not travel unless you have permission from the State. Your children will be educated in subjects once again defined by the dialecticians. From the cradle to the grave (does that sound familiar?) you will be monitored by processes developed by socialist dialecticians. You will think thoughts as defined by the dialecticians. The very alienation Marx denounced will take place not where you work, but in your mind.
Dialectician (n) A person skilled in critical enquiry by discussion.
(Note that a dialectician is skilled in investigating the truth of ‘Opinions’. Not the Truth per se.)
For a description of how dialecticians work I will now lean heavily on the writings of Nobel Prize winner and Polish intellectual Vaclav Havel who experienced dialectics first hand when the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) extended the hammer and sickle into Eastern Europe after World War II.
Now that it is becoming clearer (after forty years) that political correctness is a tool of socialistic control, someone like myself might ask – why is it necessary and where is it leading? Haven’t we got a good life now? Ah yes, we in the West have, but what about all those millions of people who have not? They must also be brought into the socialist fold, and you can go out into the fields to grow grain for them also.
Political correctness leads to dispossessed thinking. But since people cannot rid themselves completely of their former beliefs, they become schizophrenic. They try to hold in their minds two opposing ideas as of equal value. The internal dissonance brought about by these two opposing ideas is the field to be sown by dialecticians. The seeds to be sown are those of socialism.
Socialism: Political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the community as a whole should own and control the means of production, distribution and exchange.
(Note also that Socialism is the first stage to Communism and that Communism must be Totalitarian.)
Communism does not advocate that the community as a whole should own anything. Everything is owned by the State. The State is Totalitarian. A Totalitarian State does not permit any opposing party. A Totalitarian State demands complete subserviance of the individual to the State. End of Democracy.
We have come by easy stages to a lack of a common system of thought. This common system of thought is what holds families, communities and eventually, nations together. In all people there is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical punishment. Religion, which once provided this sense of harmony has been replaced by dialectics and dialectics has strayed into spheres increasingly less accessible to the layman. Out of this lack arises a painful sense of detachment. A sense of the hopelessness of striving for a better life permeates the mind. Why bother? In a Totalitarian State you will be told what to do at every stage of your life. You will eat a diet considered best for you by the dialecticians. Art and Literature there will be, but it will conform to Socialist Realism which will be defined by the dialecticians. You will not travel unless you have permission from the State. Your children will be educated in subjects once again defined by the dialecticians. From the cradle to the grave (does that sound familiar?) you will be monitored by processes developed by socialist dialecticians. You will think thoughts as defined by the dialecticians. The very alienation Marx denounced will take place not where you work, but in your mind.
My Analysis of Political Correctness
For me, political correctness made its first appearance around 1976. I don’t think it was called political correctness then. I was working hard. I was studying for a degree which was intended to get me out of the type of work I had been in since I was fifteen, and working, and running a house and raising three daughters. It is surprising I noticed anything, but I was also involved in the Women’s Collective so, when the appellation ‘Ms’ was mooted as an alternative to ‘Miss’ or ‘Missus’ for women it was certainly brought to my attention.
Now the use of ‘Ms’ is not necessarily politically correct, but there were also other uses of language which were under scrutiny by feminists (feminine diminutives, the generic use of ‘he’ for example) and because my attention was caught, I remember mostly this particular appellation. I was in favour of its use.
My second memory at about this time (because I was doing an English degree) was the demand by feminists for greater inclusion (in university courses) of the study of women writers, also the proliferation of crèches (or day nurseries) and a general demand that women be given more respect on the street and in the home. Domestic violence, which was endemic in New Zealand at that time and had been for decades, was being addressed and women’s refuges set up. All of these things I was (and still am) in favour of.
Parallel with feminist demands were demands from people of colour for the same type of linguistic changes. They too wanted rights and respect. Then homosexuals and lesbians wanted rights and respect. And so it went on until practically anyone who wasn’t white and male had a gripe they had to have satisfied within the law.
The problem with liberalism is, by virtue of its name and ideology, it has no boundaries. Once liberalism takes hold nobody seems able to be illiberal. Liberalism snowballs, as it has, into ludicrous situations. Well, we thought it was liberalism, until recently, when it seems all the changes which have taken place in societies since the early 1970’s are not actually liberal at all. We are being choked by change. We are confused and unhappy. We now live in a world which is threatening and uncertain, a world where to tell the truth may lead to a prison sentence, a world where to tell a joke or draw a cartoon may lead to death.
Young people, born since 1970, may not notice too much difference but I do. I once worked (1965) for an engineer boss whose father was a Protestant clergyman. My boss knew I had been convent educated and many were the Protestant/Catholic jokes told in that office. I wouldn’t dare do that now. It is politically incorrect. Even if I worked for the same boss, neither of us would dare laugh about something like that anymore in case ‘someone’ overheard and took offence.
What has happened? Political correctness has morphed into something else. That ‘something else’ has entered every area of life – into schools, hospitals, the workplace, entertainment, everywhere I can think of. It is no longer political correctness, although we think of it as such. It is now dialectics.
to be continued...
Now the use of ‘Ms’ is not necessarily politically correct, but there were also other uses of language which were under scrutiny by feminists (feminine diminutives, the generic use of ‘he’ for example) and because my attention was caught, I remember mostly this particular appellation. I was in favour of its use.
My second memory at about this time (because I was doing an English degree) was the demand by feminists for greater inclusion (in university courses) of the study of women writers, also the proliferation of crèches (or day nurseries) and a general demand that women be given more respect on the street and in the home. Domestic violence, which was endemic in New Zealand at that time and had been for decades, was being addressed and women’s refuges set up. All of these things I was (and still am) in favour of.
Parallel with feminist demands were demands from people of colour for the same type of linguistic changes. They too wanted rights and respect. Then homosexuals and lesbians wanted rights and respect. And so it went on until practically anyone who wasn’t white and male had a gripe they had to have satisfied within the law.
The problem with liberalism is, by virtue of its name and ideology, it has no boundaries. Once liberalism takes hold nobody seems able to be illiberal. Liberalism snowballs, as it has, into ludicrous situations. Well, we thought it was liberalism, until recently, when it seems all the changes which have taken place in societies since the early 1970’s are not actually liberal at all. We are being choked by change. We are confused and unhappy. We now live in a world which is threatening and uncertain, a world where to tell the truth may lead to a prison sentence, a world where to tell a joke or draw a cartoon may lead to death.
Young people, born since 1970, may not notice too much difference but I do. I once worked (1965) for an engineer boss whose father was a Protestant clergyman. My boss knew I had been convent educated and many were the Protestant/Catholic jokes told in that office. I wouldn’t dare do that now. It is politically incorrect. Even if I worked for the same boss, neither of us would dare laugh about something like that anymore in case ‘someone’ overheard and took offence.
What has happened? Political correctness has morphed into something else. That ‘something else’ has entered every area of life – into schools, hospitals, the workplace, entertainment, everywhere I can think of. It is no longer political correctness, although we think of it as such. It is now dialectics.
to be continued...
Tuesday, June 13, 2006
Cirrhosis of the Liver
I don't know where the NZ Herald gets their information from. Coffee helps prevent cirrhosis of the liver. Actually, it is eating which helps prevent cirrhosis of the liver. Partway down the article they actually ask themselves - why don't all alcoholics get cirrhosis of the liver? Well, here's the answer dipsticks:
Alcohol is a slow poison, but its excessive consumption of not the cause of cirrhosis of the liver which, incidentally is not the only location this condition can strike. Cirrhosis of the liver is basically a form of acute malnutrition caused by protein deficiency; it is only common among alcoholics when they ignore food in favour of drink. The disease is endemic to famine areas, the inhabitants which drink no alcohol at all.
If anyone drank coffee and didn't eat, they would get cirrhosis of the liver as well.
Alcohol is a slow poison, but its excessive consumption of not the cause of cirrhosis of the liver which, incidentally is not the only location this condition can strike. Cirrhosis of the liver is basically a form of acute malnutrition caused by protein deficiency; it is only common among alcoholics when they ignore food in favour of drink. The disease is endemic to famine areas, the inhabitants which drink no alcohol at all.
If anyone drank coffee and didn't eat, they would get cirrhosis of the liver as well.
Friday, June 09, 2006
The Olympic Flame
The idea of the undying flame of the Olympic torch belongs to Adolph Hitler. He came up with the idea for the 1936 Olympic Games and an impressive array of runners was organised to carry the flame from Athens to Berlin.
Female and Male
Ultimately derived from Latin where it meant 'the suckling one', 'female' is not just the word 'male' with a differentiating prefix. The current spelling came into being as a direct result of that misconception. Originally the word was 'femelle', the second part of the word still alive and well in French where it serves as the pronoun 'she'.
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