BOB'S BITS
- Stanley
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Re: BOB'S BITS
ROSIE
You’re not supposed to have too much pride, but I can’t help have some about that poster. It’s just sad I didn’t know it was me sooner. Geraldine Doyle, 2002, as quoted in the Lansing [MI] State Journal.
‘That poster’ was the “We Can Do It” one, of a woman war worker. Her (presumably) long hair tied up in a red bandana, her blue denim shirt sleeves rolled up, she’s flexing her right bicep. Her assertiveness shines out of a bright, blaring background. She proudly celebrates the woman workers of WWII. And they needed to be celebrated, for most of the young men workers were at war, or (like my father) training for it. Meanwhile, America’s industries were transformed into “the arsenal of democracy,” and they had to recruit a new work force. Of course white woman workers had been around for some time, their ranks swelled by European immigrants, especially in low-wage jobs, but now women had to work in heavy industries. The “We Can Do It” poster was, originally, part of Westinghouse’s recruitment effort. It became better known in the 1970s as new-wave feminists took up the image of the strong woman. In Michigan, Geraldine Doyle saw the poster, remembered that her photo had been taken when she worked at an Ann Arbor metal press, and put herself forward as the likely model for ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ Geraldine Doyle (née Duff) was born in a Detroit suburb on July 31, 1924. Her mother, a composer, encouraged Geraldine’s talent at the cello. But the war came, and the young cellist became a young metal worker. Fearful for her hands. she soon left that work, married a dentist, raised six kids, and then became proud of her war work, possibly (who knows?) prouder than she had ever been before. And she was taken up by the media as the ‘real’ Rosie the Riveter. Geraldine was remembered that way when she died in 2010. Meanwhile, out in Washington, Naomi Fraley and her sister remembered that when they’d worked at a Naval Air Station (as machinists) Naomi’s picture (bending over a metal press) had been taken and seemed to be the model for the “We Can Do It” poster. Three times married, a long-time waitress at a Palm Springs watering hole, and even at 80 a bit of a flashy dame, she was at first ignored. But after Ms. Doyle’s death in 2010 Naomi’s case was taken up by historians, and it’s now argued that Naomi Fraley (née Parker) was the original poster girl. I have an open mind on the matter, but when I became dean of an honors college that was (and remained) 2/3rds female, I decided that the best art work I could hang outside my office door was the “We Can Do It” poster. It was great propaganda, and it does ring a truth. Women can do, and be proud of the doing. But after the war, government, industry, and Hollywood worked like beavers to get women back home, safely married. So maybe Geraldine Doyle was, historically speaking, the “real” Rosie. ©.
You’re not supposed to have too much pride, but I can’t help have some about that poster. It’s just sad I didn’t know it was me sooner. Geraldine Doyle, 2002, as quoted in the Lansing [MI] State Journal.
‘That poster’ was the “We Can Do It” one, of a woman war worker. Her (presumably) long hair tied up in a red bandana, her blue denim shirt sleeves rolled up, she’s flexing her right bicep. Her assertiveness shines out of a bright, blaring background. She proudly celebrates the woman workers of WWII. And they needed to be celebrated, for most of the young men workers were at war, or (like my father) training for it. Meanwhile, America’s industries were transformed into “the arsenal of democracy,” and they had to recruit a new work force. Of course white woman workers had been around for some time, their ranks swelled by European immigrants, especially in low-wage jobs, but now women had to work in heavy industries. The “We Can Do It” poster was, originally, part of Westinghouse’s recruitment effort. It became better known in the 1970s as new-wave feminists took up the image of the strong woman. In Michigan, Geraldine Doyle saw the poster, remembered that her photo had been taken when she worked at an Ann Arbor metal press, and put herself forward as the likely model for ‘Rosie the Riveter.’ Geraldine Doyle (née Duff) was born in a Detroit suburb on July 31, 1924. Her mother, a composer, encouraged Geraldine’s talent at the cello. But the war came, and the young cellist became a young metal worker. Fearful for her hands. she soon left that work, married a dentist, raised six kids, and then became proud of her war work, possibly (who knows?) prouder than she had ever been before. And she was taken up by the media as the ‘real’ Rosie the Riveter. Geraldine was remembered that way when she died in 2010. Meanwhile, out in Washington, Naomi Fraley and her sister remembered that when they’d worked at a Naval Air Station (as machinists) Naomi’s picture (bending over a metal press) had been taken and seemed to be the model for the “We Can Do It” poster. Three times married, a long-time waitress at a Palm Springs watering hole, and even at 80 a bit of a flashy dame, she was at first ignored. But after Ms. Doyle’s death in 2010 Naomi’s case was taken up by historians, and it’s now argued that Naomi Fraley (née Parker) was the original poster girl. I have an open mind on the matter, but when I became dean of an honors college that was (and remained) 2/3rds female, I decided that the best art work I could hang outside my office door was the “We Can Do It” poster. It was great propaganda, and it does ring a truth. Women can do, and be proud of the doing. But after the war, government, industry, and Hollywood worked like beavers to get women back home, safely married. So maybe Geraldine Doyle was, historically speaking, the “real” Rosie. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Re: BOB'S BITS
I've just had a skim round - and there are a lot of other alliteratively named candidates for the image.
Not to mention "Wendy the Welder".
Not to mention "Wendy the Welder".

Born to be mild
Sapere Aude
Ego Lego
Preferred pronouns - Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine
My non-working days are Monday - Sunday
Sapere Aude
Ego Lego
Preferred pronouns - Thou, Thee, Thy, Thine
My non-working days are Monday - Sunday
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
CLAUDIUS
“I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other . . . was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius". The Emperor Claudius, in Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934).
Emperor Claudius wrote his own autobiography, but it hasn’t survived. To fill out a complex character, Robert Graves produced a two-volume novel-autobiography. It’s full of poetic license (and Graves was a pretty fair poet), but overall it’s about right. It was also used as text for the BBC docudrama, I, Claudius (1976) starring Derek Jacobi. If it’s anywhere on stream, you should take it in. The ‘real’ Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, etc., was born in Gaul (Lyon in present-day France) on August 1, 10 BCE. His pedigree was good enough (his grandmama was a wife of the divine Augustus) that he was taken in as a sort of cadet member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (27 BCE to 64 CE) which formalized Julius Caesar’s murder of the Roman Republic. For almost any family member, that meant wealth, power, and danger. Indeed, one’s life expectancy waned as one’s power waxed, and Julio-Claudian history is full of assassinations (poisonings, skewerings, assisted suicides, etc.). Young Claudius avoided all this because no one thought much of him. He had a limp. He stammered. He had a noticeable palsy. And in a family whose business was heroism and glory, such a child didn’t count for much. His mother thought him irremediably stupid and farmed the boy out to his grandmother. (Later, as emperor, Claudius deified grandma, although not, it seems, out of gratitude). In due course, “Uncle Claudius” became sidekick to his nephew, the infamous Caligula. Caligula’s excesses offended even the Praetorian Guard, who assassinated him. Somehow (and there’s a lot of disagreement on this) Claudius survived, and for some reason the Praetorian’s proclaimed him emperor, in 41 CE. Claudius, who’d prospered reasonably well as a weak-bodied and absent-minded uncle, did pretty well in this “golden predicament.” As Roman Emperors go, he was OK. Along with the usual flaws (murders, etc.) he rebuilt Rome (two new aqueducts and one repaired), strengthened the imperial bureaucracy, and—probably above all—was the Roman emperor who finally conquered Britain (at least as far north as the Fosse Way). It made him a hero and bought him a “triumph,” even though he was only in Britain for a couple of weeks. And in a departure from custom, he brought a conquered British chief, Caractacus, back to Rome and set the barbarian up in a luxury villa. So Claudius is a bit of a puzzle. And the puzzle includes his death, in 54 CE. Was it poison, administered (or overseen) by his third wife, Agripina? Or did this 64 year old man-god succumb to his childhood illnesses? Either way, he was replaced by Nero, which was not an improvement. ©
“I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other . . . was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as "Claudius the Idiot", or "That Claudius", or "Claudius the Stammerer", or "Clau-Clau-Claudius" or at best as "Poor Uncle Claudius". The Emperor Claudius, in Robert Graves, I, Claudius (1934).
Emperor Claudius wrote his own autobiography, but it hasn’t survived. To fill out a complex character, Robert Graves produced a two-volume novel-autobiography. It’s full of poetic license (and Graves was a pretty fair poet), but overall it’s about right. It was also used as text for the BBC docudrama, I, Claudius (1976) starring Derek Jacobi. If it’s anywhere on stream, you should take it in. The ‘real’ Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus, etc., was born in Gaul (Lyon in present-day France) on August 1, 10 BCE. His pedigree was good enough (his grandmama was a wife of the divine Augustus) that he was taken in as a sort of cadet member of the Julio-Claudian dynasty (27 BCE to 64 CE) which formalized Julius Caesar’s murder of the Roman Republic. For almost any family member, that meant wealth, power, and danger. Indeed, one’s life expectancy waned as one’s power waxed, and Julio-Claudian history is full of assassinations (poisonings, skewerings, assisted suicides, etc.). Young Claudius avoided all this because no one thought much of him. He had a limp. He stammered. He had a noticeable palsy. And in a family whose business was heroism and glory, such a child didn’t count for much. His mother thought him irremediably stupid and farmed the boy out to his grandmother. (Later, as emperor, Claudius deified grandma, although not, it seems, out of gratitude). In due course, “Uncle Claudius” became sidekick to his nephew, the infamous Caligula. Caligula’s excesses offended even the Praetorian Guard, who assassinated him. Somehow (and there’s a lot of disagreement on this) Claudius survived, and for some reason the Praetorian’s proclaimed him emperor, in 41 CE. Claudius, who’d prospered reasonably well as a weak-bodied and absent-minded uncle, did pretty well in this “golden predicament.” As Roman Emperors go, he was OK. Along with the usual flaws (murders, etc.) he rebuilt Rome (two new aqueducts and one repaired), strengthened the imperial bureaucracy, and—probably above all—was the Roman emperor who finally conquered Britain (at least as far north as the Fosse Way). It made him a hero and bought him a “triumph,” even though he was only in Britain for a couple of weeks. And in a departure from custom, he brought a conquered British chief, Caractacus, back to Rome and set the barbarian up in a luxury villa. So Claudius is a bit of a puzzle. And the puzzle includes his death, in 54 CE. Was it poison, administered (or overseen) by his third wife, Agripina? Or did this 64 year old man-god succumb to his childhood illnesses? Either way, he was replaced by Nero, which was not an improvement. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
TELEPHONERY
Some may claim that it is unscientific to speak of the operations of nature as “miracles.” But the point of the title lies in the paradox of finding so many wonderful things—as wonderful as any miracle that was ever recorded—subservient to the rule of law. Elisha Gray, in the foreword to his Nature’s Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science (3 vols., 1899)
Elisha Gray was a proponent of the idea of “intelligent design.” So it’s no surprise to find that he was an elder in his Presbyterian congregation in Highland Park, Illinois. His church building still stands, solidly, on a prominent corner, a pleasing mix of conventional styles. But it’s nowhere nearly as miraculous as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in nearby Oak Park (1905). Gray, who died in 1901, didn’t live to see Wright’s wonder, but he might have approved. Gray came by his science naturally, through experience and experiment, and to him the Unity Temple might have been just another miracle. Elisha Gray was born a Quaker, in rural Ohio, on August 2, 1835. Like Emerson’s hero, that mythical Vermont farm boy, Gray tried his hands at many skilled trades, particularly carpentry. He also tinkered with electricity. And so at the relatively advanced age of 25 he went to Oberlin College, but only to study for its science certificate. As with Harvard, Oberlin then thought science not a fully accredited discipline. Gray completed the course in two years, found a wife (Oberlin student Della Minerva Shepard). and then became one of America’s most prolific inventors. Gray’s “telautograph” enabled people to sign contracts by telegraph. It was a great success at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, and became part of a valuable property eventually absorbed (in the 1990s) by Xerox. He’s said also to be the original inventor of the electric synthesizer, the maker (or murderer?) of so much modern music. And he became a great popularizer of science, with several publications (including his last, quoted above) intended to open the wonders of the natural world to the citizenry of a popular republic. And that should be enough. But Elisha Gray will always be remembered as the man who didn’t quite invent the telephone. His “caveat” (as sort of advance reservation for an invention “in the works”) was filed in Washington a few hours before Alexander Graham Bell’s full patent application. The caveat cost Gray $10. Bell’s patent application cost $15. Both documents survive, and have become mildly famous in themselves, for they were very similar. Almost immediately the patent lawyers got to work. The case seems to me impossibly complicated. In the end, the proper patent application, at $15, won the prize. But both Bell and Gray had sold their claims to corporate actors, and there was little personal enmity. So successive generations have blamed Bell for the troublesome, disruptive telephone. ©.
Some may claim that it is unscientific to speak of the operations of nature as “miracles.” But the point of the title lies in the paradox of finding so many wonderful things—as wonderful as any miracle that was ever recorded—subservient to the rule of law. Elisha Gray, in the foreword to his Nature’s Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science (3 vols., 1899)
Elisha Gray was a proponent of the idea of “intelligent design.” So it’s no surprise to find that he was an elder in his Presbyterian congregation in Highland Park, Illinois. His church building still stands, solidly, on a prominent corner, a pleasing mix of conventional styles. But it’s nowhere nearly as miraculous as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Unity Temple in nearby Oak Park (1905). Gray, who died in 1901, didn’t live to see Wright’s wonder, but he might have approved. Gray came by his science naturally, through experience and experiment, and to him the Unity Temple might have been just another miracle. Elisha Gray was born a Quaker, in rural Ohio, on August 2, 1835. Like Emerson’s hero, that mythical Vermont farm boy, Gray tried his hands at many skilled trades, particularly carpentry. He also tinkered with electricity. And so at the relatively advanced age of 25 he went to Oberlin College, but only to study for its science certificate. As with Harvard, Oberlin then thought science not a fully accredited discipline. Gray completed the course in two years, found a wife (Oberlin student Della Minerva Shepard). and then became one of America’s most prolific inventors. Gray’s “telautograph” enabled people to sign contracts by telegraph. It was a great success at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, and became part of a valuable property eventually absorbed (in the 1990s) by Xerox. He’s said also to be the original inventor of the electric synthesizer, the maker (or murderer?) of so much modern music. And he became a great popularizer of science, with several publications (including his last, quoted above) intended to open the wonders of the natural world to the citizenry of a popular republic. And that should be enough. But Elisha Gray will always be remembered as the man who didn’t quite invent the telephone. His “caveat” (as sort of advance reservation for an invention “in the works”) was filed in Washington a few hours before Alexander Graham Bell’s full patent application. The caveat cost Gray $10. Bell’s patent application cost $15. Both documents survive, and have become mildly famous in themselves, for they were very similar. Almost immediately the patent lawyers got to work. The case seems to me impossibly complicated. In the end, the proper patent application, at $15, won the prize. But both Bell and Gray had sold their claims to corporate actors, and there was little personal enmity. So successive generations have blamed Bell for the troublesome, disruptive telephone. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
CRYSTAL PALACE
No occupation is more worthy of an intelligent and enlightened mind than the study of Nature [wherein] we shall constantly find some new object to attract our attention, some fresh beauties to excite our imagination, and some previously undiscovered source of gratification and delight.
--Sir Joseph Paxton.
Paxton practiced his preachments, for he was an eminent horticulturalist, famed for his care of the magnificent gardens at Chatsworth, the country seat of the Cavendishes, dukes of Devonshire. Among Paxton’s delights was the “Cavendish banana,” Musa cavendishii, a cultivar he developed from plants brought to Chatsworth from Mauritius. And it’s our delight too, for today our breakfast banana (or our ‘split’ banana) is almost certainly a cavendishii. It was developed in the early 1830s by Paxton, but didn’t reign supreme until the 1950s, when the Gros Michel banana (the “Big Mike”) fell prey to a fungus. Commercial cultivars are like that. Prized for their commercial virtues, they don’t retain the genetic diversity of their natural forbears, and probably the Musa covendishii will, one day, meet a similar fate: unless the Trump tariffs get them first. All the chief sources of USA bananas have been hit by rates ranging from 10% to 15%, significant taxes in a low-margin market. Paxton’s reputation will survive, for his love of (managed) nature lives on at Chatsworth and elsewhere. Joseph Paxtonwas born into a farming family in Bedfordshire on August 3, 1803. As a seventh son, he would have to find his sustenance elsewhere. So, lying about his age, he obtained an apprenticeship at the Chiswick Gardens, and it was there that he came to the attention of William Cavendish, 6th duke of Devonshire. Aged only 20, Paxton became head gardener at Chatsworth. There he not only revolutionized plant life but built astonishing structures to house his rarities (including, of course, bananas). And it was this building experience, especially with greenhouses, that led to Paxton’s most famous commission. It was not for a garden or a greenhouse but for the magnificent hall that housed Prince Albert’s ‘Great Exposition’ of 1851. Built almost entirely of cast iron and glass, it was satirized as a “crystal palace”, but the satire stuck. Previous bids came in too high or too ponderous, but Paxton’s was cheap and, miraculously, came in on time and was completed even slightly below budget. Already familiar with new processes for making large glass panes, Paxton took each pane at its manufactured size, slotted the panes into iron pillars, louvered some of them to control temperatures, and left London with a glassed exhibition hall of huge dimensions. The Crystal Palace, a triumph of man over nature, became a symbol of Victorian Britain’s industrial primacy. Sadly the Crystal Palace has not survived, except as a football club. Paxton’s banana may not stand its tests of time, either. But there’s always Chatsworth. ©.
No occupation is more worthy of an intelligent and enlightened mind than the study of Nature [wherein] we shall constantly find some new object to attract our attention, some fresh beauties to excite our imagination, and some previously undiscovered source of gratification and delight.
--Sir Joseph Paxton.
Paxton practiced his preachments, for he was an eminent horticulturalist, famed for his care of the magnificent gardens at Chatsworth, the country seat of the Cavendishes, dukes of Devonshire. Among Paxton’s delights was the “Cavendish banana,” Musa cavendishii, a cultivar he developed from plants brought to Chatsworth from Mauritius. And it’s our delight too, for today our breakfast banana (or our ‘split’ banana) is almost certainly a cavendishii. It was developed in the early 1830s by Paxton, but didn’t reign supreme until the 1950s, when the Gros Michel banana (the “Big Mike”) fell prey to a fungus. Commercial cultivars are like that. Prized for their commercial virtues, they don’t retain the genetic diversity of their natural forbears, and probably the Musa covendishii will, one day, meet a similar fate: unless the Trump tariffs get them first. All the chief sources of USA bananas have been hit by rates ranging from 10% to 15%, significant taxes in a low-margin market. Paxton’s reputation will survive, for his love of (managed) nature lives on at Chatsworth and elsewhere. Joseph Paxtonwas born into a farming family in Bedfordshire on August 3, 1803. As a seventh son, he would have to find his sustenance elsewhere. So, lying about his age, he obtained an apprenticeship at the Chiswick Gardens, and it was there that he came to the attention of William Cavendish, 6th duke of Devonshire. Aged only 20, Paxton became head gardener at Chatsworth. There he not only revolutionized plant life but built astonishing structures to house his rarities (including, of course, bananas). And it was this building experience, especially with greenhouses, that led to Paxton’s most famous commission. It was not for a garden or a greenhouse but for the magnificent hall that housed Prince Albert’s ‘Great Exposition’ of 1851. Built almost entirely of cast iron and glass, it was satirized as a “crystal palace”, but the satire stuck. Previous bids came in too high or too ponderous, but Paxton’s was cheap and, miraculously, came in on time and was completed even slightly below budget. Already familiar with new processes for making large glass panes, Paxton took each pane at its manufactured size, slotted the panes into iron pillars, louvered some of them to control temperatures, and left London with a glassed exhibition hall of huge dimensions. The Crystal Palace, a triumph of man over nature, became a symbol of Victorian Britain’s industrial primacy. Sadly the Crystal Palace has not survived, except as a football club. Paxton’s banana may not stand its tests of time, either. But there’s always Chatsworth. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
BUCHAN
The ideas of the ancient Bards were generally simple and sublime, and expressed in language at once natural, nervous, and fiery; and every word (such was their conciseness) seemed indispensably necessary to the harmony of the whole. Peter Buchan, from the Foreword of his Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland(2 vols, Edinburgh, 1828).
Buchan’s Foreword follows his dedication (to the Duke of Buccleuch), and then come two volumes of ballads. You can read them online, via the digital collections of the University of California. All the ballads that I have read were rendered in short stanzas, sometimes pages long, and in narrative form—like all good folk musics, they tell stories. There is no musical notation, but clearly they were meant to be sung. Whether they were meant to be performed in mixed company is more difficult to say. Many of Buchan’s ballads are about love, but not of the courtly sort. Jealous fathers and brothers and husbands protect ‘their’ women’s virtue, but unsuccessfully. Well-born girls scorn the advances of traveling knights and minstrels, but are finally “ta’en.” These ballads are not as ‘earthy’ as some of Robert Burns’s, but as Buchan says in his foreword the language is natural, nervous, and fiery enough to tell of conquests and cuckoldry of several sorts, and true love too. Peter Buchan’s indefatigable collecting produced many published volumes and mountains of manuscripts, and was part of a Scottish cultural civil war, fought over the proper geography of Scottish culture. Buchan’s work gained him the patronage of Scots peers (not only the Duke of Buccleuch but also a distant kin, the Earl of Buchan. Buchan enjoyed too the rather patronizing patronage of Sir Walter Scott who used Scots legends to gain more lasting fame (and more current income) than Buchan ever dreamed of. But Peter Buchan himself was an extraordinary character, the younger son of a Peterhead ships pilot born in that busy fishing port on August 4, 1790. His parents were both Buchans (‘of that ilk’) but not rich, so Peter was apprenticed out, to a chapbook printer in Stirling. He more than picked up the trade to become a printer in his own right, first back home in Peterhead, then in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. And not only that. Buchan invented important devices connected with printing and, into the bargain, learned (or taught himself) engraving, and used materials other than hot lead to make printing images, including finely worked stone. A Buchan engraving of his oil portrait furnishes the frontispiece of Ancient Ballads and Songs. He was also an aggressive proponent of animal rights. Not least of Peter Buchan’s triumphs is that he learned, or taught himself, how to write vigorous English prose. This should not surprise us, for some still say that the best, purest English in all the world is spoken in Inverness, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. You just have to get used to the accent. ©.
The ideas of the ancient Bards were generally simple and sublime, and expressed in language at once natural, nervous, and fiery; and every word (such was their conciseness) seemed indispensably necessary to the harmony of the whole. Peter Buchan, from the Foreword of his Ancient Ballads and Songs of the North of Scotland(2 vols, Edinburgh, 1828).
Buchan’s Foreword follows his dedication (to the Duke of Buccleuch), and then come two volumes of ballads. You can read them online, via the digital collections of the University of California. All the ballads that I have read were rendered in short stanzas, sometimes pages long, and in narrative form—like all good folk musics, they tell stories. There is no musical notation, but clearly they were meant to be sung. Whether they were meant to be performed in mixed company is more difficult to say. Many of Buchan’s ballads are about love, but not of the courtly sort. Jealous fathers and brothers and husbands protect ‘their’ women’s virtue, but unsuccessfully. Well-born girls scorn the advances of traveling knights and minstrels, but are finally “ta’en.” These ballads are not as ‘earthy’ as some of Robert Burns’s, but as Buchan says in his foreword the language is natural, nervous, and fiery enough to tell of conquests and cuckoldry of several sorts, and true love too. Peter Buchan’s indefatigable collecting produced many published volumes and mountains of manuscripts, and was part of a Scottish cultural civil war, fought over the proper geography of Scottish culture. Buchan’s work gained him the patronage of Scots peers (not only the Duke of Buccleuch but also a distant kin, the Earl of Buchan. Buchan enjoyed too the rather patronizing patronage of Sir Walter Scott who used Scots legends to gain more lasting fame (and more current income) than Buchan ever dreamed of. But Peter Buchan himself was an extraordinary character, the younger son of a Peterhead ships pilot born in that busy fishing port on August 4, 1790. His parents were both Buchans (‘of that ilk’) but not rich, so Peter was apprenticed out, to a chapbook printer in Stirling. He more than picked up the trade to become a printer in his own right, first back home in Peterhead, then in Glasgow, Edinburgh, and London. And not only that. Buchan invented important devices connected with printing and, into the bargain, learned (or taught himself) engraving, and used materials other than hot lead to make printing images, including finely worked stone. A Buchan engraving of his oil portrait furnishes the frontispiece of Ancient Ballads and Songs. He was also an aggressive proponent of animal rights. Not least of Peter Buchan’s triumphs is that he learned, or taught himself, how to write vigorous English prose. This should not surprise us, for some still say that the best, purest English in all the world is spoken in Inverness, Aberdeen, and Edinburgh. You just have to get used to the accent. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
RIVONIA
Ag! You’re Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams and you’re under arrest! Detective Sergeant Wynand Jacobus Wessels, August 5, 1962.
“Ag!” is an Afrikaans exclamation, like the English ‘oh!’ and, in certain circumstances, the Germanic “ach!” What is more interesting is how Wessels and his patrol crew knew who they were arresting, for while Cecil Williams (1906-1979) was already known for his public activities as an anti-Apartheid activist, a radical playwright, and an aggressively “out” homosexual, how did they know that the man posing as Williams’s chauffeur was really Nelson Mandela? There are several answers to that question, but one is that the American CIA had told them. Having already (mis)identified Mandela as a “suspected communist,” the CIA had been tracking him for some time. The “black Pimpernel” wasn’t easy to track. He had just traveled to London and then around Africa seeking support for the African National Congress (ANC) from the Pan African Congress (PAC). Trouble was that the PAC, under Albert Luthuli’s leadership, had pledged to a peaceful solution of the Afrikaans’ color problem. Along the whole rainbow of human colors, the South African government had chosen pink-grey, a Caucasian coloration known generally as “white,” as the only shade for citizenship in South Africa. The whole rest of the rainbow was to be shut away, unless needed for cheap labor. For various reasons, the South African authorities could only put Mandela away for minor offenses, but a police raid near Johannesburg soon gave them reason to pull Mandela out of prison and charge him with treason, along with others but as “Defendant #1”. Everybody knows the ultimate outcomes of all this, Mandela’s election as South Africa’s president, his “Truth and Reconciliation” commission, but we should also note the real rainbow nature of Mandela’s co-conspirators, including Cecil Williams. He was born in Cornwall, the son of a blacksmith. Mandela and Williams had just been visiting the home of an Asian, the photo-journalist G. R. Naidoo, who was Mandela’s contact man for Albert Luthuli. The car itself, an Austin Cambridge, was given to Williams by an elderly pink-grey woman who didn’t like apartheid. And in court at Rivonia, Mandela’s codefendants displayed the whole rainbow of South Africa’s population. And they were defended by a rainbow of lawyers including George Bizos, of pink-grey (Greek) parentage. Among the young lawyers Bizos consulted was Sydney Kentridge, who went on, later in his career to defend Desmond Tutu and Albert Luthuli. Kentridge, of Lithuanian-Jewish parentage, thus represented three Nobel Peace prize winners—before they won. Sir Sydney, as he is now known, is still alive, the only survivor of the Rivonia Rainbow, people who need to be remembered for their courage, whatever their colors. ©
Ag! You’re Nelson Mandela and this is Cecil Williams and you’re under arrest! Detective Sergeant Wynand Jacobus Wessels, August 5, 1962.
“Ag!” is an Afrikaans exclamation, like the English ‘oh!’ and, in certain circumstances, the Germanic “ach!” What is more interesting is how Wessels and his patrol crew knew who they were arresting, for while Cecil Williams (1906-1979) was already known for his public activities as an anti-Apartheid activist, a radical playwright, and an aggressively “out” homosexual, how did they know that the man posing as Williams’s chauffeur was really Nelson Mandela? There are several answers to that question, but one is that the American CIA had told them. Having already (mis)identified Mandela as a “suspected communist,” the CIA had been tracking him for some time. The “black Pimpernel” wasn’t easy to track. He had just traveled to London and then around Africa seeking support for the African National Congress (ANC) from the Pan African Congress (PAC). Trouble was that the PAC, under Albert Luthuli’s leadership, had pledged to a peaceful solution of the Afrikaans’ color problem. Along the whole rainbow of human colors, the South African government had chosen pink-grey, a Caucasian coloration known generally as “white,” as the only shade for citizenship in South Africa. The whole rest of the rainbow was to be shut away, unless needed for cheap labor. For various reasons, the South African authorities could only put Mandela away for minor offenses, but a police raid near Johannesburg soon gave them reason to pull Mandela out of prison and charge him with treason, along with others but as “Defendant #1”. Everybody knows the ultimate outcomes of all this, Mandela’s election as South Africa’s president, his “Truth and Reconciliation” commission, but we should also note the real rainbow nature of Mandela’s co-conspirators, including Cecil Williams. He was born in Cornwall, the son of a blacksmith. Mandela and Williams had just been visiting the home of an Asian, the photo-journalist G. R. Naidoo, who was Mandela’s contact man for Albert Luthuli. The car itself, an Austin Cambridge, was given to Williams by an elderly pink-grey woman who didn’t like apartheid. And in court at Rivonia, Mandela’s codefendants displayed the whole rainbow of South Africa’s population. And they were defended by a rainbow of lawyers including George Bizos, of pink-grey (Greek) parentage. Among the young lawyers Bizos consulted was Sydney Kentridge, who went on, later in his career to defend Desmond Tutu and Albert Luthuli. Kentridge, of Lithuanian-Jewish parentage, thus represented three Nobel Peace prize winners—before they won. Sir Sydney, as he is now known, is still alive, the only survivor of the Rivonia Rainbow, people who need to be remembered for their courage, whatever their colors. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
WOLLASTON
When our views are sufficiently extended to enable us to reason with precision concerning the proportions of elementary atoms, we shall find the arithmetical relation alone will not be sufficient to explain their mutual action, and that we shall be obliged to acquire a geometric conception of their relative dimensions. William Wollaston, 1808.
This was a revolutionary thought, and coming nearly a century before J. J. Thomson’s experimental proof that atoms had parts, it was presciently early. So William Wollaston advanced it conditionally ( “I am inclined to think . . .”) and as a byproduct of a lecture on salts—which are among the most reactive of elements in the periodic table. Before that table existed, Wollaston was a pioneer in isolating and identifying the elements. He’s less well known than Humphry Davy, with whom he often worked. Davy, after all, discovered seven elements just in 1807-1808; Wollaston is credited with only two, each of far less importance than Davy’s. But it was all exceedingly clever stuff for chemists using primitive lab equipment (including, too often, their own taste buds) to make these truly ‘elemental’ discoveries. William Hyde Wollaston was a vicar’s son, born in Dereham parish, Norfolk on August 6, 1766. It was a large family (17 kids), but William’s father was one of those classic scientific parsons (an amateur astronomer), and William grew up with a good library, too. His family had means enough to send him to Charterhouse School and then on to Cambridge, whence he graduated BA, then MD. He practiced medicine briefly, but a family inheritance enabled him to set up in London as a ‘scientist.’ The word itself was yet to be coined, so Wollaston was known as a chemist. For him it turned out to be a profitable profession. He was most famed as the inventor of an economic way to refine and produce usable platinum. His work with platinum made him rich, but also brought recognition for his parallel discovery of two atomic elements (palladium, 1802, and rhodium, 1804). Already well-established in London’s scientific community (he had been elected to the Royal Society in 1793) Wollaston continued pioneer work in several fields, notably electricity, optics, mapmaking, and spectroscopy. He devised a battery that produced electricity only when needed and several revolutionary lenses (especially one for his camera lucida). He continued to experiment in medicine, offering scientific proof of the complex relationships between blood sugar and diabetes. In atomic theory—besides predicting that the atom itself had a geometric structure—he made important advances in assigning atomic weights to different elements. But he left the Anglophone world with a problem, too; William Wollaston served on the parliamentary commission that, in 1818, rejected the metric system as a standard of weights and measures. But that’s another story, a triumph of ideology over common sense. And today, we have too much of that. ©.
When our views are sufficiently extended to enable us to reason with precision concerning the proportions of elementary atoms, we shall find the arithmetical relation alone will not be sufficient to explain their mutual action, and that we shall be obliged to acquire a geometric conception of their relative dimensions. William Wollaston, 1808.
This was a revolutionary thought, and coming nearly a century before J. J. Thomson’s experimental proof that atoms had parts, it was presciently early. So William Wollaston advanced it conditionally ( “I am inclined to think . . .”) and as a byproduct of a lecture on salts—which are among the most reactive of elements in the periodic table. Before that table existed, Wollaston was a pioneer in isolating and identifying the elements. He’s less well known than Humphry Davy, with whom he often worked. Davy, after all, discovered seven elements just in 1807-1808; Wollaston is credited with only two, each of far less importance than Davy’s. But it was all exceedingly clever stuff for chemists using primitive lab equipment (including, too often, their own taste buds) to make these truly ‘elemental’ discoveries. William Hyde Wollaston was a vicar’s son, born in Dereham parish, Norfolk on August 6, 1766. It was a large family (17 kids), but William’s father was one of those classic scientific parsons (an amateur astronomer), and William grew up with a good library, too. His family had means enough to send him to Charterhouse School and then on to Cambridge, whence he graduated BA, then MD. He practiced medicine briefly, but a family inheritance enabled him to set up in London as a ‘scientist.’ The word itself was yet to be coined, so Wollaston was known as a chemist. For him it turned out to be a profitable profession. He was most famed as the inventor of an economic way to refine and produce usable platinum. His work with platinum made him rich, but also brought recognition for his parallel discovery of two atomic elements (palladium, 1802, and rhodium, 1804). Already well-established in London’s scientific community (he had been elected to the Royal Society in 1793) Wollaston continued pioneer work in several fields, notably electricity, optics, mapmaking, and spectroscopy. He devised a battery that produced electricity only when needed and several revolutionary lenses (especially one for his camera lucida). He continued to experiment in medicine, offering scientific proof of the complex relationships between blood sugar and diabetes. In atomic theory—besides predicting that the atom itself had a geometric structure—he made important advances in assigning atomic weights to different elements. But he left the Anglophone world with a problem, too; William Wollaston served on the parliamentary commission that, in 1818, rejected the metric system as a standard of weights and measures. But that’s another story, a triumph of ideology over common sense. And today, we have too much of that. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
Nothing received yesterday, I have mailed Bob and asked the question......
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
THE FOX
Le roman de Renart le contrefait. Six stories compiled by a monk from Troyes, circa1320.
Or, as we might say, in English, The Story of Reynard the Counterfeit. Reynard was of course a fox, and clever as one too. The fox stories became so popular that renard replaced goupil for “fox” in the French vocabulary. And it goes without saying that the fox is clever, sometimes diabolically so. Renard (or “Reynard”) talks chickens into stewpots. Renard is dressed to kill, disguised in a monk’s hood. In the same century, exported into England, the fox appears in one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, playing (fatally, again) to the ego of Chanticleer the rooster. So the fox became the common property of the English and the French, and more broadly representative of the ‘trickster figure’ known throughout the world’s folk cultures, Aesopian to a fault. But in the middle of the 16th century, during the brief but eventful reign of Queen Mary, there appeared a ‘real’ Renard, Simon Renard, born in Franche-Compté in about 1513. He died in Madrid, Spain, on August 8, 1573, and it’s there, in Spain, that we hang this particular fox’s tale. Little is known of this Renard’s origins, but they were probably gentle at least, for he attended university (Louvain), became a notary, and by 1547 was appointed to an important diplomatic post in the service of Emperor Charles V and then Charles’s son Philip II, King of Spain. Both of them, Hapsburgs to the core, appreciated Renard’s fox-like character, and sent him to England to attend King Edward VI, but really (for the boy-king Edward was dying) to clear the ground for the Princess Mary, Edward’s elder sister and heir apparent. Mary was also Catholic, and thus dear to Hapsburg hearts as the monarch-in-waiting who might return England to the Pope’s fold. It was a confused and often violent time, and Simon Renard’s dispatches (to Philip II, in Madrid) are today a major source for historians. But not a dependable source, for the fox couldn’t resist the temptation to make himself more central than he really was. He does seem to have been important in arranging the marriage between Philip II and Queen Mary, and he was one of those who happily reported that the marriage was consummated. He may also have reported Mary’s (false) pregnancy. King Philip distrusted Simon Renard for other reasons (and who would trust a fox?), and although Renard ‘retired’ to an important post in Spain he soon fell victim to the same sort of court intrigues he had helped foment in London. His lasting significance may be that he shielded Princess Elizabeth from charges that she had supported a rebellion against Queen Mary. And when Mary died childless, in November 1558, Elizabeth’s reign began. England remained a Protestant nation. In Madrid, Simon Renard died in disgrace and out of office. ©
Le roman de Renart le contrefait. Six stories compiled by a monk from Troyes, circa1320.
Or, as we might say, in English, The Story of Reynard the Counterfeit. Reynard was of course a fox, and clever as one too. The fox stories became so popular that renard replaced goupil for “fox” in the French vocabulary. And it goes without saying that the fox is clever, sometimes diabolically so. Renard (or “Reynard”) talks chickens into stewpots. Renard is dressed to kill, disguised in a monk’s hood. In the same century, exported into England, the fox appears in one of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, playing (fatally, again) to the ego of Chanticleer the rooster. So the fox became the common property of the English and the French, and more broadly representative of the ‘trickster figure’ known throughout the world’s folk cultures, Aesopian to a fault. But in the middle of the 16th century, during the brief but eventful reign of Queen Mary, there appeared a ‘real’ Renard, Simon Renard, born in Franche-Compté in about 1513. He died in Madrid, Spain, on August 8, 1573, and it’s there, in Spain, that we hang this particular fox’s tale. Little is known of this Renard’s origins, but they were probably gentle at least, for he attended university (Louvain), became a notary, and by 1547 was appointed to an important diplomatic post in the service of Emperor Charles V and then Charles’s son Philip II, King of Spain. Both of them, Hapsburgs to the core, appreciated Renard’s fox-like character, and sent him to England to attend King Edward VI, but really (for the boy-king Edward was dying) to clear the ground for the Princess Mary, Edward’s elder sister and heir apparent. Mary was also Catholic, and thus dear to Hapsburg hearts as the monarch-in-waiting who might return England to the Pope’s fold. It was a confused and often violent time, and Simon Renard’s dispatches (to Philip II, in Madrid) are today a major source for historians. But not a dependable source, for the fox couldn’t resist the temptation to make himself more central than he really was. He does seem to have been important in arranging the marriage between Philip II and Queen Mary, and he was one of those who happily reported that the marriage was consummated. He may also have reported Mary’s (false) pregnancy. King Philip distrusted Simon Renard for other reasons (and who would trust a fox?), and although Renard ‘retired’ to an important post in Spain he soon fell victim to the same sort of court intrigues he had helped foment in London. His lasting significance may be that he shielded Princess Elizabeth from charges that she had supported a rebellion against Queen Mary. And when Mary died childless, in November 1558, Elizabeth’s reign began. England remained a Protestant nation. In Madrid, Simon Renard died in disgrace and out of office. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
SWAMINATHAN
I followed Swami Vivekananda’s teachings when I was young. He said, this life is short, its vanities are transient. He alone lives who lives for others. M. S. Swaminathan, 2011.
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was born in Madras, India, on August 7, 1925, and died in Kerala in 1923. That’s about as un-transient as one can get, and a case can be made that, for 98 years, Swaminathan lived for others, for in the fulness of his age he was universally recognized as the progenitor of India’s ‘Green Revolution.’ In broad, that is the process by which India seems to have become self-sustaining in food production. This marks a near miracle. At the time of the last serious famine, 1943, India’s population was 390 million. Today it stands at nearly 1.5 billion. Of course we don’t do miracles these days, and this transition has been a complex one. For instance, serious food shortages in the 1960s owed partly to distribution problems; rice and wheat stocks were back from the market to increase profits. Another factor in India’s food prosperity has been the increasing productivity of its urban economies. But there has been a “green revolution,” call it what you will, and M. S. Swaminathan was its leader. And as important as Swami Vivekananda’s Hindu teachings were to Swaminathan’s success, science must take some credit. The young Swaminathan grew up in a prosperous family, high-caste and professional. At first he intended to follow his father and become a medical doctor. But he changed course. A number of factors, including that 1943 famine, led to a degree in agricultural science and then a doctorate. His research on the genus Solanum (that’s potatoes to you and me) led him to a UNESCO fellowship and further studies in the west, notably at Cambridge and Wisconsin, and a conviction that better genetic engineering could address India’s food problem. In this he was a disciple of Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) whose work in plant genetics won Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize. Along with the science Swaminathan developed a holistic approach, ecological in the broadest sense, taking in climate change, chemical pollution, and those age-old distribution problems (“forestalling” and “engrossing,” as early modern western moralists called them, “monopoly” to us). And with an extended family with its roots deep in Keralan agriculture, Swaminathan broadened his approach to address both the poverty and the conservatism of India’s farmers and tenants. He also advocated enhancing the role of women in farm production and marketing, an effort which (under India’s present Hindu nationalist rule) has lapsed. He’s been criticized for also expanding the role of multinational monopolies in world agriculture. But his “Evergreen Revolution”, as he came to call it, never aimed to turn the world upside down. Swaminathan took the world as he found it, and tried to improve upon what he found. ©.
I followed Swami Vivekananda’s teachings when I was young. He said, this life is short, its vanities are transient. He alone lives who lives for others. M. S. Swaminathan, 2011.
Mankombu Sambasivan Swaminathan was born in Madras, India, on August 7, 1925, and died in Kerala in 1923. That’s about as un-transient as one can get, and a case can be made that, for 98 years, Swaminathan lived for others, for in the fulness of his age he was universally recognized as the progenitor of India’s ‘Green Revolution.’ In broad, that is the process by which India seems to have become self-sustaining in food production. This marks a near miracle. At the time of the last serious famine, 1943, India’s population was 390 million. Today it stands at nearly 1.5 billion. Of course we don’t do miracles these days, and this transition has been a complex one. For instance, serious food shortages in the 1960s owed partly to distribution problems; rice and wheat stocks were back from the market to increase profits. Another factor in India’s food prosperity has been the increasing productivity of its urban economies. But there has been a “green revolution,” call it what you will, and M. S. Swaminathan was its leader. And as important as Swami Vivekananda’s Hindu teachings were to Swaminathan’s success, science must take some credit. The young Swaminathan grew up in a prosperous family, high-caste and professional. At first he intended to follow his father and become a medical doctor. But he changed course. A number of factors, including that 1943 famine, led to a degree in agricultural science and then a doctorate. His research on the genus Solanum (that’s potatoes to you and me) led him to a UNESCO fellowship and further studies in the west, notably at Cambridge and Wisconsin, and a conviction that better genetic engineering could address India’s food problem. In this he was a disciple of Norman Borlaug (1914-2009) whose work in plant genetics won Borlaug the Nobel Peace Prize. Along with the science Swaminathan developed a holistic approach, ecological in the broadest sense, taking in climate change, chemical pollution, and those age-old distribution problems (“forestalling” and “engrossing,” as early modern western moralists called them, “monopoly” to us). And with an extended family with its roots deep in Keralan agriculture, Swaminathan broadened his approach to address both the poverty and the conservatism of India’s farmers and tenants. He also advocated enhancing the role of women in farm production and marketing, an effort which (under India’s present Hindu nationalist rule) has lapsed. He’s been criticized for also expanding the role of multinational monopolies in world agriculture. But his “Evergreen Revolution”, as he came to call it, never aimed to turn the world upside down. Swaminathan took the world as he found it, and tried to improve upon what he found. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
BROADWOOD
It should not surprise us that the weakness of folk song is most often apparent in its verse. A child will sing before it can speak . . . Bearing this in mind we shall deal more justly with the doggerel narrative and irregular metre of the country ballad. Lucy Broadwood, English Traditional Songs and Carols (1908).
Lucy Broadwood was a collector of English folk songs. She began in her youth, in rural Sussex, listening to Christmas carolers and transcribing (words and music) from neighborhood elders. Her enthusiasms matured into print when, aged 39, she published her first ‘academic’ collection, English Country Songs (1893). It sold well, for in the “Arts and Crafts” age of John Ruskin and William Morris, the English reading public was readier than it had ever been to appreciate the old, the quaint, and the simple. Broadwood also performed folk song concerts which were well attended and noted in the press. It’s no surprise to find her, in 1898, among the founder-members of the Folksong Society, serving as its secretary and, from 1908, as the editor of its Journal, in which, of course, she continued to publish her findings. She also drew into the society leading figures from English classical music, including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger. In return, these composers made brilliant use of traditional music in writing their concert pieces. And Lucy Broadwood was herself a serious musician. “A child can sing before it can speak,” and she developed a career as a performer in small, often private, concerts in and around London. Broadwood also studied classical music. Later she published a new edition, with notes, of an early Henry Purcell opera. She also acted as patron or sponsor of performances by English and foreign musicians. Hers was an amateur career, in tune (pardon the pun) for her time. So it helps to understand that she was born to music, for her father ran the family firm of Broadwood & Sons. Founded in 1728, Broadwood made pianos. Beethoven used a Broadwood. So did the queen of Spain (hers was a more luxurious model than Ludwig’s). And Broadwood furnished Victoria with pianos, too, not least at Balmoral. Born in Scotland on August 9, 1858, Lucy Broadwood grew up in the Broadwood family mansion at Lyne, Sussex. There she was privately educated and of course learned piano (and several other instruments), and sang in family concerts. Undoubtedly the Broadwoods were most interested in classical music, but it’s worth pointing out that Lucy’s uncle John was an early collector of folk songs. It’s also a pointer to her future that she was christened Lucy Etheldred Broadwood, an old Anglo-Saxon moniker usually male but appropriate to a little girl who would become a leading collector of ancient folk music. And if you want to buy a piano with a pedigree, Broadwood & Sons still makes them—and still enjoys royal patronage. ©.
It should not surprise us that the weakness of folk song is most often apparent in its verse. A child will sing before it can speak . . . Bearing this in mind we shall deal more justly with the doggerel narrative and irregular metre of the country ballad. Lucy Broadwood, English Traditional Songs and Carols (1908).
Lucy Broadwood was a collector of English folk songs. She began in her youth, in rural Sussex, listening to Christmas carolers and transcribing (words and music) from neighborhood elders. Her enthusiasms matured into print when, aged 39, she published her first ‘academic’ collection, English Country Songs (1893). It sold well, for in the “Arts and Crafts” age of John Ruskin and William Morris, the English reading public was readier than it had ever been to appreciate the old, the quaint, and the simple. Broadwood also performed folk song concerts which were well attended and noted in the press. It’s no surprise to find her, in 1898, among the founder-members of the Folksong Society, serving as its secretary and, from 1908, as the editor of its Journal, in which, of course, she continued to publish her findings. She also drew into the society leading figures from English classical music, including Ralph Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger. In return, these composers made brilliant use of traditional music in writing their concert pieces. And Lucy Broadwood was herself a serious musician. “A child can sing before it can speak,” and she developed a career as a performer in small, often private, concerts in and around London. Broadwood also studied classical music. Later she published a new edition, with notes, of an early Henry Purcell opera. She also acted as patron or sponsor of performances by English and foreign musicians. Hers was an amateur career, in tune (pardon the pun) for her time. So it helps to understand that she was born to music, for her father ran the family firm of Broadwood & Sons. Founded in 1728, Broadwood made pianos. Beethoven used a Broadwood. So did the queen of Spain (hers was a more luxurious model than Ludwig’s). And Broadwood furnished Victoria with pianos, too, not least at Balmoral. Born in Scotland on August 9, 1858, Lucy Broadwood grew up in the Broadwood family mansion at Lyne, Sussex. There she was privately educated and of course learned piano (and several other instruments), and sang in family concerts. Undoubtedly the Broadwoods were most interested in classical music, but it’s worth pointing out that Lucy’s uncle John was an early collector of folk songs. It’s also a pointer to her future that she was christened Lucy Etheldred Broadwood, an old Anglo-Saxon moniker usually male but appropriate to a little girl who would become a leading collector of ancient folk music. And if you want to buy a piano with a pedigree, Broadwood & Sons still makes them—and still enjoys royal patronage. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
TWANG
YOUR USE OF THE TRADEMARK BROADKASTER ON YOUR ELECTRIC GUITAR IS AN INFRINGEMENT ON OUR TRADEMARK BROADKASTER . . . WE REQUEST IMMEDIATE ASSURANCE THAT YOU ARE ABANDONING THE USE OF THIS NAME. Western Union telegram, February 20, 1951, from the Fred Gretsch Manufacturing Company.
Ever since electricity had been tamed and wired, its musical potentials were obvious, and not only for recording. Electricity could produce music, and the Fred Gretsch Company, of Brooklyn, makers of all sorts of musical instruments but mainly drums, moved into the electromusic business in the 1920s. Several mergers later (and a spectacular bankruptcy), Gretsch still makes electric instruments, and is still famous for its guitars, supplied to (inter alia) Chet Atkins, Bo Diddley, and George Harrison. Gretsch also made electric banjoes, one of them patented (in 1937) as the “Broadcaster.” Then along came the Fender “Broadcaster”, in 1950, and Gretsch rose up, like the colossus it was, to defend its right to the name, and Fender obligingly removed the “Broadcaster” logo. For a while, Fender waggishly called the guitar a “Nocaster,” but then settled on “Telecaster,” more in tune with the new age of television. It worked well, but was soon (in 1956) superseded by the Fender “Stratocaster.” Today, the “Stratocaster” comes in bewildering varieties, selling from under $400 to a super-deluxe $15,000. Souvenir Stratocasters, though, cost more. Jimi Hendrix’s went for nearly $3 million, and in 2020 an Australian with too much money bought Kurt Cobain’s for over $6 million. And to think all this started with the “Broadcaster” (or, as Western Union mis-keyed it, “BROADKASTER”)! All this started with Leo Fender, born near his parents’ orange plantation in Anaheim, CA, on August 10, 1909. He was an odd kid, made odder by the loss of one eye, catholic in his musical tastes and eccentric in his youthful enthusiasms for messing around with radios, electricity, and sound amplification. By the early 1940s his radio repair shop was transitioning into a music business, some repair work and more tinkering, and his first electric guitar was a steel one, Hawaiian style. That design was a bit cumbersome for backyard bands and in 1949 Leo came up with a ‘real’ electric guitar, the “Esquire,” further improved in 1950 with the “Broadcaster,” a natural name to choose for a radio nut. Leo did more tinkering, not only changing names but adding electrical pickups, and of course with amplifiers paired with each guitar model’s particular features. They were cheap, light, most of them easy to move from venue to venue, and a player with only basic talents (strumming and/or picking) could anchor a whole combo. Leo sold his company in 1965 but then, suffering perhaps from tinkering-withdrawal symptoms, started anew, concentrating this time on the amplification end—which was where he began. He died in 1991, but “the Fender” has become a symbol of the age. ©
YOUR USE OF THE TRADEMARK BROADKASTER ON YOUR ELECTRIC GUITAR IS AN INFRINGEMENT ON OUR TRADEMARK BROADKASTER . . . WE REQUEST IMMEDIATE ASSURANCE THAT YOU ARE ABANDONING THE USE OF THIS NAME. Western Union telegram, February 20, 1951, from the Fred Gretsch Manufacturing Company.
Ever since electricity had been tamed and wired, its musical potentials were obvious, and not only for recording. Electricity could produce music, and the Fred Gretsch Company, of Brooklyn, makers of all sorts of musical instruments but mainly drums, moved into the electromusic business in the 1920s. Several mergers later (and a spectacular bankruptcy), Gretsch still makes electric instruments, and is still famous for its guitars, supplied to (inter alia) Chet Atkins, Bo Diddley, and George Harrison. Gretsch also made electric banjoes, one of them patented (in 1937) as the “Broadcaster.” Then along came the Fender “Broadcaster”, in 1950, and Gretsch rose up, like the colossus it was, to defend its right to the name, and Fender obligingly removed the “Broadcaster” logo. For a while, Fender waggishly called the guitar a “Nocaster,” but then settled on “Telecaster,” more in tune with the new age of television. It worked well, but was soon (in 1956) superseded by the Fender “Stratocaster.” Today, the “Stratocaster” comes in bewildering varieties, selling from under $400 to a super-deluxe $15,000. Souvenir Stratocasters, though, cost more. Jimi Hendrix’s went for nearly $3 million, and in 2020 an Australian with too much money bought Kurt Cobain’s for over $6 million. And to think all this started with the “Broadcaster” (or, as Western Union mis-keyed it, “BROADKASTER”)! All this started with Leo Fender, born near his parents’ orange plantation in Anaheim, CA, on August 10, 1909. He was an odd kid, made odder by the loss of one eye, catholic in his musical tastes and eccentric in his youthful enthusiasms for messing around with radios, electricity, and sound amplification. By the early 1940s his radio repair shop was transitioning into a music business, some repair work and more tinkering, and his first electric guitar was a steel one, Hawaiian style. That design was a bit cumbersome for backyard bands and in 1949 Leo came up with a ‘real’ electric guitar, the “Esquire,” further improved in 1950 with the “Broadcaster,” a natural name to choose for a radio nut. Leo did more tinkering, not only changing names but adding electrical pickups, and of course with amplifiers paired with each guitar model’s particular features. They were cheap, light, most of them easy to move from venue to venue, and a player with only basic talents (strumming and/or picking) could anchor a whole combo. Leo sold his company in 1965 but then, suffering perhaps from tinkering-withdrawal symptoms, started anew, concentrating this time on the amplification end—which was where he began. He died in 1991, but “the Fender” has become a symbol of the age. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
SKULL AND BONES AT HARVARD
Wyman saw where others only looked. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in The Atlantic, November 1874.
So good Dr. Holmes memorialized his friend—and patient—Jeffries Wyman, who had just died of a chronic lung ailment. Holmes was not the only mourner. Young William James, just embarking on his career, noted that while other members of the Harvard faculty taught how to be famous, to blow and bluster, Wyman had taught science. Much the same point was made by the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell.
Nothing to count in World, or Church, or State,
But inwardly in secret to be great,
To widen knowledge and escape the praise,
To toil for Science, not to draw men's gaze.
Since then, Wyman has suffered the common fate of the overly modest and has been almost forgotten. But he was well-known in his time, a comparative anatomist of great gifts, long-time curator of the Peabody Museum, and (not least) a chief prosecution witness in the spectacular Parkman-Webster murder trial (1849-1850). That case tore New England to shreds, for both the victim (Parkman) and the murderer (Webster) were Boston brahmins. Jeffries Wyman’s anatomical knowhow convinced the jury that the bones found in Webster’s furnace were indeed the bones of one individual—Parkman—and Webster, a professor at Harvard medical, was duly hanged. Jeffries Wyman was also born to the Boston purple, on August 11, 1814, the son of the director of the McLean Asylum. He duly went on to Harvard, took a medical degree, then studied anatomy in London and Paris, then taught in Virginia. There he disliked the climate (weather and politics), and returned to the Hub of the Universe in 1847 as curator of the Peabody. He worked in comparative anatomy, both in the lab and in the field (as far afield as wild Wisconsin), but he was most famed for his study of the African gorilla. He’s credited with coining the word, but more than that his work helped Charles Darwin to formulate the radical notion that humans and gorillas were of common descent. Jeffries Wyman also held that humans—all of them—were, anatomically, a single species, thus distinguishing himself from scientists (and, doubtless, Virginia slaveholders) who wanted to see black Africans as a separate creation. So of course Wyman was involved in the disputes that followed Darwin’s revolutionary On the Origin of Species (1859). Theologically a deist, Wyman wanted to believe in creation (or, more accurately, “creations”). But as Lowell and Holmes noted, Jeffries Wyman was also a scientist, and he came to accept Darwin’s views on evolution. He was already of the view that humans were of one, unitary species. ©
Wyman saw where others only looked. Oliver Wendell Holmes, in The Atlantic, November 1874.
So good Dr. Holmes memorialized his friend—and patient—Jeffries Wyman, who had just died of a chronic lung ailment. Holmes was not the only mourner. Young William James, just embarking on his career, noted that while other members of the Harvard faculty taught how to be famous, to blow and bluster, Wyman had taught science. Much the same point was made by the abolitionist poet James Russell Lowell.
Nothing to count in World, or Church, or State,
But inwardly in secret to be great,
To widen knowledge and escape the praise,
To toil for Science, not to draw men's gaze.
Since then, Wyman has suffered the common fate of the overly modest and has been almost forgotten. But he was well-known in his time, a comparative anatomist of great gifts, long-time curator of the Peabody Museum, and (not least) a chief prosecution witness in the spectacular Parkman-Webster murder trial (1849-1850). That case tore New England to shreds, for both the victim (Parkman) and the murderer (Webster) were Boston brahmins. Jeffries Wyman’s anatomical knowhow convinced the jury that the bones found in Webster’s furnace were indeed the bones of one individual—Parkman—and Webster, a professor at Harvard medical, was duly hanged. Jeffries Wyman was also born to the Boston purple, on August 11, 1814, the son of the director of the McLean Asylum. He duly went on to Harvard, took a medical degree, then studied anatomy in London and Paris, then taught in Virginia. There he disliked the climate (weather and politics), and returned to the Hub of the Universe in 1847 as curator of the Peabody. He worked in comparative anatomy, both in the lab and in the field (as far afield as wild Wisconsin), but he was most famed for his study of the African gorilla. He’s credited with coining the word, but more than that his work helped Charles Darwin to formulate the radical notion that humans and gorillas were of common descent. Jeffries Wyman also held that humans—all of them—were, anatomically, a single species, thus distinguishing himself from scientists (and, doubtless, Virginia slaveholders) who wanted to see black Africans as a separate creation. So of course Wyman was involved in the disputes that followed Darwin’s revolutionary On the Origin of Species (1859). Theologically a deist, Wyman wanted to believe in creation (or, more accurately, “creations”). But as Lowell and Holmes noted, Jeffries Wyman was also a scientist, and he came to accept Darwin’s views on evolution. He was already of the view that humans were of one, unitary species. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
HOLY ORDERS
Be diligent in serving the poor. Love the poor, and honor them as you would honor Christ Himself. Louise de Marillac.
In a touching scene in the Alan Rickman film A Little Chaos (2014), the female lead (Kate Winslet) is introduced to the ladies of Louis XIV’s court. Though of noble birth, Madame de Barra is quite lost at the Sun King’s court: until she is introduced to the women. They are wives or mistresses, led by Louis XIV’s current favorite, Madame de Montespan. Together they find community in their losses, dead children and fading beauties. De Barra confesses her own haunting loss, a daughter, and is made to feel ‘at home’. But—besides sexual intrigues of one sort or another, punctuated by childbirths—what did court ladies do in 17th-century France? One 17th-century court lady became cofounder of one the Catholic Church’s most distinctive orders, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Louise de Marillac was born on August 12, 1591, in Picardy. Her father was a noble, Lord of Ferrires. That might have been a good start, but Louise was born out of wedlock (her widower father was, so to speak, between wives). He acknowledged the baby as his but without any legal rights to rank, then (when Louise was 12) introduced her to the court of Marie de Medici. Louise managed this very challenging environment well enough to marry (aged 22) a rising star of the court, Antoine le Gras. The queen’s secretary. Louise bore him a son and, like other court ladies, became involved in charity work. Unlike many of the “Ladies of Charity,” who tended to leave the dirty work to their servants, Louise worked with the poor, in their poverty. In that work she discovered a mission, and when her husband died (in 1625) she was ready to take it up full time, working in tandem with a local priest, Vincent de Paul. Their joint harvest was The Company of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Father Vincent was canonized in 1737; two centuries later the Catholic Church got around to Louise de Marillac, made a saint in 1931. The Daughters grew into a major sisterhood, wearing at first a very distinctive habit. It has always been an uncloistered sisterhood, working in the world of the poor, and bound to their service only by annual vows. Elizabeth Seton imported the order into the USA in 1812 and, in 1963, became the first American-born saint of the church. It’s an inspiring story, which I first learned from two elderly (“retired” they said, pointedly) Daughters when in 2001 the UMSL Honors College moved into what is now called “Provincial House.” It was for many years the HQ of the Daughters of Charity’s midwestern province, one of five worldwide. My office, they told me, was where they used to hold vigils for dead Daughters. “Only the sex has changed,” one of them chuckled. Provincial House’s main wings are called Seton and Legras, and the complex is still dominated by its gothic-revival chapel. ©
Be diligent in serving the poor. Love the poor, and honor them as you would honor Christ Himself. Louise de Marillac.
In a touching scene in the Alan Rickman film A Little Chaos (2014), the female lead (Kate Winslet) is introduced to the ladies of Louis XIV’s court. Though of noble birth, Madame de Barra is quite lost at the Sun King’s court: until she is introduced to the women. They are wives or mistresses, led by Louis XIV’s current favorite, Madame de Montespan. Together they find community in their losses, dead children and fading beauties. De Barra confesses her own haunting loss, a daughter, and is made to feel ‘at home’. But—besides sexual intrigues of one sort or another, punctuated by childbirths—what did court ladies do in 17th-century France? One 17th-century court lady became cofounder of one the Catholic Church’s most distinctive orders, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Louise de Marillac was born on August 12, 1591, in Picardy. Her father was a noble, Lord of Ferrires. That might have been a good start, but Louise was born out of wedlock (her widower father was, so to speak, between wives). He acknowledged the baby as his but without any legal rights to rank, then (when Louise was 12) introduced her to the court of Marie de Medici. Louise managed this very challenging environment well enough to marry (aged 22) a rising star of the court, Antoine le Gras. The queen’s secretary. Louise bore him a son and, like other court ladies, became involved in charity work. Unlike many of the “Ladies of Charity,” who tended to leave the dirty work to their servants, Louise worked with the poor, in their poverty. In that work she discovered a mission, and when her husband died (in 1625) she was ready to take it up full time, working in tandem with a local priest, Vincent de Paul. Their joint harvest was The Company of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul. Father Vincent was canonized in 1737; two centuries later the Catholic Church got around to Louise de Marillac, made a saint in 1931. The Daughters grew into a major sisterhood, wearing at first a very distinctive habit. It has always been an uncloistered sisterhood, working in the world of the poor, and bound to their service only by annual vows. Elizabeth Seton imported the order into the USA in 1812 and, in 1963, became the first American-born saint of the church. It’s an inspiring story, which I first learned from two elderly (“retired” they said, pointedly) Daughters when in 2001 the UMSL Honors College moved into what is now called “Provincial House.” It was for many years the HQ of the Daughters of Charity’s midwestern province, one of five worldwide. My office, they told me, was where they used to hold vigils for dead Daughters. “Only the sex has changed,” one of them chuckled. Provincial House’s main wings are called Seton and Legras, and the complex is still dominated by its gothic-revival chapel. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
CONNEXION
My work is done. I have nothing left to do but go to my Father. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntington, June 17, 1791.
Uttered on the day of her death, these ‘last words’ of the Countess’s suggest resignation and peace. One hopes so, for her long life (she died just short of her 84th birthday) was a stormy one. Her most recent biographer has diagnosed her as cyclothymic (mildly manic-depressive). But she lived in an age when mental illness was not understood, and some of her contemporaries were less kind. Certainly she exhausted the patience of successive Anglican prelates, and in 1780 several of her “chapels” were denounced by the established church. In response, the countess pronounced herself a dissenter and denounced the offending bishops. Those chapels became the mother churches, so to speak, of one of the smallest of today’s evangelical denominations, known as “The Countess of Huntington’s Connexion.” Selina, Countess of Huntington, was born on August 13, 1707 as Selina Shirley. Her father was the second earl Ferrers, with estates in Ireland and Northamptonshire, so she was brought up in some comfort, and known as “Liney” within the circle of her family and friends. In 1728 she was married off to the 9th earl of Huntington, and in 1729 her father died. Her many pregnancies (too many, it must be said) and her disputes with her siblings over her father’s estate set her on course to become the most famed, most loved, and perhaps most reviled woman of faith in the Anglophone world. Amidst all these battles she found evangelical religion to be her comfort and strength. In particular she was attracted by the ‘methodism’ of John Wesley, announcing her conversion in 1739. It was then still a movement within the established church (a position Wesley himself never abandoned), but with a follower like Liney Hastings the seeds of separation were already sown. Cyclothymic or not, she was a woman of parts. Intelligent, well educated, and wealthy, the countess’s energy fomented discord even among Wesley’s followers (she was a Calvinist in theology and thus favored George Whitefield over the Wesley brothers). Her endless energy and financial resources led to various missionary ventures, not only in the UK but also in the North American colony of Georgia and another, that turned out to be longer lived, in Sierra Leone. After the American Revolution, the state of Georgia closed her down. The Connexion lived on. I think its most signal success was the conversion (in the 1850s) of Thomas Molson, in Montreal, who built a Connexion church right next to his brewery. Besides his Connexion church, and his brewery, Molson became an important patron of McGill University. Goodness only knows what Selina Hastings would have thought about all that. But she would have said something. ©.
My work is done. I have nothing left to do but go to my Father. Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntington, June 17, 1791.
Uttered on the day of her death, these ‘last words’ of the Countess’s suggest resignation and peace. One hopes so, for her long life (she died just short of her 84th birthday) was a stormy one. Her most recent biographer has diagnosed her as cyclothymic (mildly manic-depressive). But she lived in an age when mental illness was not understood, and some of her contemporaries were less kind. Certainly she exhausted the patience of successive Anglican prelates, and in 1780 several of her “chapels” were denounced by the established church. In response, the countess pronounced herself a dissenter and denounced the offending bishops. Those chapels became the mother churches, so to speak, of one of the smallest of today’s evangelical denominations, known as “The Countess of Huntington’s Connexion.” Selina, Countess of Huntington, was born on August 13, 1707 as Selina Shirley. Her father was the second earl Ferrers, with estates in Ireland and Northamptonshire, so she was brought up in some comfort, and known as “Liney” within the circle of her family and friends. In 1728 she was married off to the 9th earl of Huntington, and in 1729 her father died. Her many pregnancies (too many, it must be said) and her disputes with her siblings over her father’s estate set her on course to become the most famed, most loved, and perhaps most reviled woman of faith in the Anglophone world. Amidst all these battles she found evangelical religion to be her comfort and strength. In particular she was attracted by the ‘methodism’ of John Wesley, announcing her conversion in 1739. It was then still a movement within the established church (a position Wesley himself never abandoned), but with a follower like Liney Hastings the seeds of separation were already sown. Cyclothymic or not, she was a woman of parts. Intelligent, well educated, and wealthy, the countess’s energy fomented discord even among Wesley’s followers (she was a Calvinist in theology and thus favored George Whitefield over the Wesley brothers). Her endless energy and financial resources led to various missionary ventures, not only in the UK but also in the North American colony of Georgia and another, that turned out to be longer lived, in Sierra Leone. After the American Revolution, the state of Georgia closed her down. The Connexion lived on. I think its most signal success was the conversion (in the 1850s) of Thomas Molson, in Montreal, who built a Connexion church right next to his brewery. Besides his Connexion church, and his brewery, Molson became an important patron of McGill University. Goodness only knows what Selina Hastings would have thought about all that. But she would have said something. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
JUST
Life is the harmonious organization of events, the resultant of a communion of structures and reactions. Edward Everett Just, The Biology of the Cell Surface(1939).
Drawn from one of the last of Just’s scientific publications, this suggests a materialistic explanation of the origin of life. Six years earlier, he wrote, in much the same vein, about “life as an event” whose origins could be found in a circumstance of chemicals and structures, a concatenation so to speak. But the words “harmonious” and “communion” suggest something more, and indeed Edward Just derived his own ethical system from his studies of the living cell. It’s an interesting thought about this distinguished cytologist, who as a human being learned how to make do with life as he found it. Edward Everett Just was born in Charleston, South Carolina on August 14, 1883. His paternal grandfather had been born enslaved, was then freed and, as a builder, became a leading man in the city’s substantial freedman population. His father was also a builder. Just’s mother, Mary, founded a school and, after his father’s early death, was the family breadwinner, supplementing her school income by hard labor in the phosphate mines. Edward worked the mines, too, but Mary Just sent Edward north to get a better education than could be provided for a black boy in Charleston. He repaid her faith by graduating from Dartmouth College (in 1903) with top honors in several disciplines, biology of course but also history and sociology. He should have been class valedictorian, but the Dartmouth faculty chose a ‘token white’ instead. Just went on to Howard University for graduate study, then to teach. His work there was distinguished enough to win him the first-ever NAACP’s Spingarn medal in 1913. His ambition to learn still more about the cell took him on to Chicago for a PhD, then to Europe. There he found better acceptance than in the USA, winning appointments to leading research institutes in Italy, Germany, and France. His years in Germany coincided with the rise of Hitler, which brought him in conflict with a different breed of racism. In 1940, imprisoned as an enemy alien, he was repatriated, only to die (of cancer) in 1941, aged only 58. What might have happened to Just had he lived longer is a tantalizing question. Long accepted as a leading cytologist (he had published with, inter alia, Thomas Hunt Morgan and Clarence McClung), he had been unable to translate his remarkable research accomplishments into a faculty appointment at any leading “white” university. Instead, Edward Everett Just practiced harmony and communion with the scientific profession from his ‘continuing’ appointment at Howard University. His career reminds us of the continuing relevance of policies that enjoined diversity, equity, and inclusion in recruitment, employment, and promotion. ©.
Life is the harmonious organization of events, the resultant of a communion of structures and reactions. Edward Everett Just, The Biology of the Cell Surface(1939).
Drawn from one of the last of Just’s scientific publications, this suggests a materialistic explanation of the origin of life. Six years earlier, he wrote, in much the same vein, about “life as an event” whose origins could be found in a circumstance of chemicals and structures, a concatenation so to speak. But the words “harmonious” and “communion” suggest something more, and indeed Edward Just derived his own ethical system from his studies of the living cell. It’s an interesting thought about this distinguished cytologist, who as a human being learned how to make do with life as he found it. Edward Everett Just was born in Charleston, South Carolina on August 14, 1883. His paternal grandfather had been born enslaved, was then freed and, as a builder, became a leading man in the city’s substantial freedman population. His father was also a builder. Just’s mother, Mary, founded a school and, after his father’s early death, was the family breadwinner, supplementing her school income by hard labor in the phosphate mines. Edward worked the mines, too, but Mary Just sent Edward north to get a better education than could be provided for a black boy in Charleston. He repaid her faith by graduating from Dartmouth College (in 1903) with top honors in several disciplines, biology of course but also history and sociology. He should have been class valedictorian, but the Dartmouth faculty chose a ‘token white’ instead. Just went on to Howard University for graduate study, then to teach. His work there was distinguished enough to win him the first-ever NAACP’s Spingarn medal in 1913. His ambition to learn still more about the cell took him on to Chicago for a PhD, then to Europe. There he found better acceptance than in the USA, winning appointments to leading research institutes in Italy, Germany, and France. His years in Germany coincided with the rise of Hitler, which brought him in conflict with a different breed of racism. In 1940, imprisoned as an enemy alien, he was repatriated, only to die (of cancer) in 1941, aged only 58. What might have happened to Just had he lived longer is a tantalizing question. Long accepted as a leading cytologist (he had published with, inter alia, Thomas Hunt Morgan and Clarence McClung), he had been unable to translate his remarkable research accomplishments into a faculty appointment at any leading “white” university. Instead, Edward Everett Just practiced harmony and communion with the scientific profession from his ‘continuing’ appointment at Howard University. His career reminds us of the continuing relevance of policies that enjoined diversity, equity, and inclusion in recruitment, employment, and promotion. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
MACBETHWHO?
Methought I heard a voice cry “sleep no more!
Macbeth doth murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast. Macbeth to Lady Macbeth, after he murdered Duncan.
Des Moines schools didn’t think us mature enough to take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth until 12th grade. They were probably right. A noble man, proven in battle and rewarded for it, descends to treacheries and murders. Then he’s paid back. In class, we argued about why. Where was Macbeth’s ‘tragic flaw’? And in arguing, we treated the tale as if it were real life, and not “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.” (Macbeth again, in Act V, contemplating his inevitable doom). But there was a ‘real’ Macbeth, Mac Bethad mac Findlaích, and his story was even bloodier than the one Shakespeare retailed. Mac Bethad mac Findlaích was born around 1000AD, when a “Scotland” was still in some distant future. There were kingships, of this or that patch, and they were often at war. Mac Bethad, son of the king of Moray and possibly the grandson of a greater king (Malcolm II, king of Alba), was expected to take part. His first step was bloody enough, for it’s likely that he masterminded a massacre (in 1032) of a cousin and the cousin’s followers. For good measure Mac Bethad married the cousin’s widow, Gruoch, and took her son as his own. The murder, and the marriage, helped Mac Bethad to become king of Moray in 1034. Then Mac Bethad fought Malcolm II’s legitimate heir, Duncan I, in 1040, and with Duncan’s defeat and death Mac Bethad became king of Alba and was called “king of the Scots.” He ruled for 17 years, and seems to have enjoyed it. No insomnia is reported. Mac Bethad went on a pilgrimage to Rome, which may have eased his conscience if it needed easing, and on his travels he recruited new knights (and their retinues) from Normandy. But it all came to naught, and Mac Bethad mac Findlaích died in battle on August 15, 1057. Poetically, his kingship passed first to his stepson, Lulach. But the stepson, Lulach, ruled for only a year. He is characterized in narrative poems and songs as stupid or unlucky. He was soon unlucky enough, in 1658, to be killed in battle by another Malcolm, who duly became Malcolm III and ruled for almost 40 years. In all this there was an actual battle of Dunsinane and, for good measure, a Duncan or two. And it seems to me that the Mac Bethad’s wife Gruach may have had some of the steel that made Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth such a frightful person. But otherwise it is a case where the “truth” is a good deal stranger than Shakespeare’s fiction. But it is not as mesmerizing, nor as tragic. ©.
Methought I heard a voice cry “sleep no more!
Macbeth doth murder sleep”—the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast. Macbeth to Lady Macbeth, after he murdered Duncan.
Des Moines schools didn’t think us mature enough to take on Shakespeare’s Macbeth until 12th grade. They were probably right. A noble man, proven in battle and rewarded for it, descends to treacheries and murders. Then he’s paid back. In class, we argued about why. Where was Macbeth’s ‘tragic flaw’? And in arguing, we treated the tale as if it were real life, and not “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.” (Macbeth again, in Act V, contemplating his inevitable doom). But there was a ‘real’ Macbeth, Mac Bethad mac Findlaích, and his story was even bloodier than the one Shakespeare retailed. Mac Bethad mac Findlaích was born around 1000AD, when a “Scotland” was still in some distant future. There were kingships, of this or that patch, and they were often at war. Mac Bethad, son of the king of Moray and possibly the grandson of a greater king (Malcolm II, king of Alba), was expected to take part. His first step was bloody enough, for it’s likely that he masterminded a massacre (in 1032) of a cousin and the cousin’s followers. For good measure Mac Bethad married the cousin’s widow, Gruoch, and took her son as his own. The murder, and the marriage, helped Mac Bethad to become king of Moray in 1034. Then Mac Bethad fought Malcolm II’s legitimate heir, Duncan I, in 1040, and with Duncan’s defeat and death Mac Bethad became king of Alba and was called “king of the Scots.” He ruled for 17 years, and seems to have enjoyed it. No insomnia is reported. Mac Bethad went on a pilgrimage to Rome, which may have eased his conscience if it needed easing, and on his travels he recruited new knights (and their retinues) from Normandy. But it all came to naught, and Mac Bethad mac Findlaích died in battle on August 15, 1057. Poetically, his kingship passed first to his stepson, Lulach. But the stepson, Lulach, ruled for only a year. He is characterized in narrative poems and songs as stupid or unlucky. He was soon unlucky enough, in 1658, to be killed in battle by another Malcolm, who duly became Malcolm III and ruled for almost 40 years. In all this there was an actual battle of Dunsinane and, for good measure, a Duncan or two. And it seems to me that the Mac Bethad’s wife Gruach may have had some of the steel that made Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth such a frightful person. But otherwise it is a case where the “truth” is a good deal stranger than Shakespeare’s fiction. But it is not as mesmerizing, nor as tragic. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
LADY NAIRNE
Come thro’ the heather, around him gather,
Ye’re a’ the welcomer early;
Around him cling wi’ a’ your kin,
For wha’ll be king but Charlie.
Carolina Oliphant. “Wha’ll be king but Charlie.”
‘Charlie’ was Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), Bonnie Prince Charlie, the last serious Stuart pretender. Oliphant’s song itself became popular among Scots, at home and abroad. Some, doubtless, sang it to declare their Jacobitism. More lastingly, it’s been sung to express doubt about the Union of 1707 which birthed the (dis)United Kingdom. When Carolina Oliphant composed “Wha’ll be king” she was still a loyal supporter of the Stuart cause. Certainly she was born of that ilk, on August 16, 1766, in Gask, Perthshire. Indeed her parents were only able to return to Gask because, at long last, they had “composed” with the House of Hanover. They’d been in exile, attainted as traitors, because of their families’ support for the ‘45’, a rising in which many highlanders rose up in support of ‘Charlie,’ only to be slaughtered at Culloden or (like the Oliphants) scattered to the four winds. Finally back home, in Gask, they (defiantly?) named their new daughter Carolina, in honor of Prince Charlie. She was brought up a Jacobite, her prayerbooks pasted with Stuart names, and she sang songs to match. But there was a parallel tradition, clannish ballads, some of them earthy, urging the lassies to “geld” the lads with their “gully knives.” And the Oliphants were not Gaelic in speech, rather Scots, a dialect of Old English. So when Carolina Oliphant began to compose and publish, her work read (and sounded) like that of the Lowland (“Lallan”) bard, Robert Burns. And, as with Burns’s songs, some of it was earthy, even licentious. But all things pass. Aged 40, Carolina Oliphant married a cousin, William Nairne, also a descendant of Jacobite exiles. Nairne had a lairdship to recover, and a loyalty to prove. He served first in Edinburgh as an army quartermaster, and then in 1824 his title was restored. Caroline Oliphant thus became Caroline, Lady Nairne. And along with that process her poetry, and her songs, changed. She’d always published anonymously (as “Mrs. Bogan of Bogan”) but now Mrs. Nairne wrote tamer, more polite verse and music. She even contemplated a bowdlerized version of Robert Burns’s work. What she planned, others finished. It’s said that in his her career traced an important cultural change in Scotland. Perhaps so, but when her husband died in 1830 Lady Nairne chose to live the rest of her life in exile, finally on the continent, in Brussels. But she chose to die where she’d first breathed, in Gask, where she was buried in the family chapel. ©.
Come thro’ the heather, around him gather,
Ye’re a’ the welcomer early;
Around him cling wi’ a’ your kin,
For wha’ll be king but Charlie.
Carolina Oliphant. “Wha’ll be king but Charlie.”
‘Charlie’ was Charles Edward Stuart (1720-1788), Bonnie Prince Charlie, the last serious Stuart pretender. Oliphant’s song itself became popular among Scots, at home and abroad. Some, doubtless, sang it to declare their Jacobitism. More lastingly, it’s been sung to express doubt about the Union of 1707 which birthed the (dis)United Kingdom. When Carolina Oliphant composed “Wha’ll be king” she was still a loyal supporter of the Stuart cause. Certainly she was born of that ilk, on August 16, 1766, in Gask, Perthshire. Indeed her parents were only able to return to Gask because, at long last, they had “composed” with the House of Hanover. They’d been in exile, attainted as traitors, because of their families’ support for the ‘45’, a rising in which many highlanders rose up in support of ‘Charlie,’ only to be slaughtered at Culloden or (like the Oliphants) scattered to the four winds. Finally back home, in Gask, they (defiantly?) named their new daughter Carolina, in honor of Prince Charlie. She was brought up a Jacobite, her prayerbooks pasted with Stuart names, and she sang songs to match. But there was a parallel tradition, clannish ballads, some of them earthy, urging the lassies to “geld” the lads with their “gully knives.” And the Oliphants were not Gaelic in speech, rather Scots, a dialect of Old English. So when Carolina Oliphant began to compose and publish, her work read (and sounded) like that of the Lowland (“Lallan”) bard, Robert Burns. And, as with Burns’s songs, some of it was earthy, even licentious. But all things pass. Aged 40, Carolina Oliphant married a cousin, William Nairne, also a descendant of Jacobite exiles. Nairne had a lairdship to recover, and a loyalty to prove. He served first in Edinburgh as an army quartermaster, and then in 1824 his title was restored. Caroline Oliphant thus became Caroline, Lady Nairne. And along with that process her poetry, and her songs, changed. She’d always published anonymously (as “Mrs. Bogan of Bogan”) but now Mrs. Nairne wrote tamer, more polite verse and music. She even contemplated a bowdlerized version of Robert Burns’s work. What she planned, others finished. It’s said that in his her career traced an important cultural change in Scotland. Perhaps so, but when her husband died in 1830 Lady Nairne chose to live the rest of her life in exile, finally on the continent, in Brussels. But she chose to die where she’d first breathed, in Gask, where she was buried in the family chapel. ©.
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
YEAST
I beg to report that I do not consider myself ‘portly,’ merely fat in the wrong parts of the body. Also, I am not ‘bankerish,’ as I tend to enjoy horse racing. Raoul Fleischmann.
Thus Mr. Fleischmann sought to correct some text in an investment house publication which had told clients that Fleischmann was “portly, bankerish with rosy cheeks, china-blue eyes, gruff and of a roguish manner.” It isn’t recorded whether the investment house thus recommended its clients to invest in Fleischmann, but he was a hot property. His main business was yeast, Fleischmann’s Yeast. Fleischmann’s recently sold for $1.4 billion, so that might have been a good investment. But Raoul Fleischmann is best remembered for his other business, for he was the “angel” who put up the money (a mere $25K) for The New Yorker magazine. When The New Yorker fell on hard times, which was immediately, Fleischmann kept it afloat with another $700K, in installments, over the years, to meet balance sheet problems or payroll shortfalls. Of course he was a rich man. Besides bankerishly betting on the horses he played high stakes poker. And he had enough left over to build himself a 20-room ‘cottage’ on Long Island. So he was probably a good investment bet. Certainly he’d never known poverty. Raoul Fleischmann was born in Vienna, Austria, on August 17, 1885, while his parents were on holiday. His father, Louis, had parlayed his interest in Fleischmann’s Yeast into a career as a New York baker and restauranteur, at which he made enough to send Raoul to the best schools: Lawrenceville, then Princeton, then Williams. Back home in New York, young Raoul took up the family’s core businesses (yeast and banking) and did very well at them. But it was Raoul the man about town who met Harold Ross and Jane Grant, and was talked by them into investing a bit of his wealth in a new “comic” magazine. Fleischmann hesitated, but when Ross and Grant changed the prospectus to a focus on New York, he added his $25,000 to their $20,000 and in 1925 The New Yorker was born. Through all the vicissitudes that followed, Fleischmann proved a model publisher. Roguish to a fault, and maybe just slightly portly, he enjoyed it enough to move his office into the same building, but he left the magazine to its editor (Ross for the first 26 years) and its writers. The favor was much appreciated, and The New Yorker flourished, not only in its native city but, I happen to know, in such far-flung places as Dubuque and Des Moines, where it was read by at least a few little old ladies. In his (usually) hands-off approach, Fleischmann offers a telling contrast to modern publishers. And a model of success, too, for by the time Raoul Fleischmann died, in 1969, The New Yorker (and Fleischmann’s stock in it) were worth millions: it’s a profitable story and a moral tale. ©
I beg to report that I do not consider myself ‘portly,’ merely fat in the wrong parts of the body. Also, I am not ‘bankerish,’ as I tend to enjoy horse racing. Raoul Fleischmann.
Thus Mr. Fleischmann sought to correct some text in an investment house publication which had told clients that Fleischmann was “portly, bankerish with rosy cheeks, china-blue eyes, gruff and of a roguish manner.” It isn’t recorded whether the investment house thus recommended its clients to invest in Fleischmann, but he was a hot property. His main business was yeast, Fleischmann’s Yeast. Fleischmann’s recently sold for $1.4 billion, so that might have been a good investment. But Raoul Fleischmann is best remembered for his other business, for he was the “angel” who put up the money (a mere $25K) for The New Yorker magazine. When The New Yorker fell on hard times, which was immediately, Fleischmann kept it afloat with another $700K, in installments, over the years, to meet balance sheet problems or payroll shortfalls. Of course he was a rich man. Besides bankerishly betting on the horses he played high stakes poker. And he had enough left over to build himself a 20-room ‘cottage’ on Long Island. So he was probably a good investment bet. Certainly he’d never known poverty. Raoul Fleischmann was born in Vienna, Austria, on August 17, 1885, while his parents were on holiday. His father, Louis, had parlayed his interest in Fleischmann’s Yeast into a career as a New York baker and restauranteur, at which he made enough to send Raoul to the best schools: Lawrenceville, then Princeton, then Williams. Back home in New York, young Raoul took up the family’s core businesses (yeast and banking) and did very well at them. But it was Raoul the man about town who met Harold Ross and Jane Grant, and was talked by them into investing a bit of his wealth in a new “comic” magazine. Fleischmann hesitated, but when Ross and Grant changed the prospectus to a focus on New York, he added his $25,000 to their $20,000 and in 1925 The New Yorker was born. Through all the vicissitudes that followed, Fleischmann proved a model publisher. Roguish to a fault, and maybe just slightly portly, he enjoyed it enough to move his office into the same building, but he left the magazine to its editor (Ross for the first 26 years) and its writers. The favor was much appreciated, and The New Yorker flourished, not only in its native city but, I happen to know, in such far-flung places as Dubuque and Des Moines, where it was read by at least a few little old ladies. In his (usually) hands-off approach, Fleischmann offers a telling contrast to modern publishers. And a model of success, too, for by the time Raoul Fleischmann died, in 1969, The New Yorker (and Fleischmann’s stock in it) were worth millions: it’s a profitable story and a moral tale. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
WILDERNESS
I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by—or so poor she cannot afford to keep them. Mardie Murie.
How’s this for a honeymoon? First, in 1924, get married in Alaska, at sunrise (on August 19, in Anvik on the Yukon, that’s early in the morning), then take off on a 500-mile trek across the Brooks Range tracking the caribou to their winter range. That’s how Olaus and Mardie Murie started off their married life, and for Mardie it was great fun. She was born Margaret Elizabeth Thomas on August 18, 1902, in Seattle. As a kid, she moved to Alaska and fell in love with the place. At 15, she organized and executed a long trek through the wilderness. Her parents thought she needed a stateside education, and sent her to Reed College, in Portland, then Simmons in Boston. But the wilds still called, and Mardie returned home to be the first woman graduate of what would become the University of Alaska. She won a business degree, and it’s interesting to speculate what that might have led to—but pointless. She’d met the young naturalist Olaus Murie (1889-1963) while at Reed. He taught in the sciences but mainly about nature. Mardie liked the subject, loved the teacher, and in 1924 undertook another long trek (a lot of it by steamboat, down the Yukon River) to marry him. Then came the great caribou census-honeymoon, then a move back to the states, a log cabin near Jackson Hole, three children, a graduate degree for Olaus, and a lifetime of campaigning for the preservation of wilderness wherever it still existed. Along with all that, the two Muries (often with their children in tow) kept on studying nature, compiling foundational fieldwork on the ecology of the whole Yellowstone Basin. They were among the principal architects of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Sadly, Olaus didn’t live long enough to see its final passage, but in a sort of homage to him Mardie wrote up a novel, Two in the North, a fictional account of that first caribou run. It sold well and has recently been reissued. Meanwhile, Mardie went back to work on the wilderness campaign, lobbying congresses and presidents by herself and with others (notably the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society). She took particular pleasure in the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, first created by Eisenhower and then expanded by Carter. And she suffered as the USA proved too poor—and/or too greedy—to keep it whole and inviolate. The ecological balance Mardie Murie spent her life fighting for seems, today, to be receding from us, now that we have a president who sees our public lands only as a profit opportunity: Disneyish theme parks, timberlands, or mineral mines. After receiving the Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1998, Mardie Murie died at home, in Wyoming, in 2003. Hers was a long life, and a well-fought one. ©
I hope the United States of America is not so rich that she can afford to let these wildernesses pass by—or so poor she cannot afford to keep them. Mardie Murie.
How’s this for a honeymoon? First, in 1924, get married in Alaska, at sunrise (on August 19, in Anvik on the Yukon, that’s early in the morning), then take off on a 500-mile trek across the Brooks Range tracking the caribou to their winter range. That’s how Olaus and Mardie Murie started off their married life, and for Mardie it was great fun. She was born Margaret Elizabeth Thomas on August 18, 1902, in Seattle. As a kid, she moved to Alaska and fell in love with the place. At 15, she organized and executed a long trek through the wilderness. Her parents thought she needed a stateside education, and sent her to Reed College, in Portland, then Simmons in Boston. But the wilds still called, and Mardie returned home to be the first woman graduate of what would become the University of Alaska. She won a business degree, and it’s interesting to speculate what that might have led to—but pointless. She’d met the young naturalist Olaus Murie (1889-1963) while at Reed. He taught in the sciences but mainly about nature. Mardie liked the subject, loved the teacher, and in 1924 undertook another long trek (a lot of it by steamboat, down the Yukon River) to marry him. Then came the great caribou census-honeymoon, then a move back to the states, a log cabin near Jackson Hole, three children, a graduate degree for Olaus, and a lifetime of campaigning for the preservation of wilderness wherever it still existed. Along with all that, the two Muries (often with their children in tow) kept on studying nature, compiling foundational fieldwork on the ecology of the whole Yellowstone Basin. They were among the principal architects of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Sadly, Olaus didn’t live long enough to see its final passage, but in a sort of homage to him Mardie wrote up a novel, Two in the North, a fictional account of that first caribou run. It sold well and has recently been reissued. Meanwhile, Mardie went back to work on the wilderness campaign, lobbying congresses and presidents by herself and with others (notably the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society). She took particular pleasure in the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, first created by Eisenhower and then expanded by Carter. And she suffered as the USA proved too poor—and/or too greedy—to keep it whole and inviolate. The ecological balance Mardie Murie spent her life fighting for seems, today, to be receding from us, now that we have a president who sees our public lands only as a profit opportunity: Disneyish theme parks, timberlands, or mineral mines. After receiving the Medal of Freedom from Bill Clinton in 1998, Mardie Murie died at home, in Wyoming, in 2003. Hers was a long life, and a well-fought one. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
- Stanley
- Global Moderator
- Posts: 100717
- Joined: 23 Jan 2012, 12:01
- Location: Barnoldswick. Nearer to Heaven than Gloria.
Re: BOB'S BITS
DANDELION AND BURDOCK
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. Charles Elmer Hires.
One of my first forays in historical research was a project on ‘working class fiction,’ or more precisely on short stories written by working-class people. My main sources were socialist newspapers, one published in St. Paul, MN, the other in Racine, WI. Both weeklies printed short stories submitted by subscribers, and there were a lot of stories. On the whole, I found them disappointing: elementary prose and conventional plot lines, as in “poor boy makes good” or “plain Jane finds true love.” They have left no lasting impression. But what I do remember, in both weeklies, were the many, many adverts for patent medicines. Most (rather like the short stories) promised only better health or happier lives. But many promised miracles, infallible cures for cancer, other serious illnesses, or debilitating conditions. Charles Elmer Hires, pharmacist, was a master of such advertising techniques, and always on the lookout for new products. He prospered, too. Born in relatively humble circumstances in rural New Jersey on August 19, 1851, Hines apprenticed at a drug store in 1863, and before he could vote he'd saved enough money ($400!) to have his own big-city (Philadelphia) pharmacy. By the time he died, in 1937, Hines was rich enough to have a mansion, and a country estate, in Philadelphia’s ‘main-line’ suburbs. One guesses that he sold a lot of cures, most of them bought wholesale and sold retail. But there’s better profit in making and marketing one’s own concoctions, and Hines was most famous for (and best enriched by) his “root beer.” Of course he didn’t invent root beer. You’d have to go back quite a long way to find the first human who made tasty drinks out of roots, leaves, and barks. But while on his honeymoon, Hires tasted a ‘root tea’ at a New Jersey inn. Possibly it made him feel better. Maybe it improved his honeymoon experience. But certainly he thought it could make him some money. He secured the recipe, tinkered with it, added a few ‘natural’ ingredients, called it “root beer” and by 1876 was ready to market the stuff at Philadelphia’s “Centennial” exposition. At first it was a dry mixture (powdered roots, sassafras, etc.) to which the customer added water, sugar, and yeast. At the exposition, Hines gave it away ‘wet’, to be quaffed on the spot. It proved popular, but Hires wanted to sell it. Otherwise he’d just be winking in the dark. So Hires’s Root Beer was “the Temperance drink” and “the greatest health-giving beverage in the world.” When Hires’s yeast element roused the suspicions of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, he conducted his own analysis to discover his root beer had less alcohol in it than half a loaf of ordinary bread, which (true or not) also made good ad copy while poking fun at the WCTU. He began to bottle the stuff, out of his own plant in waterfront Philadelphia, and he became America’s first soft drink millionaire. Hires Root Beer stayed in family ownership until 1960, at which point it began its journey through the wilderness of corporate takeovers. By now, it’s had four corporate owners, has lost its identity as a root beer and is sold spiked with alcohol. So the WCTU’s nightmare turned out to be prophetic. But Hires Root Beer had long since been forced (by federal regulation) to moderate its health claims and clean up its ingredients, notably to remove the cancer-causing elements in sassafras oils. It’s a story for our times, proving that liberty just ain’t what it used to be. ©
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark. Charles Elmer Hires.
One of my first forays in historical research was a project on ‘working class fiction,’ or more precisely on short stories written by working-class people. My main sources were socialist newspapers, one published in St. Paul, MN, the other in Racine, WI. Both weeklies printed short stories submitted by subscribers, and there were a lot of stories. On the whole, I found them disappointing: elementary prose and conventional plot lines, as in “poor boy makes good” or “plain Jane finds true love.” They have left no lasting impression. But what I do remember, in both weeklies, were the many, many adverts for patent medicines. Most (rather like the short stories) promised only better health or happier lives. But many promised miracles, infallible cures for cancer, other serious illnesses, or debilitating conditions. Charles Elmer Hires, pharmacist, was a master of such advertising techniques, and always on the lookout for new products. He prospered, too. Born in relatively humble circumstances in rural New Jersey on August 19, 1851, Hines apprenticed at a drug store in 1863, and before he could vote he'd saved enough money ($400!) to have his own big-city (Philadelphia) pharmacy. By the time he died, in 1937, Hines was rich enough to have a mansion, and a country estate, in Philadelphia’s ‘main-line’ suburbs. One guesses that he sold a lot of cures, most of them bought wholesale and sold retail. But there’s better profit in making and marketing one’s own concoctions, and Hines was most famous for (and best enriched by) his “root beer.” Of course he didn’t invent root beer. You’d have to go back quite a long way to find the first human who made tasty drinks out of roots, leaves, and barks. But while on his honeymoon, Hires tasted a ‘root tea’ at a New Jersey inn. Possibly it made him feel better. Maybe it improved his honeymoon experience. But certainly he thought it could make him some money. He secured the recipe, tinkered with it, added a few ‘natural’ ingredients, called it “root beer” and by 1876 was ready to market the stuff at Philadelphia’s “Centennial” exposition. At first it was a dry mixture (powdered roots, sassafras, etc.) to which the customer added water, sugar, and yeast. At the exposition, Hines gave it away ‘wet’, to be quaffed on the spot. It proved popular, but Hires wanted to sell it. Otherwise he’d just be winking in the dark. So Hires’s Root Beer was “the Temperance drink” and “the greatest health-giving beverage in the world.” When Hires’s yeast element roused the suspicions of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, he conducted his own analysis to discover his root beer had less alcohol in it than half a loaf of ordinary bread, which (true or not) also made good ad copy while poking fun at the WCTU. He began to bottle the stuff, out of his own plant in waterfront Philadelphia, and he became America’s first soft drink millionaire. Hires Root Beer stayed in family ownership until 1960, at which point it began its journey through the wilderness of corporate takeovers. By now, it’s had four corporate owners, has lost its identity as a root beer and is sold spiked with alcohol. So the WCTU’s nightmare turned out to be prophetic. But Hires Root Beer had long since been forced (by federal regulation) to moderate its health claims and clean up its ingredients, notably to remove the cancer-causing elements in sassafras oils. It’s a story for our times, proving that liberty just ain’t what it used to be. ©
Stanley Challenger Graham
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!
Stanley's View
scg1936 at talktalk.net
"Beware of certitude" (Jimmy Reid)
The floggings will continue until morale improves!
Old age isn't for cissies!